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| Favela Metro-Mangueira (Photo credit: CatComm | ComCat | RioOnWatch) |
The
original impetus for the massive demonstrations of 2013 was a
nationwide rise in bus fares, but with the upcoming Confederations Cup,
FIFA’s dress rehearsal for the World Cup, public attention quickly
focused on the vast sums being invested in stadiums and the
infrastructure for the tournament.
The “FIFA standard” of the new
stadiums was contrasted with the recurrent problems of public transport,
health and education. The double whammy of also being selected to host
the 2016 Olympics engendered a wildly ambitious restructuring and
development plan in Rio de Janeiro.
On
December 5, 2009, the Strategic Plan of the City Government announced
by Mayor Eduardo Paes presented as one of its core aims the reduction of
the total surface area occupied by favelas (shanty towns) by
3.5%, purportedly because they were located “in areas at risk of
landslides or flooding, conservation areas, or areas of public utility.”
But as a banner carried by a protesting victim of this eviction policy
read: “When rich people live in the South zone, it’s called a noble
area, when poor people live there it’s called an area at risk.”
Graffiti on the walls of Metro Mangueira by Moroccan-French artist Pleks Kustom (photo by author).
Even
the beloved Maracana stadium, an international icon of Rio’s identity,
had to be entirely reconstructed in line with FIFA directives.
In the
process the geral - the cheap standing area occupied by Rio’s
most ardent football fans - has been abolished, effectively excluding
the poorer part of the population from attending games.
Watching live
football is now the privilege of the “whites”, the upper and
middle-class spectators who are able to pay more for the right to watch
the game sitting down.
In the process of reconstructing Maracana, the
developers hit on a perfect scheme for earning more money by knocking
down the surroundings as well to make space for a massive parking lot
and shopping mall.
The destroyed
surroundings of the stadium included Friedenreich School, one of Rio’s
best municipal schools (in a country which ranks 78th for quality of
education); Lanagro, Rio’s only laboratory for analyzing foodstuffs
(while Brazil has the highest consumption of pesticides in the world and
all corn and soy plantations are genetically modified); the
Olympic-standard Celio de Barros athletics complex and Julio de Lamare
water-sports complex (both newly reconstructed at vast expense for the
2007 Pan-American Games and used for training Rio’s Olympic athletes);
Metro Mangueira, a poor community built 34 years ago by the construction
workers of the Rio underground, hence its name; and finally Aldeia
Maracanã, a multi-ethnic indigenous community created in 2006 around the
abandoned 19th century building, which had long been associated with
indigenous culture and which housed the Indian museum for over twenty
years.
Metro Mangueira is emblematic
of the many evictions carried out or planned in the lead-up to the World
Cup and the Olympics.
It was once an orderly, close-knit community and,
although poor, the houses were solidly built by construction-workers.
In October 2010, employees of the City Council started informing the
inhabitants that their community was “at risk”, marking their houses
with crosses and numbers, reminiscent of the Nazi practices in Jewish
ghettos.
The 107 families who accepted were moved to Cosmos, some 45
miles away, causing enormous hardship for those with jobs or schools
nearby. The City Council tractors then moved in to demolish the newly
abandoned homes, leaving huge holes and piles of broken masonry, opening
the community to drug dealers, prostitution and a plague of rats and
mosquitoes.
As a result, the official
explanation used to justify the eviction became a self-fulfilling
prophecy. With families and individuals occupying the ruins and rubble
of the demolished homes, the area was soon transformed into a risk zone.
Finally, at the beginning of 2014, with the World Cup in sight, the
demolition trucks moved back into the community. Instead of a real
option for those about to be evicted, the city council proposed to
register them in the federal programme Minha Casa, Minha Vida
(My House, My Life) which subsidizes low income families to acquire
houses. Although federal, this program is administered by city councils
in each state.
There have been no new public housing developments in the
central area of Rio, so the register is just a piece of paper. Popular
resistance to the demolition of Metro Mangueira lasted several days and
led to a large contingent of military police attacking young and old
alike with pepper spray, bombs and rubber bullets.
Resistance during the final eviction of Metro Mangueira (photo by Paula Kossatz).
Before
the advent of Google Maps, maps of Rio de Janeiro depicted the older,
more traditional areas of the city and the newer expansions towards
Barra and Recreio while the rest of the area was apparently uninhabited
space.
Google maps dealt a serious blow to this bucolic image of the Cidade Maravilhosa (‘Wonderful City’) by revealing that all available space in the urban area - hills, valleys, rough ground - was occupied by favelas.
The reaction of much of the elite was a sense of betrayal, but it’s
impossible to sweep these satellite images under the carpet. Suddenly
everyone was forced to admit the favelas‘ existence.
After the draconian austerity measures and structural reforms imposed by the IMF during the debt crisis of the 1980s, the favelas
had spread rapidly as more and more people were driven to the cities by
the expansion of industrial agriculture.
In their new urban dwellings,
the inhabitants lingered in a sort of limbo-state, as an auxiliary labor
force at wages insufficient to adequately feed their families, let
alone pay for housing.
Signs of the acute housing crisis in Rio are
reflected in the number of people - even entire families - sleeping in
the streets in the city center, while new favelas continuously spring up in every available space.
So
when at the beginning of April 2014 some of the leaders of the Movement
of Homeless Workers identified a large building and surrounding yard
and out-houses which used to belong to the former telephone company
Telerj, and which had been abandoned for nearly twenty years, they
quickly set about occupying the area.
Thousands of families invested
their minimal resources into buying planks to construct huts in the area
which in the space of a week was occupied by ten thousand people.
Although the occupants of the Telerj building included pregnant women,
elderly people and thousands of children from babies to adolescents, no
real attempt was made to identify the occupants or investigate their
necessities.
TV Globo, Brazil’s
biggest television network, was quick to denounce the “invaders” as
criminals, flying over the area for aerial shots of the “invasion.”
The
telephone company that took over from Telerj - Oi - had never occupied
the building, which was going to be sold to the city government and
which was destined for the ‘My House, My Life’ program.
However, with
the impasse of the occupation, the “owners” soon appeared and a suit for
reintegration of the property was rushed through the courts.
On
Wednesday, April 9, Mayor Eduardo Paes announced that the occupation had
been carried out by organized professionals, implying criminal intent,
and declared that the area should be “disoccupied” and returned to its
owners. The mayor went as far as stating that “really poor people who
need houses don’t stake out their plots with planks and construction
materials.”
Rubble is all that remains of the Metro Mangueira community (photo by author).
So
what was the solution for all this “criminal activity”?
At dawn on
April 11, 1.600 heavily armed military police invaded the area. Sleeping
women were kicked awake, huts were knocked down, everyone was sprayed
with chemical spray - not from the usual hand-held canisters but from
massive cylinders the size of fire extinguishers, which the police
carried in backpacks.
All members of the press, whether corporate or
independent, were expelled from the area and even one of the Globo
reporters was arrested by police on the spurious charge that he was
“throwing stones.” Occupants allege that four infants succumbed to the
chemical spray and rumors circulated that one of the reasons for keeping
reporters out was to prevent them from witnessing the fatalities.
The
sheer number of people involved, the fact that noone had time to create
a real register of the occupants of the building, and the pandemonium
that ensued makes it impossible to corroborate the facts.
Nonetheless,
the photographs and videos of independent reporters on the scene bear
witness to the terror of the “disoccupation.” Testimonies of many of
those involved reveal that these are people who have already been
evicted from other areas in recent demolitions and evictions, while
others are victims of the rising prices engendered by the militarization
of the favelas.
The
occupation and subsequent eviction of the Telerj building, just as the
destruction of the Metro Mangueira community, is exemplary of the
complete disregard for right to housing of Brazil’s poorest people.
On
the one hand, entire neighborhoods are demolished to make space for
parking lots and shopping malls, and on the other many favelas
have been occupied by militarized police forces (UPPs). This means that
communities lacking any form of public services are basically placed
under permanent curfew, which goes under the dubious title of “Public
Security,” and any kind of protest is treated as a criminal uprising.
The contagious spirit of the mass protests that have been rocking Brazil over the past year has also found fertile soil in the favelas,
where the death of every young person murdered by police is another
rallying cry for popular resistance.
As the current wave of anti-World
Cup protests shows, the genie is out of the bottle - and it will take a
lot more than violent evictions and police repression to silence the
awakened and indignant multitude.
Vik Birkbeck
is British by birth but is a long-time resident of Brazil. As a media
activist she has been filming and photographing popular culture and
street movements since the eighties. All the photos in the article are
by the author.
Luciano Cunha
is a Brazilian author, cartoonist and graphic designer. His latest
creation is the anti-hero O Doutrinador (‘The Indoctrinator’), who -
dressed in black, sporting a Sepultura t-shirt, carrying a machine gun
and with his face covered by a gas mask to avoid identification - has
set out on a mission to rid the country of its corrupt politicians.
In
less than a year the comic has drawn a lot of attention from infuriated
Brazilians who in some way feel connected to the anti-hero’s mission.
The popularity of O Doutrinador has sky-rocketed in the past year,
drawing attention not only from those who support Cunha’s work, but also
from government figures who attempt to muzzle him via lawsuits,
violating his freedom of expression and trying to kill his creative
liberty.
We at ROAR are therefore very excited to feature a series of
unique drawings by Cunha to illustrate our Brazil coverage in the coming
weeks. O Doutrinador can be found on Facebook, YouTube, and his personal website.
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