by Laura Moulton, Contributing Writer
Last fall while preparing for a trip to Brazil, I did research online and discovered an article in the New Yorker about the favelas, or slums, of Rio de Janeiro. It detailed recent events in a favela called Moro do Dende, profiled a notorious drug dealer called Fernando Gomes de Freitas and described the inability of the government to bring order. I read the article carefully, chilled by particular phrases: armed posse with automatic weapons, city busses torched, the practice of dismembering police or rival gangs, tossing bodies into the sea for the crabs to eat.
In a photo, two young men lay on their bellies on the street, hands cuffed behind them. In less than a month I would fly with my children and extended family to the city of Rio for my brother’s wedding. My children were 5 and 2, and I was taking them to a place with a crime rate supposedly four times that of the United States, where just that month a military helicopter had been shot from the sky during a stand-off between two rival gangs, where street kids huffed glue and the vast shantytowns that clung to the hillsides above the sea stretched on forever. The article underscored the complete chaos in the favelas and the corruption of the police who were supposed to be fixing the problem.
The State Department Web site’s warnings about Brazil were no more reassuring: ignore stoplights between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. to avoid holdups. Even the beaches were dangerous, with very strong riptides and a “higher-than-average probability of shark attacks.”
The journey to Rio de Janeiro meant leaving comfortable beds in Portland, a fenced yard with grass, a housecat and a coop full of chickens. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t taken risks before. I’d buzzed through rice paddies on a motorcycle in the dark in northern Taiwan, and traveled at high altitude in the Andes of Ecuador with a mule. I knew what it was like to be holed up in a Peruvian motel room on an Easter Sunday with a terrible stomach virus and no seat on the toilet, or to visit a Bangkok hospital with a kidney infection on a New Year’s Eve. So I was not uncomfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable. Or of not knowing exactly where I would sleep when night fell. It was all part of the grand adventure. But going to Rio this time meant bringing two small children who, while highly adaptable, also needed to eat at fairly regular intervals, and to sleep at night.
My new Brazilian in-laws chose an apartment in a middleclass neighborhood in a district called Flamengo, determined that we should lodge in a safe place. It was safe, alright: a gated community, 13 floors of apartments. A swimming pool, children’s play area, a mini-movie theater, cobblestone paths with palm trees growing out of raised beds, a café, a gym. The works. And while the grind of busses and distant sirens went on in the street outside, inside was peaceful, if unreal. Maybe it’s OK to maintain a little distance, I told myself. This was a wedding trip, and we didn’t have to carpe diem the hell out of it like past travel adventures. Couldn’t we just work on tans and learn Portuguese, and feed the kids fresh mango juice?
We left the rain in Portland and stepped into the sun of Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilians we met were friendly, and we quickly got to know the residents at the apartment complex. We also learned the names of various lifeguards, waiters, and nannies in the compound, and it didn’t take long to figure out that when these people went home each night, they went home to favelas. The people who scrubbed the toilets, who swept up dead cockroaches, who tended the apartment complex’s children while they watched Finding Nemo in Portuguese, who smiled and gave us the thumbs-up sign in greeting — they punched out at night and left our oasis for the real world.
There are just under a thousand favelas spread across the city of Rio, and 20 percent of the city’s population lives in them. Conditions vary, but a common denominator is a lack of public services ranging from transportation and mail delivery to sewage systems. Favelas are often governed by drug lords like the one profiled in the New Yorker piece — they mete out their own system of justice and provide for the residents in lieu of governmental support. The same State Department site that warned of shark attacks also talked about the “Favela Pacification Plan,” a process by which police would stage incursions into favelas and take control, promising protection and public service utilities to those who cooperated. Unfortunately, these clashes often resulted in many dead, including civilians. The State Department warned U.S. citizens to “avoid Rio’s favelas, even those favelas that have been recently ‘pacified,’’’ and added, “several local companies offer ‘favela jeep tours’ targeted at foreign tourists. U.S. citizens are cautioned that neither the tour company nor the city police can guarantee their safety when entering favelas.”
I was very grateful for the opportunity to be in Brazil, for the chance for my children to explore a new language and culture, and for the time to celebrate with my brother and his new family. I wasn’t about to court risk for its own sake. But it felt wrong to visit a beautiful, complicated country and not dare to learn about the rougher parts of life for people who existed beyond the gated apartment where I lived. I left my kids with my family and set out to explore the other Brazil.
The rendezvous point for the favela tour I signed up for was the immense and white-pillared Copacabana Palace. It was an uncomfortable irony to hail a taxi to a posh area of town so that I could be driven to visit a devastatingly poor one. I walked through the marbled entrance and found a seat in the lobby. After a moment, a woman entered wearing a crisp white polo shirt that read “Favela Jeep Tour.” Behind her was parked a very military-looking black jeep with no roof. My heart sank — had I accidentally booked a tour in which the poor become the exotic wildlife on display?
“Here for the favela tour?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Room number?”
“I’m not staying here,” I told her.
“Then you’re with the other tour,” she said.
The other tour guide, Alfredo, strolled in wearing surfer shorts and a red t-shirt, sporting a plaid Gilligan hat and Converse tennis shoes. I noted with relief that he looked like someone you could go skateboarding with and seemed no more at home at the Copacabana Palace than I was. His van carried a handful of people, Brits and Americans, a couple of Canadians. As we began the drive he told us about the two favelas we would visit: Rocinha, the largest favela in Rio, and the smaller Vila Canoas, home to a non-profit school called Para-ti. Even though Alfredo didn’t belittle the other tour company, he made it clear that his operation was different. They invested thousands of dollars a year in Para-ti, he said, and a portion of the money tourists paid to go on the tour would go to residents of the favelas. They did not just drive around and look.
As we moved through the heat and crush of traffic, Alfredo gave us a quick history lesson. In the late 1800s, a group of soldiers and refugees from the Canudos Civil War set up an encampment on a hillside above the city. If the government couldn’t house them, they would house themselves. The thorny-leafed, hardy favela plant growing on the hillside next to them was an apt metaphor for their own resiliency, so they christened their camp Morro do Favela, and the first favela was born.
Alfredo said the current mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, and his public security officer, José Mariano Bletrame, had been aggressive in ordering dwellings in the favelas to be torn down, and people to be relocated.
“Two reasons,” he said. “World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.” He told us there were already five favelas formerly ruled by druglords that had been taken over and were now run by the police. He was hopeful that change was on its way, but acknowledged that there would be many challenges.
“Brazil is a beautiful, beautiful country,” he said. What most needed fixing was the social discrimination and disparity of wealth and educational opportunities for the people. “If they fixed these things, whoa, it is heaven,” he said. “It becomes perfect.”
The van entered Rocinha and it was as though we’d passed over an invisible line, with the sudden appearance of a giant pile of garbage. The streets were filled with people coming and going, and they paid little attention to us. We pulled to a stop along the main road, and got out to look at the paintings and handmade jewelry for sale by residents of Rocinha. Alfredo had prepared us for this stop in the van, and reminded us that buying their work was an immediate way to help financially. The street we were on had the most developed infrastructure in Rocinha and allowed for garbage pickup, electricity, running water and sewer. But the further one ventured into the favela, the more it became a vast network of houses upon houses, accessible only by foot, tiny paths with no organized postal service and sewage that ran to an open ditch. He led us up the hill and through a garage to a balcony overlooking the valley, where we saw the mind-boggling sea of tiny apartments built one above the other, constructed of brick, wood, garbage, and tin, whatever people could find. It was a kind of architectural miracle. And nightmare. No wonder the landslides could be so devastating. In a few months, after heavy rains and flooding, a mudslide in the Morro Bumba favela would entirely cover more than sixty houses, as well as a daycare center, a church, a pizza parlor. More than two hundred people died.
“Follow me, guys,” Alfredo said.
We took a walk through Rocinha and discovered a city within a city. Amid the graffiti-covered cinderblock walls and uneven sidewalks, a makeshift, improvised commerce thrived. At an Internet café, patrons sat on plastic chairs in front of computers. A man got a haircut at a barbershop, and tiny fans from the repair shop next door blew little black puffs of his hair into my path. A cat groomed itself next to an enormous pothole, and above it hung tiny wooden cages with bright flashes of colorful birds inside. An incredible network of tangled wires overhead was evidence of electrical wiring Alfredo said was tampered with by “gatos,” or those who borrowed electricity without paying for it. Everywhere around us life crackled with energy. Rocinha boasted its own newspaper, banks, a radio station, video stores, beauty parlors. I stopped at a stall and bought shoelaces for my father.
The next favela we visited was quieter. In the dim, cool alleys of Vila Canoas we stepped down improbably steep steps, between the narrow corridors formed by the corners of apartments almost touching. The dark passageways featured tiny bars with friendly proprietors, one-room restaurants, and a small courtyard with bright murals painted by children. Up above, a group of policemen in matching gray uniforms ate lunches of meat, rice and black beans next to the “Bem Vindo (Welcome to) Vila Canoas,” sign. Everywhere we went, the people greeted Alfredo warmly, joking with him and smiling at us, and it was a relief they did not view our visit as an intrusion on their privacy.
In the van on the way home, people were quiet. Alfredo said, “Well, guys, that’s the tour. You now know more about favelas than most of the people living in Rio.”
In a way, I understood this. In a city with such an overwhelming disparity between rich and poor, sometimes it must have been easier not to look. In fact there were plenty of warnings against looking. Warnings from the media, and from the U.S. State Department. Those who lived in the apartment complex warned me about the favelas before I went. Nobody should go there, they said. It’s too dangerous. And so none of us goes, none of us sees, except the poor who can’t afford to live anywhere else. Media shapes our perceptions, and stokes our fears. And what develops is a fear also of poverty, of people who live in the slums, who have less. It is true that life in a favela can be miserable and fraught with danger. I’m not here to claim otherwise: that a druglord called Fernandinho doesn’t dismember rival gang members, that police aren’t executed and innocent people caught in the shoot-outs. All of that is probably true. But all of what I learned about and saw in the favelas is also true: There’s a woman named Shayla who makes lovely necklaces and bracelets in Rocinha, and she will gladly sell them to you. Next to her, a handsome young kid will greet you and invite you to look at his colorful paintings. Down in the interior of Rocinha, there will be a stall that sells shoelaces, and a woman will greet you warmly and count change back into your hand.
No place is rotten to the core. In the most forsaken places, there will be a beauty parlor, an Internet café, people hurrying to a birthday party, balancing a cake on a bicycle. Their lives will be unfolding, small triumphs and some tragedy, whether or not anyone sees.
Photos by Byben Parzybok