Published: November 29, 2006 11:50 am      

Mirror on the mountain: Brazil contrasts

Rocinha has a dubious distinction as Brazil’s largest favela, or shanty-town, dominating the slopes of Rio de Janeiro’s Dois Irmaos mountain.

Overlooking some of the richest neighborhoods in South America, Rocinha provides a startling contrast between the lifestyle of the “haves’” in the “asfalto” city below and the have-nots who work for them as maids, doormen, drivers and some times prey on them as criminals. In many ways the illegal settlement holds up a mirror to that structured society below, and despite the great difference in income and material wealth, the world on the hill is not so incomprehensible, its people’s hopes, dreams and goals not so different from those of the upper class that fear them.

This was the realization that had led Paul Snead, a professor at San Diego State University, to create the Two Brothers Foundation, a non-governmental organization that provides free English language instruction and offers cultural exchange between the inhabitants of Rocinha and the wider world. Knowledge of English is a must for passing the college placement tests called ‘vestibulars’ in Brazil, and an aid in finding jobs in Rio’s tourist economy. In a small school rented out by the Foundation on a back alleyway called Travessa Roma, adults spend time in child sized chairs after long days of work as waiters, day care providers, and hotel maids to get the chance to better themselves, a sight that had inspired me to volunteer there as an English teacher four nights a week.

Controlled by rival drug and criminal factions, the settings of gang warfare and police invasions, illegally leaching electrical power from the city below, hand built by the residents with questionable plumbing and barely extant sanitation, the favelas are viewed as an embarrassment by Brazil’s establishment.

During the 1960s and 1970s, forced relocations drove most of the shanty towns out of the Zona Sul, Rio’s “South Zone,” to distant inland locations. However, the difficulty developers faced working with the steep slopes of mountains like the Dois Irmaos allowed the opportunity for squatters to build their own communities in the hills, and build they did.



Rocinha, with a population estimated at more than 200,000, boasts many paved roads and is the first favela to have been granted a municipal bus line. With the traffic and the recognition that favela dwellers are consumers, legitimate businesses have begun to move in, a process described as “asphaltization” by the residents. While there is simply no way to compete with chain drug stores or Bob’s – Brazil’s homegrown answer to McDonalds – locals have moved to corner some markets before outsiders can. Construction supplies and furniture have long been a staple of the favela’s internal economy – every building is a work in progress, and many mornings the sound of hammering is commonplace – but new mercantile trends were visible as well. Rocinha’s first upscale gym, R1 Fitness, with a membership rate – around $20 a month – one fifth that of what was available in the neighboring areas.



R1 fitness boasted a swipe card entry system, brand new equipment including treadmills and a class full of spinning bikes, and a staff doctor and free trainers who push clients to do their best. It could have been anywhere, except instead of chemical cleanser to wipe the equipment down, plastic squirt bottles were filled with cachaça, Brazilian sugar cane liquor. The music of choice is American gangster rap music, with the explicit lyrics left in. It might seem shocking to many Americans to hear that in the mixed company of the gym, but even more so at the local pizza parlor. Pizza Lit was Rocinha’s first sit-down restaurant and still its most popular. Every night of the week, families and dates there sit mesmerized by rap videos.

Gangster rap is popular in Rocinha in part because many young men there live real gangster life styles. The bluster of Rocinha’s homegrown “Proibidao” funk music – rap that is banned from Rio’s airwaves because of its references to real criminals boasting of real crime – belies a reality that sees teenage boys with machine guns, sniper rifles and shotguns patrolling the favela’s streets day and night, sometimes visibly consuming drugs and/or alcohol. It does not take long for an outsider to attract their attention.



In the crosshairs

To be a resident of the favela of Rocinha is to be watched. In my apartment building my comings and goings were noted by a neighbor with one leg named Little Zé who sat on the doorstep all day long smoking cigarettes. Residences less than 10 feet across the alleyway shared “rear window” views with me. And the crime faction – Amigos Dos Amigos (friends of friends) – that commands Rocinha have their watchmen posted at every entrance to the favela.

At the busy street entrances, bleached blonde black skinned boys with binoculars scan the pedestrian traffic, on the lookout for police and more importantly, members of rival gangs. Children will set off fireworks at the approach of police into the favela. One of the days while I lived there the police invaded a neighborhood higher up the hill and the fireworks went off all afternoon. Rival gangs are a bigger threat than the police, who will ultimately retreat to the safety of the asfalto. The Commando Vermelho, Brazil’s first major crime faction and former rulers of Rocinha, would be coming in with the intention of taking over, and all summer and for many months before a CV takeover attempt was rumored and feared. These are the major battles in the war between crime factions, and can last days and bring down police occupations of weeks or months.

Closer to the Boca de Fumo – “Mouth of Smoke” – which are the druglords’ strongholds and distribution points – the guardians are well armed. One evening I nervously ate dinner with several volunteers in an open sided restaurant right across from a teenager with a huge sighted sniper rifle that he kept trained on the alley the entire time we were there. Pistols are flashed and waved. At night patrols come through the streets carrying an impressive array of weaponry including machine guns.

The same question gets asked by the police, but their surveillance methods and motives are a bit less polished. They sit in or near squad cars at the entrance of the favelas, and they specifically target anyone who looks foreign or upper class coming out of the favela for a drug search, their assumption being that anyone foreign or upper class visiting Rocinha is there to buy drugs. It is a common sentiment among Rio’s citizens that the police are corrupt, in bed with the drug lords, and more interested in fleecing tourists than apprehending the vanloads of drugs and weapons that move between favelas every day.



The lifespan of a soldado – a weapon bearing soldier in the crime factions – averages in the low twenties. Most expect to be killed by police or a rival gang, and even revel in the macho image of gangland martyrdom. While foreign visitors who get to know the favelas can grow to appreciate the fact that they will not be mugged, robbed, or even begged for money during their time in the favelas in a city notorious for crime, that security comes at a cost to the inhabitants of the favela. Business owners in Rocinha are expected to pay tribute money to the Amigos Dos Amigos, and behavior must be checked or there will be consequences – to the extreme that two men ready to fight each other over a woman or money will go to the Boca first to ask permission to fight. Permission is inevitably denied. Everywhere are not so subtle signs with messages like “Don’t throw garbage in this street, or you will be next!” The gangsters, nursed to their current level of power and popularity during the fascist days of Brasil’s dictatorship when the poor had no other viable champions, have taken on the role of fascist overseers themselves, and the education in obedience they give Rocinha’s citizens doubtless serves to preserve class relations when those citizens descend from the hill to labor away in the homes and businesses of the asfalto.

Though they stand apart in their governance, the inhabitants of the favelas are just as patriotic as every other Brazilian when the World Cup rolls around and the national team competes at the highest level to add to their world-beating collection of honors. Streamers in the yellow, green, and blue of the flag are hung over every street and nearly every alley of Rocinha. Graffiti of Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, the teams’ stars, covers the faces of schools. During the Brasil games projection TVs attract throngs out on the main streets. The enthusiasm is just as strong if not stronger among the country’s most hard pressed citizens as it is among the middle class and elites. However, when Brasil lost their bid to repeat as World Champions to France, the residents of Rocinha had an option not available to those living in regular neighborhoods down below. Bonfires were built at every corner, fueled by the flags and streamers torn down immediately after the game. The graffiti of Ronaldinho was unceremoniously whited out. The party was over, and it was time to get back to the realities that those weeks of soccer seemed to smooth over.



The view from above

In Brazil, locked into a feudal class system still redolent of slave owning days, social mobility is notoriously difficult. You might expect people living in self-built hovels in a squatter settlement to be looking for a way out. In Rocinha, this is rarely the case, and in fact, people from the middle class who grew up in regular neighborhoods are starting to move in to Rocinha. In addition to the low rent and nearly nonexistent utility costs, these new immigrants to the favelas cite the sense of security and community, as well as economic opportunities, as their motivation.

On the streets of Copacabana and Ipanema, one has to pay attention and at all times is at risk of being assaulted, robbed, or conned. This danger ends at the borders of the favela – ends, in fact, as soon as you board one of the favela-owned combi vans that complement city bus service to the area. The sense of safety a favela resident feels even carries down the hill to the beach at Sao Conrado, a piece of white sand with a stream of hang gliders landing at the west end and one life guard post at the other side. Surveying the beach one day, a man looked around at the crowd and remarked “The beach belongs to Rocinha today.”

Tourists come through Rocinha in several ways. Jeep tours have been organized for more than a decade. These tour companies are tolerated because they pay protection to the crime lords and the money makes its way back into community development, but the sense of being examined like a zoo animal is resented. Other tour companies just stop at the overpass with the best view of the favela and let people photograph from a distance. This is deeply resented. On the other hand, expatriates with the time to volunteer in the favela, who are able to get to know someone from within first, are met with kind approval. If the visitor can speak any Portuguese, they can quite quickly come to feel part of the community. Volunteers with the Two Brothers Foundation could barely walk down the street without running into the shopkeepers and neighbors who had become my friends, an experience not easily had in the upscale neighborhoods nearby.

When one couples the safety and community with the difference in economic scale, the favela begins to look appealing, at least to some. While the upper class of the Zona Sul looks on the hills with fear and a touch of loathing, those newly arriving from other parts of Brazil – or the world (Rocinha boasts a large community of immigrants fresh from China) – see the chance to live in one’s own home with a hillside view of the ocean for a small fraction of the cost paid elsewhere as a dream come true. Entrepreneurs have come to realize that the low cost of setting up a business inside the favela, coupled with the consumerist drive of Rocinha’s inhabitants, make it a very attractive place to start a new venture. Restaurants, shops, gyms, even day care are being set up by “reverse commuters” from the asfalto city below. Eventually, a day will come when parts of Rocinha are simply considered regular neighborhoods like adjacent Sao Conrado and Gavea. What that will mean for the crime lords and the less fortunate living in more primitive conditions further up the hill is up for debate. What is going on inside Rocinha is a mirror of what is going on in the wider world, and that the pride and functionality of this self-built community surpasses that of many of the planned neighborhoods it literally looks down upon.

(Chris DeFrancisco, a Ph.D in anthropology, accompanied the Two Brothers Foundation to Brazil this summer.)