The destruction of Vila Autódromo was built into the proposal; simples assim, as Brazilians say; as simple as that. The residents would be resettled in a housing project also built by the winning developer with federal funds on city-owned land.
Two days after the proposal’s unveiling, the Estado de S. Paulo newspaper scrutinized what seemed a minor part of the deal: the city’s purchase of the future housing project’s plot. Expenditures that high had to be published in the municipal register. This one had something funny about it: the cost had initially been published as $1 million. The figure had been corrected and republished three times. Each time, the price had gone up until it reached $10 million.
The article revealed the plot’s owners were two real estate development companies that had donated substantially to the mayor, to his chief of staff, and to three department heads directly involved in the removal of Vila Autódromo. Among them was Jorge Bittar, the head of the housing authority.
The two developers who owned the land purchased by the city were also responsible for three condomínios within a mile of Vila Autódromo. These units would rise in value once the favela was no longer visible from their balconies.
And there was more: according to a report by the city’s geotechnical experts, about 70 percent of the plot purchased by the city was considered an “área de risco.” It stood just under the mountains of Pedra Branca State Park, in a “medium risk” zone between the high-risk areas among the peaks and the low-risk flatlands.
Brought together, these bits of information allowed a peek into the black box of municipal decision-making. They also explained why most residents in the community were reluctant to leave. They understood what was happening. Many of them, like Altair, had seen it all before.
The growing number of reasons offered for their removal also fed their mistrust. There were at least two new ones in 2012: the first, explained in a city-produced video, had a feeder road of the Transcarioca passing right over Vila Autódromo. Another, offered by the mayor in an interview, held that “two-thirds of the community was in an environmental preservation area.”
So was their eradication necessary because they stood in the way of a stretch of highway or because they occupied a protected area? Or by one of the handful of alternatives offered in years past? It didn’t matter. Each new plan only emphasized the sense among residents that whatever the latest excuse, the real goal was their removal. There was a lot of money to be made and they were in the way.
As part of their effort to stay, Vila Autódromo did what the residents of another lagoon-side community, Catacumba, had done decades ago: they drew up their own urbanization plans. With technical help from a group of academics, they produced a study of what it would take to meet environmental regulations and bring services to their homes. The Plano Popular da Vila Autódromo, handed to the mayor in August 2012, was viable and economical. Their whole project cost less than that of the land purchased for their resettlement.I
But the city’s plans went on unaltered. By early 2013, construction began on the housing complex to which residents would be moved even as most of the community remained steadfast in its refusal to leave.
There had been so many reasons offered for the removal of Vila Autódromo that I’d begun to collect them, like stamps or trading cards. A new chief of the housing authority gave me another: Vila Autódromo’s land would be turned into a public park.
The situation was at a standstill when the mayor suddenly reversed course and agreed to meet with the residents in August 2013. He admitted he’d made a mistake and agreed to everything: to Vila Autódromo’s permanence, to its urbanization, and to the resettlement within the community of any residents who had to be moved for environmental reasons. Those who wanted to leave would get market-rate compensation or an apartment in the housing project. All negotiations would include the residents’ association and the technical advisors.
It was a startling victory. Vila Autódromo had been able to fight off its demolition entirely. When the community announced this to the public, they signed the note with “Viva a Vila Autódromo! A Vila Autódromo Vive!”
Long live Vila Autódromo. It was a storybook ending.
But the story wasn’t over and it wasn’t simple. These stories seldom are.
In the months that followed the mayor’s apparent capitulation, the city presented residents with yet another plan. This one would preserve the center of the community but would clear out the homes along its borders—nearly half of its houses—to create elevated access ramps into the Olympic Park. These ramps, raised six feet off the ground, would enclose the remaining homes in a belt of pavement and traffic.
The mayor offered to discuss this and answer questions in person but only with those who got an invitation in the mail. This led to even more anxiety and uncertainty. It wasn’t clear why some were included and not others. What did it mean if you were chosen? Would the mayor be making new offers? Was this just another ploy to divide them?
This meeting was called for a Sunday in October 2013. The Wednesday before, about 150 people crowded into the favela’s St. Joseph the Worker church to discuss what to do. Men and women lined up and took the microphone, though there nothing new in their recitations. They’d been in this together for years; they knew each other’s stories and feelings. They weren’t sharing information so much as reaffirming their convictions. If the city was trying to pull them apart, their words were a reminder of what bound them together:
“. . . We built this place; we built this city. We have a right to it,” said Altair.
“. . . on Sunday, we’ll only need to get one word in to tell the mayor what we think: no,” said Inalva, a retired public school teacher.
Hovering in the back was Maria da Penha Macena. I knew Penha, as she was called, from other meetings like this; she kept busy plying everyone with coffee and cookies and seldom sat down.
She didn’t go to the microphone, but I knew her story; it was the story of many of those present. Penha had cleaned other people’s homes and cooked their food for decades to build her family’s three-story home. They had saved for each load of bricks and bucket of paint; together they carried the cement, laid the tiles, and hung the doors. The building was their home: subdivided into apartments, it housed Penha, her husband, her daughter, her mother, her mother-in-law, and her mother-in-law’s other children, Penha’s brothers- and sisters-in-law, and their families. But it was also a repository of their memories, their effort, and their plans for the future.
By the time the meeting ended at around 11 p.m., the decision was made: they’d all go meet the mayor, invitation or no invitation. On Sunday morning, they gathered and walked over to the convention center, where Mayor Eduardo Paes was waiting in a conference hall auditorium, behind a moat and three levels of locked doors guarded by security guards. I went along. The residents chanted, they waded across the moat, they argued with the gatekeepers, waved their invitations around—and they eventually got in. All of them. They saw the mayor and heard his proposal.
It felt, briefly, like success; they’d achieved something that had been denied them. But what was won? It had been a long day. Much effort, planning, and energy had gone into preparing for it, and yet, as I drove away, I realized they were no closer to a resolution.
For years the city had waged a long and wearying war of attrition against this community. With its exclusive invitations and selective release of information, the meeting that Sunday had not been a real attempt to reach a settlement, just another step on the treadmill of proposals and counterproposals, concessions and reversals that spun on and on, with no conclusion and no rest. Residents there had lived with this for two decades, but the buildup to the Olympics was making it unbearable. They were exhausted.
The last time I went to Vila Autódromo was on a Saturday in March 2014. I was on my way to a family lunch and stopped to check on Penha and the others. An injunction blo
cking demolitions in the favela had been overturned days before, and already there were gaping holes where the first few houses had been punched out. The dust and noise of twenty-four-hour construction at the Olympic Park next door permeated the community.
At the residents’ association, Penha and others were wrapping up a meeting with activists and academics. They had spent the morning polling neighbors about this latest defeat and drawing up new plans. After the meeting, I walked with Penha to her house. The sun was vicious; along the way, we passed the sad voids where homes had stood.
None of this seemed to weigh her down. Penha is tiny, no more than five feet tall, with small bones and a bright energy that got me thinking of hummingbirds. On our way to her house, she made quick stops to inquire after someone’s sick baby, to kiss a friend hello, and to touch the forehead of a goddaughter who called out for a blessing:
“A bênção, madrinha!”
“Deus te abençoe e te dê felicidade,” she answered. God bless you and give you happiness.
It was well past lunchtime when we got to her home; her family was waiting for her to eat and so was mine, but we stole just a few more minutes to climb up to the rooftop and look over at the future Olympic Park.
From the very top of the building, we could see the Jacarepaguá lagoon and the glare of glass-fronted high-rises on the other side. The Olympic Park was a pit of red mud. A welcome gust of air came over the water.
The mayor’s first attempt to demolish this community had been in 1993—more than twenty years ago. What made him so relentless?
“They want to turn us into the Lagoa,” she said, nodding in the direction of the lagoon. That made sense: Lagoa, the lagoon that stretches from the Botanical Gardens to Ipanema. After favelas were removed from its surroundings in the 1960s it became one of the most desirable addresses in town.
The story of Vila Autódromo is complicated, full of dead ends, reversals, surprises. But as Penha put it, it was also simple. It had happened before. If Barra was to be Rio’s new south side, an enclave of privilege and exclusivity, Vila Autódromo had to go. Simples assim. None of this was new; it had always been this way.
Timbered mountains rose beyond the placid waters. This was one of the places were Rio’s physical beauty asserted itself and demanded attention. What seemed remarkable was not what city authorities and their backers wanted to do, but the fact that they had been prevented from doing it—so far.
I had returned to Brazil counting on the economy and politicians, the World Cup and the Olympics as catalysts for change. Indeed, they were transforming the face of the city, for better or for worse. But I’d also found that ordinary people like Penha were driving a profound change by simply demanding their basic rights, including the right to be heard by their elected officials and to be treated lawfully.
Standing next to me on her rooftop in her cutoff shorts and flip-flops, Penha smiled and flapped her pink, “Jesus loves me” T-shirt in and out to catch the breeze. Whether she’d be standing there by the time the Olympics started in 2016 was anyone’s guess. But that she was still there, enjoying the breeze, calm and unwavering, was extraordinary. This did feel like a victory—incomplete and temporary, perhaps, but hard-won and unprecedented, a bright kernel I could take with me as I drove away.
* * *
I. This plan would later win the Urban Age Award, granted by the Deutsche Bank and by LSE Cities, a research center at the London School of Economics, in recognition of the effort made by the community to improve its environment.
CHAPTER 16
THE WORLD BELONGS TO THE DARING
I was on vacation, hiking among glaciers and sheep in the mountains of eastern Turkey and disconnected for the first time in years from Brazil and the news, when I checked my email and found it full of puzzling messages. The connection was slow, so I stared in confusion at those subject headings—“Hope you’re safe,” “Are you OK?”—for a few seconds before the rest of the messages loaded.
Safe? I had no idea what they were talking about.
As their messages and Brazilian news websites appeared on the screen, my heart sank. What had prompted them to write was news, big news, big enough to show up in American papers.
Demonstrations were blanketing downtown Rio, São Paulo, and other state capitals; police were cracking down on protesters with batons, firing tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets at close range. Images of bloodied protesters were all over my social media feeds. I saw the reason behind the worry piling up in my inbox. Journalists were particularly targeted. One photographer was hit in the eye with a rubber bullet; a handful of others were hit in the face. In photo after photo, the strikes looked deliberate. The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism tallied fifteen journalists hurt in one day of protest coverage in São Paulo.
All of it seemed surreal, an anachronism reminiscent of the aggression unleashed by the military regime on pro-democracy protesters a generation ago.
What happened to the new Brazil, this up-and-coming country with solid institutions, a breath of equality, freedom of speech? The president and her two predecessors, the worker and the intellectual, had all fought in their very different ways for a government that represented its people, for democracy. Now marchers and reporters were once again being bloodied on public streets by police untrained or uninterested in peaceful crowd control. And there I was, stranded in a mountain town on the other side of the world.
The violence of the police reaction came as a shock, but so did the demonstrations themselves. In the short weeks I’d been away, Brazil had erupted with some of the largest and most resonant waves of protest in its history.
The catalyst was an innocuous march over a ten-cent hike in bus fares in São Paulo. Dissatisfaction had built like gas in room with a slow leak, invisible but dangerous. The unrest in São Paulo was the spark that triggered an explosion of pent-up demands. Within days, protesters were clamoring for better hospitals, better schools, less corruption, less brutality at the hands of police.
Back in Istanbul, I watched as videos showed Brazilian streets convulsing in city after city. Hundreds of thousands were joining these demonstrations that no politician, community leader, academic, or journalist had predicted. Even the protesters themselves were caught off guard by the strength of the movement, which wasn’t even a formal movement. Although banners were soon raised, there was no political party behind the rallies, no singular issue or segment of society leading the charge.
I understood the frustration. This was June 2013. By then I’d been in Brazil for nearly three years, and knew about the terrible services, the corruption that drained public funds, and the venal political class. But those problems had plagued Brazil for generations. What new element suddenly made that old mix so explosive? And why were protests that started over the cost of public transportation and called for basic services so threatening to authorities they elicited this violent response?
The answers were rooted in the changes I’d observed since arriving. The country’s economic outlook had changed since that cover of The Economist showed Cristo rocketing off his perch. The boom of 2010, when talk of Brazil was studded with exclamation marks and the economy grew at a China-like rate, had given way to three years of middling growth. But this wasn’t the whole explanation, or even most it. This slowdown hadn’t hit pocketbooks just yet. Employment was still strong, and inflation, the indicator that most worried Brazilians who suffered the instability of the 1980s and 1990s, was still within predicted parameters.
Watching videos stream over the Internet, reading and rereading placards and banners, what I saw were core middle-class demands: For a country without corruption! Stop the thievery or we stop the country. We want hospitals. Where are our taxes going?
There were polite ones—Sorry for the inconvenience, we’re changing the country!—and those that went for laughs: There are so many things wrong in this c
ountry I can’t fit them on this poster!
Not even the national passion was spared their fury; fans trying to reach Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium for the Confederations Cup, a test run to the World Cup, had to charge past clouds of tear gas and riot police trying to contain protests over the volume of public money spent on sports venues. Posters pointed this out as well: Forget stadiums, I want world-class schools. Call me World Cup and invest in me! one student’s sign said, and another, I didn’t vote for FIFA!
What I saw was that, with dinner on the table and democracy guaranteed, Brazilians wanted more—they wanted the whole package. The protests were the growing pains of a middle-income country with a middle class that had awakened to the reality that they paid taxes, they voted, and they wanted what was their due: decent services and elected officials who represented their interests.
After all, this was not the broke Brazil of yore that defaulted on international loans and cycled through so many currencies the Treasury had run out of historical figures with which to illustrate new bills—or so the joke went. This Brazil rested on a decade of economic stability and growth, and had enough oil reserves to pave its way to a better future. Watching the protesters with their banners, I saw a people who had long recognized the country’s entrenched inequities, but who had only recently become aware of its potential. That was the Brazil they were chanting for on the streets.
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