By Albert Garcia & Suari
On the 19th 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”.
