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

by Juliana Barbassa

  By the time I arrived, the standoff between police and the indigenous had grown tense. Officers in black, Kevlar-encrusted riot uniforms and yard-long weapons formed a shoulder-to-shoulder barricade in front of the compound. The main gates were locked; through gaps in the rusty metal I could see the liquid gleam of eyes. From within came birdsong, singing, and the sound of a flute. Some of the indigenous sat astride the wall holding ceremonial bows and arrows decorated with feathers. Many had donned headdresses and painted themselves in black and red geometric designs.

  A police commander told me they were just waiting for orders to enter; until then, they would secure the perimeter. Chanting rose from within the compound. I approached the wall and told one of the men perched above that I knew Carlos. A minute later, they lowered a wooden ladder. From the top, I surveyed the surreal scene: on one side, riot police dressed for urban counterinsurgency; on the other, bare-chested men in feathered crowns sang and shook rattles while women and children milled around and peered through the gate.

  Carlos and the others had called to their side everyone they could; within the compound were at least two hundred activists, students, and journalists. There were men with faces covered by balaclavas or tied T-shirts observing the standoff from a tower that rose above the second floor. Their bows and arrows were not the wood-and-feather contraptions of the indigenous below, but professional archery equipment.

  Carlos was among the hundred or so supporters gathered out back, where the residents’ thatch-roofed houses stood. He was trying to speak over an agitated crowd that included many of the indigenous, an assortment of activists, an opposition politician, and two public defenders. It was chaotic; voices rose at once, opinions crisscrossed, unheard.

  No one knew why the police had come without a judicial order to enter, but without one, they couldn’t evacuate the residents, said one of the public defenders.

  “This is absolutely arbitrary,” he said. “It could be a bloodbath.”

  No one knew whether an order was really on its way or how far police were willing to go to enforce it if it came. The strain made the crowd restive. This situation didn’t feel safe. There were too many angry people, few substantial conversations, and a lot of armed men beyond the gates—plus the guys in the balaclavas above. Carlos was calling for calm, but his voice didn’t carry far.

  “We cannot fight them with bows and arrows,” he said. “They are going to come in. We have to stay firm, without aggression.”

  He was a leader for quieter times, not the type to take a platform and rally a crowd. I had a feeling that the Aldeia Maracanã might be the worse for it.

  The police blockade lasted through the afternoon; at the end of the day, still without an order to enter, the officers disbanded. I went home as confused as I when I arrived. Was it possible this was all an intimidation stunt? If so, it worked. By the time I left the Aldeia Maracanã, tempers were frayed and heated voices whipped up arguments for and against various courses of action—leaving, staying, resisting, compromising, fighting.

  The tension continued to build over months, with legal parrying in the courts, visits by attorneys, and ostensive police presence around the settlement. I was traveling when Governor Cabral sent in the shock troops, but I didn’t need to be there to know what happened. It was all over the national and international news: officers in their RoboCop gear striding through clouds of tear gas and pepper spray as they handcuffed and dragged scores of indigenous and other protesters out of the compound by the arms or legs. Carlos was there, bare-chested, in a yellow-feathered headband, arguing with police in bulletproof vests.

  The indigenous were resettled in metal containers furnished with bunk beds in western Rio, next to a leper colony. The containers were plunked on a cement platform and covered by a tarp. They flooded with the first rain.

  Following the events in communities like Metrô, Aldeia Maracanã, and dozens of others, I began to notice parallels between the removal program in pre-Olympic Rio and the one carried out under the military dictatorship during the 1960s and 1970s.

  The settlements singled out then and now shared one very significant characteristic: they were on land that had soared in value. Removing favelas was often the last step toward unlocking a region’s full real estate potential.

  Decades ago, most demolished communities were in the south side. Now, nearly half of the targeted communities were in the west, Rio’s booming real estate frontier and home to most Olympic venues. The second significant cluster was still in the sought-after south-central zone.

  And where were these families being resettled? Two-thirds were destined for housing developments in the far northwest, beyond the mountains that loomed over Barra and Jacarepaguá. This area was getting 80 percent of the housing intended for the poorest favelados, the families subsisting on under $11,000 a year.

  The far northwest is the cheapest real estate in town. It is also the region with the fewest jobs—only 8 percent, compared to 60 percent in the center-south—and the most deprived of essentials such as public lighting, sewerage, transportation, schools, and hospitals. Much like in the 1960s, the residents with the fewest resources were being relocated to areas with the least infrastructure and that were farthest from sources of work.

  There was, however, one very revealing difference between these two waves of removals: the reaction of the targeted favelas. While in the past there had been some resistance, such as in Catacumba, where residents drew up their own urbanization plan, residents were far more organized now.

  Some of the advances that had raised Brazil to prominence and brought it the World Cup and the Olympics, such as the economic stability, the decrease in inequality, and the expansion of its middle class, had also raised the population’s expectations and made it harder to push through projects that they did not perceive to be in their interests.

  This new awareness was also manifest in Rio’s favelas. Residents were reclaiming stigmatized words like favela and favelado, or using the less loaded term, comunidade, community. Leaders like Franci held that favelas were not a problem but a solution, albeit an imperfect one, to the city’s insufficient housing and mass transportation. Integrating these communities into the urban fabric by providing the amenities they lacked was simpler, cheaper, and better city planning than destroying and relocating them, they said, and they were ready to confront their elected officials to defend this position.

  All this meant that resistance to removals was widespread and substantial in some cases—and that expectations were high for the Morar Carioca program, which had promised to upgrade all remaining favelas by 2020. According to its official guidelines, Morar Carioca would further “socio-spatial inclusion and the expansion of the right to the city,” goals that touched the core of this cidade partida, this split city.

  Soon after Morar Carioca’s announcement, the city’s housing authority hired a nonprofit organization to survey the communities, and the Institute of Brazilian Architects held an international competition for favela urbanization proposals, selecting forty firms.

  The mayor touted the program often during his reelection campaign in 2012; when he won, its aims were incorporated into his second-term inaugural speech in January 2013: “To Cariocas, we will leave a legacy that will improve life in Rio, particularly among the poorest, with interventions in infrastructure, mobility, and a strategic vision for development.”

  And so, when Morar Carioca unraveled, the disappointment was sharp—for favela residents, who had answered questions about improvement they’d like to see; for the professionals who had developed plans that would never leave the drawing board; but also for those like myself who believed this was Rio’s moment to address its greatest imbalance.

  There was no official announcement of the program’s dismantling, no explanation to the public, to the communities, or to the architects and engineers. Funding simply failed to materialize. The organization hired to
poll favela residents had its contract severed immediately after the mayor’s second-term inauguration. By mid-2014, four years after the program was announced, construction had started in only two of the forty projects.II The removals continued apace.

  Sometimes this dizzying policy about-face could be seen within a single community. Residents in the Vila União de Curicica favela, for example, went from listing their priorities for Morar Carioca improvements to being slated for removal in less than two years.

  I brought this up with Pedro da Luz, president of the Rio CHAPTER of the Institute of Brazilian Architects. The organization is venerable, nearly a century old, and often called upon as the arbiter of planning debates, including those involving Rio’s Olympic projects.

  Pedro is a man of complete sentences and thoughtful pauses, but the unexplained demise of Morar Carioca broke his loping conversational stride and sent his fingers raking through his unruly gray mane.

  “Public policy like this presupposes planning, commitment, follow-through,” he said. “But this . . .” He held his hands open and empty before him and shook his head, as if to show there were no words that captured his frustration.

  The institute doesn’t get into public spats. But it had partnered with the city and lent the program its name and prestige, only to watch Morar Carioca be trotted out for political use and then gutted. Pedro was left holding the carcass of its good intentions, and was grasping for a way to be civil about the mess in his hands.

  By abandoning the urbanization program and accelerating mass removals, Rio went from having a favela integration program to actively promoting spatial segregation of the poor; it also went from investing in the city’s core to encouraging the expansion of its urban footprint.

  This was in keeping with other decisions, such as building new western-centered transportation routes (the Transolímpica, Transcarioca, and TransOeste), extending the subway to Barra, and placing most of the Olympic venues there. The fact that this region was car-dependent, still lacking in appropriate infrastructure, and built on a model of exclusive gated communities meant Rio was taking a path that was environmentally unwise, expensive to maintain, and a traffic nightmare in the making. This course would also heighten the city’s historic social and economic imbalances, and inscribe them into the landscape.

  “The city is physical, concrete,” Pedro said. “When we make a mistake, it is a mistake that will last for forty, fifty years. That’s a problem.”

  All of these changes were wrapped around the need to prepare for the World Cup and the Olympics. From the moment the city was chosen as a host, authorities began regularly invoking deadlines and creating emergency measures to meet them. This state of exception applied to refurbishing stadiums and building venues, but it also lent urgency and freed from regulatory trammels projects that were only indirectly associated with the sporting events. After three years in Rio, I began to understand how this state of exception was being used to reshape the city; Cariocas would live with its legacy for many decades, as Pedro da Luz had pointed out. This brought me back to my original questions: what city was being created here? Who stood to gain from it, and who would lose? How were the World Cup and the Olympics being used in this context?

  These are not easy questions to answer. There are powerful political, economic, and social actors involved, but their interests and allegiances are not always explicit or easy to untangle. One of the places where these forces clashed prominently, revealing something of their inner workings, was in a small, west-side favela of about three thousand residents called Vila Autódromo.

  * * *

  I. Adoniran Barbosa happens to be from São Paulo, but Rio sambistas also spoke of this phenomenon.

  II. What Rio’s favelas did get were highly visible projects that opened them up to tourism and often required the removal of hundreds of families. A $20 million steel and glass elevator built in Cantagalo, which leads to a lookout over Ipanema, pushed out 300 families; another 2,100 families were resettled to make way for a $105 million gondola system in Alemão. Another gondola system installed in Providência for $37 million also pushed out hundreds of homes.

  CHAPTER 15

  WE BUILT THIS CITY

  Altair Guimarães knows about removals. He can tick off on his fingers the times he’s seen his house torn down. The first was in 1967, when he was fourteen. The family home in Lagoa was demolished to make way for high-rises, and they were resettled in the Cidade de Deus housing complex. The second came when he was thirty-five, married, and a father of two girls. Their house was torn down to make way for a highway. They gathered their belongings and moved to Vila Autódromo, a small west-side favela ensconced between two highways, the Jacarepaguá lagoon, and what used to be Rio’s Formula 1 racetrack.

  He was fifty-eight when we met at Vila Autódromo’s neighborhood association, a tall man with rough-hewn features and powerful hands that testify to the decades he spent working construction. He was facing the loss of his home for the third time.

  Rio’s Olympic candidature dossier called the city’s west side “the heart of the Games”; it would be the site of the main Olympic sports cluster. As it happened, Vila Autódromo sat right in the middle of that cluster. According to the bid book, the Olympic Village, the Media Village, the main press center, and the international broadcast center would all be within a three-mile radius of the community. The Olympic Park would be right next to it, where the old Formula 1 track had stood.

  Vila Autódromo’s real estate had been rising in value for decades. The Olympics sent it soaring. Without delay, the city put into motion plans to clear out the community. Residents learned of this along with everyone else—through the news.

  Altair spoke with an anger built over decades.

  “You work your whole life and never have anything to show for it,” he said. “They can’t move us like we’re trash, from one place to another.”

  Vila Autódromo started as a fishing village on the margins of the Jacarepaguá lagoon in the 1960s. It grew as Cariocas moved westward, taking in construction workers like Altair, who raised the region’s first condomínios and then built their own homes nearby. They were soon followed by the vast array of service workers demanded by gated communities and shopping malls: maids, nannies, gardeners, janitors, security guards, doormen, mechanics, plumbers, waiters.

  By the 1990s, developers had realized the west was where the city had room to grow. Vila Autódromo faced its first threats in 1993 and in 1996, when the city charged them in court with causing “damage to the urban environment, damage to the natural environment, and aesthetic, landscape and touristic damage,” and requested “measures for the removal of people and things.” Leading the effort was twenty-three-year-old Eduardo Paes, then in his first political position as deputy mayor of the west side.

  The city lost its case, and the community secured several safeguards: more than one hundred families got titles to their land in 1997; in 1998, those who lived by the lagoon got a concession of use that allowed them to stay for ninety-nine years. In 2005, the City Council recognized them as an “Area of Special Social Interest,” which meant they were apt for integration into the city. Construction boomed all around.

  Then came the 2007 Pan-American Games. Many of its venues were in the neighborhood; this intensified development in the region and bolstered real estate prices. The threat against Vila Autódromo was renewed. Demolition crews came close enough to spray-paint the SMH tag on a few homes before the plan was overturned.

  Still, this was nothing compared to the pressure that came bearing down on them once the IOC chose Rio as host of the 2016 Olympics. From that moment on, Rio authorities became intent on clearing out the community, and resorted to a wide range of tactics to achieve this.

  The official reason for the removal shifted over time. The initial justification was that the city needed to expand two highways that met at its borders. Bet
ween 2009 and 2010, the mayor or his representatives offered up at least three more explanations: the area was too difficult to urbanize; it would be the site of the Olympic Media Center; it infringed upon a security zone around the future Olympic Park.

  Residents fought off each allegation, with the help of activists and academics who had joined in a technical support team, but as the arguments against them morphed, their status remained unclear.

  Then, in August 2011, the press gathered for the announcement of the winning design of Rio’s Olympic Park. The contest included sixty proposals from firms in eighteen countries and was presided over by the IAB, Pedro da Luz’s organization. There was much expectation surrounding this, not least from the residents of Vila Autódromo. What was in store for their sliver of land?

  The winner was the British firm Aecom, an engineering and architecture company that had designed London’s 2012 Olympic Park. Their plan came with a surprise: they made room for Vila Autódromo. There it was, right on the map presented by the firm, labeled and represented as a little cluster of homes tucked between two parking lots and a back entrance to the Olympic Park.

  Did this mean the tiny favela would be able to stay, in full view of international news cameras during the competition and, perhaps more significantly, within sight of the high-end condomínios sprouting nearby? If not, why?

  The answers came in fragments, and revealed much about the forces fueling Rio’s transformation.

  In October 2011 the city announced that it was taking bids from developers for participation in the public-private partnership that would build the Olympic Park. This was the same sort of deal behind the disastrous Vila do Pan and the Olympic golf course. The total cost of the 290-acre project was about $700 million. The federal government would pay for the sports arenas; the city would come in with $250 million. For their contribution, the developer would get the right to raise condomínios and hotels on 75 percent of the Olympic Park’s grounds after the Games—a transfer of 217 acres of prime, publicly owned land to private hands.