Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  Her name was Leidemar Barreto. She was raised on the hill, and she’d welcomed the police presence. Anyone who has children will be glad there are fewer drug users threading the lanes, she said, and fewer men flashing their weapons. But she hadn’t counted on this: the violence had been a barrier between the favela and the sky-high rents beyond. In the past two years, since the UPP had come, her monthly payments had doubled to $180, eating up half of what she made selling lingerie from home.

  As she talked, her six-year-old barreled out of the dark room, punching suddenly into the light then disappearing down the cement stairway. She stuck one leg inside the doorway, pressed a flip-flopped foot down on the plywood here, there, around the beams that supported the floor. The damp had softened the wood, rotting it in places; that made her sick with worry for the kids who ran in and out, heedless.

  “I want to leave, but where can I go from here?” she asked. Her customers, her children’s school, the friends who helped out when money was tight at the end of the month, the store where her word was credit . . . Santa Marta held all that. Every corner had its story, every face was familiar. She’d never lived anywhere else, and couldn’t fathom a life far from its beehive heart.

  Leidemar’s family and her community came to represent in my mind the paradox of this new Brazil.

  The plank holding Leidemar afloat was Brazil’s broad poverty-fighting program, Bolsa Família. Its popularity had helped elect President Dilma; in turn, Dilma would quadruple its scope so that by 2013, nearly 50 million Brazilians benefited—fully one-fourth of the population. Although Brazil remained one of the most unequal countries in the world, programs like this, coupled with economic stability and the real growth seen over the past decade, had shrunk the gap between rich and poor to a fifty-year low.

  This was visible in Santa Marta. Favelas that had been synonymous with grinding poverty and lack of opportunity now housed members of this new middle class. A 2012 survey of Rio’s one thousand biggest favelas showed 66 percent of residents had officially reached that stratum, earning roughly between $500 and $2,050 a month.II

  Zé do Carmo’s success was exceptional among his neighbors, but not by much. Although he hadn’t shared his full income with me, the little he told was enough to conclude that he fell into the 13 percent of favela residents who had climbed into a higher-income bracket, with earnings above $2,050 a month. A decade ago, only 1 percent of people living in favelas fit this category.

  Santa Marta had free Wi-Fi and nearly half the homes had a computer. Cell phones were ubiquitous in the community, and credit cards common. Half the households had substituted the chubby old television sets for sleek flat-screens, and one-third had cable. In short, many of them had the stuff of the global middle class.

  There was real pride in these possessions. The widespread use of computers and smartphones also pointed to another characteristic of this new middle class: three-fourths of them were better educated than their parents, and nearly all were more connected. But this visit also pointed out some of the glaring shortcomings of a purely economic definition of class. First, there were the parameters. The starting point for Brazil’s class C—the middle slice of the country’s A, B, C, D, and E socioeconomic classification system—was a monthly salary of $500. Moving the goalposts and decreeing that someone with that income was no longer poor but part of this other category called “middle class” did not make his wages go further at the supermarket. But let’s leave the numbers aside.

  A financial definition of middle class may describe important material changes, but it left out aspects that are essential to most anyone’s definition of a middle-class existence. That community, as the first UPP, had become a model and had been granted an unusual array of services. But its residents still lacked uniform access to essentials like safe and regulated electricity, water, and sanitation, not to mention quality education and transportation.

  What did this mean? The ravages of hunger weren’t as visible as they had been when I had last lived in Rio, twenty-one years ago. The punch-in-the-gut sight of a four-year-old begging at the traffic light was far less common in this new Rio. This mattered, immensely; it was one of Brazil’s most tangible achievements.

  But no matter what the statistics said, to members of Rio’s traditional middle class, and to many of Santa Marta’s residents themselves, the favela’s residents were still poor because they lacked a middle-class quality of life. And Santa Marta wasn’t unique. Its conditions were replicated all over Rio, around Brazil. Scratch the glaze of stuff and the old hierarchies remained the same.

  * * *

  I. The cosigner requirement represents a particular hurdle for foreigners and Brazilians from other states, since they are unlikely to know property owners in the city who are willing to vouch for them.

  II. Different organizations have their own parameters for what constitutes the middle class in Brazil. This is the definition used by the federal government.

  CHAPTER 8

  SAVING THEMSELVES

  I was lingering in the office, taking advantage of the calm after dark to file expenses and listen to the evening news. It was January 2011, and in the few months since I’d returned, the city had sunk deep into the hot, wet Southern Hemisphere summer. Even the walls seemed to sweat. Outside my window, a hard rain fell in sheets that obscured the bay and the Sugarloaf Mountain, and turned the streets below into a congested river of red taillights.

  A note of alarm in the announcer’s voice made me look up at the TV flickering in the corner. There was trouble in the mountains that rose fifty miles or so north of the city. The downpour was loosening whole slopes in the craggy range, unleashing avalanches of mud and wiping out entire neighborhoods. It was happening very fast: dozens were confirmed dead already and many more missing.

  On a clear day, the craggy peaks of the Serra dos Órgãos are visible from Rio. Their sawtooth outline rises just beyond the bay to more than seven thousand feet, topped with impossibly steep formations like the Dedo de Deus, the Finger of God, a slender column of granite that ensnares clouds drifting in from the ocean. These fluted spires gave the mountains their name; Serra dos Órgãos means the Organ Range. The cool climate of the mountains has long drawn Cariocas looking for relief from the heat of the flats. The Portuguese royal family spent their summers in the Serra’s heights when Brazil was the seat of their empire in the nineteenth century; German and Swiss immigrants settled the lush valleys, leaving their traces in steep-roofed cottages that seem forever in wait of snow. Now Rio’s well-off retreat to weekend homes there, and the gentler climate supports farms that supply nearly all the vegetables and fruit consumed in the city below.

  The mountains are also an extreme manifestation of the state’s roller-coaster terrain and its characteristic inequalities. Cities there have grown organically to a great degree, defying grids, squeezing and curling around whatever nature threw in their path: skyscrapers rise against mountains; roads hold lakes and hillocks in boa-constrictor loops; concrete creeps onto marshy bogs. Settlements grew over decades with little or no long-term planning, more often than not without supporting infrastructure and with negligible monitoring for safety or the environment. As a result, housing developments strangle riverbanks, cling to denuded hillsides, spread into floodplains.

  This is a landscape in which the man-made and natural have struck a precarious balance. Add to it the relentless sunshine and awesome downpours of the tropics and you’ve got a mixture that is equal parts spectacular and lethal. During the summer months, clouds can gather into great bruised hammerheads and flash-flood streets in the time it takes to gulp down a cafezinho at a corner bar. I’ve seen fifteen minutes of rain send so much water charging through the underground pluvial system that it gushed out of manholes in powerful geysers that popped off the heavy metal lids and kept them dancing more than a foot off the ground. Storms like this could turn a trash-choked creek into a dam
that broke violently, and the exposed flanks of a mountain into avalanches of mud. It happened nearly every summer.

  In the previous year, 2010, torrential rain had plunged the state of Rio into chaos. Trees were knocked down, taking power lines with them; rivers overflowed their banks, ripped craters into the asphalt, and flooded Avenida Brazil in the middle of the rush hour, forcing drivers to abandon their cars. The fire department had to use rafts to pick up desperate commuters. Mudslides in the resort of Angra dos Reis, in Ilha Grande, and in the city of Niterói across Guanabara Bay added to that year’s death toll of more than three hundred.

  This was why downpours such as the one that lashed at my office window that January evening left Cariocas on edge. My parents had a home up in the mountains. I knew the area and I was all too familiar with the way houses grew more modest toward the outskirts of town, until they were just hand-laid brick walls that rested, without foundations, on granite bedrock or topsoil.

  Outside my window, branching bolts of lightning coursed through the leaden underbellies of storm clouds like angry veins. The rain worsened. I turned up the TV so I could hear the news over the wind that whistled through the cracks and rattled the glass panes. In between phone calls in which I tried to confirm the extent of the damage, I filed a short piece to the wire. With each phone call, the news was grimmer. The death toll was climbing in leaps. I updated the article with new information as fast as I could get it. It seemed that whole mountains were starting to give way.

  By 9 p.m., the news had tipped from tragic to catastrophic. A series of huge landslides had left nearly two hundred dead and hundreds more missing. I had to get up there, but by then it was too dark and dangerous to drive. I’d leave early the next morning.

  I was on my way by 5 a.m. with the photographer Felipe and the AP’s veteran cameraman Mário Lobão. Diarlei Rodrigues, a taxi driver who had become a part of the video crew, drove us. The rain fell in sheets that erased every sight and drowned every sound outside the car. Within an hour and a half of creeping along through an eerie, blank landscape, we reached Teresópolis, the city of Teresa, named after the wife of the Portuguese emperor. Petrópolis, named for the emperor himself, Dom Pedro, was also suffering heavy damage.

  We parked as close as possible to the disintegrating slopes, then rushed toward them on foot, against the flow of families escaping with whatever belongings they could carry: sodden pillows, a stereo wrapped in plastic, supermarket bags lumpy with photo albums, clothes, shoes. The cobblestoned road that led past my family’s home was washed out. There were deep muddy craters where the black stones had been. We worked as we walked, talking to survivors streaming downhill in the rain. It took us most of the morning to reach the foot of one of the avalanched mountains—a distance of no more than two miles.

  At the fringes of town, whole slopes had crumbled, turning entire communities into sliding graveyards. The immense furrows left behind looked like open wounds that continued to disgorge a viscous red mud.

  We decided to split up the team. Felipe and I wanted to go farther up to search for survivors who might be stranded and see what rescue efforts were under way, but the video camera made Mário far less mobile. He and Rodrigues would remain at the bottom of the slopes that day. Felipe and I picked one gouged mountainside and clambered as we could, clinging to trees and roots to follow the path of a blown-out creek that had swept away its bridge and scores of homes along its bank.

  Flanking this trail of devastation there were cars and trucks flipped like toys, and several buildings ripped open by the force of the flash flood to reveal the strangely intact half of a living room or the remnants of a bathroom. Within the great churning trough, there were the remnants of entire homes and lives—PVC pipes, sheets, plastic buckets, bits of a dinner table, a mattress, a teddy bear, shattered bricks, broken glass, a family portrait in a plastic frame.

  There were also bodies in the mud. Sometimes they were mangled into something shapeless, a torso stripped of clothing by the water, the bones inside smashed and breaking through the skin, sometimes distinctly human—a manicured hand sticking up through the sludge, or a man’s face frozen in a moment of wide-eyed terror, his mouth and nose stuffed full of mud.

  For hour upon hour we worked, trying to gauge the degree of destruction and interviewing survivors about the extent of their loss as warm rain continued to lash the saturated terrain. The sky was leaden and close, with a low, oppressive cloud ceiling. The dense greenery of the forest that bordered the mudslides heaved and pulsed under the storm’s blows, giving the impression the land was gasping for breath.

  Terrified families cowered in the houses that remained, unsure of what to do as an angry red river rushed a few feet away. The loose soil around the small brick homes melted away, the danger far from over. There was no visible government help at that point. It wouldn’t come for days: the rain and fog obscured the jagged peaks, keeping away the helicopters. The government later justified their lack of action by saying that the terrain was too steep and rough for safe rescue operations.

  In the absence of the state, people rescued themselves. Families dug up and carried their dead on makeshift gurneys as I watched. One father put his twelve-year-old son’s body inside a refrigerator tossed up by the mud to protect his boy from the roaming dogs as he turned back to dig for three other children and his wife. He’d put their photos inside a plastic folder and showed them to whoever passed by; he’d ask if they’d seen his missing family, and clung to the hope one of them had escaped. One elderly man with rheumy blue eyes sat on a log, beyond concern for the rain spattering his face, running through the stubble of his gray hair. His sodden T-shirt hung from his wiry frame. He’d lost his entire family, the thirteen people who’d lived in three side-by-side homes, and would not leave the ground in which they lay. There was nothing else for him, he said, but to sit with them, his hands helpless on his knees, big farmer’s hands, thick and knobby-jointed like uprooted trees, dark with mud.

  When Felipe and I hiked back to town at the end of the afternoon, we walked past long lines of mud-covered wretches who were trudging back up, navigating the slippery muck in flip-flops, picking around sharp metal edges and tile shards, their hands wrapped around plastic supermarket bags bulging with food and water for survivors who were too old, too young, or too hurt to make the trek themselves.

  After filing our stories and images from the car, we went looking for the local cemetery. Night was falling and it still rained when we found it. The rust-colored soil was churned and pitted with open graves. Those holes in the ground were terrible things: a hundred gaping maws in the earth, surrounded by a glutinous mud that sucked at our shoes when we walked.

  Diggers wore masks to keep out the smell as they worked. The morgue overflowed in the first few hours, and bodies needed to be buried fast. The summer heat worked quickly on the drenched corpses. Families gathered around fresh mounds topped with simple crosses of unfinished pine.

  One family was lowering a small casket under the rain into the wet hole in the ground. I approached them, looking for one more story that would help carry this tragedy to readers who’d never heard of Teresópolis. A man, the uncle of the child being buried, stood dry-eyed and silent. He showed me the photo of a little boy not yet three years old. A woman who might have been the child’s mother, or an aunt, held a blue plastic truck with big black wheels. Behind me, someone by another grave site was keening, screaming a name: “Maicon! Maicon!”

  I started to feel physically sick. So far, I’d controlled my own feelings by focusing on the work: reporting, calling in information, going out for more. But after fourteen hours of this, I was beginning to crack. Leaving the family, I walked quickly past the wailing mother, who by now was trying to throw herself into her son’s grave, still calling his name. I was running by the time I got to the edge of the cemetery and found Rodrigues’s taxi. It was empty. I pulled open the door and took refuge in the back. The ima
ge of the three-year-old boy stayed with me; he was my nephew’s age. These people spoke Portuguese, a language that for much of my life I had used only with family. Their pain felt close, personal. Alone for the first time that day, I cried hard, punching the seat in front of me. More than crying, it felt like vomiting. I could no longer hold the contents of the day.

  When it became too dark to shoot, the crew returned to the car. The cameraman took in the scene with a glimmer of sarcasm in his eyes. He’d been doing this kind of work for nearly as long as I’d been alive, and he kept feelings at bay. As we drove off, he went on to mimic the scene from the cemetery, starting with his version of my dash to the car. From then on, any overt sign of emotion on my part drew sniggers from the guys and high-pitched cries of “Maicon! Maicon!”

  I didn’t cry again, but over the next six days, my frustration over the inefficiency of the rescue effort grew. The worst of the disaster happened on January 11 and 12. It wasn’t until January 15 that I saw the first representative of the state, a national defense soldier, on the devastated bank of a river where houses had been razed days earlier. With a clean uniform and a rifle across his chest he stood out as an island of order and tranquility amid the chaos. I stopped.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Our work here today is to prevent looting,” he answered.