Favelas, Rio’s guilty conscience

In anticipation of playing host to both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil has rolled out a “Favela Pacification Program” in Rio de Janeiro in a desperate attempt to curb rampant violence in its sprawling, gang-controlled hillside slums. When President Obama visited Rio in March, he made a point of stopping by and celebrating one of the slums under police control, called Cidade de Deus (or “City of God”). There he kicked around a soccer ball with neighborhood kids, albeit in a walled school compound with tight security.

The pacification program has its advocates and its critics, and it remains to be seen what kind of effect it will have on Rio’s favela-dwellers in these years leading up to the two big sporting events, and even more crucially, in the years following. ESPN's Wright Thompson has a really well-written piece for "Outside The Lines" on the complicated impact on the favelas even now. It’s lengthy but worth every word. Here’s a blurb:

The favelas, Rio's guilty conscience, almost a thousand of them, overlook paradise but never, ever partake. Dense, urban slums with wretched educational opportunities, no social services, no police protection, they exist outside civilized society. Residents who live in the city don't go up the hill. It's possible to live a middle-class life without the violence of the slums affecting one's daily existence. But the violence is always there. In 2010, there were 4,798 murders in Rio. That's about a fourth the number of murders annually in the entire United States. (The U.S. population is about 300 million people. Rio has 6 million.) Favelas are desperate places, and they've been ignored since the first one popped up in 1897. Only now, some of them are close to venues for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.

Rio has less than three years to fix a crisis a century in the making.

The clock is ticking.

Read the whole thing here.

Tweet