The 600 favelas of Rio

By Albert Garcia & Suari

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On the 19^th century a group of Brazilian soldiers, together with some slaves who just received their freedom decided to create a new settlement next to the city of Rio. The same happened on many different cities around Brazil; however Rio de Janeiro still has the highest amount of the so-called “favelas”. They have been growing in number and size; a wide range of different factors have been affecting the introduction of more population to these slumps. Housing prices on the city, the arrival of immigrants, urbanization, unemployment, rural exodus… are examples of the factors happening on the XX which lead to the creation of the 600 favelas that Rio has today. These suburbs next to the metropolitan city are organized between them and the city government did not take them into account much.

However since 1970s they have been famous for the gangs, dugs-dealing and the violence onsite; that’s why some programs have been made to ensure the development and cleaning of the favelas (Comitê para Democratização da Informática, 1997), but they were not very successful. The gangs inside the favelas are very organized and even the police or the army has trouble of going into them.

A few years ago the World cup of 2014 and the 2016 Olympic games were given to the city of Rio; the government, with the purpose of giving a good image of the city had to clear up the favelas. A Police pacification Unit has been introduced to fight the gangs and, many different programs will be undertaken in order to pacify the suburbs of the “City of God”. The government expected that the two massive sports events would bring wealth to the city and not very skilled jobs for the poorer people. However most of the Brazilian people are not seeing the changes and with less than a year for the first event they guess that it is only a distraction for the civilians: being focused on the football they will not think of the hard reality. 

To promote the world cup, which needs huge stadiums and an improvement on the infrastructures of the country; cuts on sanitation and services have been made. Furthermore some people from the favelas have been dislocated of their homes to create a “better environment”, as the Sports and leisure minister says. Housing of people is also destroyed every day for the need of space to create stadiums. The indemnities are practically null, attempts are made for the residents to build new homes, but most of them are relocated outside the city. After all the changes that are being made the favelas are still very dangerous and the drugs are part of the every-day.

In fact, there is also a good side of the changes occurring on the Favelas of Rio; A part of the cleaning which could be good for the tourists, the levels of crime exist, but they are much lower. The gangs on the favelas understand that the tourism is a great income; therefore they respect them and try to deal with them to economically. They learned that is better for the present and for the future to sell products and services instead of committing crimes to their main source of income.

In conclusion, we could argue that the situation of the favelas in Rio has been lasting for a very long time, and it seems it will lasts for some longer. However new regulations are being implemented to clean up the suburbs with despair success and acceptability from the locals. It will be important to look over 2016 to see which is the future for the favelas on “The city of God”.