Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (60 page)

Favela residents do not pay property taxes, and some middle-class voters resent this. As services increase, such taxes seem inevitable. Purified water and reliable electricity will come with water and electric bills. “As soon as the neighborhoods stop being dangerous,” Faustini said, “the residents become subject to all the commercial exploitation that is routine in prosperous cities, but that they are too inexperienced to resist.”

Some favela dwellers have occupied the same house for three generations, and it seems unrealistic to insist that it’s not their property. Others settled in only last year, and it is not a foregone conclusion that they should have squatter’s rights. If you grant people ownership of favela houses, will they sell off their land to rich people who want to take advantage of the views? Many favelas enjoy extraordinary vistas; some look over the city of Rio, across to the statue of Christ the Redeemer, and out to sea. In any other city, people would bankrupt themselves for such panoramas. Some favela dwellers pay rent, which has already escalated where UPPs have been established. The prevailing view among most middle-class Cariocas is that the favelas must be preserved; many dislike the idea of seeing all the poor people exiled. I asked everyone I met inside the favelas whether they wanted to move to a “better” neighborhood, and the only ones who did were relatively recent emigrants from other parts of Brazil. Favela natives
wanted to fix up the world they loved. Though Batan is a favela in the northwestern end of town—the really ugly, poorest part, far from the beach—one of the kids I met there said, “If you could bottle the joy in this place, you could sell it in the Zona Sul.”

Some argue that the whole UPP program serves as a Band-Aid for the World Cup and the Olympics; that it will surely disintegrate from lack of funding once those events have taken place, with huge budget cuts in 2017; and that if or when the gangs return, anyone who has cooperated with the UPP will be targeted for retribution. In 2010, two years after the UPP was launched, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found that nothing was being accomplished by the program, complained of its strong-arm, militaristic tactics, and criticized the idea that “occasional violent invasions can bring security.” The Geneva Conventions apply to war, but not to a state’s policing of its own citizenry. While the military is trained to kill, police in most countries are trained to arrest instead; policing is not soldiering. Any confusion about the line between those two roles leads to abuse. Fear of corruption persists. “Corruption is never one-sided,” Bastos said. “Someone has to be willing to pay and someone has to be willing to receive, and we have to address both sides.” The question remains to what extent the UPPs protect the upper class and to what extent they really improve life in the favelas. Security is a military achievement, and safety is a social one. Security may be achieved through violence, but safety requires peace. Is the UPP helping to create safety, or is it really focused on security? Even a benign police action can degenerate into military occupation, especially in a country so recently freed from dictatorship.

I attended a meeting in the recently pacified favela of Morro dos Prazeres at which community leaders from that area and neighboring districts met with an impressive array of government representatives. City administrators had suspended garbage collection during the rainy season because the steep streets became unsafe for trucks. The favela residents didn’t want their garbage left rotting in the streets for months. Some residents’ plumbing had failed, so they had to fetch
water in buckets. “Is anyone in Santa Teresa fetching water in buckets?” someone asked ironically, referring to a prosperous area that bordered his favela. Rio has no coherent program for universal sanitation that could be fully implemented before 2025.

The electric company had installed meters on some streets but programmed them incorrectly, so some people were being charged for others’ electricity. The utilities worked where the police set up offices, but not elsewhere. The government had closed a day-care center that didn’t conform to legal requirements, and as a result, some children had no place to go when their mothers went to work. Plans had been announced to demolish structurally unstable houses on steep hills prone to mudslides, but nobody had figured out where to house the displaced occupants. People had been searched for arms coming in and out of their own neighborhoods just because they were young, male, and dark-skinned. The social UPP program was having a rocky start.

Nonetheless, when someone stood up and said, “Despite all that, we used to fear the police, and now we respect the police,” the crowd of three hundred cheered. Erik Vittrup Christensen, who works for the UN’s human settlements program, UN-HABITAT, in Rio, said, “Acknowledgment is the oxygen here.” One teenager I met in Batan said, “I thought I would spend my whole life feeling abandoned, that if I wanted education, health, money, culture, I’d have to leave, and now I think I can stay and have those things.” Another said, “My cousin was killed by the old police, and now, the police of Batan are my friends; one is giving me classes in capoeira [a Brazilian martial art] and another in music. For him, music is just for listening; for me, it’s a chance to save my life.” But he was still afraid of what might happen in his future, after the Olympics, “after the novelty wears off for these police.” As he pointed out, the same old problems were happening a thousand feet away in another, unpacified favela, “and they could come back here easily.”

People in Rio with lighter skin unquestionably have an easier time. Officially, Brazilians define themselves as members of one of five races—
branco
(white),
preto
(black),
amarelo
(yellow), indigenous, and
pardo
(brown),
which a local demographer translated, roughly, as “et cetera.” When asked to describe themselves, however, a wide sampling of Cariocas provided 136 different descriptions of their own race. Here, race is explicitly conflated with privilege. At one gathering I attended, a journalist pointed across the room and asked, “Who’s that black man over there?” The black people being asked said, “He’s not black; he’s our leader.” The leader himself then said, “When I was black, my life was harder.” In a recent survey, Brazilian city dwellers claimed to notice more racism in small towns than in urban areas; conversely, people in small towns claimed that there was no racism where they lived, but a lot in the big cities. Everyone perceives the problem, but no one claims it. In one survey of São Paulo residents, 97 percent claimed they were not racist, but 98 percent said they were closely related to someone who was racist. Self-knowledge is nowhere a widespread commodity.

Marcus Vinícius Faustini left the favelas to become an actor and returned with loudspeakers mounted on his car to announce as he drove through the poorest areas that he would teach theater to students. He has enrolled two thousand young people in educational and vocational programs. He believes that the middle-class’s attraction to the favelas traps the favela residents. “It’s not fair to say that if you’re born in the favela, you can express yourself only through funk music or samba,” he said. “The favela dwellers should have the option to express themselves with Beethoven if they wish.” He points out that the government supports capoeira classes in the favelas, but not courses in marketing or business. He acknowledged that the pacification process was intended to make favela life less chaotic. “But who defines what chaos is?” he asked. Life works in the favelas because of organic, patched-together systems that serve people’s needs. “If you resolve chaos by destroying what functions, the ramifications can be very alarming,” he said. His own dream is that after he teaches favela kids all the things they don’t know from the outside world, the outside world will come in to learn from the favela. “What the UPP
gives them won’t have any meaning,” he said, “until they are allowed to give something back.”

Cíntia Luna, a community leader in Fogueteiro, walked me through her favela at sunset. She pointed out a half-built edifice that had been designated ten years earlier as a school. “I checked all the records,” she said. “The school was funded every year; they paid for teachers, lunches, supplies. But the doors were never opened. Where do you think the money went?” I wondered whether such suspicions of treachery had made her a cynic about the pacification. When I asked her, she put a hand on my arm and said, “Don’t say anything for a moment.” We stood in silence, then she explained, “There was never a moment when you could hear the wind like this. You’d have heard shooting, yelling all around us.”

Despite all that danger and disruption, she maintained that the neighborhood was peaceful, in its way, even before the police drove out the gangs. “Everybody knows everybody, and we have a mellow speed of life,” she said. “We were never afraid of the gangs, who were actually much more efficient about getting the electricity fixed or providing services than these city offices we now have to call. But we were afraid of the conflict between the gangs and the police. So now the people in the Zona Sul are happy not to have our gangs, and we are happy not to have their corrupt police. It’s only a compromise, but it gives us all a better quality of life.”

Brazil was primarily a colony, then a dictatorship, and despite occasional brief intervals of electoral government, the idea that it belongs to its own people began to take root widely only in 1988. “Every institution had to adjust to democracy,” Soares said. “First the political institutions, then business, then culture. The police, however, we inherited from two centuries of brutality: the time of slavery, the dictatorship. This is the last change.” He described going into the favelas with Lula during his first presidential campaign. Lula said to Soares, “I want to talk about health care, education, employment, and all they want to talk about is the police!” Soares said he told Lula, “Because that has to do with whether their sons will come home alive. You have to be alive to want to fight for a job or an education; you have to be alive even to get sick and want treatment.”

Programs to improve the favelas are nothing new; one Brazilian aid worker quipped to me that there were more NGOs than people in Brazil. But for the first time, people from the favelas are starting their own public service organizations. Luiz Carlos Dumontt and Dudu de Morro Agudo founded Enraizados, which is devoted to “cultural militancy”; its website gets more than six hundred thousand hits each month. Dudu is a rapper who teaches kids to produce music and videos as a way of enticing them away from gangs. Enraizados artists also make graffiti murals to beautify otherwise grim neighborhoods. The operation has established a street library: you find a book on the road, log on to the website stamped opposite the title page, and make a note of where you found it, whether you liked it, and where you’re leaving it so someone else can find it. Thus the books circulate through the favelas.

Fernando Gabeira is famous for having kidnapped the American ambassador to Brazil in 1969 as part of a protest against the dictatorship; the adventure was the subject of a bestselling book and the 1997 movie
Four Days in September
. In 2008, Gabeira lost the Rio mayoral election by less than 1 percent. When I sat with him in a sidewalk café, passing cars stopped to honk appreciation. “These UPPs are succeeding in conquering and the politicians are celebrating,” he said, “but are they celebrating the people they’ve conquered?” Gabeira averred that the long-standing scenario described by police as a conflict between justice and crime had actually been a conflict between two kinds of crime, with the police trying to appropriate the drug dealers’ profits and power. “Security is an impression as much as it is a reality, however,” he explained. “If people think things are better, they are better. The rich people are happier now, and so are the poor people. That’s already quite a success.”

Cariocas are fiercely opinionated about the rejuvenation of historic sites in the frenzy of construction leading up to the World Cup and the Olympics. The Maracanã soccer stadium is being either ruined or saved. The Theatro Municipal has just been fully restored for its centennial; modeled on the Garnier in Paris, it is where Arturo Toscanini
made his conducting debut and has hosted Sarah Bernhardt and Igor Stravinsky. The theater holds nearly twenty-five hundred people and is sold out most nights for programs of opera, ballet, and classical music. On Sundays, tickets are available for one real (about twenty-five cents), and the theater is mobbed with visitors from the favelas. On the theater’s birthday, July 14, the public is invited to come for free, and the theater is open all day. Luciana Medeiros, Rio’s leading music critic, said, “The change in crime, you might not think of it as affecting the life of culture, but with these changes in Rio, everybody wins. When I was a kid, one of the most symbolic things was that the street was so dirty. All of a sudden, everybody takes care.”

When I went to meet the mayor in the baroque city hall, half the people there wore flip-flops. Rio is a casual place. But casual is not frumpy. While most cultures have created fashion and then found models to show it off, Brazil produced models and then started making fashion to clothe them in. “Our models come out of the favelas with this amazing natural elegance,” said Sergio Mattos, who owns one of Rio’s biggest modeling agencies. “They need to look good with their clothes on. But for Rio’s beach culture, they have to look good with their clothes off. We have the world’s only fashion industry without eating disorders.” Brazilians have a keen sense of beautiful bodies, and almost no sense of unbeautiful bodies. The great-looking people wear skimpy swimsuits (including some called
fio dental
: dental floss), but people who are old and fat wear equally tiny suits without self-consciousness. Brazil is singularly devoted to the aesthetics of sensuality. One young woman I met in a favela confided that she spent a third of her income on hair-care products. “My hair is the only beautiful thing I own,” she said, “and I am going to parlay it into the rest of my life.”