Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Nonetheless, when someone stood up and said, “Despite all that, we used to fear the police, and now we respect the police,” the crowd of three hundred cheered. Erik Vittrup Christensen, who works for the UN’s human settlements program, UN-HABITAT, in Rio, said, “Acknowledgment is the oxygen here.” One teenager I met in Batan said, “I thought I would spend my whole life feeling abandoned, that if I wanted education, health, money, culture, I’d have to leave, and now I think I can stay and have those things.” Another said, “My cousin was killed by the old police, and now, the police of Batan are my friends; one is giving me classes in capoeira [a Brazilian martial art] and another in music. For him, music is just for listening; for me, it’s a chance to save my life.” But he was still afraid of what might happen in his future, after the Olympics, “after the novelty wears off for these police.” As he pointed out, the same old problems were happening a thousand feet away in another, unpacified favela, “and they could come back here easily.”

People in Rio with lighter skin unquestionably have an easier time. Officially, Brazilians define themselves as members of one of five races—branco (white), preto (black), amarelo (yellow), indigenous, and pardo (brown), which a local demographer translated, roughly, as “et cetera.” When asked to describe themselves, however, a wide sampling of Cariocas provided 136 different descriptions of their own race. Here, race is explicitly conflated with privilege. At one gathering I attended, a journalist pointed across the room and asked, “Who’s that black man over there?” The black people being asked said, “He’s not black; he’s our leader.” The leader himself then said, “When I was black, my life was harder.” In a recent survey, Brazilian city dwellers claimed to notice more racism in small towns than in urban areas; conversely, people in small towns claimed that there was no racism where they lived, but a lot in the big cities. Everyone perceives the problem, but no one claims it. In one survey of São Paulo residents, 97 percent claimed they were not racist, but 98 percent said they were closely related to someone who was racist. Self-knowledge is nowhere a widespread commodity.

Marcus Vinícius Faustini left the favelas to become an actor and returned with loudspeakers mounted on his car to announce as he drove through the poorest areas that he would teach theater to students. He has enrolled two thousand young people in educational and vocational programs. He believes that the middle-class’s attraction to the favelas traps the favela residents. “It’s not fair to say that if you’re born in the favela, you can express yourself only through funk music or samba,” he said. “The favela dwellers should have the option to express themselves with Beethoven if they wish.” He points out that the government supports capoeira classes in the favelas, but not courses in marketing or business. He acknowledged that the pacification process was intended to make favela life less chaotic. “But who defines what chaos is?” he asked. Life works in the favelas because of organic, patched-together systems that serve people’s needs. “If you resolve chaos by destroying what functions, the ramifications can be very alarming,” he said. His own dream is that after he teaches favela kids all the things they don’t know from the outside world, the outside world will come in to learn from the favela. “What the UPP gives them won’t have any meaning,” he said, “until they are allowed to give something back.”

Cíntia Luna, a community leader in Fogueteiro, walked me through her favela at sunset. She pointed out a half-built edifice that had been designated ten years earlier as a school. “I checked all the records,” she said. “The school was funded every year; they paid for teachers, lunches, supplies. But the doors were never opened. Where do you think the money went?” I wondered whether such suspicions of treachery had made her a cynic about the pacification. When I asked her, she put a hand on my arm and said, “Don’t say anything for a moment.” We stood in silence, then she explained, “There was never a moment when you could hear the wind like this. You’d have heard shooting, yelling all around us.”

Despite all that danger and disruption, she maintained that the neighborhood was peaceful, in its way, even before the police drove out the gangs. “Everybody knows everybody, and we have a mellow speed of life,” she said. “We were never afraid of the gangs, who were actually much more efficient about getting the electricity fixed or providing services than these city offices we now have to call. But we were afraid of the conflict between the gangs and the police. So now the people in the Zona Sul are happy not to have our gangs, and we are happy not to have their corrupt police. It’s only a compromise, but it gives us all a better quality of life.”