Rant about favelas

Bruce and I went on a favela tour Saturday. Favelas are the shanty towns or slums that surround or make up part of the large cities of Brazil. My initial response to a tour of the slums was disgust. When I was in South Africa I never “toured” a township, not by design, I just never did. But I knew it was a possibility. In this case I struggled with the thought of making the poor a tourist attraction.

Of course the tourist aspect of the slums is made palatable by adding a humanitarian bent. The tour company we went with has a school in the small favela we toured. Eighty percent of the operating budget for that school is financed by Favela Tours. So we could feel good that our 65 real ticket (about $38.00) was doing some good. Apparently the tourist traffic is brisk. The last stop on the tour was at some roadside artists. They told us that a bus load of 75 Israelis have stopped early that day.

As we toured the two favelas (one small, Vila Canoas, around 3,000 people and one large, Rocinha, around 200,000 give or take 50,000) I thought a lot about some of my past readings. I’ve been trying to diversify my understanding of poverty and the world’s poor. Paul Farmer’s book, The Pathologies of Power, gave me a slight introduction to Liberation Theology and Eduardo Galeano’s 1970’s expose, The Open Veins of Latin America, gave me a very populist historical interpretation of the causes of Latin America’s poverty.

My first real brush with Liberation Theology taught me the concept of “preferential treatment for the poor”, the idea that the poor should truly be the first in line for food, the first in line for health care, the first in line for education. A political foundation emanating from Christian theology though simply stated it is quite complicated to grasp and extremely divisive when when taken to it’s extreme.

After taking the tour I am no longer disgusted. I’m more saddened that we (the tourists enjoying the riches of Rio whether in a hostel or 5 star hotel) can go through the motions of viewing the favelas, acknowledge certain facts, buy a few items to spread the wealth (perhaps trickle down is more appropriate) and pay our fee which will help fund a school and then go home to our hostel or hotel, go to the beach and really nothing changes. The status quo continues.

Brazil has one of the most unequal distributions of wealth in the world. Driving through Sao Paulo I had a number of favelas pointed out to me. Some are very small, essentially an encampment of very temporary looking huts under freeway interchanges while some are large and dead center in the midst of the wealth of the city, condos towering above them.

It’s probably a bad analogy, but I can’t help but think of touring a favela as going to the zoo. I don’t like the concept of caging animals for our enjoyment and I don’t really like going to zoos, but that hasn’t stopped my hypocritical attendance of concerts at the zoo. The favelados (residents of the flavelas) are free to come and go, they are not caged. But they live in these conditions because they have nowhere else to go. And they are literally surrounded by places they could not live. There is no state presence in the favelas. The police do not go in. Leaving one favela there was a police presence of about 4 cars and a handful of policemen with guns showing. They were marking their territory at the border.

The favelas do have a rule of law of sorts. First, to locate yourself in a favela you need to connect with a community. Our guide Isabel lives in a favela. Isabel has been in Brazil for about two and a half years, is originally from Germany, speaks 5 languages, and works with Flavela Tours and the school that they fund. She explained that to rent a place in the favela is purely through word of mouth and connections. There is no craigslist, no rental section in the newspaper. Once in you become a member of the community. She lived in London before coming to Brazil. In London she never talked to her neighbors, didn’t even know their names. In the flavela that would be impossible.

Since there is no state presence, no structured police force (though the police do come in to occasionally track down a drug dealer) the community monitors and polices itself. According to Isabel there is no rape. If someone is known to have rapped they will be killed. Theft is very rare. If someone steals and is caught and it’s minor their arm will be broken. If the crime is more serious they will be killed. Tourists are generally safe because a cardinal rule is not to attract the police. Tourists will call the police. If a flavelado has a dispute within the favela they can first go to the residence association and if that doesn’t work they go to the real power, the drug dealers. In the large flavela we visited (around 200,000 people) we saw men with guns openly sitting in public. These were the drug dealers and they were doing the same thing the police had done at the border, marking their territory and making their presence known.

We were strictly forbidden from taking pictures along the main street of the large favela where the dealers walked openly with their guns. The drug dealers have been burned in the past by journalists who took their pictures and then published them. The police likely know who all the drug dealers are but the dealers don’t want their pictures out there. Many of the drug dealers are in their teens. The current boss of the large favela is in his 30’s, quite a ripe age for a dangerous profession.

As we drove and walked through the main streets of the favela we passed internet cafes, clothing stores, appliance stores, meat shops, fruit and vegetable stands, everything you would need to survive. There was a McDonald’s in this flavela until 10 years ago when a change in command between the drug dealers created a 10 day war. The McDonald’s was not damaged but 10 days of bullets and fighting between the three gangs and the police left McDonald’s without the will to stay. Now there is a Bob’s Burgers which is a well known Brazilian chain. There are three banks in this favela. A common story is that the banks have never been robbed except once. Supposedly one was robbed but not by who you’d expect. It was robbed by the police.

The history is that the first favelas were formed in Rio over a hundred years ago when soldiers returned from internal battles and had been promised land for their troubles. The land they were directed towards were the steep, unwanted hillsides around the city. Over the century disparate groups of people migrating from different parts of the country for varying types of work (construction one decade, manufacturing another, etc.) created their own distinct favelas. According to Isabel there are now over 700 different favelas around Rio. The military dictatorships took an eradication policy towards the favelas claiming to be prepared to build housing for them. When the housing never materialized the favelas continued to grow, sometimes on the very sites where the government had planned to build new housing or right back where the favela had been destroyed.

After the military dictatorship ended in the 80’s a different tactic was taken with the favelas. Historically the government had abdicated jurisdiction to the community. There were no land titles and no addresses. Where there were streets that the central government had built before the favela formed there was some recognized markers (ie a paved road and addresses). The large favela we toured has a famous road right through the center. It is part of what was the major Rio car race in the 30’s. Today the windy curves are extremely difficult for the large city buses to manage and apparently they were for those race cars 80 years ago as well.

Today there are moto taxis that race around the favelas. These motorcycles provide the services of taxis. They are cheap, can driver where cars cannot and can get around stuck buses. I noticed that many of them turn off their motors when descending down the hills. I assume that is to conserve on gas.

Most of the favelas had no paved roads, no running water and no electricity. About 10 years ago a project called Barrio Favela earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars to bring some infrastructure to the favelas. Now over 90% of the residents have running water, an hygenic sewage system, electricity, paved roads and steps and some schools. Most of the favelas have few main roads where cars drive and the majority of the communities are accessed by narrow alley ways and steps, sometimes so narrow one could barely move a refrigerator through. Barrio Favela ended and Isabel noted many times that the government needs to start a new project.

One of the goals of the tour is to show that the vast majority of the residents of the favelas are good citizens living and working in their community. Many clean houses, are nannies or janitors. They do the base jobs that keep the economy running. They live there by virtue of the fact they cannot afford anywhere else. A small minority are criminals and even though the favelas are left to the vices of the drug dealers the law of the street generally keeps the favelas in order.

I am glad to have learned what I did about the favelas. I am still uncertain if touring poverty is a meaningful way of understanding the plight of a huge percentage of the world’s population. Likely because of the work I’m looking to do and the place I’m at in my life it seems disingenuous to see the direness of a situation and leave it in place. As if the act of viewing should somehow either appease or change the situation. The system has obviously left a large portion of the world unfairly treated. I don’t hold any one country responsible. We are all responsible as we all benefit from their poverty. We have for many years and apparently will for many years to come. Perhaps this is why the words “preferential treatment for the poor” rang true to me. If it isn’t preferential treatment that the first world has experienced, unfettered for centuries now, what is it?