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

by Juliana Barbassa

  The city I loved, with its arresting combination of rock and water, white sand and emerald forest, was a mutilated poem, missing some of its grandest passages: the whales that had once migrated past Ipanema, their passage now recorded in the name of that rocky outcropping, Arpoador; the dolphins that are part of the city’s shield, now seen far more often emblazoned on the sides of municipal buses than in the polluted bay; and the Carioca itself.

  I had gone looking for a physical river but also for the story that it told about the city. The two have been closely twined for centuries; the Carioca had shaped life in Rio, and Rio in turn had transformed the river. It was now a turbid reflection of the metropolis and its perverse relationship with its privileged natural setting.

  I got up, cold and dispirited, and walked down to the car where Phellipe waited. As he drove me back down we chatted about his work, and what he hoped to see for his community, the teenagers he worked with, the river.

  What would it take for the Carioca to run clean all the way to the ocean? Money, tremendous political will, and cooperation from the population. It would also take coordination between the city of Rio, responsible for the welfare of its rivers, and the state of Rio, in charge of Guanabara Bay, the ocean, and the beaches.

  None of this was forthcoming.

  If one looked beyond the river to Guanabara Bay, the outlook was a little more promising. Cleaning it up was one of Rio’s Olympic bid promises. The bay would host the sailing competition; floating trash could ensnarl a boat and cost an athlete a medal. This created a firm deadline and directed funds to the issue.

  Carlos Minc, the environmental secretary for the state of Rio, had assured me that Rio would be ready in time. He had launched a series of programs that, if successful, could go far toward cleaning Guanabara Bay and bringing basic sanitation to the population around it.

  Some of the plans, such as the closure of dumps like Gramacho and the use of the minirobots within Rio’s existing plumbing to root out illegal wastewater connections, were already under way. Others were just beginning. They included hooking bayside towns to a sewerage system, increasing the capacity and number of sewage treatment plants, and installing floating fences called eco-barriers across the mouths of rivers to keep out the trash that floated down.

  Another plan was to build treatment units like the one at the Carioca’s delta across the mouths of the five most polluted rivers draining into the bay. Of course, this would help clean up the bay, but would do nothing to improve conditions in the rivers. It simply recognized the waterways had become conveyors of wastewater, and treated them as such.

  But even under the Olympic time pressure and with funding available, many of these projects were running late; several had not started at all. After the Olympics, there would be no drive to do it. Like most Cariocas, I was skeptical of how much would really be accomplished.

  This wasn’t the first time Cariocas had heard promises like this. In 1992, after the first UN environmental conference in Rio, authorities announced a large effort to build waste treatment plants with money from international bank loans and the state. More than twenty years and $760 million later, of the four plants built and inaugurated with due pageantry, one plant treated a trickle of sewage; the other three had never treated a drop. Why? No one ever built the connections between the plants and a sewerage system, or set up the pumping stations to feed them. Then, too, there had been money and political will, but not enough to stop the whole project from falling to mismanagement and corruption.

  Axel Grael took a longer view of the issue. He was the former head of the state environmental agency and president of Projeto Grael, an environmental cleanup and education nonprofit that focused on the bay.

  The Grael family has a keen interest in seeing conditions improve. They also know Guanabara Bay far better than most; it is their backyard. Axel’s brothers, Lars and Torben, are Olympic medalist sailors who refined their skills in its waters. Torben’s daughter, the twenty-two-year-old Martine Grael, also grew up sailing in the bay and hoped to qualify in the Rio Olympics.

  When Rio hosted the World Military Games in 2011, Grael’s nonprofit was hired for an emergency cleanup of the sailing lanes. Using specially outfitted boats with nets, they hauled half a ton of trash out of the water just ahead of the race. This kind of Band-Aid approach wouldn’t do for the Olympics, he said. This work took years, decades, to carry out well. He was not optimistic.

  Rio had been born by the bay, by the mouth of the Carioca. A walk from its delta to its source took me back in time and revealed much about the past, and how the city’s waterways became so polluted. But to see where the city was headed, I needed to leave the old city behind and go out west, to the suburbs of Barra da Tijuca and beyond. They were Rio’s urban frontier. A drive out there was a glimpse of Rio’s future.

  * * *

  I. Once the Carioca aqueduct was abandoned in 1896, the Arcos da Lapa were put to use as support for the trolley tracks that connected downtown to the heights of Santa Teresa.

  II. The project seeded tens of thousands of trees on the denuded slopes, and led to the creation of the Tijuca Forest and the Paineiras Forest in 1861. This was the core of what would later be the Tijuca National Park, smack in the middle of Rio and one of the world’s largest urban forests.

  III. Before Rio’s first sewage system was installed, enslaved men carried barrels of excrement to the bay in the evenings. Historians say these porters were called tigres, or tigers, for the stripes left on their skin by the spills. The habit of throwing the contents of chamber pots out the window was also common, with results so disastrous that an 1831 municipal decree sought to regulate the activity. From then on, the waste could only be thrown into the street at night, and after three warnings of Água vai! or “Here goes the water!” Failure to obey led to fines and hefty compensation to the victims.

  IV. Even the beach showers that run on generators plunked on the sand are not safe, as they tap into contaminated groundwater.

  CHAPTER 11

  LONG LIVE CONSTRUCTION

  Pushing through undergrowth in galoshes and a raincoat, picking off the gnats that stuck to my face, I wondered for the third or fourth time that morning whether this outing was a good idea.

  The ankle-deep mud threatened to suck my boots off my feet and I was having trouble sticking close to the man in front of me, a biologist in a chewed-up canvas hat and those funny-looking FiveFingers shoes. Plus, we were looking for jacarés-do-papo-amarelo, or broad-snouted caimans, and I wasn’t quite sure how I’d feel when we found one. These South American cousins of the alligator are extremely territorial and grow to between six and eight feet long. Older males in the wild can reach eleven feet of tough leather, teeth, and muscle, with a bite that could easily crack a turtle shell. Or a shinbone.

  This bushwhacking was part of a class given by the biologist Ricardo Freitas. He’s a caiman expert and offered the only hands-on classes on crocodilian handling in the country. Twenty-five academics and wildlife veterinarians had flown from central and northern Brazil to Rio for the chance to learn Ricardo’s techniques. By the end of the weekend, we’d know how to capture, measure, tag, and then safely release the pissed-off, manhandled creatures.

  Western Rio was the place to find them. This stretch of the city stood at the foot of a mountain range that included metropolitan Rio’s tallest peak, the Pedra Branca, and was enshrouded in a 31,000-acre forest, the Pedra Branca State Park. Runoff coursed from its heights into the flatlands, where mangrove forests and interconnected lagoons sheltered more than five thousand creamy-bellied Caiman latirostris.

  Ricardo was optimistic. It was just a matter of time, he whispered over his shoulder. They loved this narrow, leafy channel that formed a natural bridge between two brackish lagoons. This marshy landscape had always been their home, he said. Jacarepaguá, the neighborhood I’d driven through to meet him, h
ad an indigenous name that meant “place of jacarés.”

  But more than that—they had nowhere else to go. Running alongside the walled-in banks of this little canal were residential streets with gated buildings where penthouse apartments sold for a million dollars.

  Women wrapped in neon spandex leaned over the railing to watch Ricardo muck around as they headed for their constitutional along the beach less than two blocks away. An elderly couple walking their poodle stopped to ask: was it true the beasts could snack on pets?

  The contrast was surreal, but the home of jacarés—the region that included Barra da Tijuca, Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Jacarepaguá, and others—was also the fastest-growing part of the city. Nowhere was Rio’s physical transformation more visible than in its western suburbs.

  As fast as change had come over the past few years, this process would only continue to accelerate until 2016. This ecologically fragile part of Rio would host the greatest number of Olympic venues. According to Rio’s bid, the sporting event would highlight the city’s natural assets and provide leverage to remedy existing damage. These promises had been an essential aspect of selling Rio as a candidate city. A discourse analysis of the Olympic bid showed that “environment” or its variation, “environmental,” was the second most used word after “security.”

  How did the fast-paced development of the west side, and the impending Olympic project, fit into this picture?

  The answer started with the crocs. They’d been there first. They were also tougher than other species, built to adapt and withstand conditions that could wipe out other critters. They would be my gauge.

  To Cariocas living in a city squeezed by natural features, where buildings rise shoulder to shoulder, blocking views and airflow, the western suburbs offered space. Relatively undeveloped until the 1980s, the region had absorbed most of Rio’s residential expansion since then. I knew the area well. My parents had moved into one of its first gated communities when they relocated to Rio from abroad; decades later, my brother followed after his second child was born.

  Going to see my family meant an hour’s drive from Flamengo. The route itself reveals Barra’s appeal. It starts within the perennially jammed streets of Botafogo, once an elite bedroom community, now a throughway in which streets are lined with a jumble of residential buildings, shops, schools, and government buildings and the roads are thick with buses, motorcycles, cars. Pedestrians spill off its narrow sidewalks and cyclists weave through traffic, each adding to the confusion. The drive continues through the clogged streets of other packed neighborhoods—Humaitá, Jardim Botânico—before diving into the tunnels that lead out west.

  To enter Barra da Tijuca, the first of the western neighborhoods, after all that chaos and congestion is like coming up for air. Drivers emerging from the last tunnel have the ocean on the left and a lagoon backed by luxuriantly green mountains to the right. A sign says “Welcome to Barra.”

  Gone are the pedestrians, the diesel belches, the visual clutter. The west is sleek, with sixteen-lane highways, luxury malls, and gated communities. This is a landscape designed for cars, not pedestrians. Residential life is contained within condomínios, guarded and enclosed collections of buildings and houses that promise to deliver everything that was lost as Rio grew: tranquility, fresh air, safety. Some of these condomínios hark back to that paradise lost with names such as Nova Ipanema, or New Ipanema, where my parents lived, or Novo Leblon. Others have even more nakedly aspirational names that suggest, in English or a suitable European language, a privileged life: Les Résidences de Monaco, Riveira dei Fiori, Barra Golden Green. The rarefied airs are partly justified: if considered separately from the rest of Rio, the region has a Human Development Index score on par with Norway and New Zealand.

  Maintaining this segregated lifestyle in an unequal society has a cost that goes beyond condo fees and gasoline bills; it is essentially a life behind gilded bars. Going to see my parents means driving up to gates flanked by armed guards, then waiting as one security officer, protected by a cabin, calls their apartment. Permission to enter granted, the gate opens and I pull into an idyllic once-upon-a-time land where children still play in the streets and where there are extensive landscaped gardens for running and hiding as well as playgrounds, sports fields, swimming pools, a restaurant, and a bar. One’s entire life, or at least a certain kind of life, could be completely contained within the community’s tree-lined streets: there is a hair salon, a massage studio, waxing and manicure facilities, a bakery, a convenience store, and a private school.

  The Barra way of life has a lot of takers—including the Olympic Games. There will be competitions in the south, along Ipanema, Copacabana, and Flamengo; in the center-north, home of the Maracanã and Engenhão stadiums; and in Deodoro, in the northwest. But the west side will host the main Olympic sports cluster, with fifteen venues housing competitions from boxing and table tennis to swimming and gymnastics.

  As the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee put it, the region provides a “truly beautiful setting . . . surrounded by lagoons, mountains and parks.” They forgot to mention the beaches—more than sixteen miles of dazzling white sand facing the Atlantic. The potential was evident, and most everyone wanted a piece.

  This meant the place was a construction zone. On each visit, I watched construction crews birth high-rises of 10, 15, 20 stories out of earthen craters. While the population of Rio had grown about 8 percent between 2000 and 2010, Barra’s population grew by 47 percent, according to the census. But that’s practically sluggish compared to stretches even farther west—Jacarepaguá, Recreio dos Bandeirantes, and other neighborhoods—where the buildings popped up like mushrooms after the rain to house a population that had expanded by up to 150 percent. Altogether, Barra and the eight surrounding neighborhoods had added an astounding 278,000 new residents during those ten years. Traffic thickened and slowed to a crawl even on the sleek new highways.

  This mad race showed no signs of stopping. Hotel chains were busy adding nearly 4,000 rooms in the area in anticipation of the Olympics. Between 2010 and the Games, Barra was expected to gain another 65,000 residents or so, and Jacarepaguá, another 53,000, according to the Instituto Pereira Passos, an urban planning organization connected to the city government.

  Even the transportation projects that were promised as one of the most useful Olympic legacies in this gridlocked city—an extension of the subway and nearly one hundred miles of exclusive bus lanes, part of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system—all fed the west side. The Transcarioca BRT linked it to the international airport; the Transolímpica BRT, to working-class neighborhoods to the north. The Transoeste BRT, the first one completed, plowed over virgin marshland as it reached from the center of Barra to the city’s far western border. New gated communities sprouted in its wake.

  All this, remember, in the “place of jacarés.”

  No one knew Rio’s caimans like Ricardo, the biologist who’d founded the Instituto Jacaré. Since 2000, when he established the research center, he’d caught, tagged and cataloged nearly five hundred of them. But on the wet, early spring day when I joined him on the banks of that muddy creek, a southwest wind streaked with rain lowered temperatures. Leaden clouds smudged out the sun. It wasn’t good caiman-catching weather. The cold-blooded animals found it warmer in the water.

  After a few hours of tramping around, we’d seen dozens of eyeballs and nostrils prick the creek’s surface, but few caimans loitering on the banks. Those we did see slid with surprising speed through the brush and swam away as we approached, shying away from the bits of fish tied to a rope that we dragged through the water as bait. Although Ricardo said the caimans generally posed no threat to people—or poodles, for that matter—we were not ready to wrestle a healthy, unwilling croc out of the water. We decided to break for lunch and try later. If the caimans weren’t out in the cold, there was no reason why we should be.

  I went with Ricardo, his intern Camila, a
nd a handful of graduate students to a beachfront barbecue joint. Almost on cue, the clouds broke and let through a watery sunshine. We huddled around an outdoor table and ordered a bucket of beers. Even in informal Rio, we drew stares: after a morning of sloshing around canals, we were covered in mud. With the dirt, our bush-beating outfits, and green-eyed Ricardo’s five-day beard and beaten-up hat, we could have been extras in an Indiana Jones movie.

  The conversation turned to the flurry of development that was burying these wetlands in concrete slabs. Much of this new construction, from the Olympic sites to the mega-highways to the private housing, was being done by draining or filling the marshy land. This was anathema to the croc lovers gathered there.

  Ricardo reached into the ice bucket for a beer. The Pan-American Games should have been a lesson, he said.

  “We’re still cleaning up and paying for that mess,” he said.

  The 2007 competition was seen as a trial run for the 2016 Olympics. But as Ricardo pointed out, it could also serve as a warning. Operationally, the games were a success, but their price tag was a shocker. The competition that had been billed at $250 million cost public coffers at least $1.15 billion, according to the Tribunal de Contas da União, or TCU, a federal auditing body. It may be more; at the time of the report’s writing the government had not fully accounted for all expenses. Even without knowing the total cost, the 2007 Pan-American Games was the most expensive in the history of the event, and fifteen times more expensive than the previous edition in Santo Domingo in 2003.