Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Some favela dwellers have occupied the same house for three generations, and it seems unrealistic to insist that it’s not their property. Others settled in only last year, and it is not a foregone conclusion that they should have squatter’s rights. If you grant people ownership of favela houses, will they sell off their land to rich people who want to take advantage of the views? Many favelas enjoy extraordinary vistas; some look over the city of Rio, across to the statue of Christ the Redeemer, and out to sea. In any other city, people would bankrupt themselves for such panoramas. Some favela dwellers pay rent, which has already escalated where UPPs have been established. The prevailing view among most middle-class Cariocas is that the favelas must be preserved; many dislike the idea of seeing all the poor people exiled. I asked everyone I met inside the favelas whether they wanted to move to a “better” neighborhood, and the only ones who did were relatively recent emigrants from other parts of Brazil. Favela natives wanted to fix up the world they loved. Though Batan is a favela in the northwestern end of town—the really ugly, poorest part, far from the beach—one of the kids I met there said, “If you could bottle the joy in this place, you could sell it in the Zona Sul.”

Some argue that the whole UPP program serves as a Band-Aid for the World Cup and the Olympics; that it will surely disintegrate from lack of funding once those events have taken place, with huge budget cuts in 2017; and that if or when the gangs return, anyone who has cooperated with the UPP will be targeted for retribution. In 2010, two years after the UPP was launched, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights found that nothing was being accomplished by the program, complained of its strong-arm, militaristic tactics, and criticized the idea that “occasional violent invasions can bring security.” The Geneva Conventions apply to war, but not to a state’s policing of its own citizenry. While the military is trained to kill, police in most countries are trained to arrest instead; policing is not soldiering. Any confusion about the line between those two roles leads to abuse. Fear of corruption persists. “Corruption is never one-sided,” Bastos said. “Someone has to be willing to pay and someone has to be willing to receive, and we have to address both sides.” The question remains to what extent the UPPs protect the upper class and to what extent they really improve life in the favelas. Security is a military achievement, and safety is a social one. Security may be achieved through violence, but safety requires peace. Is the UPP helping to create safety, or is it really focused on security? Even a benign police action can degenerate into military occupation, especially in a country so recently freed from dictatorship.

I attended a meeting in the recently pacified favela of Morro dos Prazeres at which community leaders from that area and neighboring districts met with an impressive array of government representatives. City administrators had suspended garbage collection during the rainy season because the steep streets became unsafe for trucks. The favela residents didn’t want their garbage left rotting in the streets for months. Some residents’ plumbing had failed, so they had to fetch water in buckets. “Is anyone in Santa Teresa fetching water in buckets?” someone asked ironically, referring to a prosperous area that bordered his favela. Rio has no coherent program for universal sanitation that could be fully implemented before 2025.

The electric company had installed meters on some streets but programmed them incorrectly, so some people were being charged for others’ electricity. The utilities worked where the police set up offices, but not elsewhere. The government had closed a day-care center that didn’t conform to legal requirements, and as a result, some children had no place to go when their mothers went to work. Plans had been announced to demolish structurally unstable houses on steep hills prone to mudslides, but nobody had figured out where to house the displaced occupants. People had been searched for arms coming in and out of their own neighborhoods just because they were young, male, and dark-skinned. The social UPP program was having a rocky start.