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

by Juliana Barbassa

  Beyond being grossly over budget, the Pan-American Games also left behind structures that were underused and expensive to maintain. Some were passed on to private initiatives and closed to public use. Others were just plain shoddy, including the Pan’s most visible and most expensive venue, the Estádio Olímpico João Havelange, also known as the Engenhão. At $192 million, it was six times over budget. It was also passed on to the private sector—in this case, a soccer team—for a modest rent of $15,000 a month plus maintenance expenses.

  The stadium turned out to have such serious structural defects that it was forced shut in March 2013, less than six years after its inauguration. The absurdity of it was on everyone’s mind: Rio’s mayor had admitted in a press conference that “depending on wind velocity and temperature,” the roof could collapse or blow off.

  The Engenhão had never been a popular arena, but with the Maracanã closed for Olympic reforms, it was the only one Rio’s teams had at the moment. Shutting it down left soccer-mad Cariocas without a stadium—for how long, no one knew. Officials estimated it would be back up in 2015, after yet more money was spent expanding its seating capacity from 45,000 to 60,000 for the Olympics, when it is slated to host the track and field events.

  Most of the Pan’s venues had been built out in the west, establishing the model that would be followed with the Olympics. One in particular became a symbol of the poor planning, the expense, and the questionable motives that marred many of these works: the Vila Pan-Americana, or Vila do Pan. This condomínio of seventeen buildings was raised on a forested strip of land between a creek and the Camorin lagoon through a public-private partnership, a collaboration between local government and a construction firm. It was meant to house the athletes and later be sold as residential units.

  The project raised questions from the start. Yes, the state had a desperate need for housing—in 2007 it was 338,068 units short. But most of the demand was among families earning less than eight thousand dollars a year, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Why were Rio authorities creating incentives for private enterprise to build yet another upper-middle-class development?I

  The Vila do Pan was also a very expensive option for housing the athletes. Each day they spent there cost taxpayers $568.50—nearly double the $300 daily rate charged by premium hotels in the area.

  But the Vila’s biggest flaw was only revealed once the athletes were gone. Its pastel-colored towers had been laid over unstable clay. In the years that followed, the ground shifted and subsided, sending long, jagged cracks down the condomínio’s streets, exposing water and gas pipes, tilting electrical posts, and bending the metal gates.

  Even as the city started building its Olympic sites, it was still throwing fistfuls of cash at the Vila do Pan to fix the disaster. Initially estimated to cost about $2 million to correct, the sinking grounds had swallowed more than $15 million by 2012. All this for apartments no one could love: in spite of the land grab out west, the Vila do Pan has never been more than two-thirds occupied. At night, when Barra’s towers light up, its buildings are pocked with darkened windows.

  The TCU concluded its report on the Pan-American Games by mentioning that they had provided a chance for this naturally exuberant city to set right its serious environmental problems. This opportunity had been wasted, the report said; efforts made were “timid, insufficient.”

  Now the Olympic preparations presented the city with a new chance. But from the perspective of the ecologists, biologists, and zoologists at the table, the Olympics were doing more harm than good. The new bus thoroughfares, the rush to build bigger, better, faster, funneling ever more residents into an area unprepared for the onslaught . . . Ricardo exhaled in frustration, took another swig, shook his head, and unleashed a stream of invective.

  “The reality is fuck the animals, fuck biodiversity, fuck the laws, and long live construction,” he said. “All of this is being done because some people will make a lot of money, and it’s being done with no monitoring, no support, no rescue of species.”

  This was often how construction was done in Rio, he said. Out west there was simply more of it, happening faster than anywhere else in the city, with very little being done to mitigate the deforestation, loss of wetlands, and habitat disruption that it caused. Regulations governing construction on beachfronts and wetlands were being plowed under, he said, along with the flora and fauna. The laws that required a study of environmental impact before building were just not taken seriously.

  “It’s all just eyeball. You take a look around, see if you can spot animals. That’s your environmental impact report,” he said.

  At that point, waiters interrupted us with great, bloody platters piled high with steak, grilled chicken, and sausage. Ricardo served himself a heaping plateful of beef and before tucking in, threw out a rhetorical question. “Really, what is the law when it stands in the way of what the government wants to do?”

  That was the crux. Instead of providing oversight, Rio officials were actively shoving aside regulations to speed up the construction process. The most egregious example of this circumvention was the golf course being built for the Summer Games. I’d been following the story, as golf would be included in the Olympics for the first time in over a century.

  From the start, negotiations surrounding its location were fraught. According to Rio’s Olympic bid, the golf competition would be held at the private Itanhangá club. But in June 2011, Mayor Eduardo Paes announced to visiting members of the International Olympic Committee that there had been a change in plans.II Instead of refurbishing the private club, the city would build a brand-new course on a gorgeous stretch of white sand and coastal marsh bordering the Marapendi lagoon and facing the ocean. Best of all, he pointed out, this would come at no cost to the public; the developer would be paid with the right to build around the course.

  The first hurdles were environmental. The plot, although degraded in parts by illicit removal of its white sand, was a legally protected area and home to a number of jacarés and other critters, among them two threatened species found only in Brazil—Lutz’s tree iguana and the Fluminense swallowtail butterfly. But those were just the first concerns. Others would emerge as the project was pushed forward in 2012.

  In March, the name of the course designer was announced by the local organizing committee with due pomp—after all, it would be a state-of-the-art three-hundred-acre course. A developer was chosen to lead the $30 million job. The cost would be borne by the construction company, as the mayor had said. As compensation, the firm earned the right to build twenty-two new high-rises right behind the course, facing the landscaped grounds, the lagoon, and the cool blue Atlantic beyond.

  Official go-ahead came during an extraordinary session of the Rio de Janeiro City Council called for the afternoon of December 20. Most Cariocas were well into their summer vacations by then. In the meeting, council members approved one measure with several astonishing provisions. First, it green-lighted construction on the protected area. It also sliced an additional fourteen acres of forested grounds from a neighboring natural park—also habitat for the threatened butterfly and iguana—and added it to the course. Finally, it increased the height limit of the buildings that would be raised by the course developer from six to twenty-two stories.

  The price tag on one penthouse apartment in the super-deluxe condomínio next door was $6 million. That’s just the value of one penthouse.

  The whole thing was authorized by the mayor in January 2013, still during the summer holidays, and rubber-stamped by the city’s environmental department in April. There was no environmental impact report; the project was never put to public debate. Work began immediately.III

  I raised the issue with Ricardo. As a biologist working in the area, he had been watching this unfold and, I hoped, could offer some insight on what a three-hundred-acre pesticide- and herbicide-fed lawn would mean for the region’s ecolo
gy. This was marshy land, and the water table was high. Chemicals that leached into the groundwater would necessarily spread to the lagoon nearby.

  But this was a charged topic for the croc expert. When the area was first mentioned as the site of the Olympic golf tournament, he’d sent an email to the local organizing committee warning that if they built a golf course out west, they’d have unexpected guests. He got no answer. But once work began and the jacarés started to show up, the company managing the site for Rio 2016 hired Ricardo to manage the animals.

  “It’s not that all of a sudden they’re genuinely concerned with what happens to the jacarés,” he said. “It’s just that, because of the Olympic Games, they’re a problem, and they need to be dealt with.”

  We wrapped up the lunch. The sun was burning off the puddles. Ricardo took deep drags on his cigarette as we talked and made our way back to the creek.

  Ricardo fundamentally disagreed with the construction of the golf course, but figured the crocs would be better with him than without him. Part of what motivated these weekend courses was seeing the damage done when the crocs got in the way of construction or showed up in someone’s swimming pool. They could end up shot or injured—often with broken necks after being lassoed and yanked around.

  Then there was the money. He earned twenty dollars an hour teaching ten hours of classes a week at a private university. The rest of his time went to the institute. He had to take consulting jobs to supplement his salary—things like pulling caimans out of condomínio fountains. Protecting jacarés on the site of the 2016 golf course was a good gig.

  “I love my job, I love the animals, but there is no return in it, no money, no time to publish,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette on the side of his pants and putting an end to the conversation. “So. Let’s catch come crocs.”

  The afternoon was warm now, the air thick and moist; good weather for jacarés. Their eyes and nostrils cut through the creek’s nearly stagnant surface. Several were sunning themselves by the water. We spread out along the banks. I stayed with the intern, Camila, who was standing on a narrow footbridge spanning the creek and tying squishy fish parts to the end of a rope. Once she had her line baited, she threw it into the water and gave it a couple of tugs so that it slapped the water like a flailing fish. This awakened immediate interest: a couple of crocs turned in our direction. A few more slaps of the rope and two pairs of protruding eyes began gliding our way. Their wakes spread, overlapped, and seemed to stir up interest in the other caimans. We had an audience.

  One middle-aged woman in sarong and bikini top stopped on her way to the beach to berate Camila for fouling the wooden bridge with the fishy stench. It was true the bag reeked. So did Camila, who was elbow-deep in blood and guts. Face smeared with fishy goo from pushing up her glasses with dirty hands, Camila glared at the beachgoer’s fleshy, receding back.

  “And they complain the jacarés are aggressive,” she said under her breath. “She sniffs her own shit all day and she’s complaining about fish?”

  That was also true. Although the creek linked two lagoons in protected park areas, the smell was unmistakable: human feces. This creek was foul with sewage. It had the stink of the Carioca River and the same whitish scum frothing the banks. The wastewater poured out under the bridge from one of several cement tubes that opened over the stream. As I watched, a condom slid out and plopped into the water, its latex body undulating gently like some unknown invertebrate.

  These western suburbs were sold with the promise that they offered Rio as it used to be—safe, calm, clean—but they were quickly catching up with the worst aspects of the old city. The mad dash to develop meant construction had far outpaced infrastructure; most buildings in Barra, Recreio, and Jacarepaguá had been thrown up before the region had a supporting sewerage system. This meant they either built their own treatment plants, as the law required, or they dumped their sewage fresh out of the toilet into the streams and lagoons via the rainwater mains. With little monitoring, entire gated communities, malls, and office parks did the latter.

  According to the state secretary for the environment, Carlos Minc, nearly $35 million were being invested in new pipes and pumping stations in the region to improve the situation. The new infrastructure would run through what was being called the “Olympic Axis,” and included the future Olympic Park, several centers, hotels, office parks, and condomínios. During a visit to the construction site in September 2013, he’d said projects costing $350 million had already brought significant improvements over the previous six years. During that time, sanitation in the region had gone from zero to 60 percent. This was indeed real progress. With the new lines in the ground, any new construction would have a formal system available to which it could connect.

  The problem, as Camila pointed out in a huff, was what we could see and smell in the canal. The vast majority of houses, high-rises, and stores erected before the infrastructure was in place had been blithely pouring their untreated waste into nature for decades. Once sewage pipes were installed in the area, they were expected to follow the law and connect to the formal system within sixty days—at their own expense. Whether this happened or not, the water and sewerage company began charging them for the service, the street was checked off the dirty list, and the percentage of the region considered to have basic sanitation treatment grew.

  This was why the canal that opened onto the beginning of Barra beach rendered that stretch of ocean unfit for bathing, although official statistics showed 85 percent of the neighborhood was reputedly connected to sanitation treatment. That canal was the end point of the western lagoon complex and its direct connection to the ocean. It was so foul with sewage that one biologist referred to it as Barra’s rectum. From that opening, a brown stain fanned out over the ocean.

  The state environmental department did spot compliance checks, fining some of the larger violators. This included several large condomínios that were found pouring their wastewater into lagoons and creeks that, as Camila had noted, were within reach of their residents’ noses as they enjoyed their spacious porches.

  Minc, the state environmental official, had taken to physically stoppering pipes carrying sewage from the most egregious repeat offenders. He called this simple but effective strategy an “ecological cork.” But there was not enough manpower to check each building, each mall and office park; there was also no treatment available to the favelas that had sprung up to house the army of service workers who staffed the west’s housing complexes. And so the creeks filled with sewage, turning neon green when the summer sun fed the photosynthesizing cyanobacteria that thrived in them.

  Untrammeled development without adequate planning, together with Rio’s habitual environmental neglect, resulted in what we could see in the canal that day: shit flowing, unchecked, even along Rio’s urban frontier.

  “The biggest danger to us in this work isn’t really the jacaré, it’s the water,” Ricardo said, explaining the risks start with exposure to hepatitis A and go from there. “That’s the reality we work with as urban biologists.”

  As we continued the conversation, four crocs had surrounded Camila’s slapping fish. They hung back, cautious. Then in one furious whip of the tail, one of them lunged for the fish and snapped its jaws around it. The rope with the bait was tied so that it looped around his upper jaw. As the animal thrashed, this closed around its bony upper mandible although the tether stayed loose.

  “Hold steady!” Ricardo yelled as he ran off the bridge and down to the banks of the creek. He waded in, stirring up bubbles of sulfurous gases and cursing the filth he was sinking into. “Shit, shit, shit, fuck this fucking shit!”

  As the caiman calmed down, Camila slowly walked toward the bank, gently pulling the ensnared croc through the water. The animal shook its massive head every once in a while in annoyance, but otherwise allowed its body to glide toward Ricardo.

  Once near the muddy shore, Ricardo took the r
ope and tugged it toward land, where we waited. As he pulled, the professor explained that this process of capture and measurement doesn’t hurt the animals. Inexperienced handlers often use a tool that looks like a stick with a metal loop at the end to lasso the animal. The length of the stick keeps the crocs away and makes the handler feel safer, but it isn’t flexible and can dislocate or break the animal’s vertebrae, he said. The method he was showing us required some training but was safe for the caimans.

  It took some tugging to land the croc, but once there, it stood absolutely still, as if wondering what to make of all this. Its mouth, which turns up at the corners, giving it a wicked grin, was agape and showed jagged, yellowed teeth; its golden eyes, divided by a narrow black slit, were on us. Ours never left it. We had all seen how fast these creatures could move.

  Ricardo approached, tapping the animal on the nose a few times. Its mouth opened wide. Ricardo held his canvas hat in his hand, then thrust its brim toward the croc. The great maw snapped shut; the ecologist immediately reached underneath its chin with one finger and tilted its head all the way up. He then pinched the jaws shut between his forefinger and thumb.

  So that was why Ricardo’s hat looked so chewed up. This time the caiman missed it, but sometimes it was faster.

  “You’ve got to work with its anatomical limitations,” he said, still holding the jaw shut with one hand.

  Although the jacaré’s jaw is powerfully muscled, nearly all that strength is used to cinch its viselike bite, he said. Once the mouth is closed, the musculature to open it is weak—so weak the jaws can be held together with two fingers. Ricardo swung his leg around the croc, crouched over it, and taped the mandible shut. Once the feet were also bound, the animal could be measured and studied. This one was six feet long and sixty-four pounds. Figuring out the gender required Ricardo to stick a finger in the animal’s cloaca, an all-purpose excretory and reproductive opening, to search for a curved, retractable penis. The croc submitted with resignation. No penis was found—it was a rare female.