by Zirin, Dave
The Olympic developers are destroying more than old homes. To our left stands a series of old houses, one of them bearing the date 1884. Maurício tells us that the favela dates from 1897, but some of the buildings closer to the base are older. About seventy million dollars will be spent around Providência in what is being called “World Cup and Olympic modernization.” Most of that money will be spent on a cable car, even though most favelados will not use it. Why are they building it, then? Maurício’s answer is as logical as it is distressing: “A lot of people get a lot of money from public works projects. It looks good for the city, too—even though it’s not good for the community. This cable car is not for the residents. It makes the city look clean, without the image of favelas and poverty. It’s for the tourists. Meanwhile the construction in and around Providência will push people to leave even if they are not [forcibly] evicted.”
I ask him if he thinks that there is actually a plan to have a Rio without favelas. He doesn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.” Then he explains how this process has deeper roots than just pre-Olympic opportunism:
The first part of the process is giving people title—formalizing the land as a marketable commodity owned by one individual rather than controlled informally by the community. Land value goes up—many people will sell or be tempted to sell—not to people in the community because almost nobody here has enough money to buy. So, eventually, much if not all of the land in the favela will be sold to people from outside the favela, people who have more money. It’s a business opportunity for developers and by extension the government. They don’t think micro, on the scale of people’s lives. They only think macro.
Maurício sounds like an economist, but he is speaking from direct experience. This process has already begun in Providência. We soon will see evidence of this for ourselves.
We stop and talk to an older woman seated on a stoop in front of a group of buildings. She has short-cropped grey hair and is wearing earrings and a black tank top. She is seventy-one years old, born and raised in Providência. Her name is Doralice, but she goes by Glorinha. She recently heard that the government would be evicting her. “Like it or not, I have to go. I’ve been displaced. I have no place,” she says. “My dream is not to leave here, for sure. But orders are orders. They gave us orders to leave. . . . I don’t want to fight, I just want to be somewhere safe.” Glorinha—and this says more about her spirit than the reality of the situation—tells us that she considers herself one of the lucky ones, because her new home will be an apartment down by the train station at the bottom of the hill. She feels fortunate that at least she is not being moved miles from friends and family, as others she knows have been. I ask her if she believes that all of the men in matching hardhats, all of the cranes, all the rubble will yield something positive for Providência in the end. She smiles, shrugs her shoulders, and says, “I won’t know if it’s good or bad until I’ve seen the end of it. All I’ve seen so far is lots of holes in the street.” Then she gets much more serious: “I’ve heard reports of unsafely built public housing. Here we make our homes safe. I don’t want to be somewhere made by [the housing authority] that isn’t safe. I don’t want to end up on the street, but I’ve got children, grandchildren, great grandchildren.”
Maurício tells us that, while different kinds of projects and objectives around the World Cup and Olympics are leading to the evictions, the end result in Providência will be the displacement of eight hundred homes, roughly one-third of the community. “There’s no reason they couldn’t build new houses on the hill for those they’re displacing. Look at this new tram station. Its foundation is formed from solid granite. If they can build a giant tram, they could also build a large apartment building up here.” We part ways with Glorinha and crouch through a small doorway that leads into a steep, narrow staircase wedged in between two buildings. Sunlight streams onto our faces from above. This is one of the many favela alleyways and shortcuts in which you can easily get lost without a guide. The staircase cuts up the hillside and at the top we meet the road again, after it has rounded the bend on its gentle climb up. Below, the road was paved. Here, it’s mostly dirt and gravel.
After we reach the top and take in the remarkable view of the port, Maurício speaks about the drug trade, which was the pretext for Providência’s “pacification” and now its gentrification. “It’s important to understand drug trafficking in Rio,” he says. “The violence that happened in Providência was not infighting over territory between rival gangs. The fighting that occurred here was between the traffickers and the police. The police would come here, up this road here”—he points uphill about a hundred yards, where the road dead-ends into a wide concrete staircase that continues upward—“and they would shoot at the stairs. There could be normal people here going about their business, children, women, a person on crutches—the police wouldn’t even see that. They’d just shoot, as long as there were traffickers nearby. It was very dangerous and caused a lot of havoc in the community.” Sure enough, bullet holes still dot the areas where Maurício says the shootings took place. In Rio, one of the most expensive cities on earth, police make the equivalent of slightly over a thousand dollars a month. That is a recipe for corruption and violence. Because of this, when the UPP came to Providência, Maurício tells us people were actually relieved because “they protected us from the regular police.”
As we walk the narrow roads, we see VW Kombi vans, a shuttle service, speeding up and down the hills at breakneck speeds, spewing exhaust. Across the street, two young boys sit outside a small café playing Galaga, a classic arcade game from the 1980s I remember pouring whole allowances’ worth of quarters into. A couple of construction workers walk down the hill while I show the kids my Galaga skills. One of them carries a jackhammer slung over his shoulder. Maurício pulls me away and continues on the theme of the police. Before the UPP, it was common practice for the police to extort bribes from residents who ran businesses in the community. “The police would make the place more dangerous so that they could make money getting paid off to provide ‘security’ for businesses.’” He describes how deeply entrenched this system was—and still is—in much of Rio. Money flows upward: from the small business owners to the crooked cops they pay off for protection, from those cops to their battalion commanders, and from the battalion commanders to the state deputies who oversee the police force. This is the darker side of the “Brazilian cost,” and it hasn’t gone anywhere.
We approach the wide staircase. Off to the right, several thick concrete pillars rise from the ground. This area is packed with construction workers and machinery. Maurício informs us that this was the community’s public square before the city took it over for the cable-car project. He tells us stories, pointing to different rock-strewn spots where a barbecue or a game had taken place. Now the square is gone, soon to be replaced by the top station of the cable car. On the corner adjacent to the work zone is a café with an open doorway. Inside a group of men sit drinking sodas and talking loudly. Their voices echo out onto the street corner.
We make our way up the wide concrete staircase. Maurício points out even more bullet holes in and around the stairs, evidence of past battles between police and drug traffickers. Some holes are in the metal railings on either side of the staircase and others are still in the houses that line the way. As he talks, two more blue-overall-clad construction workers walk around the corner, also with sledgehammers resting on their shoulders. There is an odd tension as we wait for them to pass. We learn that, remarkably, the cable car is not the only disruptive project underway in Providência. Just beyond where the cable car ends, at the base of the wide central staircase, the city is planning to build a new funicular tram to go the rest of the way up the hillside. We see evidence of its construction—there, a pile of rubble sits where there used to be a house. In fact, according to Maurício, everyone in the homes on the left side of the staircase will be evicted to build the tram.
Then he tells a story that will
stay with me long after the Olympic confetti has been swept away. Maurício tells us that, originally, the city wanted to evict the residents of all of the houses on both sides of the staircase. When development plans for the city came out in the wake of the World Cup and the Olympics announcement, the city ruled that all of the houses on the left side of the staircase were “unsafe” and thus needed to be cleared. Shortly thereafter, a plan came out showing a tram to be built along the right side of the staircase—meaning those houses would also be demolished. It took ferocious community resistance to beat back the real-estate developers and keep what they had. Maurício and others from the community protested to the city, asking why they couldn’t just build the tram on the left side of the stairs, where they were going to evict people anyway. The city responded as coldly as it had to Jane Nascimento in Vila Autódromo: “We have our plan, so save your breath.” What happened next is a beautiful example of art as resistance. Maurício took photos of all the residents who lived in the houses on the right side of the stairs—the side that would be unnecessarily evicted to build the tram. He had them blown up larger than life, then wheat-pasted them on the sides of the houses lining the stairs. It was a massive public art display that humanized the cost of demolishing all these homes. A public rally was called in Providência to highlight the city’s intransigence and neglect of the community’s wishes. The photo installation became a viral story on social media and eventually in Brazil’s corporate press. Finally, the city relented and decided to change its plan—only the precarious homes on the left side of the staircase would be evicted after all. The tram could be built in their place; those living on the other side of the stairs would be able to keep their homes. It was a small but important example of the kinds of concessions the city government could be forced to make.
About halfway up the stairs, we meet an older woman who knows Maurício. She stands in the doorway to her house, which is slated for eviction. Seven people live here. She is the head of her household and is still negotiating with the government over where they will relocate her family. The apartment they are offering, she says, is only forty square meters. Alongside the staircase, we see one of the makeshift engineering feats that allow communities like Providência to exist: an old cast-iron water main with literally dozens of “unofficial” (read: illegal) taps in it, each branching off into a smaller PVC pipe that snakes its way into the densely packed homes. Maurício tells me that each tap in the main probably feeds about thirty homes. This type of utility rigging has historically brought power, water, and other services to favelas all across Brazil, in violation of existing building codes and the mores of private property. Like the rest of the favelas, these utility hookups reflect nothing but the work, skills, and creativity of community members in meeting their needs.
After we reach the top of the stairs, we make a beeline down the pathway to a larger building painted bright yellow. This is Maurício’s community arts center, called Favelarte. Favelarte provides basic education to community youth, with a special focus on the visual arts. Inside are a library, study center, and rooms where tutors run after-school programs in literacy, math, and the arts. Maurício describes their film screenings, poetry readings, and other activities. “When we first started,” he explains, “we put in this library. But we soon realized that most kids coming to us didn’t know how to read. So we put in the reading room upstairs, where there is someone who can help teach them to read.” The story of Maurício’s school is emblematic of Rio’s breakneck real-estate appreciation. He bought the building in 2009 for around twelve thousand dollars. Eighteen months later, when development plans for Providência got under way, the government offered to buy the building from him for thirty-two thousand dollars. He rejected the offer. Now, he says, the building is valued at seventy thousand dollars, an appreciation of nearly 500 percent in just over three years’ time.
The rising real-estate values at the top of Providência shed light on something else: the evictions of most families at its very pinnacle. These are the people who would ostensibly be served by the tram. So why evict them? According to the oft-repeated statements of city officials, it is because these homes are built in a “precarious fashion” and reside in a “risk area.” In other words, they are in danger of being damaged or destroyed by landslides. However, the last landslide here was in 1968. Most community residents don’t accept that these homes are at any kind of risk. They believe that rising property values are a far greater danger to their homes than mudslides. I am told that, just on the other side of the hill, several homes have already been bought up by a wealthy Brazilian who is building a large mansion nearby.
Maurício points out another factor that we cannot see from our vantage point at the top of Providência: viewed from the rapidly developing port area and downtown, the hill where we stand is an important element of the Rio skyline. Atop Providência sits a beautiful old white chapel, just a few hundred yards from Maurício’s house. However, the chapel is currently surrounded by homes that block views of it from below, down the hillside. “If you take these houses down,” Maurício says, “the favela is no longer visible from the city below. The city wants to fix up this historic chapel and make this a scenic view from below.” It is part of a massive and multifaceted process of “sanitizing” the city, displacing residents and destroying history and culture, in order to make Rio more palatable for tourists and the wealthy—that is, to make it more marketable.
Maurício takes us down the other side of the hill; it is a harrowing experience. We walk along a path that is now being widened, underpinned, and made into a road. He describes it as the path the drug gangs used to take their victims to execute them. They would blindfold people, walk them down this path, shoot them, and then dump their bodies over the cliff, he says.
Further down, Maurício stops at a little yellow-painted corner where the path branches out in two different directions. We are among extremely tightly packed buildings now. “This spot is where my father’s drug trafficking operation started,” Maurício says. He tells us about the drug ring run by his father and his father’s cousin. As far as he knows, it was the first drug trafficking ring in all of Rio. At first all they sold was marijuana. Then in 1965, cocaine came in, brought in by a guy who worked for the Brazilian Air Force. The 1970s were when violence between competing traffickers became particularly brutal, he says. In addition to competing over turf, the state turned a blind eye to some traffickers if in return they agreed to police the favelas. Another journalist on the tour comments,
There is a very deliberate attempt to unlock value that’s been long trapped in Rio de Janeiro because of violence. The drug trafficking during the last generation has kept the lid on real estate prices in Rio and other Brazilian cities, and this UPP program is a way of releasing that value into the national and international market without any break whatsoever. And that’s why the pacification programs are being financed by people like Eike Batista, Brazil’s wealthiest man. . . . He sees it as an investment that will generate immediate and spectacular returns.
Maurício doesn’t say much more. He feels like he has said enough. If we don’t see it by now, there simply is not much more he can say.
When we return to the offices of Catalytic Communities, I listen to the words of Marcos Alvito, with whom I spoke on my first day. After seeing Vila Autódromo and Providência, I hear new meaning in his words: “The mega-event preparations are about sweeping the human surplus out of sight by the thousands upon thousands. Rio de Janeiro’s magical urban developers conjure away the spectacle of the poverty the system produces. Soon only the mastications of prosperity, but not its excrement, will be seen in these cities, where the wealth created by all of Brazil is squandered.”
Conclusion
“FIFA-Quality Schools”
As far as I’m concerned, the explosion of indignation in Brazil is justified. In its thirst for justice, it is similar to other demonstrations that in recent years have shaken many countries in man
y parts of the world. Brazilians, who are the most soccer-mad of all, have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it. That is a fire police violence will never put out.
—Eduardo Galeano1
The Resistance
The streets of Brazil erupted in 2013 as a million people took to the streets in the first mass demonstrations the country had seen since the dictatorship. Every major city, and even several small towns, saw people in the streets, bravely facing tear gas, violence, and intimidation. The protests coincided with the Confederations Cup, a top-shelf international soccer tournament viewed as a precursor to the almighty World Cup. Everywhere a publicly funded stadium grew from the ground, it became a focal point for protest. Without any formal leadership or traditional social movement organizations, people were protesting everything: corruption, the priorities of government, the ways the “Brazilian cost” had become a millstone hanging from their necks. Journalist Wright Thompson outlined their anger: