Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Rodrigues proudly showed me drawings made by schoolchildren, some depicting police playing soccer or dancing. “Every drawing has the sun shining,” he pointed out. “We looked at drawings done before, and every one with police in it was dark.” The police ask community members about their particular needs; it’s what Colonel Rodrigues calls “soft social control.” He added, “We will not be a city without violence. We’ll be a city with normal violence. We know the plan is working because people in the favelas have started to report petty crime to our police. That’s the trust we are trying to establish.” Some police are taking theater classes to learn how to modulate their voices and demeanor to communicate authoritatively but without aggression. Others have been cynical about such tactics; one complained, “What’s next? Ballet?” But Rodrigues contended that the work has helped the police hone their attention, perception, and speech. Geniality is an art.

Rodrigues himself attends funk parties in the favelas. Hip tourists stay in favela hostels, a few of which have achieved high levels of chic. Travel companies sell favela tours, “like a safari,” Moriconi said, “in open vans,” and the new Museu de Favela is one of the most dynamic spaces in Rio. But tourism in the favelas can often feel voyeuristic rather than engaged, and many favela residents find it stigmatizing and patronizing. They don’t want to be photographed by visitors exploring the picturesque side of misery and crime.

In the past two years alone, the rate of bullet wounds in Rio has declined by half; the murder rate is now lower than that of Washington, DC. The changes do not always go smoothly, but this is clearly a moment of transformation. The popular press thrives worldwide on stories of crime and disaster, but this government has made serenity into headline news. Beltrame told me that so many people have benefited from the UPP that they simply would never allow the old system of gang rule to resurge. “Any politician who chooses to end the pacification will lose too many votes. It will be impossible,” he said. “People’s lives have improved too much.” The real success of the UPP has been to lessen the role of fear in the social economy. Graham Denyer Willis, a British expert in the developing world who is on the faculty at Cambridge University, notes that the purpose here was to “decrease the distance—spatial, social, and psychological—between citizens and the state.”

Nonetheless, the plan for sustained occupation of the favelas by the UPP can seem infantilizing, suggesting that without a visible security force, residents will revert to criminality. Christopher Gaffney, an American professor of urban planning who lives in Rio, said, “The cheerleaders for the UPPs are saying, ‘Well, the UPPs are here, we’ve got rid of the armed drug traffickers,’ but they don’t say, ‘We’ve substituted one armed force for another.’ And that’s all they’ve done without creating mechanisms for a civil society to flourish.”

The psychoanalyst Marcus André, who treats well-to-do Cariocas for high fees and favela residents for free, told me, “I was tired of being afraid of the favelas; and it turns out they were tired of being afraid of us, too. We had a fantasy of who they were, and they had an equal one about us. When you finally cross the wall, you resolve paranoia on both sides.” When he began working in the favelas, a teenage girl asked him why he’d come. “I came to learn from you,” he said. She laughed at him and replied, “You must be very stupid if you need to learn from us.” He hopes to foster self-esteem in such long-disenfranchised people. He takes his own children into even the unpacified favelas. “There is some danger,” he said, “but the danger of growing up with that fantasy paranoia is worse.”

André Urani, a leading Brazilian economist and author of Rio: The Turning Point, told me that at the end of the eighties, among 188 countries recognized by the International Monetary Fund, only one had a more closed economy than Brazil, which was Myanmar. It’s worth remembering that democracy is only twenty-six years old in Brazil; the consumer society is even newer. Urani noted, “The absence of meaningful economic activity undermined everyone’s self-esteem and resulted in huge decadence in economic, political, and social terms.” Fernando Gabeira, a popular Brazilian politician and author, said, “Since the dictatorship, Brazil has become steadily more present in the world, and the world has become steadily more present in Brazil.” That reciprocal presence has called out new competencies and skills. Artist Vik Muniz said, “Evolutionarily speaking, human beings aren’t good at much. We don’t have great vision, we’re not very fast, we don’t have big fangs, and we’re not particularly strong. We can dominate the other animals only because of our ability to organize. Somehow, we forgot that in Rio.”