Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Brazil was primarily a colony, then a dictatorship, and despite occasional brief intervals of electoral government, the idea that it belongs to its own people began to take root widely only in 1988. “Every institution had to adjust to democracy,” Soares said. “First the political institutions, then business, then culture. The police, however, we inherited from two centuries of brutality: the time of slavery, the dictatorship. This is the last change.” He described going into the favelas with Lula during his first presidential campaign. Lula said to Soares, “I want to talk about health care, education, employment, and all they want to talk about is the police!” Soares said he told Lula, “Because that has to do with whether their sons will come home alive. You have to be alive to want to fight for a job or an education; you have to be alive even to get sick and want treatment.”

Programs to improve the favelas are nothing new; one Brazilian aid worker quipped to me that there were more NGOs than people in Brazil. But for the first time, people from the favelas are starting their own public service organizations. Luiz Carlos Dumontt and Dudu de Morro Agudo founded Enraizados, which is devoted to “cultural militancy”; its website gets more than six hundred thousand hits each month. Dudu is a rapper who teaches kids to produce music and videos as a way of enticing them away from gangs. Enraizados artists also make graffiti murals to beautify otherwise grim neighborhoods. The operation has established a street library: you find a book on the road, log on to the website stamped opposite the title page, and make a note of where you found it, whether you liked it, and where you’re leaving it so someone else can find it. Thus the books circulate through the favelas.

Fernando Gabeira is famous for having kidnapped the American ambassador to Brazil in 1969 as part of a protest against the dictatorship; the adventure was the subject of a bestselling book and the 1997 movie Four Days in September. In 2008, Gabeira lost the Rio mayoral election by less than 1 percent. When I sat with him in a sidewalk café, passing cars stopped to honk appreciation. “These UPPs are succeeding in conquering and the politicians are celebrating,” he said, “but are they celebrating the people they’ve conquered?” Gabeira averred that the long-standing scenario described by police as a conflict between justice and crime had actually been a conflict between two kinds of crime, with the police trying to appropriate the drug dealers’ profits and power. “Security is an impression as much as it is a reality, however,” he explained. “If people think things are better, they are better. The rich people are happier now, and so are the poor people. That’s already quite a success.”

Cariocas are fiercely opinionated about the rejuvenation of historic sites in the frenzy of construction leading up to the World Cup and the Olympics. The Maracanã soccer stadium is being either ruined or saved. The Theatro Municipal has just been fully restored for its centennial; modeled on the Garnier in Paris, it is where Arturo Toscanini made his conducting debut and has hosted Sarah Bernhardt and Igor Stravinsky. The theater holds nearly twenty-five hundred people and is sold out most nights for programs of opera, ballet, and classical music. On Sundays, tickets are available for one real (about twenty-five cents), and the theater is mobbed with visitors from the favelas. On the theater’s birthday, July 14, the public is invited to come for free, and the theater is open all day. Luciana Medeiros, Rio’s leading music critic, said, “The change in crime, you might not think of it as affecting the life of culture, but with these changes in Rio, everybody wins. When I was a kid, one of the most symbolic things was that the street was so dirty. All of a sudden, everybody takes care.”