Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Building inside the favelas is unregulated, and when the rains come, houses collapse. Walled off from the city proper, these gang-dominated enclaves have been the setting of endless violence. Most cities have slums, but in many—including many others in Brazil—these are on the outskirts of town or in a single, contained enclave. Rio’s favelas are dotted all through the city like the chocolate chips in a cookie. The city’s peculiar geography is such that shantytown gunfire is audible even in the most affluent neighborhoods. The social distances in Rio outmeasure the geographic ones.

  Much of Brazilian culture originated in Rio’s favelas. Samba evolved there, and the new funk music, too. Many soccer stars hail from the favelas, and some of Brazil’s famous models. Carnival in Rio—the biggest pre-Lenten festival in the world, with 2 million people a day partying in the streets—depends largely on the “samba schools” of the favelas, which compete to put on the most glittering displays. French aristocrats never say that France would be nothing without the slums of Paris, and most upper-class Italians are embarrassed by the Mafia; hip-hop culture notwithstanding, most Americans opt for the suburbs. But in Rio de Janeiro, those who have privilege admire those who don’t. José Maria Zacchi, one of the architects of change in Rio, told me that in nineteenth-century Brazil, little distance separated the manor house and the slave quarters, and not much has changed in that regard. “The educated upper middle class loves to mingle with the people, loves it,” the poet and critic Italo Moriconi said. “It’s part of the Carioca culture.” (The word Carioca refers to people or things from or of Rio.) Yet Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world—a place, as the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz said, of “cultural inclusion and social exclusion.”

  Carioca pride began its slip in 1960, when the capital was moved to remote Brasília and the government functionaries skipped town. Previously a federal district on the order of Washington, DC, or Mexico City, Rio was folded into the surrounding, undeveloped state for administrative purposes. Business shifted increasingly to São Paulo; Rio was deindustrialized. Violence from the favelas threatened rich and poor. Wealthy people employed private security forces, drove bulletproof cars, and stopped wearing jewelry. Drug gangs fought one another and an incredibly corrupt police force. The gangs sometimes put their enemies into towers of tires and set them on fire—a method of execution known as the microwave oven, similar to the South African atrocity called necklacing.

  Some policemen moonlighted in private militias, protection organizations within favelas and slums that were hard to distinguish from the gangs they theoretically controlled; Moriconi referred to the “promiscuous relationship between police and crime.” In 2008, Philip Alston, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, said, “A remarkable number of police lead double lives. While on duty, they fight the drug gangs, but on their days off, they work as foot soldiers of organized crime.” In 2008, 1 in every 23 people arrested by Rio de Janeiro’s police force was killed by police or by others in custody before making it to trial—a striking statistic considering that the ratio for the United States is 1 in 37,000.

  Luiz Eduardo Soares served briefly as national secretary of public security under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, who ruled from 2003 to 2010. Soares instituted a program to enter poor areas with respect. “We were there offering a public service, not invading,” he told me. But policing is a local issue, and it was hard to change problematic procedures and attitudes with a national policy. “When you give a policeman discretionary authority to kill, you’re also giving him authority to sell life,” Soares said. “He can say to the suspect, ‘I can kill you. That won’t cost me anything. But I can also not kill you. How much would you give me?’ ” It does not take long for such behavior to become organized. Favela residents armed themselves heavily. Innocent people were injured and killed in the cross fire, and life expectancy was short. In the Zona Sul, street crime became ubiquitous. Upward of a thousand people a year were killed by police in Rio and São Paulo alone, a significantly higher number than that for the whole United States. The chief of special operations of the Rio police was indicted for corruption. “If you were poor, you were scared of the police; if you were rich, you were skeptical of them,” said Roberto Feith, Rio’s leading publisher.

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  Given the centrality of sports to the Brazilian psyche, it’s no surprise that the World Cup and the Olympics should have inspired Rio’s leadership to attempt a change. After decades of internecine quarreling among their administrations, the mayor of Rio, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and the federal government of Brazil began to work in sync. In 2008, Rio’s secretary of security, José Mariano Beltrame, introduced the UPP (Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora, or Pacifying Police Unit), a new force of younger, ostensibly uncorrupted officers under the aegis of the military police rather than of local bosses. “We need fresh, strong minds, not a Rambo,” said UPP commander Colonel José Carvalho at its start.

  Since the program began, the favelas have been invaded one by one almost as acts of war. Beltrame announces his plan before entering each favela, giving drug dealers a chance to flee; his focus is on eliminating guns rather than on closing down contraband-distribution networks. He enters forcibly, using airpower, the army, and the marines. Once the rout is over, police establish a UPP Social, a sort of Marshall Plan intended to install or upgrade education, sanitary services, legal electricity and cable television, and job training. The police stay on to protect the citizens of the favelas, rather than to protect the residents of the Zona Sul from the favelas. Pre-Beltrame, the reactive police presence established sporadic dominion in response to particular acts of violence; now, the UPP aims to cultivate a proactive peace. Previous programs sought to bulldoze the favelas; current ones seek to reform them.

  During the dictatorship of the sixties and seventies, police officers received a pay raise for every “enemy” they killed in the favelas. The new regime has turned that incentive on its head, declaring that even criminals have human rights. UPPs have been established in only sixty-eight of Rio’s eleven hundred favelas, but Beltrame started with some of the toughest ones and nearly three hundred thousand people are already living in pacified areas. Ultimately, the goal is for all the favelas to be neighborhoods within the city, rather than isolated entities. When I asked Beltrame how long it would take to pacify the rest of the favelas, he replied that the problem was finding enough honest police officers.

  Conservative forces had long averred that crime could be suppressed by escalating use of force; previous efforts in the favelas were essentially conquests, with the entire citizenry treated as enemy combatants, so extrajudicial killings were considered casualties of war. The more liberal perspective was that violence was the product of a flawed social structure and would evaporate only if injustice were redressed; that point of view generated limp social programs and a proliferation of NGOs. The right was troublingly violent, and the left, troublingly complacent. The genius of Beltrame’s agenda is that it satisfies both sides. The right is thrilled because crime is down; the left is thrilled because social justice is advanced. The rich are safer, and the poor are richer. Beltrame told me that he had fired a vast number of police for corruption, but he emphasized that the police were “only one element in the larger project of public security.” Soares said, “Half the regular police force is corrupt; another thirty-five percent are indifferent; and fifteen percent care about injustice. Now that fifteen percent are in ascendancy.”

  The residents of the favelas were highly suspicious of members of this new police force who claimed their purpose was to serve rather than to oppress. Gradually, the favela dwellers have begun to say that they feel safe in their own homes. As the tension between residents and police has de-escalated, the police have come to feel safer, too, and some have voluntarily stopped carrying heavy guns. The police neutralize the geography by demolishing bunkers,
patching gun holes, and removing gang-related graffiti. The first day after a pacification, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro arrives to tell residents that he’s got an eye on what’s happening to them. There are still drug dealers inside the favelas, but most people no longer bear arms, and the random violence that has taken so many lives has been radically diminished. Gangsters driven out of one favela have a hard time setting up shop in other gangsters’ territories. Many find themselves with nowhere to go but jail. Gang fighting among arms and drug interests—the Red Command and the Terceiro Command are the largest—no longer takes place on the streets of pacified favelas; the Red Command’s patrão (commander) complained, “It is fucking up our lives. It’s affecting our business badly.”

  Beltrame told me that the primary issue was transit. “The state failed to provide the favelas with schools, electricity, water, sewage, or day care, or to enforce simple contracts such as alimony on grounds that they couldn’t go in there,” he said. “Once people can pass in and out of the favelas, all those services become obligations of the state.” He envisioned the UPP Social as the next logical step, one that had to be conceived differently from the forced pacification. “The troops that landed on Normandy did not rebuild Europe,” he said. “The UPP has ended a dark empire of the drug lords, a sort of dictatorship, and now the people can rebuild.” Ricardo Henriques, head of the UPP Social, said that people need a new kind of relationship to replace the one they’ve had with crime. “You need to construct a civil society,” he explained. Beltrame added that favela residents who used to aspire only to be big shots within their communities now had an infinity of other possibilities. “The UPP is opening curtains to a world outside that they didn’t know existed, much less that they could be part of,” he explained. “The police presence grants them the opportunity to transform their own lives, which they didn’t have before.”

  Some of the people in the favelas contend that the pacification process is just more of the same terrifying violence—not so unlike conditions under the gangs and drug lords. When I met with Colonel Robson Rodrigues da Silva, who has implemented the primary UPP plan and formed the new police force, he said, “Of course, the first phase of pacification is repressive; we make many arrests. But the second phase is the opposite. We researched what the police and the favela population have in common, and as we are a Christian country, we figured out that the family is it. So the officers were taught always to build a good relationship with children.” In one neighborhood, police dispensed chocolate Easter eggs. In another, they have been teaching kids to fly kites—an especially potent symbol because children enlisted as lookouts used to warn gang members that the cops were coming by pulling their kites from the sky. The police have created sports competitions at which children from several favelas come together to play; each wears a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of his or her community. Before pacification, this would have been impossible; rival gangs would have killed one another.

  Rodrigues proudly showed me drawings made by schoolchildren, some depicting police playing soccer or dancing. “Every drawing has the sun shining,” he pointed out. “We looked at drawings done before, and every one with police in it was dark.” The police ask community members about their particular needs; it’s what Colonel Rodrigues calls “soft social control.” He added, “We will not be a city without violence. We’ll be a city with normal violence. We know the plan is working because people in the favelas have started to report petty crime to our police. That’s the trust we are trying to establish.” Some police are taking theater classes to learn how to modulate their voices and demeanor to communicate authoritatively but without aggression. Others have been cynical about such tactics; one complained, “What’s next? Ballet?” But Rodrigues contended that the work has helped the police hone their attention, perception, and speech. Geniality is an art.

  Rodrigues himself attends funk parties in the favelas. Hip tourists stay in favela hostels, a few of which have achieved high levels of chic. Travel companies sell favela tours, “like a safari,” Moriconi said, “in open vans,” and the new Museu de Favela is one of the most dynamic spaces in Rio. But tourism in the favelas can often feel voyeuristic rather than engaged, and many favela residents find it stigmatizing and patronizing. They don’t want to be photographed by visitors exploring the picturesque side of misery and crime.

  In the past two years alone, the rate of bullet wounds in Rio has declined by half; the murder rate is now lower than that of Washington, DC. The changes do not always go smoothly, but this is clearly a moment of transformation. The popular press thrives worldwide on stories of crime and disaster, but this government has made serenity into headline news. Beltrame told me that so many people have benefited from the UPP that they simply would never allow the old system of gang rule to resurge. “Any politician who chooses to end the pacification will lose too many votes. It will be impossible,” he said. “People’s lives have improved too much.” The real success of the UPP has been to lessen the role of fear in the social economy. Graham Denyer Willis, a British expert in the developing world who is on the faculty at Cambridge University, notes that the purpose here was to “decrease the distance—spatial, social, and psychological—between citizens and the state.”

  Nonetheless, the plan for sustained occupation of the favelas by the UPP can seem infantilizing, suggesting that without a visible security force, residents will revert to criminality. Christopher Gaffney, an American professor of urban planning who lives in Rio, said, “The cheerleaders for the UPPs are saying, ‘Well, the UPPs are here, we’ve got rid of the armed drug traffickers,’ but they don’t say, ‘We’ve substituted one armed force for another.’ And that’s all they’ve done without creating mechanisms for a civil society to flourish.”

  The psychoanalyst Marcus André, who treats well-to-do Cariocas for high fees and favela residents for free, told me, “I was tired of being afraid of the favelas; and it turns out they were tired of being afraid of us, too. We had a fantasy of who they were, and they had an equal one about us. When you finally cross the wall, you resolve paranoia on both sides.” When he began working in the favelas, a teenage girl asked him why he’d come. “I came to learn from you,” he said. She laughed at him and replied, “You must be very stupid if you need to learn from us.” He hopes to foster self-esteem in such long-disenfranchised people. He takes his own children into even the unpacified favelas. “There is some danger,” he said, “but the danger of growing up with that fantasy paranoia is worse.”

  * * *

  André Urani, a leading Brazilian economist and author of Rio: The Turning Point, told me that at the end of the eighties, among 188 countries recognized by the International Monetary Fund, only one had a more closed economy than Brazil, which was Myanmar. It’s worth remembering that democracy is only twenty-six years old in Brazil; the consumer society is even newer. Urani noted, “The absence of meaningful economic activity undermined everyone’s self-esteem and resulted in huge decadence in economic, political, and social terms.” Fernando Gabeira, a popular Brazilian politician and author, said, “Since the dictatorship, Brazil has become steadily more present in the world, and the world has become steadily more present in Brazil.” That reciprocal presence has called out new competencies and skills. Artist Vik Muniz said, “Evolutionarily speaking, human beings aren’t good at much. We don’t have great vision, we’re not very fast, we don’t have big fangs, and we’re not particularly strong. We can dominate the other animals only because of our ability to organize. Somehow, we forgot that in Rio.”

  There is a great need for organizing, and a great need for organizational tools. Rodrigo Baggio works to bridge Brazil’s digital divide by collecting donations of old computers and setting up community centers in the favelas to provide technical training. Less than a third of Brazilians have Internet access, compared with nearly three-quarters of people in the United States. Baggio’s work began long before pacification, but he’s stepped it up since
then. “You are taking away the jobs they were training for, as drug dealers,” he said. “You have to give them some other opportunities to pursue instead.” That analysis makes humanitarian sense; it makes economic sense, too.

  Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, the most successful businesswoman in Brazil, took over the National Steel Company in 1999—no mean feat for a woman in a Latin country. She was offered the National Oil Company, but turned it down, and at fifty-five, she is overseeing the business side of the Olympics. She emphasized that while credit for the turnaround in Brazil tends to go to Lula, the process really began with his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The 1980s and the early nineties were a time of appalling inflation. “Rich people don’t suffer so much with inflation; their houses and cars go up in price to keep pace,” Bastos said. “But for poor people, who depend on the money they get each week to live on, it’s a tragedy; the job that paid them enough to feed their family last week doesn’t pay enough to do it this week.”

  Even for someone of her stature, the high inflation rate meant chaos. She would work out her company budget for the year, and two months later it had become meaningless. “No one could make plans,” she sighed. Once Henrique had inflation under control, however, planning began to happen. “It changed the whole mentality of Brazil,” she said. The pacification in Rio, in her view, was part of a larger arc of change. She told me that she had always driven a bulletproof car, but that she had recently bought a car with windows that roll down. Her children had never been in such a vehicle before, and they loved it.

  The Olympic plan has been controversial. Bastos worked to renegotiate Brazil’s international debt with the IMF in the early 1990s, which spurred internal economic recovery, and she believes that the Olympics will provide a similar “occasion to get our house in order.” Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, told me, “The word Olympic refers to something that is hard to achieve. Look, Barcelona was reborn from the Olympics; Athens was nearly bankrupted. It’s not easy, what we need to do. The way I see it, we can let the Olympics use the city, or the city can use the Olympics to achieve permanent goals.” Some poor citizens question the decision to build a system of commuter trains to Barra da Tijuca, the wealthy district that first elected Paes to office. The layout seems designed to reinforce social stratification rather than ameliorate it. Many people are being evicted from their homes—nineteen thousand families in one year—to make way for the new lines.