Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  This summer, Nepalese workers died at a rate of almost one a day in Qatar, many of them young men who had sudden heart attacks. The investigation found evidence to suggest that thousands of Nepalese, who make up the single largest group of labourers in Qatar, face exploitation and abuses that amount to modern-day slavery, as defined by the International Labour Organisation, during a building binge paving the way for 2022.55

  The charge of “slavery” that many Nepalese workers are bringing forth results from the fact that their pay is being withheld to keep them from fleeing the labor camps in the night. Food and water have also been rationed as a way to compel them to work for free. After a day in the scorching sun, they sleep in filth, twelve to a room.

  Pattisson quotes one Nepalese migrant employed at the Lusail City development, a $45 billion city being constructed from the ground up, which will include the ninety-thousand-seat stadium for the World Cup final. “We’d like to leave, but the company won’t let us,” he says. “I’m angry about how this company is treating us, but we’re helpless. I regret coming here, but what to do? We were compelled to come just to make a living, but we’ve had no luck.”56

  In normal times, more than 90 percent of workers in Qatar are immigrants, with 40 percent coming from Nepal. But these are not normal times. There has been a massive push for migrant workers. Qatar aims to spend more than a hundred billion dollars on stadiums and infrastructure for the World Cup, part of a broader effort to remake and “modernize” the emirate. A hundred thousand workers have already come from Nepal, one of the poorest nations on earth, and as many as 1.5 million will need to be recruited to get the job done. Thousands more will die if action is not taken.57 I spoke with Jules Boykoff, author of Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games and a former professional soccer player. He said, “Sports mega-events like the World Cup are upbeat shakedowns with appalling human costs. This is trickle-up economics that magnifies the widening chasm between the happy-faced promises of mega-event boosters and on-the-ground reality for the rest of us.”58

  The issue is clearly not soccer. The issue isn’t even having a global tournament like the World Cup. It is the way these mega-events are linked to massive development projects used as neoliberal Trojan horses to push through policies that would stun the most hardened of cynics: a shock doctrine of sports. The people of Brazil, demanding “FIFA-quality hospitals and schools,” are showing the world a way to envision how we can emerge from this brutal cycle. The Nepalese migrant workers, just by having the courage to come forward, are doing the same.

  Everything I have seen in this world of “celebration capitalism” and “neoliberal Trojan horses” makes me extremely anxious about how hosting the World Cup and Olympics, like a back-to-back one-two punch, will affect Brazil over the next two years. All of the most viral germ cultures in World Cup and Olympic planning—police brutality, evictions, real-estate grabs, the negation of public space, corruption—are already boils on Brazil’s body politic. Activists, political reformers, and ordinary citizens have been working for generations to lance these boils. The World Cup and Olympics are instead causing them to spread, grow, and mutate until you cannot tell where the mega-event planning ends and the Brazilian state begins. In so many ways, landing the Olympics was the perfect coda to Lula’s peculiar brand of politics.

  Brazil’s greatest hope lies in resistance—not after the fact, when the bill comes due, but now, while the sporting shock doctrine is still being implemented. In the next chapter, we’ll look at how that resistance is growing in Brazil’s favelas.

  Chapter 7

  Target Favelas

  Where opulence is most opulent . . . misery is most miserable.

  —Eduardo Galeano1

  Bruce Springsteen once wrote a song called “Mansion on the Hill.” Its image of the wealthy living on high, lording their homes and their status over the unwashed masses in makeshift shacks, rings as true in the United States today as it did in the distant past. If you live in California and just say you live in “the Hills,” people know, thanks to a mass culture that glorifies and bathes itself in excess, that this means status, wealth, and security. Maybe the wealthy have always taken comfort in that symbolism, or maybe they’re just fighting a primitive fear of being wiped away in a biblical flood, but a better quality of life has always been inextricably linked with living in a state of elevation. The wealthy live on the hills while the poor eke out a living in their shadows, gazing upward in wonder and envy.

  In Brazil, this state of affairs has historically been turned on its head. The wealthy of the great city of Rio have always lived at the bottom of the hill, safe from mudslides thanks to an environmental preservation policy at the turn of the twentieth century that declared the hillsides public land. In an effort to settle close to jobs in what was then Brazil’s capital city, and with no large-scale affordable housing policy to assist them, people occupied these poorly protected hillside spaces, moving quickly into the higher-up areas. These communities of the poor are, of course, known as favelas.

  All favelas share a common history as squatter settlements developed autonomously over the course of decades by Brazil’s working poor and unemployed, with minimal or no government support, thanks to very stringent squatters’ rights laws.2 Today they range widely in size, from countless small communities to places like Rocinha, a favela in Rio that is home to about 150,000 people. Favelas also contain a wide range of income levels and employment statuses, as well as churches, schools, and small businesses. Many if not most favela houses, contrary to stereotypes, are solidly built with materials not commonly associated with slums. Most favela homes have electricity and running water; a sizable percentage have Internet access as well. In one recent study of six favelas, 31 percent of homes had computers and Internet access. Yes, as we will see, there is tremendous variance in the standard of living in the favelas, from stable working-class homes to extremely precarious living situations. But to venture into a favela is to see with your own eyes that people devote an unbelievable amount of care to their individual homes, often with the help of neighbors, to make them uniquely theirs—places where they are proud to raise their families.

  The Scramble for Rio

  With the advent of the World Cup and Olympics, however, Rio has become ground zero for a speculative real-estate boom that would make the San Francisco Bay area blush. The real-estate tycoons and construction magnates are looking up to the hills and envisioning that land developed: a Rio without favelas. Normally, Brazil’s stringent laws would prevent this from happening. But the World Cup and Olympics have created “states of exception”—think eminent domain on steroids—that allow politicians to declare settled laws obsolete. Using any possible pretext—drugs, crime, environmental hazards—they can state that, with so many foreign visitors and heads of state coming to the country, they have an obligation to higienizar (clean out) the favelas to make the nation “safe” for the World Cup. This new reality, in which people’s homes become fair game, has massive implications for residents across the country—but particularly in Rio. Inequality actually worsened in Rio under Lula, though it improved in many parts of the country. In 2011, Brazil’s statistical agency, the IBGE (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística), released the findings from its 2010 census, which stated that 22.03 percent of the 6,323,037 residents of Rio de Janeiro live in favelas—what the report refers to as “substandard” and irregular housing communities. Although the city’s total population grew only 3.4 percent, the favela population has grown by 27.7 percent over the last decade.3

  In 2014, even though the official line is that race is “not an issue” in Brazil, the descendants of slaves not only make up more than half of the nation’s population but also are the largest group in the favelas. Brazilians of African descent live shorter lives, make less money, have more difficulty finding employment, and are more likely to be among the ten thousand people killed by police over the course of the last decade. As Bryan McCann writes,
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  Black favela residents have faced particular hurdles in achieving civil rights, and persistent racism does explain part of the stigma against favela residents. . . . Black residents were inevitably concentrated more heavily in the substandard, precarious urban spaces effectively reserved for those without full rights: Rio’s favelas. Furthermore, their blackness reinforced dominant understandings of these as zones beneath the protections of law and guarantees of citizenship.4

  The difference with the United States, and this is immediately visible upon walking the favela streets, is that the favelas aren’t segregated: there is no “black favela,” “white favela,” or “Indian favela.” Intermarriage is very frequent, and 30 percent of households in today’s Brazil are multiracial. Yet racism is so persistent that it is not uncommon to hear complaints about “too many” people of African descent on the public beaches or in the malls. This has led to organizing campaigns where groups of black Brazilians numbering in the hundreds walk as one into malls, their very visibility a statement of protest.

  The favelas are perhaps best known, and most notorious, for their history of poverty and violence—mostly in the minds of those who have never set foot inside these communities. My own experience in the favelas is that they feel far more open and friendly than many of Rio’s wealthier neighborhoods, which are defined by gated communities and a militarized police force. This experience is not uncommon. According to one poll, 79 percent of people who had heard of Brazil’s favelas—but had never actually set foot inside them—had a negative view of them. However, 72 percent of people who had actually visited the favelas came away with positive feelings. Count me among the 79 percent who had a negative view, equating favela with “slum,” before I was able to see them for myself—and among the 72 percent who turned around after experiencing them for myself. My negative views were formed by a concern that some have romanticized the poverty in which people have historically been forced to live. Having reported from the townships of South Africa and the south of Chile, I know that poverty in the Global South is nothing anyone should paint in pretty colors. The favelas of Rio, however, are a different and very specific kind of community.

  When you walk up a hill into a favela, you are entering a different world. Of course, it depends on the favela, but the contrast is more than a hillside community on top of wealth. It’s the difference between an open community, where people are generally friendly, hanging out on stoops, and ready to talk, and a sidewalk where people are rushing to work, eyes straight ahead, clutching their bags. I spoke with Theresa Williamson, a city planner and executive director of Catalytic Communities, a nonprofit that works with communities in Rio’s favelas to distribute real images of their lives and to challenge the myths used to justify residents’ expropriation. She said,

  You need to start, first of all, by exploding the connection between the favelas and criminality. At the height of the drug-trafficking explosion last decade, the drug trade and attendant realities were practiced in less than 50 percent of favelas. Even in those communities, we are talking about less than 2 percent of residents directly involved. Obviously the community has connections indirectly. There’s a lot of money flowing because of drug trafficking, so indirectly a lot of people benefit, you could say. But most of those people don’t want that. That’s not their choice. It’s the money that’s flowing in their community. No one mentions that the reason favelas exist in the first place is because there’s no history of affordable housing.

  In the twentieth century, after the 1888 abolition of slavery, “squatting,” or building on unused land without authorization, was most city dwellers’ only option in a land dominated by oligarchs. To this day, Brazil has some of the world’s most extreme concentration of land ownership; until the late 1980s its land inequality was the worst in the world. Some individual Brazilian families own swaths of land bigger than some European countries. Brazil is also one of the most urbanized societies in the world, with a higher percentage of the population living in the cities than we have in the United States, and it went through this process of urbanization earlier than the United States did.

  Indeed, the idea of “squatting” assumes that land has always been private property—but for most of human history, people have simply built homes where they could. As Gisela, who lives in Vila Autódromo, put it to me, “There is this assumption that we’re squatters. We joke among ourselves, every one of our ancestors squatted. They didn’t buy it, it’s a process. People have to find a way to survive.” Or as Theresa Williamson put it: “The assumption internationally, but in Brazil especially, is that these are unknowable, dangerous, precarious communities. All of these negative assumptions ignore huge [positive] qualities in these neighborhoods.”

  The most derisive, stereotypical ideas about the favelas exist within Brazil itself. In my visits, I’ve found that middle-class Brazilians take pride in having never gone up the elevators, tramways, or stairs into these communities. They take pride in their families’ historic blindness to the favelas whose entrances lie mere yards from some of the city’s central thoroughfares. They discuss the favelas, especially incidents of violence—the more lurid the better—with their eyes wide and a shake of their heads. But they do not reckon with their reality. To be clear, I do not want to seem like I am in any way underselling the very real poverty there. But the same questions that plague the rest of Brazil—education, health care, employment—are the questions for the people of the favelas.

  One thing that was immediately obvious when I visited the favelas was the amount of care, personal ownership, and dedication that residents put into developing their own small spaces. They invest every cent they earn into their homes and often do the construction themselves, in collectives. People in the neighborhood gather to build, setting aside a Saturday to help a neighbor put on a roof or put up walls. “I’ve personally watched a community form from scratch and watched how they took an area that was wetlands—it was full of water—and literally filled it in with construction debris,” said Theresa. “They put stakes in the water. It was just amazing. And they do it collectively, and then they put up tables where they serve food in the evening and they have a community toilet for everybody in the beginning . . . but literally within a few months, they were putting in plumbing. Squatting and building on land can be seen as far more effective than finding a place to rent.”

  This sentiment is shared by many others, she added:

  Every story is different. What they all have is a very strong feeling of attachment and association with that house that they built. . . . Sometimes you have a whole plot and you’ll have three houses on the plot for three separate families. Within the community you have subcommunities, microcommunities of families, and they interact with each other . . . [and] provide each other with support: a mother has kids who need daycare and there’s no daycare anywhere, so the other mother will take the kids. Every single inch is embedded with memory. It’s not like a building that went up, and you bought an apartment. . . . The whole space around you is embedded with memory . . . of the blood, sweat and tears that went into it, of the sacrifices that went into it, of the different people who helped build it, of the family—that somebody died here, somebody lived there, somebody was born here and somebody got sick there. You have all these layers of memory, and it’s simply not the case for the Brazilian middle class, there’s very little recognition.

  When you consider everything that families put into building the favelas, it makes the land grab all the more repugnant. It also explains why alongside these evictions have also come mass movements and organization against them. The World Cup, even though it is a smaller, less expensive operation than the Olympics, is actually a greater danger to these communities precisely because, as mentioned, it reaches out, octopus-like, with tentacles in cities and towns all over the country.

  I visited several favelas on day trips organized by Catalytic Communities. What I saw was that from the Favela do Metrô, next to Rio’s legendary
Maracanã Stadium, all the way to favelas distant from the mega-event action, everyone feels under threat. You can sense it—or you can just open your eyes and see it. At Favela do Metrô, hundreds of families found themselves living on the rubble of their former homes with nowhere to go after a merciless round of demolitions by Brazilian authorities. The Guardian reported that “redbrick shacks have been cracked open by earth-diggers. Streets are covered in a thick carpet of rubble, litter and twisted metal. By night, crack addicts squat in abandoned shacks, filling sitting rooms with empty bottles, filthy mattresses and crack pipes improvised from plastic cups. The stench of human excrement hangs in the air.”5 This may be accurate, but let’s be clear: the squalor moved in largely after the people were pushed out. These conditions are the result of the evictions, not a reason to carry them out. They did not exist until after the residents were forced to leave their homes.

  One favela resident, Eomar Freitas, said, “It looks like you are in Iraq or Libya. I don’t have any neighbors left. It’s a ghost town.” The reasons for this are a mystery to nobody. He said, “The World Cup is on its way and they want this area. I think it is inhumane.”6 In response, the Rio housing authority said that it was offering favela dwellers “dignity.” Dignity, translated, means newly built government housing where families are asked to live in a place roughly the size of a supermax prison cell. Maybe something was lost in translation. Or perhaps a bureaucrat’s conception of “dignity” is becoming homeless so your neighborhood can serve as—literally—a parking lot for wealthy soccer fans. By bulldozing homes before giving families the chance to find new housing or be “relocated,” the government is flagrantly violating basic human rights. Amnesty International, the UN, and even the IOC—fearful of the damage to its “brand”—have raised concerns, although the IOC and FIFA certainly haven’t said anything about stopping it. And there is more “dignity” on the way. According to Julio Cesar Condaque, an activist opposed to leveling the favelas, the worst-case scenario is that “between now and the 2014 World Cup, 1.5 million families will be removed from their homes across the whole of Brazil.”7