Brazil: A Course in Economic Contrasts
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- From atop a hunchback mountain called Corcovado, the Christ the Redeemer statue so often seen in tourist books overlooks an ocean city of seemingly endless beauty.
He sees Maracana Stadium, built for the 1950 World Cup and still the largest in the world with a capacity for 200,000. He sees the famous Sugar Loaf mountain standing at the entrance to Guanabara Bay and the fabulous white-sand beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
But just as breathtaking as the scenery are the slums, or favelas as they are known here. A tourist traveling from the international airport to downtown can't help but notice the shacks and run-down apartment buildings along the route. Lean-tos, open fires, even the occasional horse dot the landscape.
And despite government efforts to clean up those in the most visible areas, favelas climb the hillsides and fill nooks and crannies everywhere like a fog that refuses to lift.
In a four-city tour of the country, you can't escape concluding that Brazil is a land of great contrasts - incredible wealth and desperate poverty, densely populated cities and immense expanses of open country.
The distribution of income is among the most unequal in the world - on the so-called Gini Index of income distribution, Brazil scores around 58 on a 100-point scale by its own most-recent government statistics. Perfect equality would be a score of 0 - while total inequality would be a score of 100. The United States generally ranks around 40 on the scale, while Sweden is one of the most equitable countries with a score around 25.
It has been estimated that the top 1 percent of Brazilians have more money than the poorest 50 percent combined.
And the country is increasingly urban - just 40 years ago, 55 percent of its residents were rural; now only about 22 percent live in rural areas as people flock to the cities in search of jobs, often staying for lack of anything better to do.
In Rio alone, an estimated 1.2 million people live in some 600 favelas scattered throughout a city of about 5.7 million. While the government limited building on hillsides, squatters set up small neighborhoods almost wherever they could - generally without basic services, tapping into electricity or water where possible. Though favelas have been around since the late 1800s, they weren't put on a map until 1994 - symbolic of government attitudes toward the poor.
Mapping was a necessary first step in a long process aimed at providing services to these areas, says Rubem Cesar Fernandes, co-founder and director of Viva Rio, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization focusing on human rights, public safety, education and community development in the city's slums.
Not yet eight years old, Viva Rio was a response to an economic, social and political climate that had spun out of control, Fernandes says. Drug-dealing gangs had taken over the favelas, transforming the city from a very cordial society into a violent one.
A mixture of show and substance, Viva Rio was launched with a citywide two-minute silent protest for peace in December 1993, after high profile incidents in which police killed eight street kids gathered near a church and later 21 people in a favela. The group has collected books for distribution in favelas, more than 1 million signatures on a petition aimed at banning small arms in Brazil and recently 100,000 guns that were destroyed at a community event.
The group has launched a major education initiative to put students on a fast track to complete elementary education in nine months - and high school in another 11 months. That's critical in a country where 52 percent of young people age 15 to 29 have not received an elementary school diploma, Fernandes says.
Without a diploma, "you are out, you do not even get into the line" for a job, he says - at least not in the formal economy.
The program uses teachers in combination with videos like the ever-present Brazilian TV novellas (soap operas) - and covers topics like Portuguese, math, science, history and geography in lower levels, adding biology, physics and chemistry in upper levels. All aim students toward getting jobs and contributing to society. Most of the students are young women - no surprise in a city where 24 young men are killed for every young woman who dies.
In addition to the education program, Viva Rio is supporting police efforts to improve services by testing community policing in which officers spend time in slums even when not responding to calls. That's tough in a place where criminals are so heavily armed, admits Oscar Valporto, communication coordinator for Viva Rio. But he says police are definitely more a part of the problem than a part of the solution. "I don't think there's any, any police in the world that shoots as much as Rio police," Valporto says.
A final major area of work is business and community development - it's hard to earn an honest living where there are few if any banks, no job training to speak of and criminals serve as judge, jury and, sometimes, executioner.
A tour of Rocinha illustrates the problem. Home to 100,000 to 150,000 people, Rocinha is considered one of the best slums in Rio - "the first world of favelas" as locals call it. The first homes here were built about 70 years ago and now the slum has topped out on the Atlantic forest hillside.
At the base of the hill, Rocinha is a bustling, if obviously poor, neighborhood - butcher shops with fresh meat and live chickens, Coca-Cola vendors delivering bottles to small markets, a bank and even a McDonald's selling only ice-cream treats.
Carlos Costa says that makes for a nice show of how integrated the favelas are with the rest of society - but he'd rather see businesses and the government invest in a health clinic to deal with the high incidence of tuberculosis and HIV in the slum. Costa, editor of a startup monthly newspaper in Rocinha, says he'd rather see money spent on some type of program to help young people stay away from drugs and guns. Or maybe some more schools beyond the two in Rocinha that have room to accommodate about one-fourth of the estimated 8,000 children.
On a tour, Costa stops near a bustling intersection where street vendors sell clothing, watches and fresh-cooked corn to passersby. Two boys play next to an open sewer, trying to get the attention of the American tourists with their expensive cameras and relatively overflowing pocketbooks.
Here then is an indelible image of Brazil:
In one of the most beautiful cities in the world, where the beaches are cleaned constantly and food overflows at the tables in tourist-oriented churrascarias, the government can't find enough money to fix the sewer but manages to spring for spruce-up efforts like the project this day to add fresh coats of pastel paint to buildings facing a busy highway.
Meanwhile, as kids play and seemingly oblivious residents go about their business, an end loader scrapes muck from the open sewer into a dump truck, hauling away the spoils of poverty one scoop at a time.
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