Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (61 page)

Italo Moriconi said that when he was growing up in Rio, every intellectual’s identity was as a Brazilian, but that increasingly people hold an international identity and a strong local identity, founded in pride about Rio de Janeiro and its transformation. The city’s street life has been reborn now that the streets are relatively safe, and whole neighborhoods are given over to the fun between dusk and dawn. The center of nightlife is the glamorously seedy downtown historic district
of Lapa. As at the beach, the streets teem with rich and poor alike, though some of the nightclubs are expensive. In the small hours, music pours out of every other door; the caliber of decor and the quality of musicianship are unrelated, so you have to pause and listen before choosing where to go. Many of the venues seem both historical and transient, as though they were built to be temporary but survived into permanence. I decided one night to check out what appeared to be a tiny chapel, its walls crowded with devotional images, only to find that it was a bar, presided over by a middle-aged transgender woman who had moved to Rio from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais. She offered us a liqueur from her home state, redolent of cinnamon, and told us howlingly funny tales about figuring out her gender identity on a farm in the jungle. It’s not only the sun that’s warm at this latitude; friendship happens fast in Rio, and you continually find yourself in intimate conversation with people you’ve just met. They, in turn, eagerly introduce you to their friends—some of whom they’ve just met themselves—and after a few nights, you are juggling invitations to parties, dinners, rainforests.

One such new friend invited us to an early-evening samba party. People often gather to play music informally; anyone can bring an instrument and join in. Ours was in a downtown area where it attracted both businessmen on their way home from the office and favela residents on their way to clean those offices. Musically and socially, improvisation was the style. The musicians stopped only once, to announce that the smell of marijuana might bring in the police. Two ample women from Bahia were frying
acarajé
, delicious fritters of seafood and black-eyed peas, and the local bar was serving
caipirinhas
in plastic cups. Rio is not Rio without a sound track; music salts all the other senses.

Vik Muniz has made a career out of examining these ironies. The film
Waste Land
shows how he befriended garbage-pickers who lived on what they could find in a vast dump outside Rio, and eventually made them partners in his art. “You meet somebody in New York, and they say, ‘What’s your name?’ ” he said. “And the second question is ‘What do you do?’ In Rio, you get, ‘What’s your name? What do you
like
to do?’ ” Several people I met quoted Antônio Carlos (Tom)
Jobim, the musician who wrote “The Girl from Ipanema,” who once explained, “Living in New York is great, but it’s shit; living in Rio is shit, but it’s great.”

The popular talk-show star Regina Casé received me in her extravagant mansion, wearing a flowing caftan, at least five pounds of jewelry, and a cosmetics counter’s worth of makeup. “I’ve been to North America and to Europe,” she said. “You have a pine woods. You have a grove of oak trees. Have you been in our Atlantic rainforest? We have a hundred kinds of trees, everything is growing on top of everything else, it’s all competing for the sun and the water, and somehow it all survives, more lush than anywhere else in the world. That’s the social structure of Rio, too. Just as our Amazon is providing the oxygen for the world, we make social oxygen here. If you don’t learn to integrate your societies the way we’ve integrated ours, you’re going to fail. In America, you have a lot of problems, a lot of injustice, a lot of conflict. You try to solve the problems.” She threw up her hands in mock horror. “In Rio, we invite all the problems to a big party and we let them dance together. And we’re inviting the world to come here and dance, too.”

In August 2014, four years after I reported this story, I spent a few days in Rio. By then, UPPs were serving some 1.5 million people living in or near almost forty favelas, at staggering cost. Nine thousand police officers had received training to decriminalize and reinvigorate the favelas; in 2016, that number is expected to exceed twelve thousand. From 2009 to 2014, gang and police killings in the pacified favelas fell by half, and rates of other violent crimes dropped even more dramatically. The
New York Times
reported that students in the pacified favelas were performing twice as well as the average Rio student.

Despite this progress, the Institute of Social and Political Studies found that nearly half of Rio’s favelas remained under the control of vigilante militias; more than a third were in the hands of drug gangs; and fewer than one in five had a UPP presence. Between
2011 and 2013, the Police Ombudsman’s Office received nearly eight thousand complaints of police violence including assault, rape, torture, and murder—yet only eighteen officers were sanctioned as a result. A recent Amnesty International study found that on-duty police officers were responsible for 1,519 homicides in Rio over five years—nearly one out of every six of the total homicides registered in the city. In most instances, the UPP Social charged with providing medical, sports, and educational services simply failed to materialize.

The report
Exclusion Games
, issued at the end of 2015 and compiled primarily by NGOs, chronicled abuse of children’s rights and basic civil liberties in the lead-up to the 2016 Summer Olympics. It noted an uptick in police violence as the pacification program wobbled, and charged that more than four thousand families had now lost their homes while another twenty-five hundred were under threat of similar displacement. Further, it reported the disappearance of several street children in episodes of so-called social cleansing. The Rio government has disputed some of these allegations.

Then there is the matter of Amarildo. On July 14, 2013, a construction worker with epilepsy named Amarildo de Souza, who lived in the Rocinha favela, was seen entering the local police station. He was never seen coming out. He was classed as “missing” for two months, until enormous demonstrations across Rio with thousands of people chanting “Where is Amarildo?” finally led to an investigation. Ten officers, including the head of Rocinha’s UPP, were accused of torture—including electric shocks and putting the man’s head in a plastic bag—and then concealing his corpse.

In April 2014, Douglas Rafael da Silva Pereira, a dancer, was beaten to death by the police. A resident of his favela later said, “This effort to pacify the favelas is a failure; the police violence is only replacing what the drug gangs carried out before.” In “pacified” Santa Marta, people complained of escalating tension. The
Washington Post
reported that at least ten gunfights had taken place at police bases in pacified favelas. After the period of relative peace, this mounting animosity between police and gangsters generated an increase in murders, arson, and revenge killings. A Rocinha resident, Cleber Araujo, said succinctly, “It feels like we’re in a war.” A
Pew Research Trust study found that in 2014, Brazilians trusted the police less than they had four years earlier. When police battalions arrived to rout out the gangs that controlled the Maré favela, even law-abiding residents found their houses invaded and their possessions destroyed; police helicopters fired indiscriminately. In 2015, Atila Roque, the head of Amnesty International Brazil, said that the whole plan was “backfiring miserably and leaving behind a trail of suffering and devastation.” Many believe that the pacification program will be defunct as soon as the Olympics are over. Asked how long it would take for the gangs to resume their position, one favela resident said, “They will run into each other on the way out.”

I visited Vidigal, recently pacified at the time, with Márcio Januário, a playwright, actor, and dancer. Januário is black, heavily tattooed, openly gay, and widely beloved; to walk through Vidigal with him is to be greeted every ten steps. He works with children and adults in Vidigal to put on plays. When I saw him, he was fresh from a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
set in the favela and performed in what he calls Favelese—the psychological language of the slums—with his Free Minds theater company. Vidigal, which occupies a hill right above Ipanema beach and next to Barra da Tijuca, has the best views in Rio. Januário complained that the price of everything had skyrocketed with pacification. Many people had already sold the houses where they had lived for generations for what seemed to them a lot of money—but he said they would never find comparable houses because prices continued to escalate as middle-class purchasers bought into the favela adventure. Vidigal now has poor and rich areas, and these populations seldom interact. When I asked Januário whether he would ever consider relocating, he scoffed. “I have to be here,” he said as we sat in his spare, attractive studio apartment. “When it gets too expensive for me, I will leave Rio completely.”

Vidigal has terrible schools and few services. Januário, who volunteers in the schools, said that the kids aren’t interested in education because the teachers aren’t interested in teaching. He works with between thirty and forty students each year, many of whom go on to university. “When I began this project seven years ago, a teacher said to me, ‘You’re crazy! This school is for dummies. Poor black people don’t
need theater.’ ” Januário contended that people capable of so much fun were capable of learning. “When they wake up,” he said, “they open their eyes and say, ‘Where are the lions? Let’s fight them.’ You just have to change which lions they are after.” I asked whether people were less afraid within the favelas, and he said, “It’s normal to us to live in fear; it’s not so hard as it would be for you. Violence is a culture, and there are a lot of people who like violence. Don’t assume we all want peaceful lives.” Like many favela residents, he was not only unimpressed by the whole idea of pacification, but also dubious of the problem it was intended to address.

New York Times
, February 9, 2013

My friend Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s wedding brought me to Ghana. The traditional ceremony began when a representative of the groom’s family said to a representative of the bride’s, “We have seen a beautiful flower growing in your garden, and we wish to pluck it.” In keeping with tradition, the two families threw challenges back and forth, which seemed to ritualize the complex ambivalence parents often feel at their children’s marriages. But they also kept breaking into song. It felt as though they were simultaneously battling and celebrating. The presentation of the dowry didn’t feel, as I’d anticipated, like a commodification of the bride. It felt respectful, less as if they’d bought my friend than as if they’d offered a tribute in acknowledgment of her worth.

W
hen my husband-to-be and I met the Ghanaian politician John Dramani Mahama at a friend’s wedding near Accra eight years ago, I liked him immediately. I kept up with his fortunes mostly through mutual friends and was happy to learn in 2009 that he had been elected his nation’s vice president. When I read a draft of his trenchant memoir,
My First Coup d’État
, in 2010, I volunteered to
introduce him to some agents and editors in New York. Many people in the developed world expect African political leaders to be either terse and political or bloated and ideological. The surprise of John Mahama’s book is its tender humanism, and I thought it would go a long way toward breaking down prejudice in the United States. I blurbed the book when it was published last July; I am thanked in the book’s acknowledgments; I hosted a party to celebrate its publication; and I conducted an onstage interview with John Mahama at the New York Public Library on July 10, 2012.

On July 24, the Ghanaian president, John Atta Mills, died, and John Mahama stepped into the presidency; in December, he was elected to another term. In late January 2013, the Ghanaian press suddenly exploded with references to Mr. Mahama’s relationship with me. “President John Dramani Mahama has been fingered to be in bed with one Mr. Andrew Solomon, a gay lobbyist,” blared one unfortunately worded report. Another announced, “Andrew Solomon reportedly gathered a few affluent people from the gay community to raise campaign funds for President Mahama with the understanding that when President Mahama won the elections, the president would push the gay rights agenda.” I was reported to have paid $20,000 for copies of the book.

The occasion of these revelations was Mahama’s appointment of a woman one newspaper called the “fiery human and gay rights advocate, Nana Oye Lithur” to head the newly established Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection. In confirmation hearings before a parliamentary committee, Lithur averred that “the rights of everybody, including homosexuals, should be protected,” thus provoking a firestorm. I was presumed to have pushed through her nomination, even though I had in fact never heard of her. The argument that Lithur was selected not for her formidable skills but because of a foreign devil dovetailed with the continuing position among some Africans that homosexuality is an import from the decadent West.

I have neither the ability nor the inclination to meddle in foreign elections, and I paid not one red cent for the book John Mahama inscribed to me. The only way I may have influenced him on gay
rights was by welcoming him into the household of a joyful family with two dads. It is deeply unsettling to be implicated in a national scandal, to know that my attempts to be kind and helpful to someone would become his millstone.

On Friday, February 1, 2013, the president’s spokesman said that President Mahama didn’t know me. On Saturday, the president called me to apologize. On Sunday, the government issued a statement that Mahama and I know each other, that I have never made a campaign contribution or persuaded anyone else to do so, and that President Mahama “does not subscribe to homosexualism and will not take any step to promote homosexualism in Ghana.” I am not sure what is involved in promoting homosexualism, but I am pleased to know that a cordial friendship with me does not constitute such an act.