Brazil Melancholia
2011, Written Essay
Our airport taxi cruised down the highway in the middle of the night, and all was quiet apart from the gentle hum of the engine and Adele playing on the radio. Somehow, everything felt strangely familiar under the yellow glow of street lamps. From the city and its modernist buildings, to the trees lining the streets, down to the smell of the plastic upholstery in the Korean-made cab. Everything was so recognisable; everything was so surreal.
Sometimes though, we would catch a glimpse of the hills that lay beyond and were reminded that there was indeed something different about this city we just arrived in. The hills were lit up with thousands of twinkling lights and it was beautiful, even mesmerising under the cloak of darkness. It was like another world, isolated, suspended in the air, serving as a backdrop to the rest of the city. But these lights were not decoration. This was Brazil. This was Rio de Janeiro and the lights were coming from the hillside slums or favelas, notorious for their violence and crime. I asked the driver about the favelas but he did not have a single clue. "Just don’t go there", he said, "nobody does". I subsequently asked several others about the favelas during my time in Brazil, and I always got the same shrug of the shoulders and warning not to venture there. As far as the locals were concerned, the favelas had always been a foreign and hostile presence parasiting their beloved city.
However, the fact is that favelas were not always present in Rio de Janeiro.
It all started in 1889. Brazil became a republic after the monarchy was overthrown in a military coup and was eager to reinvent itself as one that was modern and progressive, but most importantly different from its colonial past. Brazil looked toward the great European capital cities as examples of ideal societies, and remodelled itself through a period of intensive urban renewal at the turn of the 20th century. One of the most impressive projects was the opening of Central Avenue in downtown Rio based on the Haussmanian boulevards of Paris. But to achieve that, a great number of homes of the low-income communities were demolished, and with very few alternative social housing schemes available, these people resorted to building their own homes in the previously deserted main hills around the city centre, giving rise to the first ever favelas. Ironically, Brazil's pursuit of utopia created one of the greatest contemporary urban problems of Rio de Janeiro.
Since then Brazil has been fighting to eradicate favelas to achieve its dream to be an ideal society. Many strategies were implemented over time. These slum dwellers were first forcibly evicted from their homes and blamed for blighting the city with their miserable will to live. In later years, they were considered social deviants and subjected to state reform and re-housed in environments that would nurture a socially-acceptable way of life, in Modernist housing estates like Conjunto de Quitungo and Pedregulho. Today, 25 percent or 35 million Brazilians live in favelas, with numbers rising year after year. In Rio alone, 21 percent of its population or 1.3 million people live in favelas. This architectural manifestation of poverty is a very stark reminder to the city of its shortcomings, so it comes as no surprise that with Rio due to host the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, the recently elected Rousseff government announced the most ambitious plan yet to tackle favelas: the urbanisation of all 600 of Rio's favelas by 2020.
Though it may be true that these fiscal policies of the IMF and the World Bank have greatly worsened the conditions of the abject poor, it is doubtful if it can be attributed as the real cause of the global problem. For one, during the 1990s, unprecedented trade expansion and cheaper production costs created almost perfect economic conditions for the Third World countries to regain lost ground and reduce inequalities created by the SAPs a decade earlier. However, contrary to expectations, an unprecedented number of countries still saw negative development, with 46 countries poorer today than they were in 1990, and 25 countries with more people hungry today than a decade ago. Mike Davis attributes this to a new wave of self-imposed neoliberal programs that accelerated the demolition of state employment, local manufacturing, and home-marketagriculture. Therefore, while the elite in the private sector benefited once again from the upsurge in the economy, the public sector was still saddled with the burden of servicing its debts and had very little surplus budget to assist the poor.
Yet, this still does not address the question why in the 1990s, the various nations, together with the IMF and the World Bank, still allowed the problem to persist when they were aware of the negative consequences these policies created in terms of income inequality and urban poverty. Why did these countries continue such self-imposed policies knowing full well of the detrimental effects urban poverty and slums brought to cities in terms of health and crime? If the current state of urban poverty was indeed created by the effects of these fiscal policies, then the obvious solution should have been to readjust the conditions of these policies to exert greater control on societal and market forces that generate such inequalities in the first place. Yet, instead of that, the poor were romanticised and praised for their capacity to self-help while state and local governmental interventions were withdrawn. By the mid-1990s, services and utilities provided to the slums in many Third World countries were done so not by the public sector, but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in partnership with various international and local aid institutions.
The Fight for Peace organisation for example, is supported by the British National Lottery and Comic Relief, and "uses boxing and martial arts combined with education and personal development to realise the potential of young people in communities that suffer from crime and violence" in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. While the work of such charities do have merit, the truth is that they provide residents what should be theirs by right as citizens. NGOs monopolise expert knowledge and middle-man roles, leaving slum dwellers powerless and dependent on such charitable hand-outs in order to live by. It removes their political qualities, participation in a sovereign political organisation, and reduces them to caricatures of innocent helplessness.
In this respect, the latest strategy to urbanise all of Rio's favelas differs little as well. The plan involves the preservation and upgrading of favelas through the provision of basic utilities, paved roads, and rebuilding shelters with more stable construction out of brick and mortar. Indeed these measures do address the immediate needs of the favelados (inhabitants), but they are simply a cosmetic beautification of the slums and do nothing to improve the inherent social conditions within these areas. Favela communities continue to suffer from the stigma of their post codes, difficult access to the city, poor informal working conditions, and violent clashes with the police. The preservation of these 'informal' places only reinforces their segregation and exclusion from the rest of the 'formal' city. Ironically, informality is even encouraged in the form of various schemes to support an internal informal economy within favelas. For example, micro-financing, a favela currency and sewing co-operatives were established as part of slum improvement projects like Favela-Bairro from 1995. But without the commercial volume and necessary mass market exposure, its products could not compete against the big commercial brands of the high-street, and was reduced to only serving the demands within the favela itself. More worryingly though, these informal workers are unrecognised, with no formal contract, rights or regulations to protect themselves from petty exploitation, resulting in extremely dire working conditions and widespread abuse of labour.
The contrast between the urban rich and poor is even more extreme and ironic when we consider that Brazil today is growing a staggering 7% at a time when other nations worry about impending recession and financial collapse. This, together with a huge influx of foreign investment and discovery of extensive oil reserves off the coast of Rio, has made Brazil one of the global economic powerhouses alongside Russia, India and China. Yet as thousands of flats in downtown Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro lie vacant as property investments of the elite rich, the urban poor fight over cramped unhygienic spaces in overcrowded favelas. Similarly, while world-class private healthcare has become a norm for most of the city residents, the urban poor are unable to afford basic public healthcare. And as jobs are in such demand that the number of foreign workers rose 30% last year, slum dwellers are still frequently denied jobs because of where they come from and are only allowed to take part in menial forms of work.
In Rio de Janeiro, NGOs provide basic education and handicraft activities for the community, but they do not equip residents with a means of education based on a formally-recognised curriculum. Similarly, though basic infrastructure such as electricity and water is now formally installed (and billed for), there is still no subsidy in public transportation for slum dwellers, making accessibility to means of work highly difficult. We must not forget that the strong endorsement of informality and self-help also implies that formality and access to state assistance is being discouraged. The urban slum dwellers are in fact being kept firmly in their precarious position. Not only are they quietly being excluded physically from accessing the city for employment or leisure, but in limiting their means of social mobility, also excluded categorically as a class from the city itself. These strategies make the separation between the 'informal' urban poor and formal city distinctly clear, and keeps the two worlds deliberately apart.
As the poor become increasingly desperate and turn to organised crime as an means of survival, they play directly into the hands of the authorities who use this as a legitimate reason to tackle the slum dwellers with force and brutality. The slums of Rio are notorious for their violent clashes with the police and are blamed for being sources of all crime and deviance. In recent months, many of these mega slums or complexos have been occupied by the military under the pretext of cleaning up organised crime in favelas and have turned into almost police states. The police now form the main conduit for social activity in these favelas and are the only channel through which residents can express their demands.
The enemy here, as defined in Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, refers to the other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it. An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one collective poses a threat to the existence of another collective with the possibility of conflict. The poor in living a life of impermanence and instability, resorting to crime and other forms of deviance, and building homes which are improvised and unregulated, embody all characteristics that are in direct opposition to the very fundamentals of city life. It threatens the city, and is therefore its enemy. The poor as enemy has even been given a public persona in recent times - that of the terrorist - that is almost always portrayed in popular culture as poor, disgruntled men living in the fringe wastelands, plotting to wreck havoc in the heart of the city for their political or religious cause.
That said, the benefits are tremendous when considered from the point of view of the state. By relegating the urban poor as an external entity, the state can relinquish its responsibilities in providing for the impoverished, while still benefitting from their contributions to the economy as illegal labourers or as consumerists. More critically though, the concept of the enemy can only exist insofar as a condition of amity exists, for it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us”. It follows that the stronger the threat of the enemy, the stronger the solidarity of friends will be. Thus the existence of an enemy, formalised in the very real and present form of the slums on the peripheries of the city, strengthens the political position of the sovereign, and any action taken to deal with the slums is legitimised and supported on the assumption that they are enemy and so it therefore must be done for the general good of the city.
Furthermore, its constant visual presence perpetually reminds the city of the tension that exists between these two opposing worlds, strengthening the unity between the people and the state as they seek protection against this threat at their doorstep. The stark contrast between the city and the other also helps to assure the privileged status of the city over the slums, and creates a unique relationship whereby the 'enemy' is not in ideological conflict with the establishment but aspires to be a part of its lifestyle one day. The urban poor are constantly reminded of their inadequate position in the form of the architectural imagery of gleaming modernist buildings. They desire to lead the consumerist lifestyle and enjoy all the luxuries the city has the offer. Yet at the same time the glorification of self-help and informality weakens their solidarity and pits one individual 'entrepreneur' against another. And as these economic actors spend all hours of their waking lives working fervently towards their goal of living in the city, it destroys any potential of them from classing together to rise up against state oppression.
Sometimes though, we would catch a glimpse of the hills that lay beyond and were reminded that there was indeed something different about this city we just arrived in. The hills were lit up with thousands of twinkling lights and it was beautiful, even mesmerising under the cloak of darkness. It was like another world, isolated, suspended in the air, serving as a backdrop to the rest of the city. But these lights were not decoration. This was Brazil. This was Rio de Janeiro and the lights were coming from the hillside slums or favelas, notorious for their violence and crime. I asked the driver about the favelas but he did not have a single clue. "Just don’t go there", he said, "nobody does". I subsequently asked several others about the favelas during my time in Brazil, and I always got the same shrug of the shoulders and warning not to venture there. As far as the locals were concerned, the favelas had always been a foreign and hostile presence parasiting their beloved city.
However, the fact is that favelas were not always present in Rio de Janeiro.
It all started in 1889. Brazil became a republic after the monarchy was overthrown in a military coup and was eager to reinvent itself as one that was modern and progressive, but most importantly different from its colonial past. Brazil looked toward the great European capital cities as examples of ideal societies, and remodelled itself through a period of intensive urban renewal at the turn of the 20th century. One of the most impressive projects was the opening of Central Avenue in downtown Rio based on the Haussmanian boulevards of Paris. But to achieve that, a great number of homes of the low-income communities were demolished, and with very few alternative social housing schemes available, these people resorted to building their own homes in the previously deserted main hills around the city centre, giving rise to the first ever favelas. Ironically, Brazil's pursuit of utopia created one of the greatest contemporary urban problems of Rio de Janeiro.
Since then Brazil has been fighting to eradicate favelas to achieve its dream to be an ideal society. Many strategies were implemented over time. These slum dwellers were first forcibly evicted from their homes and blamed for blighting the city with their miserable will to live. In later years, they were considered social deviants and subjected to state reform and re-housed in environments that would nurture a socially-acceptable way of life, in Modernist housing estates like Conjunto de Quitungo and Pedregulho. Today, 25 percent or 35 million Brazilians live in favelas, with numbers rising year after year. In Rio alone, 21 percent of its population or 1.3 million people live in favelas. This architectural manifestation of poverty is a very stark reminder to the city of its shortcomings, so it comes as no surprise that with Rio due to host the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016, the recently elected Rousseff government announced the most ambitious plan yet to tackle favelas: the urbanisation of all 600 of Rio's favelas by 2020.
The growing problem of Rio's favelas is not unique to Brazil alone, but part of a terrifying global phenomenon of rampant urban poverty that is set to become one of the most significant problems of the next century. The United Nations estimates that there are already about 1 billion people living in city slums today, in a global situation where inequality are at levels such that approximately one third of the population holds almost the entire wealth of the whole world. This gulf between the urban rich and poor is set to widen so much so that by 2035, the number living in poverty will cross the two billion mark, with 50 percent of the total population in cities living in slums.
In the book the Planet of Slums, Mike Davis puts the blame squarely on the IMF and World Bank and its milieu of "conditionalities" imposed on Third World nations for causing the massive income inequalities that exist today. As a result of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) in the 1970s, many of these indebted countries were forced to abandon state-led development strategies in order to enjoy continued membership in the world economy and access to loan facilities from these institutions. They were encouraged to devalue their currencies against stiff competition in global commodity markets, privatise many public sector services like water and electricity to free up state assets, remove import controls and food subsidies to support an import-substitution economy, and enforce stringent cost-recovery measures in health and education to recoup state losses quickly. At the same time, subsidies were also removed for peasant farmers, forcing them into an impossible situation where they had to compete on equal grounds with heavily subsidised First World agribusinesses. Thus, although many of these policies were effective in enabling the Third World governments to reduce short-term budget deficit and benefit corporate enterprise, there were also detrimental side effects. The unfavourable rural working conditions caused a "peasant flood" to the cities, while higher costs of living in the cities themselves left many amenities out of reach of the urban poor, worsening their standards of living.
Though it may be true that these fiscal policies of the IMF and the World Bank have greatly worsened the conditions of the abject poor, it is doubtful if it can be attributed as the real cause of the global problem. For one, during the 1990s, unprecedented trade expansion and cheaper production costs created almost perfect economic conditions for the Third World countries to regain lost ground and reduce inequalities created by the SAPs a decade earlier. However, contrary to expectations, an unprecedented number of countries still saw negative development, with 46 countries poorer today than they were in 1990, and 25 countries with more people hungry today than a decade ago. Mike Davis attributes this to a new wave of self-imposed neoliberal programs that accelerated the demolition of state employment, local manufacturing, and home-marketagriculture. Therefore, while the elite in the private sector benefited once again from the upsurge in the economy, the public sector was still saddled with the burden of servicing its debts and had very little surplus budget to assist the poor.
Yet, this still does not address the question why in the 1990s, the various nations, together with the IMF and the World Bank, still allowed the problem to persist when they were aware of the negative consequences these policies created in terms of income inequality and urban poverty. Why did these countries continue such self-imposed policies knowing full well of the detrimental effects urban poverty and slums brought to cities in terms of health and crime? If the current state of urban poverty was indeed created by the effects of these fiscal policies, then the obvious solution should have been to readjust the conditions of these policies to exert greater control on societal and market forces that generate such inequalities in the first place. Yet, instead of that, the poor were romanticised and praised for their capacity to self-help while state and local governmental interventions were withdrawn. By the mid-1990s, services and utilities provided to the slums in many Third World countries were done so not by the public sector, but by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in partnership with various international and local aid institutions.
The Fight for Peace organisation for example, is supported by the British National Lottery and Comic Relief, and "uses boxing and martial arts combined with education and personal development to realise the potential of young people in communities that suffer from crime and violence" in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. While the work of such charities do have merit, the truth is that they provide residents what should be theirs by right as citizens. NGOs monopolise expert knowledge and middle-man roles, leaving slum dwellers powerless and dependent on such charitable hand-outs in order to live by. It removes their political qualities, participation in a sovereign political organisation, and reduces them to caricatures of innocent helplessness.
In this respect, the latest strategy to urbanise all of Rio's favelas differs little as well. The plan involves the preservation and upgrading of favelas through the provision of basic utilities, paved roads, and rebuilding shelters with more stable construction out of brick and mortar. Indeed these measures do address the immediate needs of the favelados (inhabitants), but they are simply a cosmetic beautification of the slums and do nothing to improve the inherent social conditions within these areas. Favela communities continue to suffer from the stigma of their post codes, difficult access to the city, poor informal working conditions, and violent clashes with the police. The preservation of these 'informal' places only reinforces their segregation and exclusion from the rest of the 'formal' city. Ironically, informality is even encouraged in the form of various schemes to support an internal informal economy within favelas. For example, micro-financing, a favela currency and sewing co-operatives were established as part of slum improvement projects like Favela-Bairro from 1995. But without the commercial volume and necessary mass market exposure, its products could not compete against the big commercial brands of the high-street, and was reduced to only serving the demands within the favela itself. More worryingly though, these informal workers are unrecognised, with no formal contract, rights or regulations to protect themselves from petty exploitation, resulting in extremely dire working conditions and widespread abuse of labour.
The contrast between the urban rich and poor is even more extreme and ironic when we consider that Brazil today is growing a staggering 7% at a time when other nations worry about impending recession and financial collapse. This, together with a huge influx of foreign investment and discovery of extensive oil reserves off the coast of Rio, has made Brazil one of the global economic powerhouses alongside Russia, India and China. Yet as thousands of flats in downtown Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro lie vacant as property investments of the elite rich, the urban poor fight over cramped unhygienic spaces in overcrowded favelas. Similarly, while world-class private healthcare has become a norm for most of the city residents, the urban poor are unable to afford basic public healthcare. And as jobs are in such demand that the number of foreign workers rose 30% last year, slum dwellers are still frequently denied jobs because of where they come from and are only allowed to take part in menial forms of work.
These facts evidently show that although there are means available and necessary financial muscle to shrink the widening inequality gulf between rich and poor, very little has been done to this effect. The government could easily reintroduce subsidies for healthcare and education for the poor, impose taxes on vacant homes to push the rental market down and make it more affordable for the poor to rent, and accommodate tax breaks to encourage local enterprises instead of external imports. The urban poor is also an abundant source of cheap labour that could be employed by formal industries, yet all of these measures are not done. On the contrary, various apparatuses, while seemingly helpful towards the immediate plights of the poor, repeatedly exclude them from accessing various amenities as their rights as citizens of the state.
In Rio de Janeiro, NGOs provide basic education and handicraft activities for the community, but they do not equip residents with a means of education based on a formally-recognised curriculum. Similarly, though basic infrastructure such as electricity and water is now formally installed (and billed for), there is still no subsidy in public transportation for slum dwellers, making accessibility to means of work highly difficult. We must not forget that the strong endorsement of informality and self-help also implies that formality and access to state assistance is being discouraged. The urban slum dwellers are in fact being kept firmly in their precarious position. Not only are they quietly being excluded physically from accessing the city for employment or leisure, but in limiting their means of social mobility, also excluded categorically as a class from the city itself. These strategies make the separation between the 'informal' urban poor and formal city distinctly clear, and keeps the two worlds deliberately apart.
As the poor become increasingly desperate and turn to organised crime as an means of survival, they play directly into the hands of the authorities who use this as a legitimate reason to tackle the slum dwellers with force and brutality. The slums of Rio are notorious for their violent clashes with the police and are blamed for being sources of all crime and deviance. In recent months, many of these mega slums or complexos have been occupied by the military under the pretext of cleaning up organised crime in favelas and have turned into almost police states. The police now form the main conduit for social activity in these favelas and are the only channel through which residents can express their demands.
What we are witnessing therefore, is not a global phenomenon of exploding urban poverty where widening inequality is the unforeseen result of fiscal policy, but rather a universal and far more sinister condition that is deliberately transforming the urban poor into an enemy of the state.
The enemy here, as defined in Carl Schmitt's Concept of the Political, refers to the other, the stranger, the existential outsider, whose intense hostility threatens the state and the relations of friendship internal to it. An enemy, in this sense, exists wherever one collective poses a threat to the existence of another collective with the possibility of conflict. The poor in living a life of impermanence and instability, resorting to crime and other forms of deviance, and building homes which are improvised and unregulated, embody all characteristics that are in direct opposition to the very fundamentals of city life. It threatens the city, and is therefore its enemy. The poor as enemy has even been given a public persona in recent times - that of the terrorist - that is almost always portrayed in popular culture as poor, disgruntled men living in the fringe wastelands, plotting to wreck havoc in the heart of the city for their political or religious cause.
That said, the benefits are tremendous when considered from the point of view of the state. By relegating the urban poor as an external entity, the state can relinquish its responsibilities in providing for the impoverished, while still benefitting from their contributions to the economy as illegal labourers or as consumerists. More critically though, the concept of the enemy can only exist insofar as a condition of amity exists, for it is impossible to have a life-threatening “them” without first having a life-affirming “us”. It follows that the stronger the threat of the enemy, the stronger the solidarity of friends will be. Thus the existence of an enemy, formalised in the very real and present form of the slums on the peripheries of the city, strengthens the political position of the sovereign, and any action taken to deal with the slums is legitimised and supported on the assumption that they are enemy and so it therefore must be done for the general good of the city.
Furthermore, its constant visual presence perpetually reminds the city of the tension that exists between these two opposing worlds, strengthening the unity between the people and the state as they seek protection against this threat at their doorstep. The stark contrast between the city and the other also helps to assure the privileged status of the city over the slums, and creates a unique relationship whereby the 'enemy' is not in ideological conflict with the establishment but aspires to be a part of its lifestyle one day. The urban poor are constantly reminded of their inadequate position in the form of the architectural imagery of gleaming modernist buildings. They desire to lead the consumerist lifestyle and enjoy all the luxuries the city has the offer. Yet at the same time the glorification of self-help and informality weakens their solidarity and pits one individual 'entrepreneur' against another. And as these economic actors spend all hours of their waking lives working fervently towards their goal of living in the city, it destroys any potential of them from classing together to rise up against state oppression.
In this regard, the slum dweller is the ideal enemy of the state. The state benefits from a bolstered political position and a strengthened mandate to rule while being able to put the blame of all faults of society on the enemy without any retaliation. The enemy, on the other hand, is too weak to defend itself from such onslaught. It is literally too poor and preoccupied to make ends meet to pose any real threat of conflict against the state. There is therefore zero conflict or war, no loss of life and resources. When compared to other more conventional forms of external threats in the past, religious, nationalistic or ideological, all of which inadvertently resulted in war, the sad reality is that using the urban poor as scapegoat is a very inexpensive and highly cost effective strategy for political gain. And until the time comes when the economic and political benefits of befriending the urban poor outweigh the benefits gained from criminalising them, or until another bigger threat to the state looms on the horizon, there will always be a lack of political will to tackle the problem of slums and the urban poor.
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The city of Rio de Janeiro is a very different creature by day. The main streets are noisy and filled with traffic. Samba music blares from street-side shops and the shopkeeper greets you with a cherry hello and a slap on the back, inviting you to come on in. The weather is perfect. The people too, are impossibly perfect. Men with bronzed, chiselled bodies and women each so slender and elegant, decked out in their Havaianas, Billabong shorts and Oakley shades, all ready for the beach. Everyone looked perfectly happy. Still, there was that strange sense of uneasy familiarity, but I could not quite put my finger to it. Could it be the Mcdonald's around the corner and the HSBC across the street, or have I somewhere, somehow seen all this on TV before? I wondered about the people who did not buy into this whole surf and turf lifestyle of conspicuous consumption, but then again, who wouldn't? Not when through gaps between the buildings and on the hills that lay beyond, you are reminded of what happens if you didn't.
