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

by Juliana Barbassa

  One was a bold urbanization program announced in July 2010. Morar Carioca, or Carioca Living, was a $4 billion program that promised to bring running water, sewerage systems, paving, and public lighting to all of Rio’s favelas by 2020. This made it the most comprehensive and well-funded favela-upgrading program in the city’s history. It also had a unique participatory element: in addition to urban planners, architects, and engineers, it included sociologists and anthropologists who led consultations with residents. The mayor declared it would be the Olympics’ showcase social legacy.

  Accolades poured in from abroad; Morar Carioca could be a global model for integrating shantytowns into the formal city. The Inter-American Development Bank called it “ambitious,” and extended a $150 million loan; later, it won Rio a Sustainable Communities award from the climate change group C40 Cities.

  The other policy was the flip side of Morar Carioca. It was the largest favela removal program Rio had seen in decades. I’d seen it at work in Metrô.

  According to the mayor, this was a necessary evil. There were communities that encroached on environmentally protected land, were in the way of planned highways, or stood too close to future Olympic venues. Many of them “could not be urbanized,” he said, explaining they were in areas that were too steep or swampy. But most of them had to be removed for the residents’ own safety, because they lived in areas deemed unstable, prone to flooding or mudslide, he explained.

  “It’s a decision made based on geotechnical studies,” he said. “We’re not joking around. I’m not going to be responsible for people dying. It’s for their own good.”

  The first concrete details of this great upheaval came a mere two months after the Olympic announcement, in January 2010. It was an initial list of 119 communities to be removed. Metrô was on that list.

  I found the head of Metrô’s resident association, Francicleide Souza, or Franci, as she is known, still simmering the day’s pot of black beans. Her dark hair was pulled into a bun, and, although she was only forty-four, there were deep furrows between her brows. After turning down the flame, she stepped out of the heat of her small kitchen and into the alley so we could talk.

  The news that they had to leave left the residents in despair. Favela dweller’s homes are often their most valuable possession by far; most have no bank accounts, no savings, no pension fund, no plan B. The house represents a life’s worth of scrimping for improvements and additions; it is the roof that will be over their head once they can no longer work and the inheritance they will leave to their children. Losing a home can ruin a family.

  Metrô’s residents were offered compensation, a slot at a homeless shelter or government-built housing in Cosmos, a working-class suburb in the far northwest. Neither option was feasible, said Franci. The average government compensation was $16,000, a sum that couldn’t buy a home anywhere in a city where the square foot was going for an average of $400. As for Cosmos, it is forty-five miles away but it might as well have been on the moon. Traveling there from Metrô by a combination of buses and the train takes nearly four hours—one way. Moving would mean losing jobs, their network of friends, nearly all connection to the city.

  No one wanted to go, but there was a lot of pressure to accept the deal.

  “We were told we didn’t have a right to anything, that we didn’t even own the walls of our own homes,” she said.

  I knew that was not true; Brazil’s constitution guarantees that anyone living on unused land for more than five years has a legal claim to it, although enforcing that right took the kind of money, legal know-how, and time that few favela residents had. Given Brazil’s lethargic judiciary, the process of getting the title could take twenty years even for those who had legal help.

  Afraid they’d lose what they had, about one hundred families caved under pressure and accepted the government’s offer of housing in Cosmos, Franci said. The rest held on. Then the demolitions started: wrecking crews would come and tear down the emptied homes. Because favela apartments have shared walls, this began to compromise the safety of the houses that still stood. Franci’s house sprang a leak in the roof; others said the demolitions weakened their houses so much they could collapse in a heavy rain.

  The fear of having the single thing that stands between them and the street taken away—in exchange for what? where? when?—was paralyzing to some. Others, like Franci, put all they had into the fight to stay.

  She’d arrived in Rio alone, another frightened nineteen-year-old migrant from the northeast looking for work. Twenty-five years later, she had a job, a home she’d built alongside her husband, and a family that she raised within Metrô. When her resolve faltered, she stepped outside her home and looked at the spray-painted initials—SMH—and the number that reminded her she could be next.

  Over time, the strain on residents mounted. The rubble of the demolished homes was not removed, so the community began to look like a dump. Crack users moved into the crumbling shells; they smoked, slept, had sex, and defecated within yards of where families like Franci’s lived. The remnants of gutted homes were littered with the plastic and foil mate cups they fashioned into improvised pipes. Rats made their nests in the garbage. This began to sap the willpower of the 267 families that remained.

  When government officials returned to Metrô with an improved offer of units in a housing complex nearby, another hundred or so families took it, even though the apartments wouldn’t be ready for months. It was a blind gamble, leaving what they had for a promise, but life had become miserable, Franci said.

  “We’re afraid all the time, unsure,” Franci said. “It wears you down.”

  The selective destruction continued, undermining the integrity of the community and the resistance of those who remained.

  When I approached the International Olympic Committee and Rio 2016, the local organizing committee, with questions about Metrô, they repeated the official city line. “No families are leaving their homes without an agreement signed with the city or compensation and a move-out deadline established according to the law,” they said in an official statement.

  Their response didn’t reflect what I’d seen. Regulations forbade pushing people into distant housing complexes, destroying their homes before alternative housing was ready, and paying inadequate compensation, all of which I’d seen during my visits. But the shell game of responsibility allowed them to pass this burden back to local authorities.

  Within the city, there was a specific agency behind the removals. The initials spray-painted on homes slated for destruction made that clear: SMH, the municipal housing authority. There, the man to talk to was Jorge Bittar. I was full of unanswered questions—How many people would be moved? Why were they being rushed out even before there were concrete plans for the region, or a place for them to go?

  In addition to Metrô, more than one hundred communities had been targeted for demolition all at once. More than fifteen thousand people had been removed over three years, and many more were in line. Did the city’s housing authority have the in-house expertise and the manpower to study each case in such a short period of time, and make adequate provisions? If so, where were those reports?

  After weeks of calls and stopping by unannounced, I got an audience at the very end of the business day on a Friday.

  In his glass-walled office, Bittar unfolded an architectural rendering of the area around the Maracanã. There were long, smooth ramps leading into the great oval. Over by Metrô, the ramshackle auto mechanic shops had been trimmed into an orderly row and warehouses had been converted to workshops. The houses were gone, just as they had been on the PowerPoint presentation I’d originally seen.

  “We’re giving these people dignified living conditions,” he said, repeating the mantra I’d heard from the Olympic authorities and the mayor.

  The quick visit was enough to gather quotes for a news article, but not to answer my broader questions. Facing the
Friday night traffic on my way back to the office, I thought back to Franci cooking her family’s lunch, to the children playing in the alley outside, and to the rubble that pocked the favela. There was more to this story.

  There was reason for the lack of trust people like Franci placed in official assertions of goodwill. Campaigns to uproot favelas were old tropes in Rio, as much a part of the city as the communities themselves.

  The state had never adequately invested in homes for lower-income workers or the poor, so they built their own on unused private or public land. Between 1870 and 1890 the city’s population grew 120 percent, but the number of houses went up only 74 percent. From then until 1906, the city boomed with recently emancipated blacks and European immigrants; the number of new residents outpaced available rooms nearly three-to-one. By 1920 the first recognized favela, Providência, showed up in census records with 839 homes and six businesses.

  Even as they expanded, favelas’ existence relied on a tenuous balance of interests. On one hand, these communities allowed Rio’s poor to live close to the wealthier neighborhoods where jobs were concentrated. The government largely turned a blind eye to these settlements, which provided a pool of cheap, readily accessible labor and required no investment of public money. On the other hand, the vast majority of residents had no land titles and occupied their plots at the will of authorities. A political or economic change could throw tens of thousands out of their homes.

  This happened in the first few years of the twentieth century, when about 20,000 of Rio’s poor were forced out of downtown tenements during an urban renewal program, and again in the 1960s, following a decade of rapid industrialization that fueled migrations from the country’s interior to Rio and nearly doubled the number of favela residents from around 170,000 to 335,000.

  This increase alarmed those who saw these communities as a problem, among them the right-wing governor Carlos Lacerda. He instituted the most radical favela eradication program the state had ever seen, clearing out more than forty-two thousand people between 1960 and 1965. Brazil’s military rulers added federal muscle to this effort by creating in 1968 an agency known by its acronym, CHISAM. Its goal was the total eradication of Rio’s favelas by 1976.

  The particular sorrow of packing your things and stepping outside to watch the house you raised be torn down was inscribed in the landscape and in songs like Adoniran Barbosa’s “Saudosa Maloca”: “Se o senhor não tá lembrado, dá licença de contar . . . Que aqui onde agora está esse edifício alto, era uma casa velha. . . .” “If you don’t remember, sir, allow me to tell you, that here where there’s this tall building, there was an old house. . . .”I

  The communities carried a heavy stigma. Policy makers and much of the population spoke of favelas as urban pathologies that marred the elegant profile of the cidade maravilhosa. CHISAM’s first coordinator, Gilberto Coufal, used this language of disease and infection to explain why simply giving favelas infrastructure wouldn’t do: “Favelados will continue to think, act and live as favelados,” he told the Jornal do Brasil in 1971. “The son of that man who lived in the favela will grow up, mentally, a favelado.”

  CHISAM’s plan was to send the displaced population to housing projects. Many families went willingly at first, believing the promise of a safer, healthier environment for their children and eager for a home that came with a property title. Only once they stepped off the backs of open-bed trucks that carried them and their belongings did they realize they’d been pushed literally to the margins. These projects were in the far outskirts of the city, in remote areas without transportation, jobs, or the most basic infrastructure.

  As the word spread of what awaited them, favelados resisted. Newspaper reports from this period tell stories of people who were shot, beaten, arrested, or disappeared for refusing to leave. The Praia do Pinto favela, which used to occupy prime land in Leblon, burned down in the middle of the night on May 11, 1969, while its residents slept. Their shacks were, back then, made largely of wood. News articles say five thousand favelados were left homeless, and thirty-two were injured; although residents said in interviews that some of their neighbors perished in the fire, the number of dead was never quantified.

  The residents of the Catacumba favela, which overlooked the Lagoa and Ipanema, countered the government’s proposal with their own community improvement plan. It was published in the September 15, 1969, edition of O Dia newspaper.

  “This favela can be sanitized and urbanized,” they wrote. “We do not want alms, charities or handouts. With the approval of public powers, we will construct and pay for our own houses.”

  Their proposal was disregarded. The community’s 2,158 homes were destroyed and the families dispersed among several housing projects. The official reason given was “instability of the soil and pollution of the nearby Rodrigo de Freitas lagoon,” according to a 1972 report by the state’s planning department. These justifications for removal—the safety of residents and the environment—would resurface decades later.

  Until its closure in 1973, CHISAM tore down sixty-two favelas. Praia do Pinto and Catacumba were typical. Like them, about 60 percent of the communities removed had stood on valuable land in the south side and were resettled in the far western and northwestern suburbs. One of these housing developments, the Cidade de Deus, or City of God, took in the broken-up population of sixty-three different favelas. Its story—the abandonment by public officials, the hardship faced by the first families, its slide into the hands of drug traffickers, and the escalation of violence that followed—was typical, and was told decades later in a book and a blockbuster movie by the same name.

  As the 1970s drew to a close, the military eased its grip; the country opened up and the specter of mass relocations dissipated. For much of the 1980s and 1990s, the word “removal” was largely retired from public discourse except in specific instances. In 1992, a city planning document proposed for the first time “integrating favelas into the formal city,” and “preserving their local character.” An urbanization program, the Favela-Bairro, or Favela to Neighborhood, began paving streets and installing public lights in 1994. It seemed to signal a change in attitude toward favelas.

  Now the city was preening for World Cup and the Olympics, and that word, remoção, removal, was back in the headlines. Favela residents clearly remembered enough of the city’s history to be wary of government officials who promised them “a dignified life.”

  How much had changed since Rio’s last wave of removals?

  I was still nursing my morning coffee one Saturday in January 2013 when I was jolted fully awake by a phone call: armed police in riot gear had surrounded a settlement and were preparing to invade. I grabbed my notebook and sped over.

  The man on the other end of the line was Carlos Tukano, an indigenous native Brazilian of the Tukano tribe. Originally from an area of the Amazon that straddles northwestern Brazil and Colombia, he was the informal leader of a group of indigenous people of more than a dozen ethnicities including Guarani, Pataxó, Kaingangue, and Guajajara. They had come to Rio to work, to get medical care, to study, or to sell crafts in the streets. Without connections or a safe place to live, they had moved onto the grounds of an abandoned nineteenth-century mansion that stood right next to the Maracanã stadium.

  Most of the roof had collapsed; vines crept up the walls. What had once been decorative trees in a planned garden had grown tall and wild, obscuring the ruins and draping them in shadow. It was within the garden walls, unnoticed by the drivers who sped along the highway nearby and the fans who streamed into the Maracanã, that Carlos and the others had built a clutch of modest houses out of brick and thatch. They’d named their colony the Aldeia Maracanã, or Maracanã Village.

  As the community became more established, they began to host cultural events: storytelling for children, workshops on indigenous crafts, ceremonies. We met when an AP photographer did a photo essay on them, and I went along to write
the copy.

  Carlos was thoughtful and patient, with broad, high cheekbones and eyes that turned down at the corners, following the downward cast of his mouth. This mournful appearance hid a sharp wit.

  “Want me to wear the headdress?” he asked during our first interview. “You know, so I can look like a real Indian.” He grinned, gently mocking us and himself at once.

  We had exchanged phone numbers and stayed in touch. It was during one of my visits that Tukano explained what bound the indigenous to this crumbling old mansion. I later confirmed the details in a 2011 report done by a historian and an architect for the city’s commission on cultural patrimony.

  The building and its grounds had been donated to the nation in 1865 by Ludwig August de Saxe-Coburgo-Gotha, the Duque of Saxe, husband of Princess Leopoldina, second daughter of Emperor Dom Pedro II. It came with one condition: that it serve as an institute of Brazilian indigenous cultures.

  This request was honored for decades. The building housed the Service for the Protection of Indians until 1962, when the institution was transferred to the new capital, Brasília. The mansion was then converted into an Indian Museum. That operated until 1977, when the collection was moved to the museum’s current location in Botafogo. The mansion was then abandoned until the indigenous began to reclaim the space in 2006.

  In spite of this history, Governor Cabral announced in October 2012 that the building would be razed. Plans for the stadium’s surroundings had no more room for Carlos and the Aldeia than they did for the Metrô favela.

  Residents of Aldeia Maracanã learned of this through the news; no one bothered to explain the terms of their departure or the date. It wasn’t clear why they had to go, or what was planned for the spot. Tukano tried to puzzle out what was in store from scraps of information he found in newspapers. He would spread his clippings on an outdoor table during visits and ask if I had anything new to share. Now months of guessing had come to an end. There was panic in Carlos’s voice on the phone that morning.