Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  Even with TV cameras and media, it doesn’t mean that city officials wouldn’t be violent with us. The evicted communities are often evicted with tear gas while TV cameras are rolling. It doesn’t stop it. The reason they treat us this way is because of this view that they promote that sees all favela residents as criminals. That’s how they see us, and they respond according to that. We recently went to deliver our Plano Popular to the mayor, and they closed the gates on us as if we were some kind of threat. . . . We waited for four hours outside the mayor’s office, and finally he met with us, for one hour. When he arrived, he showed up with eight police officers by his side. . . . It was a meeting that produced nothing. He accused us of being there as a political stunt to impact the mayoral elections. He belittled the university people who came with us. He finally promised us another meeting—in forty-five days. We were outraged.

  The mayor then spoke about the meeting in the press, denouncing the urban planners who devised the alternative plan for Vila Autódromo as “hypocrites, demagogues, and imbeciles” who “don’t know the city” while pointedly not saying anything negative about the residents themselves. This “divide and conquer” strategy simply did not work. Despite his best efforts, Vila Autódromo became a symbol of resistance. Jane Nascimento tells us with terrific pride that researchers and leaders from other favelas have come to Vila Autódromo to study how they built a community of resistance. One lesson from Vila Autódromo, she says, is the openness of their work: they have welcomed “outsiders” coming in to work with them on building a resistance, unlike many other communities that have closed themselves off or turned inward and treated outsiders with suspicion.

  I ask Jane what motivates her to do this kind of work. She replies that the stories of friends who have been forcibly moved by the government are so heartbreaking, she is committed to seeing as few of them happen as possible. She tells a story about her friend Rita, who had to relocate from her home in Colônia Juliano Moreira. Rita was promised that moving would be an orderly process—and it was, until the government came and trashed her house. They arrived in a very aggressive fashion and threw everything she owned into the back of a truck, which the state-sponsored movers then dumped on the ground upon arriving at her new home. Rita’s livelihood was growing plants, herbs and other assorted home remedies, but all of her seedlings were destroyed.10

  There is a ten-foot-high masonry wall across the street from the neighborhood association. The wall blocks the noise from the racetrack, just on the other side. In front of the wall is a small playground. Several girls are playing on a swing set. Painted on the wall is a mural, part of which is a large Brazilian flag—except where the usual slogan, “Order and Progress,” would be, only one word is inscribed: Liberdade. The church is probably the most modern-looking building in the community and it gleams with care. The stucco is freshly painted and its immense wooden doors are adorned with carvings and sconces that were handmade by people in the community. Making our way through the narrow dirt streets, we come upon a group of people gathered in the shade of a leafy tree. A middle-aged man is squatting on the ground, working on an old refrigerator motor. Next to him is a very old woman in a wheelchair. Her name is Ana Paula. She has no legs and just a few teeth left in her mouth. She looks as old as time, but is sharp as a tack and beautiful in plastic jeweled bracelets and a collared blue dress with a floral pattern. I ask Ana Paula for her thoughts about the drama in her community. She says, “I love living here. I think it is the best place there is. I like everything about it. When I arrived there were only two houses here—mine and one other. I came to look after someone’s property. But the woman whose property I was looking after, she decided she didn’t want the property at all. So I just stayed.” She has a great deal of pride in Brazil, she tells us, and thinks that the Olympics will be a great deal for Rio as long as she does not have to move. This is the rub in other discussions: people love the thought of hosting the Games. They are proud of their communities; the idea that an international audience will see what they have created is a source of joy. The idea, however, that they would be physically removed, like unsightly imperfections airbrushed out of a Vogue photo shoot, is painful.

  Behind Ana Paula is a small canal. The smell of sewage wafts up from its stagnant water. Just on the other side is the highway. A group of five or six young children, boys and girls, are playing around us in the street, without fear or the hovering, worried parents who haunt the playgrounds of the United States. There is a baby in a diaper staggering around on newly walking legs. A boy rolls a ball toward him and the baby, who can barely waddle, kicks it back with authority. We walk around to a point where a small triangle of land juts into the lagoon. From here we have a sweeping view across the water to the expanse of fancy high-rise apartment buildings. It feels like they’re staring at us. Jane says the real-estate developers want to turn this into a place similar to Lagoa, a picturesque neighborhood near Ipanema where people can walk or bicycle around the lagoon. “Obviously this community is a threat to that.” Just behind us, a group of young men and women are blasting funk (or funk carioca) music—sort of a Brazilian version of reggaetón.

  I am quickly understanding why people in Vila Autódromo are fighting so hard to stay. This becomes obvious to me when we meet a man in his sixties named Armando. Armando really wants to show us his house. “You are about to see the most beautiful house in the world,” he says. Armando is a diesel mechanic. His wife, Vilma, is a seamstress. He built their home from scratch. He says that he has lived here for twenty years, adding to and upgrading the house little by little. Now it is two stories high with plumbing, electricity, and his sweat and handiwork in every square inch. The fixtures, the tile, even a lamp wire stretched tightly so it hangs behind a framed picture of his son and gorgeous twin grandchildren, bear the marks of toil and love. In the back of the house they have a kitchen that is larger than the living room, as well as a washing machine and dryer. The interior of Armando’s home quickly becomes an amusement park/jungle gym for a group of children: these are the grandkids. They set up a tent in the middle of the tiled floor of the living room, so two couches and a television surround it. Armando tells us with great joy that they come over every Sunday. It is difficult to even hear him speak over their shouting and playing. At one point they even break out into song. You would have to really love children to endure it. Armando looks thrilled.

  Armando and his wife Vilma actively attend the neighborhood association’s public meetings. “There are many bigger powers involved in the Olympics that we don’t control,” he says, referring to thirsty local developers, whom he thinks are manipulating the “cleansing” of Rio. Armando’s adult son, whom everyone refers to as Armandinho (“Young Armando”) is also extremely easy to talk to. I ask him about the Olympics. He says, “When we heard they were coming to Rio, we thought it would be great for the city. We really had no idea about the changes that would happen here. They are supposed to be games. I don’t see why hosting them means my father has to lose his home.” He tells us that younger people in Vila Autódromo are more “realistic” in their thinking than some of the older folks, like Jane and his father. Armandinho and his family live in another community a fifteen-minute bus ride away, precisely so he won’t have to engage in a constant series of fights just to have a home and raise his family. He is wearing a T-shirt with a large photo of his two sons on it. Below the photo are the Portuguese words: “Papa, thank you for sharing the best moments of my life with me.”

  “Moving the community is bad, of course,” he says. “But this is more than just a housing issue. The environmental impact of all of this development is bad too. It is bad for our local environment and the planet.” He harkens back to Rio’s hosting of the Pan American Games in 2007. “They didn’t leave any positive impact for the people who live in Rio,” he says. “The worst part was seeing these huge amounts of money getting spent, with none of it benefiting the locals. They built all of these arenas that weren’t even
used after the Games.”

  The senior Armando overhears us and, as his toddler grandchildren play underfoot, expresses his frustration: “We are fighting for our right to survive here. Our right to live. Do you know how many years I’ve worked my butt off to build this house? I did it for my kids and for my grandkids so we would have a place to live and be a family, so days like today we could all have space to be together.”

  The Olympic preparations have put these “slums” in the crosshairs of city officials, President Dilma Rousseff, and the IOC, but to enter a favela like Vila Autódromo is to see a place that could teach the powers that be a few things about civilization. Again, I don’t want to romanticize the poverty and very real day-to-day struggles to survive many in Vila Autódromo face. But I saw a community where people keep their doors open and children play joyously in the streets. It’s a place where people like Armando build and develop their homes over decades to fit their changing families. I ask him if there is anything anyone can do to help. He replies, “Just let people know that we’re here . . . and we don’t want to leave.” As we leave, we see a shirtless man leaning out from the balcony, just watching the street. We ask him the same thing we’ve been asking everyone: what do you think about the Olympics? He says, “I don’t really care. I do hope they think we are going to leave quietly. That will make it all the more satisfying when they see that we are not going anywhere. I am excited for the World Cup. Most of all, I don’t like the idea of being pushed around.”

  Developments in early 2014 have once again thrown Vila Autódromo’s future into question, despite the benefit of publicity. In response to the unprecedented level of resistance in Vila Autódromo, the Brazilian political authorities engaged in an aggressive effort to simply buy everyone out. Residents who are choosing to leave are receiving what are being called the first market-rate compensation offers in favela history. Those accepting buyouts are also being forced to move only one kilometer away—not across the city, as with many other favela removals—which will be easier on schoolchildren and residents who use public transportation to commute to work. As of this writing, there are sixty families fully committed to staying no matter what—and the bulldozers are warming up, ready to demolish the space. The fight is not over, but the forces allied against Vila Autódromo are showing their commitment to using both carrots and sticks in order to achieve their goals. Whatever happens, though, the people here have shown the world that resistance matters—and their courage is an inspiration.

  The Port, Providência, and Maurício Hora

  Later that week I receive a tour of one of the most aggressively developed parts of Rio, the port, and the favela that sits above it, known as Morro da Providência. This would not be an ordinary tour. We were to be shown around by one of Rio’s great photographers, a man who also happened to grow up in Providência: Maurício Hora. Maurício has been taking photos of Providência for more than twenty years. He is also the son of a man who was one of Rio’s most powerful drug traffickers in the 1960s and 1970s. He is a stocky, intense-looking man with intelligent eyes and a short-cropped goatee. He’s dressed in a striped V-neck shirt, with glasses hanging from his collar. Maurício is exceptionally friendly but also deliberate in his speech. There is no excess verbiage.

  The base of Providência is just two blocks from Rio’s central train station. As with several of the other favelas we have visited, we can see the construction of a massive new cable between the station and the base of the hill. Grey steel beams project out of the ground behind a corrugated metal construction fence, creating a cacophonous, dusty welcome. Two construction workers are on an aerial lift, welding something at the top of a squat, octagonal concrete pillar. A backhoe roughly the size of Trenton, New Jersey, moves the earth behind them. Maurício informs us that this construction site was once an open space and public square, the most important one in the neighborhood. The street at the base of the hill is bustling, with sprays of industrial dirt turning all of Brazil’s typically bright colors into a shade of grey. Plaster is cracking and paint chipping. This neighborhood has been targeted for Olympic-sized change. And there, at the end of the street, Providência rises up in front of us, a photogenic favela on a steep hillside.

  Providência was Rio’s first favela. It was originally known as Morro da Favela, which is why all of these communities now go by this name. It was first settled by veterans of the 1897 Canudos war who were promised housing in Rio. They waited for homes that were never built; finally, they began building their own. By the 1910s, it had become known as one of Rio’s most violent places. Recently there has been a turnaround, although not without a cost.

  Before we ascend up into Providência, we stop at the base of the hill to walk through a street market. Each stall looks like it just came out of an IKEA box, with uniform red-and-white signs and black lettering. The market’s perimeter is constructed from concrete and steel that looks significantly less grey than the surroundings. Maurício confirms that, yes, it has been newly constructed. It’s not just the market. Several steps away is a new pedestrian bridge over the street where cars buzz into a tunnel underneath Providência’s hill. Maurício tells us that the story of evictions carried out today echoes that of a hundred years prior, when squatters in a tenement building were removed from the same location where the market is now. Many of the market stalls are empty or closed, and foot traffic is minimal.

  We ask a merchant selling shirts and jackets how business is going. “Slow, if not stopped,” he responds. “This is not a strategic spot for a market. They built it here just to have an excuse to take our stalls away from the Central Station.” Business-wise, the old location was much better, he says. Then the UPP, the favelas’ “pacifying police,” entered Providência for the purpose of “cleaning it out.” That same day, there was a suspicious fire in the old marketplace. The merchant explains, his voice rising, that the whole market burned. There was a fire station less than a kilometer away, yet it took the fire engine forty-five minutes to arrive. He says he was not at the market when the fire started, but received a call shortly after it started that his stall and those of his friends were going up in smoke. Though he tells us he was “six kilometers away,” he arrived at the market half an hour before the fire trucks made it onto the scene. The merchant and Maurício both indicate—as if it is obvious, as if insulted to even have to articulate it—that the fire was a deliberate act of arson, aimed at burning the vendors out so they would have no choice but to move into the new market.

  The merchant, whose name is Henrique, is wearing brown leather shoes and clean blue jeans, with a red Nextel clipped to his belt. As he talks with us he leans against his stall. This stretch of the market is located on a ramp sloping gently upward from the street. Henrique informs us that he recently spent two years unemployed, selling odds and ends on street corners. Now, in his stall, next to a credit-card machine, he proudly displays his official vendor’s license. He is hopeful that there must be some kind of master plan to grow the area, provide him with a steady stream of customers, and finally give his new credit-card machine a workout. “I am certain that the city government will not leave us stranded,” he says. “They will do something.” Henrique is excited about the Olympics because he sees redevelopment as being linked to more customers. If the redevelopment just means endless construction, with the dirt and noise driving people away, he knows that he could be facing disaster.

  After we part ways with Henrique, Maurício leads us up the first set of steps ascending Providência’s hill. As we walk up the steep incline in heat nearing a hundred degrees, Maurício keeps up a steady patter about his home. He tells us that during the dictatorship, people from favelas were often picked up by the police for loitering, even if they were working selling wares on streets around the city. This gave them a criminal record—which made future legal (and extralegal) discrimination against them easier. With a record, getting a normal job becomes that much more difficult. We tell him that there are similar crimina
l justice strategies in the United States; we find a warped kind of solidarity in discussing whether the current US prison system is worse than the Brazilian dictatorship. Then the conversation takes a turn to the personal. “That’s how my father got into drug trafficking,” Maurício explains. “He had a mark on his record and during the dictatorship it was the only way he saw to make a living.”

  As we ascend the steps, we reach a small landing where the sidewalk levels out for about ten yards before another set of stairs begins. There is a small, rubble-strewn area set back from the sidewalk. Maurício informs us that five families had been living here, piled together on this tiny patch of ground. “It was awful,” Maurício says of their living situation. “It was very precarious.” Then they were all evicted. Now there are patches of debris and burned garbage on the abandoned site.

  We climb more stairs. A small drainage ditch runs down the hill next to us, smelling like raw sewage. Up ahead, we see a group of typically close-packed favela houses, some with satellite TV dishes mounted on their outside walls. Here the houses are brightly painted and have numbers on their doors. These are the contradictions of favela living: satellite televisions next to an open ditch carrying raw sewage. We walk by an open window and inside I can see a forty-two-inch flat-screen TV hanging on the wall. Once again we hear that sound so familiar in the Rio of 2012: jackhammers, construction noise, and the clinking of metal on brick. Ahead there will surely be a construction site, the first construction we will have seen in a favela that was not the people doing the work for themselves. This set of stairs ends in a cobblestone road. It winds around a sharp bend as it climbs up ahead of us.

  Maurício tells us of a big eviction fight recently. There was an open community space up in the favela where groups could come to play sports or have cookouts and outdoor gatherings. After a great deal of protest, it was destroyed to build a stop for the new tram and a concrete waiting area. Sure enough, a large concrete tram pillar rises up ahead: the source of that jackhammer symphony we were hearing. Its conductors are dozens of very official-looking construction workers in matching hardhats and blue overalls. They even have several steel cranes. I never do find out just how they got them up the hill, but seeing cranes on the landing of a favela is impressive. (They were all painted bright yellow—festive destruction!) The city received a great deal of flak for destroying the original public space, and its solution speaks volumes about the logic of Rio’s developers. They have now evicted a group of families from their homes in order to build a new covered field to replace the lost community space. This eviction-to-eviction cycle is a reminder that controlling construction, brick, and mortar in pre-Olympic Rio means power.