Rio’s de Janeiro’s teeming favelas are a world apart
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- The proud, old-world face of the street vendor strains under a wan smile as he cooks corn-on-the-cob over a makeshift iron stove. From time to time, he flames the coals with a flap from a cardboard box, looks up and nods politely to strangers.
He hardly seems to notice the noise of the neighborhood around him, or the forced strut of young toughs who walk by, or the foul smell emitted by the raw sewage that flows freely a few hundred yards away. One wonders how many years he has lived in this favela, wonders how much corn he has roasted in this same spot, and wonders that, if given the chance, he would ever leave. It seems unlikely.
Luke Dowdney, a young Brit, knows Rio's favelas as well as anyone "from the outside" can know them. Crowded hillside enclaves where Rio's poorest survive in clapboard and cinderblock houses, the favelas are considered a part of the city yet, as Dowdney puts it, "a world apart."
On this day, Dowdney, who works for non-profit community enabler Viva Rio, acts as a guide for a dozen American journalists. At one point, as the bus sputters up steep and narrow stone streets that were laid in the 1920s, he matter-of-factly states, "I once saw a bazooka up here." Even so, such threats of violence are not enough to make the locals move. They enjoy, after all, a kind of security they might not find in other Rio neighborhoods.
"There is almost no crime in the favelas," he says. "If there is violent crime, it is dealt with here. There is a strict social order. The drug dealers run the communities, but at the same time they provide a certain security. They might occasionally buy medicine for an elderly woman who's sick, or if a kid is good at sport, they might see about getting him a scholarship to a good school ... in the end, though, the people lose out in a massive way."
The internal unwritten code of the favelas - "the silence," they call it - is too strong and the mistrust of politicians too deep for persons like the corn vendor to ever think of leaving. The known, in their case, is more acceptable than the unknown. The mistrust is understandable in any case since for the greater part of the 20th century, the regime in power, whether progressive, moderate or military strongman, has refused to acknowledge even the existence of the favelas.
Though its economy ranks as the world's eighth largest, Brazil has long been decried as a nation whose income disparity is among the worst in the world.
According to American and Brazilian economic sources here, there are probably 50 to 60 million people - out of about 170 million - in Brazil living at or below the poverty line, with an average income of about $78 per month.
Rubem Cesar, a one-time rights activist and now executive director of Viva Rio, says it wasn't until the early 1990s that the government began to see those in the favelas as anything more than forgotten faces. The first city map of Rio to include them was in 1994. According to Cesar, that came nearly a decade too late, long after the drug dealers began wresting the power within the favelas from the traditional elders, who once held order.
"(The government) was absurd in its thinking," said Cesar. "They thought the favelas would go away. Now at least they are very much considered part of the city."
Yet they remain isolated. It is estimated that out of Rio's population of 5.7 million, roughly 1.2 million live in the favelas. On this day, an overcast and muggy day that signals the end of fall, Rocinho, a favela of some 120,000 tucked away in the hills just above the lovely beaches of Leblon and Ipanema, is a hive of activity. Youths of all ages roam the streets, men on rickety warped-wheel bicycles weave in and out heavy foot traffic, and street vendors hawk everything from soccer jerseys to CDs, watches, fresh fruit to all types of meat.
Rocinho is known as "the First World of the Favelas," not only because it is the largest, but perhaps because its living conditions are not quite as squalid as those found in other parts of the city. Still, there is ample evidence of real poverty. Thousands of residential structures sprout out of the hill, standing side by side and on top of one another as if they had been spilled like a box of dominoes.
There is great need for the basics of life in all the favelas. These include jobs, health care and education (in Rocinho, there are only 1,900 slots for more than 9,000 students at the favelas' two primary schools for students ages 7-14). This statistic contributes directly to the most troubling problem here: The shroud-like influence of gangs and drugs. Dowdney estimates that about $500,000)worth of drugs is trafficked in and out of Rocinho every week.
He has a particular concern for the teen-age boys susceptible to these evils. According to Viva Rio records, 59 percent of the youths who died in the city last year were shot to death. To that end, Dowdney, a former boxer in his school days in England, has begun a boxing club at another, more impoverished area, Favela Complexo de Mare. He calls the club "Fight for Peace" and has so far enrolled about 50 boys. This may not seem like much, but it is an inspired attempt to make a difference - "to give them something positive," he says - and in the favela, those like Dowdney take their victories where they can find them.
Leaving Rocinho, one can see the deep green soccer fields and well-kept grounds of the campus of the American School and spot the beautiful, Portuguese colonial-styled homes of Gavea, one of the city's more exclusive neighborhoods. Dowdney says the rich kids there sometimes come into the favela to buy marijuana.
Even so, Rocinho and Gavea, connected parts of the same city, remain "a world apart."