vargas-2006-when-a-favela-dared-to-become-a-gated-condominium-the-politics-of-race-and-urban-space-in-rio-de-janeiro

When a Favela Dared to Become
a Gated Condominium
The Politics of Race and Urban
Space in Rio de Janeiro
by
João H. Costa Vargas
An analysis of the key political events that led to the installation of gates and
cameras around Jacarezinho, the second-largest favela in Rio de Janeiro, in July
2001 and the reaction to them by the news media is here framed by ethnographic
data gathered since June 2001 among Afro-Brazilian activists in Rio de Janeiro.
Study of the newspaper coverage of the creation of the “favela-condominium”
and the public debate that followed shows that such discourses, albeit often tacitly, dehumanized Afro-Brazilians by linking them to crime and corruption and
depicted the favelas as likely to produce future generations of dangerous blacks
who would continue to terrorize the imagination and lives of nonfavela people.
Attention to the way race and urban space intersect is necessary if scholarship
on Brazilian cities intends to understand and dialogue with favela activists, who
have no choice but to confront their continued dehumanization.
Keywords: Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, favela, race, urban space, activism, transnational alliances
The installation of gates and cameras around Jacarezinho, Rio de Janeiro’s
second-largest favela, in July 2001 began with an intriguing idea: given that
middle- and upper-class condominiums throughout Rio de Janeiro and in other
major urban centers in Brazil (Caldeira, 2000; Zaluar, 1994) were defined by
João H. Costa Vargas is an assistant professor in the Center for African and African American
Studies and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. His forthcoming book is entitled Catching Hell in the City of Angels: Life and Meanings of Blackness
in South Central Los Angeles (2006). He thanks George Lipsitz for inspiring these reflections,
which benefited from his legendary and very real generosity. He also thanks the activists in Rio
and Los Angeles for sharing their wisdom and courage. Finally, he is grateful to Jacqueline
Pólvora for important bibliographical suggestions and to the reviewers and editors of LAP for
helpful comments.
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 149, Vol. 33 No. 4, July 2006 49-81
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X06289892
© 2006 Latin American Perspectives
49
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such protective devices, why not adopt the same strategies in an attempt to
curb police abuse and drug dealing? The activists who came up with the
thought did not even bother consulting the rest of the community. They were
sure that the idea of gates and cameras would be approved unanimously, and
so they went ahead and installed the security devices at key points in the
favela. The cameras, one of the neighborhood association members told me,
had been donated by “a Gypsy who had heard about our work.”1 Hand-held
camcorders complemented the strategy.
The daring experiment, however, was short-lived. Local activists anticipated negative reactions against the favela-condominium, and putting the
idea into practice was a calculated attempt at creating public-political facts
revealing the dire conditions in a poor and marginalized neighborhood. The
news traveled fast not only in the city and state of Rio de Janeiro but also in
São Paulo, Brazil’s largest metropolis, where, in spite of its escalating urban
violence, the historical fascination with Rio’s favelas generated a full-page
article in the nation’s leading daily, Folha de S. Paulo. Still, favela activists
were surprised by the intensity of the reaction of the police, the nonfavela
public, and the politicians, including leftist ones, to this allegedly lunatic
concept. In Brazil’s two largest urban centers, the underlying questions
informing the reaction to the events occurring in the favela revealed profound uneasiness: How could a poor, mostly Afro-Brazilian neighborhood
dare to monitor and curb the work of the police?2 How could a neighborhood
association believed to be controlled by drug dealers challenge the very
people who had put them in power? How could a favela compare itself to an
enclosed elite condominium?
In this article I describe key political events that led to the installation of
gates and cameras around Jacarezinho and the reaction to these events by the
news media. I frame the analysis of this reaction in terms of ethnographic
data that I have been gathering in Rio de Janeiro since June 2001, when I
began collaborating with the Afro-Brazilian activists who had dared to challenge the police, drug dealers, and indeed the broader society. By analyzing
newspaper coverage of the favela-condominium and the public debate
that followed, I show how such discourses, albeit often tacitly, dehumanized
Afro-Brazilians by linking them to crime and corruption and depicted the
favelas as likely to produce future generations of dangerous blacks would
continue to terrorize nonfavela people.3
News reports do not occur in a vacuum and, indeed, express hegemonic
commonsense ideas about blacks (Gordon, 1998; Hall, 1980; 1982). Utilizing
a public idiom to talk about racialized groups, they give voice to and support
structural discrimination against Afro-Brazilians resulting from policy and
everyday behavior. Interestingly, the news stories about the political conflicts
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
51
in Jacarezinho that appeared in Rio and São Paulo rarely if ever mentioned
race, but stereotypes about blacks were implicit in them. When poor neighborhoods, crime, drugs, and violence were mentioned, a tacit connection was
made with black people. This pregnant silence, also prominent in the subsequent public debate, only reinforced the stereotypes and justified discrimination in that it prevented conceptions about Afro-Brazilians from surfacing.
Silence about race thus constitutes an atmosphere in which racism persists.
Silence, furthermore, protects its producer from being seen as overtly prejudiced, and since few persons seem prejudiced the Brazilian myth of racial
democracy continues (e.g., Goldstein, 2003; Guimarães, 1999; Nascimento,
1989; Twine, 1998).4
The questions that structure this essay not only help us understand this
particular episode in Jacarezinho but also provide angles from which to analyze the mutually reinforcing, socially constructed, and politically laden categories and experiences of race and urban space:5 (1) How are notions about
Brazilian urban space influenced by hegemonic conceptions of race? (2) How
do hegemonic conceptions of race inflect understandings of urban space?
(3) What are the political consequences of the cognitive feedback loop
between urban space and race in the Brazilian context? These three questions
constitute attempts to answer the more obvious and central one: Why did the
gates and cameras in Jacarezinho cause such a passionate reaction? As this
article will show, there was more to the outrage than the conviction that the
cameras and gates would prevent the work of the police while protecting drug
dealers’ transactions. The outrage derived in large measure from the fact that
the installation of gates and cameras in Jacarezinho challenged tacit, often
repressed but well-understood connections between blackness and the favela.
In other words, the security devices disrupted hegemonic understandings of
racialized urban spaces defined by illicit activities and persons devoid of
legitimate political agency. Thus conceptualized, the people of the favelas
were ultimately dangerous, less than human, and incapable of organized and
rational political action. Favelas were thought of as areas necessarily permeable and subjected to law enforcement at all times, where preemptive stateand society-sanctioned violent measures were to contain its evils before they
spilled over into the wider polity.6
By symbolizing political will and being a critique of both the police and the
greater society, Jacarezinho’s gates and cameras constituted a frontal challenge to the normalized representations, privileges, and power structures that
define Brazil’s profoundly racialized social inequalities (Hasenbalg, 1979;
1998; INSPIR/DIEESE/AFL-CIO, 1999; Henriques, 2001; Nascimento,
1977; 1989). At the same time, the favela activists revealed an alternative sense
of urban social geography: from the perspective of those claiming autonomy
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and citizenship (as well as strategically emulating practices associated with the
rich and white), Jacarezinho was not so much a space to be systematically isolated from the rest of the city as menacing and evil as a place whose history,
political organization, and projects of social justice demanded to be recognized and respected.7 News reports and the opinions expressed by politicians,
officials, and scholars thus constituted reactions to the favela activists’
demands and the corresponding desire for the reestablishment of normalized
social relations. That such normalization required political, racial, and spatial
marginalization of the favelas became clear to black activists. Documenting
and analyzing the conflicts between the favela and hegemonic practices and
representations are central purposes of this essay.
The essay’s structure is as follows: First, I describe how the news
media made sense of the gates installed in Jacarezinho in 2001, silently yet
effectively connecting race and urban space into a powerful mechanism for
criminalizing the favela activists. I proceed by describing the favela as a
socially constructed and deeply embattled spatial reality and providing a
brief account of the Jacarezinho neighborhood association’s political history.
Part of Jacarezinho’s singularity resides in the ongoing transnational political alliances established with former Los Angeles Black Panthers in 1993
(Vargas, 2003). To contextualize the political conflict between the favela and
its adversaries and reflect on possible research agendas that emerge from it,
I discuss how the pertinent academic literature in Brazil and the United
States has approached race and urban space. I conclude with a section on the
broader theoretical and political implications of the role of race and urban
space as integral components of a hegemonic common sense that sustains
and feeds upon the imposed historical marginalization of black people in a
self-proclaimed racial paradise.
The geographic exclusion so well expressed in the maintenance, demonization, and dehumanization of favelas works both as a metaphor for and as
an inescapable concrete embodiment of a multitude of other marginalizations
to which people of African descent are subjected in Brazil—marginalization
in the areas of residence, work, health, education, and politics. It is only by
confronting the multifaceted nature of antiblack racism that we will be able to
understand and work toward the elimination of the glaring racialized inequalities that characterize Brazilian social relations. Just as the myth of racial
democracy needs to be challenged and deconstructed (D’Adesky, 2001;
Guimarães, 1999; Nascimento, 1989; Silva and Hasenbalg, 1992), so does the
other aspect of Brazil’s mythical self-image that derives from and sustains it:
the absence of residential segregation by race. Cutting-edge work by the architect Ney Oliveira dos Santos (2002; 2001; 2000; 1999), biographies such as
Benedita da Silva’s (Mendonça and Benjamin, 1997), and ethnographies by
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
53
Goldstein (2003), Sheriff (2001), Vargas (2003; 2004b), and Zaluar (1985)
suggest that, in Rio de Janeiro at least, not only are patterns of urban occupation inextricably tied to race but also conceptualizations of race derive from
the way urban space is understood.
Notwithstanding the theoretical and practical potentials of academic work,
the most incisive critique of and political alternatives to the historical forms
of spatial and racial marginalization in Brazil emerge from the collaboration
between Rio favela militants and their U.S. black allies. This collaboration is
providing effective visions that challenge the criminalization of black people
living in the favela and should be taken as a model for theoretical and practical efforts aiming at social justice.
THE FAVELA-CONDOMINIUM
On Sunday, July 8, 2001, O Dia, Rio de Janeiro’s largest-circulation newspaper, reported on its front page that recently installed locked gates sealed off
Jacarezinho from the rest of the city. A large color photograph illustrated the
fact: in it we see a young man holding a little girl’s hand as he walks through
a 12-foot copper-colored sheet-metal gate. The gate’s half-open solid door
reveals one of the neighborhood’s narrow streets, where four children are
playing. The brief but boldface caption under the photograph set the tone for
the article:
Locked Gates Shut Off Jacarezinho
Inspired by the [wealthy] South Zone condominiums, Rio’s second-largest
favela installs gates in its narrow streets and video cameras at strategic points.
But the enemy, according to local activists, is of a different kind: police
abuse. The arrangement is controversial since it leaves traffickers even more
protected in their ghettos.8
The full-page article inside, while not openly critical of the work of
Jacarezinho activists, fueled the controversy by expanding on the gates’
history and their impact on the police and drug dealers.
The experiment, according to the article, had started a few years earlier,
when similar gates were installed in the Pica-Pau Amarelo and Malvinas
favelas, which are part of the greater Jacarezinho community. The police’s
reaction then had been swift, and the gates had been removed without resistance. This time around, however, favela activists seemed better prepared to
negotiate with the police and the media. The new local leadership, elected
in January 2000, had pledged to start a new chapter in the way favelas organized and related to the wider society. Antônio Carlos Rumba Gabriel
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(known as Rumba), the elected neighborhood-association president, vowed
to restore Jacarezinho to the city’s political landscape, thus reclaiming a
long history of mobilization.9 The community, indeed, had been known
during the 1960s’ military dictatorship as Moscouzinho, “Little Moscow,”
because of the numerous leftist and clandestine political organizations that
operated in the area, protected by the geographical advantage drawn from
the hilly topography—which promoted easy surveillance from the neighborhood’s higher points—and the maze of narrow streets that made access
difficult for police cars.10
Gabriel’s administration had a marked impact on the media and local
political landscape. The website no.com.br—a well-known forum in which
current political issues are discussed by politicians, artists, intellectuals, and
activists—provided ample exposure to its agenda. Threatening to “descend
from the hills to take what is ours”—a reference to the wealthier, asphalted
areas of Rio de Janeiro—the new activists demanded an end to police brutality, more and better social programs focusing on health, education, job
training, and public transportation. In short, they demanded full citizenship.
Gabriel and his collaborators wanted for the favela what was “their right”
and alluded to the help they would get from armed drug dealers in pursuing their objectives if their demands were not met (http://www.no.com.br
[accessed August 19, 2000]).
GATES, CAMERAS, DRUG DEALERS
While some attention was paid to the demands coming from Jacarezinho,
most of the news media, intellectuals, and politicians focused on the suggestion that the community’s movement would have the help of drug traffickers
and their weapons. This suggestion hit a sensitive nerve among the city’s elites
and generated a slew of negative comments from current and former elected
officials such as the leftist former representatives from Rio Milton Temer and
Aloísio de Oliveira, intellectuals such as Inácio Cano, the public prosecutor
Rodrigo Terra, the human rights activist James Cavallaro, and Carlos Minc,
state representative for Rio de Janeiro and president of the Commission
against Violence and Impunity in the State Legislature (Petry, 2001).
O Dia insisted on the theme. Even though the full-page newspaper article
quoted Gabriel affirming his own independence of drug dealers and that of the
gates and cameras, it concluded its description of the event as follows: “The
problem is that even a child who believes in Santa knows that nothing happens
in the favela without the dealers’ consent. The cameras were allowed after a
long, six-month negotiation. Drug traffickers were concerned that they would
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
55
be negatively affected. This is how it works in a community located in the
crossfire” (Braga, 2001). It thus became clear that, until proven otherwise,
activists from the favela were linked to drug dealers who, on the one hand,
gave them money and armed protection and, on the other, enforced rules under
the constant, despotic threat of harassment and death.11 In this regard, O Dia’s
report provided the model according to which Brazil’s largest-circulation
newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo, wrote about the daring experiment. Folha’s fullpage report was headed “Carioca Favela Creates the Favela-Condominium.” A
subheading read “Violence: Jacarezinho’s Neighborhood Association Sets Up
Gates and Cameras to Control Police.” Significantly, however, the very first
article, appearing in the page’s upper left-hand corner, was entitled “Leader
Denies Ties with Drug Dealers.” The focus was on Gabriel, who stated, “I’ve
never had ties with the dealers. We neighborhood-association presidents live
in communities where there is drug dealing, and we have to live with it. But
we don’t interfere in their activities, and they leave us alone” (Folha de
S. Paulo, July 25, 2001).
In spite of Gabriel’s continued denial of involvement with drug trafficking, this São Paulo news medium, as well as Rio’s police, had apparently
made up their minds about the activist and his political group. In one of many
incidents that would mark Gabriel’s short-lived tenure as the neighborhood
association’s president, reported in the above-mentioned Folha article, he had
spent the morning in the local police station explaining why he had taken a
police car’s license plate number and called the area’s commanding officer:
“I wanted to know if that police operation (blitz) was legal, but . . . [the police
officer who arrested me] thought I was warning the dealers” (July 25, 2001).
While Folha gave Gabriel the opportunity to tell his version, it contextualized the activist’s perspective in such a way that his ties to drug dealers
became almost transparent. The article following the one analyzed in the
paragraph above, entitled “Association’s President Was Killed,” started with
the phrase “It is not uncommon for community leaders to be accused of
involvement, at least indirect, with the trafficking.” To sustain the proposition, the article cited Michel Misse, a sociology professor at Rio de Janeiro’s
Federal University and founder of the Institute of Public Safety: “Close contact (convivência) is inevitable. These people live where the traffic lives.
Community leaders have to tolerate them or be expelled from their neighborhoods. There is also the risk of assassinations. And there are neighborhoodassociation presidents that work with the traffickers” (July 25, 2001). The
expert’s comments provided alleged scientific confirmation of the suspicion
voiced by politicians and the news media. Once confirmed, Gabriel’s ties to
the traffic could be traced to events that took place long before
the gates and cameras were installed. This particular article concluded by
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reminding readers that in May 2000 Gabriel had been accused of working
for drug dealers. After an unnecessary and unexplained death of a young
man in Jacarezinho that neighbors claimed was caused by police officers,
two buses and a car had been set on fire in protest. Police informants later
revealed that the manifestation had been organized by drug traffickers, and
Gabriel was one of the people accused of collaborating with them. It is suggestive that while the article’s focus was on Gabriel and his unproven ties to
the traffickers, questions about the police and their participation in the death
of the young man were never raised.
It must be stressed that police abuse of the people of the favela, who are
mostly poor and black, is part of an ongoing historical pattern. In Rio de
Janeiro the police killed 900 people between January and August 2003, almost
75 percent of them in the favelas (Jeter, 2003). Rio police kill more than
2.5 times as many persons in a month as the New York Police Department kills
in a year (Human Rights Watch/Americas, 1997). Contrary to public perception and the repeated calls by public officials and organized sectors of civil
society for increased militarization of the “war against crime,” violent crime
in Rio has been dropping steadily. In this climate of moral panic, however,
rates of police executions are increasing alarmingly. While there were 427
“suspects” killed by the police force in 2000, this number escalated to 900 in
2002. It is widely known that the “suspects” were young black males killed in
the all-too-common militarized police operations in favelas (Amar, 2003;
Human Rights Watch/Americas, 1997). Amar (2003: 38) reminds us that “this
trend, if continued, would have pushed the tally of police executions above
1,500 in 2003 in Rio state alone, approaching parity with Baghdad, beyond the
realm of media metaphors, as the Iraqi capital suffered around 1,700 civilian
fatalities during this year’s war [of occupation].”
The ubiquity of police misconduct is part of a persistent pattern of the
widespread antiblack racism that pervades Brazilian society (Cano, 1997;
Holloway, 1997; Kahn, 1999; 2002; Paixão, 1995; J. Silva, 1998).12 Had the
newspapers and the “experts” paid attention to this pattern of racialized police
abuse, the favela activists’ justifications for the gates and cameras would have
been better understood. Indeed, to restrain the use of force by the police was
the main objective of the favela-condominium. Furthermore, the cameras
allowed for the recording of cases of police misconduct such as extortion,
beatings, and shootings—all widely reported by national and international
human rights organizations and some news media but little discussed by
“experts,” commentators, and the general public outside the favelas.13 This
recorded material would constitute evidence supporting the activists’ contentions, which, as Gabriel was quoted as saying, “are usually not taken seriously” (Folha de S. Paulo, July 25, 2001). Just as important, the cameras were
an attempt to restrain drug dealing. The negotiations with local drug dealers
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
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to install them had been so difficult precisely because the dealers knew full
well what they meant: that their activities would have to be moved away from
the cameras’ field of vision. Gabriel in fact had a history of denouncing drug
dealing in Jacarezinho. He supported and participated in a well-known multiple-week O Dia report describing, photographing, and analyzing the various facets of drug selling and consumption in the community (Aquino, 1999).
CRIMINALIZING THE PEOPLE OF THE FAVELA
Instead of taking the favela activists’ allegations seriously, both Folha de
S. Paulo and O Dia implied a connection between the favela-condominium
and drug dealers that was reinforced not only explicitly but also by a series
of more subtle mechanisms. One of those mechanisms was the juxtaposition of favela descriptions and reports on notorious drug dealers suspected
of infiltrating the neighborhood associations. In the full-page Folha report
on the gates in Jacarezinho, all the articles’ headings and contents followed
the script: besides “Association’s President Was Killed,” analyzed earlier,
“Police Arrests 5 Alleged Drug Traffickers” introduced the last commentary
section.
The three color photographs displayed in the middle of the article reinforce the otherness attributed to the favela. The photograph at the top of the
page is the same one that O Dia utilized in its front-page description of the
gates and cameras: a young man and a little girl walking through the gate.
Underneath it, another photograph shows a panoramic view of Jacarezinho,
composed of a multitude of houses built close to one another, varying from
bare red brick to stucco in many colors. Jacarezinho’s high density and
apparent poverty typify favelas. The third photo depicts Gabriel, a black man
in his late forties, in a suit and a tie in Pan-African colors, pointing to the
horizon with his raised left arm and pointer finger.
The photographs were a powerful component of the Folha full-page
report. The gates, the favela, and Gabriel pertain to a world described as
distant, poor, and dangerous, especially to readers in São Paulo, where
common sense has construed Rio as a beautiful but favela-riddled and thus
overtly dangerous city. A map next to Gabriel’s photograph provides a
graphic representation of Jacarezinho’s location vis-à-vis the country and
the city. The map is clearly composed, shows the favela’s location in various scales (national, regional, and municipal), and is complemented by
basic data displayed alongside it: “According to the neighborhood association, there are 150,000 people in Jacarezinho”; “There are about 45,000
shacks in the neighborhood, which occupy an area of 354,000 square
meters” (Folha de S. Paulo, July 25, 2001).
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These images and the accompanying articles constituted a compelling,
albeit indirect, statement about the connections between favelas, criminality,
and race. The gates and cameras were repeatedly asserted to benefit drug dealers and interfere with the work of the police, thus constituting obvious instruments of lawlessness. Significantly, the gate and favela photographs showed
Jacarezinho as a community whose details could be seen only through narrow
openings: the photograph of the sheet-metal gate provided only a glimpse of a
narrow concrete street; the panoramic Jacarezinho photograph that appeared
in Folha, likewise, was framed by an open window, suggesting a reality that
was usually hidden from everyday viewing and indeed sealed off from the rest
of the city. While it could be argued that the window frame was simply part of
an attempt to maintain the artistic theme of the report (gates, windows, openings), we would miss important aspects of the news narrative if we overlooked
the connections, albeit tacit, between urban areas inhabited by people of color
who are poor, on the one hand, and crime, on the other. Such representations
gained further substance through Gabriel’s photograph, in which his perceived
race was unmistakable, as was his place of residence and his alleged connections to lawlessness. As if to tie together the various images and written statements, the very last piece of information in the map locating Jacarezinho read,
“According to the police, the criminal faction Comando Vermelho dominates
Jacarezinho” (Folha de S. Paulo, July 25, 2001).
Rede Globo’s local television news adopted the same stance. In the week
following O Dia’s favela-condominium article, there were daily reports on the
controversy. Gabriel was interviewed briefly in the first of them, and the Rio
de Janeiro state representative Carlos Minc was featured expressing the view
that favela activists usually work for and closely with drug dealers. This was
to be Gabriel’s first and last appearance in the local news focusing on
Jacarezinho’s gates. NGO representatives and elected officials, however, were
given plenty of air time during which they confirmed the interpretation that
Rio and São Paulo newspapers gave of the events. The reduced time allotted
to the black activist vis-à-vis that given to commentators deemed more
respectable revealed Rede Globo’s allegiances. It was also telling that Rede
Globo news anchor person’s facial expressions left no doubt as to whom she
believed; while she frowned after Gabriel’s interview, she introduced her other
guests with a confident smile.
Carlos Minc’s repeated televised interviews were emblematic. A white
former urban guerrilla and at the time a Workers’ party state representative,
Minc did not hesitate to link Jacarezinho’s neighborhood association with
what he called the “traffic.” He was untroubled that, in condemning the
favela activists for their complicity with drug dealers, he drew on centuriesold prejudices against black people, especially those living in favelas. His
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myopia is a symptom of the Brazilian left’s incapacity or unwillingness to
understand and produce an effective critique of race relations. Although the
Workers’ party has undeniably the most advanced program for social justice,
encompassing land reform and wealth redistribution, and in spite of its timid
attempts to organize a national legal and executive apparatus to combat
racial discrimination, it seems that a traditional view of social relations that
makes race an epiphenomenon of class prevails.14
How did such notions of favelas become dominant? How have the people
of the favelas engaged with the negative images, practices, and polices that
systematically dehumanize them? To answer these questions will require an
analysis of the place of the favela in Rio’s geographical and political landscape.
JACAREZINHO: URBAN SPACE AND POLITICAL HISTORY
Rio de Janeiro, a global city with, according to the 2000 census, more
than 6 million people, has over 600 favelas (Burgos, 1999) accounting for
more than 40 percent of its residents. What is a favela? To respond the question, we need to consider the political and ideological dimensions of the definition of such social and urban spaces. In The Production of Space, Henri
Lefebvre noted that “(social) space is a (social) product” (1991: 26). Thus,
space is produced by and reproduces social relations. Since social relations
are determined by as well as inflecting power differentials, urban space
is deeply implicated in and shaped by the way social hierarchies actualize
themselves in a given historical moment. The existence of a neutral, readily
transparent space is a mere illusion: all urban spaces are the product of historical power struggles, and the social relations deriving from such struggles
become spatialized according to the hegemonic political order: “Every mode
of production . . . produces a space, its own space” (Lefebvre, 1991: 31).
While the resulting spatial relationships expressing subordination and domination are normally maintained through consensus, there is often a need for
explicit coercion, especially in urban spaces such as U.S. inner cities or
Brazilian favelas. In such spaces, the socially and spatially racialized relation
of subordination vis-à-vis the greater society is often—some would claim constantly via infrapolitics (e.g., Kelley, 1997; Scott, 1990) —contested. As the
principal instruments of coercion in bourgeois society, the police constitute the
first line of attack—preemptive as well as reactive—against the politics of
resistance emerging from marginalized communities. The police enact a
shared and normalized understanding about those they repress (GoodingWilliams, 1996; Rothmiller, 1992). That the police are such a historically persistent presence in U.S. black neighborhoods (e.g. Davis, 1992; Donziger,
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1996; Miller, 1996; Parenti, 2000) and Brazilian favelas (Holloway, 1997;
Paixão, 1995; J. Silva, 1998) attests to the contested nature of socially constructed, power-laden, and deeply racialized exclusionary urban spaces.
To understand how power differentials determine the social construction
of favelas—that is, to decipher urban space (Lefebvre, 1991: 38) —we need
to focus on the spatial practice of a society. Since spatial practice implies
historically specific social practices, deciphering space implies recognizing
how hegemonic understandings about the social world—its hierarchies,
privileges, and exclusions—directly shape while deriving from conceptions
and practices related to urban spaces. Thus, although the space of the favela
is not inherently dominating, it is certainly part of the way domination is
conceptualized, exercised, and contested in and through time (Foucault,
1980; Harvey, 1989).
It is entirely to be expected that the concept and experience of favela will
have historical, social, political, and racial meanings that vary according to
who is appropriating them. In what follows, I will start with the most basic
heuristic definition of a favela. As my critique of how the favela is understood by the news media, activists, and the wider society progresses, conflicting interpretations of the favela will emerge, reflecting the political and
racialized struggles that take place in, contest, and redefine it.
A favela is a residential area inhabited by poor and working-class people,
the great majority of whom are black. While some favelas have mostly brick
houses, paved streets, running water, electricity, and public transportation,
others are marked by wooden houses and the absence of urban infrastructure. Larger favelas such as Jacarezinho have areas that are relatively urbanized and areas that are not. In spite of the heterogeneity within and between
favelas, they all have in common the fact that most of their residents have
historically been excluded from the formal labor market, quality education,
and participation in the public and political spheres. Intense surveillance and
often deadly violence promoted by the state have been largely responsible
for the persistence of the exclusion of the Afro-Brazilian people of the
favela. Favelas are the historical and spatial product of this racialized and
institutionalized exclusion.15
Unlike the majority of the favelas in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, Rio’s
most densely inhabited and oldest favelas are in centrally located urban
areas. Thus, even though the people of the favelas have been historically
marginalized and their humanity and citizenship negated, they have hardly
been invisible. Favelas are usually located on prime real estate—close to
main roads and freeways, bus, train, and metro lines, shopping malls, and
soccer stadiums—and often overlook the elite’s houses and condominiums
as well as the Atlantic Ocean. They are vital communities whose visual arts,
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
61
poetry, music, and politics, in spite of attempts to marginalize them, are
integral to the city’s history and contemporary dynamics.
Inasmuch as social spaces are the products of social relations, favelas are
the products of political struggles. To contextualize the political struggles
surrounding the definition, experience, and enforcement of the favelas, I will
briefly describe two turning points in public policy in the past half-century,
the responses of people of the favelas during this time frame, and the political agendas that are being put forward by organized groups in Rio’s poor
communities. The two turning points are the negative impact of the military
dictatorship (1964–1985) on favela organizing and the effects of the 1980s’
drug trade on the favelas’ sociability networks and neighborhood associations. It is only by understanding the historical events associated with these
two points that we can begin to acquire a sense of the significance of the
recent efforts by people of the favela to revive forms of autonomous organizing and self-definition and to claim full citizenship.16
In 1968, at the height of the military regime’s repression, by decree the
functions of the favela organizations and neighborhood associations were radically redefined. Under the new rules, the military bureaucracy supervised
neighborhood associations’ statutes, membership, elections, and programs.
Almost immediately, the military dictatorship accomplished what the church
and the city and state administrations had been trying to do for the past
60 years, namely, to effectively repress the favelas. With the presence of troops
in the favelas and the intimidation, torture, and assassination of their most
outspoken leaders, the favela associations became, more than ever, operative
state offices.17
Between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, several removals took place.
Although such removals had long been part of the church’s and the state’s
plans to “clean up” the city, until the mid-1960s they had always met with
organized resistance and therefore had never been implemented. This time,
with the military, it was different. The assassinations of leaders and the violence imposed on the communities guaranteed that between 1968 and 1975
about 100,000 people were removed from favelas and put into housing
projects. More than 60 favelas were destroyed, some of them simply being
burned down by the military, which, in order to guarantee the elimination
of those communities, prevented firemen from responding to calls (Zaluar,
1985: 66; Mendonça and Benjamin, 1997: 53).18
The political effects of the military period on the favelas were profound. While many of the communities targeted by removals managed to
reconstitute themselves, the neighborhood associations were irremediably
affected. Even in the period of redemocratization that started in the late
1970s, most of the leadership remained unable to reform the dynamics of
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local political representation. Neighborhood associations had been so
methodically shaped by the military—and, to a significant degree, by both
the state and the church in previous decades—that they often continued to
fulfill the role of state representatives within the favelas. Even with the election of the leftist Leonel Brizola as governor in 1982 and in spite of his
administration’s multiple efforts to urbanize the favelas and enforce human
rights for the poor by, among other initiatives, reforming the police, the
favelas’ local organizations, especially the neighborhood associations,
remained in many of their practices appendages of the state. Their statutes
and their nontransparent electoral processes were not revised.19
The 1980s reshaped the favelas’ political dynamics to new configurations
where the numbers game (jogo do bicho) and, to a far greater extent, the drug
commerce began to dominate daily life and local associations. Young drug
lords claimed life-and-death powers in the favelas and frequently threatened
to expand their reign of terror not only to other favelas but also to surrounding nonfavela neighborhoods.20 Armed with sophisticated weapons, dealers
began to challenge the police and the state. Many of the favelas’ neighborhood associations became appendages of one of the factions of the drug
trade—Comando Vermelho, Terceiro Comando, or, more recently, Amigos de
Amigos.
Contrary to popular belief and to the justifications given by the police for
their repressive operations, Rio’s favelas do not produce powder cocaine or
arms, nor do they retain the profits of their trade. As happens in U.S. inner
cities, the favelas are mere points of sale, nodes in a transnational web, and
the great majority of drug consumers are the affluent classes. The true drug
lords are certainly not in the favelas or of the favelas. Still, favelas not only
provide cheap, numerous, and expendable labor but also, because of their
hilly topography and narrow nonlinear streets, constitute territories easily
protected against rival factions and the police. In a favela one hears frequent
gunshots and fireworks warning of the presence of suspicious persons, who
can easily be spotted from the highest vantage points as soon as they enter
claimed territory.
Such considerations, however, are hardly part of contemporary representations of the favelas. At the same time that cocaine commerce and its militarization were establishing themselves in Rio’s poorest communities, there
were considerable layoffs that disproportionately affected the poor residents
of the favelas.21 In Jacarezinho, for example, the sharp rise in unemployment
was significantly due to General Electric’s massive layoffs, which impacted
one of the few segments of the community that was part of the formal job
market. In the absence of critical analyses of the conditions in which the
drug trade flourished, the long history of negative racialized stereotypes
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
63
associated with the favelas was recycled by including the alleged effects of
drugs on these supposedly already degraded, amoral, and violent communities.22 Even though the number of people—mostly young men between the
ages of 10 and 25—who participate in the drug trade as replaceable labor
represent an infinitesimal proportion of the favela population, the drug trade
and its violence have come to dominate both the everyday life of the favelas
and the city’s collective imaginary.23 Everyday conversations, law enforcement tactics, and reports by the mass media are all testimony to this dominance. When the 1994 Operação Rio put the military on the streets, their
artillery aimed at the favelas, and suspended favela residents’ civil rights,
history was repeating itself.24 The Human Rights Watch 1996 report (1997:
33) concluded that the operation was “punctuated by torture, arbitrary detentions, and warrantless searches and at least one case of unnecessary use of
lethal force.”
In the absence of such analyses, commonsensical images about blacks
and favelas reinforce socially shared perceptions and public policy with
regard to marginalized communities such as Jacarezinho. When O Dia,
Folha de S. Paulo, and Rede Globo focus on people of the favela, they give
credence to and elaborate on the tacit but hegemonic knowledge about the
interconnections between urban space and race. Signifying pollution and
imminent threat that must be preemptively repressed, favelas and their
people are often depicted as corrupt and subhuman. The powerful cognitive
feedback loop that is established between urban space and race energizes
the curious (because silent) perpetuation of negative racial stereotypes
while functioning as a reliable dynamo that maintains social hierarchies in
place and unquestioned.
What, then, do the critical academic debates tell us about this phenomenon? How are race and urban space conceptualized by students of Brazilian
society? And how—if at all—can a review of the literature on spatial segregation by race in the United States help to make sense of the events in Rio?25
RACE, URBAN SPACE, BRAZIL, UNITED STATES
While there are a number of important publications focusing on how
urban space in Brazil is conceptualized, occupied, politicized, and transformed through social and historical struggles (e.g., Caldeira, 2000; Holston,
1989; Zaluar, 1985; 1994), race is not a central analytical category in such
accounts. A case could be made that race can be read between the lines of
these pivotal works. In the analyses that focus on Rio de Janeiro (Goldstein,
2003; Sheriff, 2001; Zaluar and Alvito, 1999) it is clear that the social groups
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occupying favelas and poor neighborhoods are disproportionately of African
descent. Although these works frequently do not explicitly mention it, I contend that what they describe is aspects of spatial segregation by race.
Another way of thinking about the academic silence about race and urban
space is to contextualize it in the broader hegemonic intellectual and political framework that supports the Brazilian myth of racial democracy. Such an
undertaking, however, would require extensive historical and theoretical
analysis of various intellectual currents in Brazil that is beyond the scope of
this article (but see Nascimento, 1989; Munanga, 1999; Guimarães, 1999;
D’Adesky, 2001).
The urban geographer and architect Ney dos Santos Oliveira is one of the
few writers on Brazilian urban processes to point to segregation by race and
make it central to an understanding of the way large cities give spatial dimensions to historical forms of racialized exclusion (2002; 2001; 2000; 1999).
Utilizing Massey and Denton’s now classic American Apartheid (1993), as
well as extensive official Brazilian census data and surveys conducted by his
own research group, Oliveira makes the case for the disproportionate number
of blacks in favelas vis-à-vis their presence in the city’s population. In one of
his studies, based on a survey conducted in a favela in Niterói (a city just east
of Rio), Oliveira shows that this community has a dissimilarity index of
60. This means that, whereas Niterói has about 70 percent whites and 30 percent blacks (including self-denominated blacks and browns), the favela has
70 percent blacks and 30 percent whites. In order to reflect the racial composition of the city, 60 percent of that favela’s blacks would have to move
elsewhere (2002: 14).
According to Massey and Denton’s framework, a 60 dissimilarity index
describes moderate segregation. However, in the case of Niterói this index
does not reveal the full extent of blacks’ experience of isolation and marginalization. Oliveira’s survey shows that even within marginalized communities, blacks experience relative disadvantages vis-à-vis whites. For example,
the area with the lower monthly income was disproportionately black and
throughout the favela whites consistently had the highest incomes. Moreover,
whereas blacks had an average of 27.4 years of residence in that favela,
whites had 19.4 years (2002: 15).26 These data suggest that the segregation
and marginalization with which blacks are confronted are multilayered and
cumulative. While blacks experience moderate segregation vis-à-vis the city
of Niterói, the effects of such segregation not only are amplified by further
segregation within the already segregated community but also become more
intense over time.27
It is of course premature to expand such conclusions to the rest of the
Rio de Janeiro metropolitan region, much less to the entire nation. Patterns
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65
of spatialization of poverty and race occur differently in different areas.
Whereas, for example, poverty was concentrated in the peripheries of cities
such as São Paulo prior to the 1980s (Fausto, 1984; Lévi-Strauss, 1986;
Rolnik, 1988), in Rio de Janeiro disparate social standing did not translate
into overwhelming spatial distance—at least not according to the more or
less neat patterns revealed in São Paulo (Kowarick, 1988). Indeed, such
proximity, made even more visible by Rio’s topography, is often given as
an explanation for this city’s high levels of urban violence and fear of crime
in the news media and popular imagination.
However, at least since the 1980s there seems to be a convergence in the
way various Brazilian metropolises produce spatial patterns expressing class
differences. Recent analyses have done much to blur the social/spatial
distinctions between Rio and other Brazilian large cities, especially São
Paulo. On the one hand, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists argue
that neat distinctions between the way social classes occupy peripheries and
central areas in São Paulo have become even more questionable. This city
has always been far more socially heterogeneous than was recognized,
especially vis-à-vis Rio (Kowarick and Ant, 1988), and has become even
more so in the past 20 years (Caldeira, 2000; Vargas, 1993). On the other
hand, recent analyses have shown that in the Rio de Janeiro’s metropolitan
region poverty is increasingly located in peripheral areas vis-à-vis the capital
city. Surrounding municipalities such as São João do Mereti, Nilópolis, and
Nova Iguaçu have a greater percentage of people who are poor and black
than central Rio de Janeiro and Niterói. They have also witnessed a greater
rate of construction on irregular lots than is recorded for Rio de Janeiro and
Niterói, thus further suggesting the concentration of the growth of poverty
in Rio’s outskirts. Oliveira (2002: 12) reached these conclusions based on
the analysis of Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) and
Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílio (PNAD) data for 1980, 1988,
and 1992.
A wealth of historical and contemporary studies details the racialization
of urban space in Rio. Zaluar and Alvito’s Um século de favela (1999), while
not explicitly focusing on race, provides evidence for the disproportionate
number of blacks inhabiting areas characterized by lack of infrastructure,
poverty, and imposed marginalization (e.g., Burgos, 1999: 28–31). Widely
cited works on Rio’s working-class communities confirm the racialization of
urban space by emphasizing the overwhelming presence of Afro-Brazilians
in favelas (Mendonça and Benjamin, 1997; Goldstein, 2003; Perlman, 1977;
Sheriff, 2001; Zaluar, 1985; 1994).
On the basis of this evidence, my continuing work in Rio de Janeiro
(Vargas, 2003; 2004b; 2005), and recent analyses of political economy
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focusing on the role of race in determining life-chances in Brazil, I would
like to suggest four working propositions that may help us understand the
negative and widespread reactions to the favela-condominium and constitute a set of research findings on which the hypothesis of the racialization
of urban space in Rio de Janeiro can be advanced.
These propositions are as follows: First, poverty is connected with race,
and, other things being equal, blacks systematically earn less and have fewer
assets than equally educated whites (Hasenbalg, 1979; INSPIR/DIEESE/
AFL-CIO, 1999; Silva and Hasenbalg, 1992). Second, poverty is related to
urban space, and the areas inhabited by the poor are the ones in which basic
services such as transportation, sewerage, and running water and durable
goods such as refrigerators and stoves are either lacking or present in smaller
numbers and/or are of lesser quality than those existing in middle- and upperclass neighborhoods (Henriques, 2001). Third, patterns of urban space occupation are inflected by race in that areas to which the poor are relegated are
disproportionately black (Oliveira, 1999; 2000; 2001). And fourth, notions of
urban space influence understandings of race in that different urban areas are
expected to correspond to different racial groups; hence the common assumption in Brazil that, if one comes from a favela, one must be of color (Vargas,
2004b).
A more precise evaluation and description of the third and fourth propositions requires further research and the development of a theoretical framework. In concluding this section, I outline insights derived from U.S. analyses
that have the potential to generate a theoretical edifice useful for understanding how Brazil’s conundrum of race and urban space works. While these
analyses unveil the mutual reinforcement that historically exists between
urban space and race, they need to be carefully adapted and modified to the
singularities of Brazil’s racial and spatial formations.
From a historical perspective, the groundbreaking work of Sugrue
(1996) is crucial in that it reveals the socially constructed and therefore
power-laden processes associated with the construction of urban space in
Detroit, principally since the 1940s. Writing on antiblack discrimination in
the areas of housing, employment, and politics, Sugrue shows how whites
used institutionalized privilege and grassroots organizing to maintain racial
homogeneity in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Often resorting to
preemptive violence to protect idealized white female purity and intimidate
black families attempting to relocate to their communities, whites represented and acted on the social world according to a clear racialized geography. White and black neighborhoods were thus not only physical entities
but also ideology-laden realities whose definition and maintenance inspired
fierce political battles. The “ghetto” was not simply a physical construct; it
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
67
was also an ideological construct. Urban space became a metaphor for
perceived racial difference. In the very act of defining the boundaries of the
“ghetto,” whites also continually defined and reinforced the boundaries of
race (Sugrue, 1996: 229).
The work of Oliver and Shapiro (1995) gives a sociological dimension to
the processes analyzed by Sugrue. The authors show that because of accumulated disadvantages, especially those related to reduced salaries and property values for houses in black neighborhoods, black families systematically
earn less income and have markedly fewer assets than similar white families.
Oliver and Shapiro’s work inspired the following statement (Brown et al.,
2003: 23, 24):
Blacks experience more difficulties obtaining mortgage loans, and when they
do purchase a home, it is usually worth less than a comparable white-owned
home. White flight and residential segregation lower the value of black homes.
As blacks move into a neighborhood, whites move out, fearing that property
values will decline. As whites leave, the fear becomes a reality and housing
prices decline. . . . In this way interlocking patterns of racialized accumulation
and disaccumulation create durable inequality.
The social and historical processes that have created racialized urban space
in the United States are specific both to this country’s racial formation
(Goldberg, 1993; Lipsitz, 1998; Massey and Denton, 1993) and to the way
local political conflicts have galvanized the mutual imbrications of race and
urban space (e.g., Davis, 1992; Gregory, 1998; Kim, 2000; Mollenkopf, 1993;
Saito, 1998). In spite of local specificities, however, race and urban space have
become metaphors for each other, and this perspective is widely accepted in
North American urban sociology, anthropology, and planning. While studies
on Brazilian cities have generally not focused on the possibility of such cognitive, political, and historical interconnectedness between race and urban
space, I argue that evidence already exists—in a few incipient urban studies
and certainly in veiled news media and socially shared representations of
favelas—pointing to the richness of such an analytical perspective. Would
poor communities be so vilified if they were not thought to be inhabited
mostly by blacks? Accordingly, would blacks be seen so negatively if it were
not for the ample and readily available representations and official policy
regarding the places in which they are overrepresented, namely, the favelas
and poor areas? The answer to these questions, I contend, depends on the
analysis of race and urban space as crucial elements of Brazil’s deeply
unequal social hierarchies. The absurd social disparities that characterize
cities such as Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife, Belo Horizonte, and
Salvador, for example, are as much about racialization of the social world as
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they are about how such racializations become encoded in and expressed by
the social and urban geography of cities.
In the concluding section, I focus on how Rio favela activists are continuing their struggle against the racialized injustices that mark their bodies,
lives, and places of residence.28 Fighting against everyday negative representations, political marginalization, and de facto second-class citizenship,
Jacarezinho militants have found powerful allies among former U.S. Black
Panther Party members.
TRANSNATIONAL POLITICAL ALLIANCES:
HOPES IN THE TIME OF NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION
While the gates and cameras caused much hullabaloo, Jacarezinho militants were involved in a more important project. Inspired by the Coalition
Against Police Abuse (CAPA) of Los Angeles, whose members had been in
Jacarezinho a few times starting in 1993 and with whom Brazilian activists
had been in political contact (Vargas, 2003), Gabriel and his collaborators
were about to organize the Zinzun Center. Named after Michael Zinzun, a former Black Panther Party member and founder and coordinator of CAPA who
had visited and remained in constant dialogue with Jacarezinho militants, the
center was to function as a place where members of the community would be
able to denounce cases of police brutality and obtain legal aid. As had been the
case in Los Angeles since at least 1976, when CAPA was founded, the various
cases of police misconduct in Jacarezinho were to serve as bases for organizing not only against law enforcement but also in protest of the various social
and economic problems afflicting the favela.29 Documenting, interpreting, and
pressuring the state authorities to acknowledge and redress such cases constituted a crucial objective of the Zinzun Center. Although Brazil has no death
penalty, the people of the favela have always known that informal, on-the-spot
death sentencing and execution are constitutive aspects of the role of the
police—aspects that are at least tacitly sanctioned by society at large.30 By disseminating information on police brutality and facilitating meetings, marches,
and rallies, members of the neighborhood association hoped to create political
facts that would translate into greater awareness within and outside the community, thus pressuring the state apparatus to redress the grievances, challenging public opinion, and preventing further acts of brutality.
A newspaper article about the Zinzun Center appeared in the O Dia report
on the favela-condominium mentioned earlier. It was headed “Black Panther
Orients Project.”31 The description of the Zinzun Center criminalized it quite
directly, linking it to the same activists who were allegedly protecting drug
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
69
dealers while opposing the police. That the center was going to be named
after a former Panther only confirmed the criminal character of the enterprise.
“Undercover” agents began to pay even closer attention to all of us involved
in the initiative following the O Dia article. There would have been no need
for intimidation if our activities had not been seen as menacing, inappropriate, and indeed criminal.32 Furthermore, none of these negative reactions
would have happened if the gates and the Zinzun Center had been installed
in nonfavela communities. It all goes to show that race and urban space produce a rather combustible combination, particularly when Afro-Brazilian
inhabitants of marginalized neighborhoods not only claim full citizenship but
by doing so question their systematic dehumanization by the state, the elites,
and public opinion.
Residential exclusion featured prominently in the ensuing debates between
Los Angeles and Rio activists. African Americans knew well the negative
effects of imposed racial segregation on neighborhoods and communities.
They often remarked that Jacarezinho looked and felt much like their own
neighborhoods: militarized police occupation, the presence of drug dealers,
poverty, widespread premature deaths, precarious housing, high rents and
exploitative grocery prices, generalized desperation, and, above all, the overwhelming presence of black people. At first, however, most Jacarezinho persons involved in these conversations did not capture the importance of race in
all of this. Some, indeed, questioned their own blackness and repeatedly
expressed their discomfort with the notion of affirming and drawing pride
from it. When the former Panthers and the more politicized favela organizers
tried to discuss the reasons for the massive presence of blacks in places such
as Jacarezinho, those who were reluctant to understand the implications of
race would point out that there were many whites in the community. The same
happened when the topics of discussion were police abuse, employment discrimination, and the poor educational and health services available in the area.
In the weekly meetings that I attended between June and August 2001, where
representatives from over 70 Rio favelas were attempting to revive a citywide
movement (Vargas, 2003), similar reluctance to come to terms with the racial
implications of favela reality frequently emerged.
Still, the very fact that such discussions were occurring is a strong indication of the changes in progress in the way black communities think of and
organize themselves. While it would be imprudent to assert a widespread
growing racial awareness among activists and residents in Jacarezinho, it is
beyond doubt that there is a generalized acceptance of the idea that the
social injustices defining their communities need to be addressed and
expressed to the wider polity. Race, urban space, and social class, among
other topics of discussion, offer analytical categories through which the
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absurdities of black and poor communities’ everyday life and autonomous
organizational strategies can emerge. In this, the alliance with U.S. black
militants is proving to be important not because African Americans provide
models to be uncritically emulated but mostly because former Panthers are
able to engage with and stimulate discussions that touch on fundamental
aspects of Brazilian social structure. In a Brazilian national context marked
by the hyperconsciousness of race and its concomitant negation,33 it is crucial that the ubiquity of race be discussed and its silencing and negation
challenged. Jacarezinho and U.S. militants are already producing concrete
results because the racialization of urban space, the spatialization of race
relations, and the possibilities for a transnational politics of resistance are
central to their dialogues and collaboration.
The symbolic and practical effects of alliances with former Black Panthers
on the local police, politicians, and drug dealers cannot be overestimated.
Because of their well-known history of confrontational politics against law
enforcement in particular and oppressive institutions in general, CAPA militants provide Brazilians a tactical edge in that they embody a tradition that
has proved effective in fighting institutionalized forms of power. Beyond the
very tangible practical outcomes, the contact with U.S. black militants has
had a transcendental quality that has generated optimism and confirmed the
Afro-Brazilians’ will to endure the struggle.34
Combating the militarized police abuse that is concentrated in the favelas,
then, constitutes a strategy for addressing the multitude of cumulative social
disadvantages blacks experience in Brazil that was first elaborated in the late
1960s in the United States. Police brutality underscores the deadly outcome
of the crystallization of race and urban space in dominant representations.
While CAPA’s original and main purpose was to give legal assistance to victims of police brutality, it considers police abuse part of a wider context of
oppression. Thus, the struggle against police brutality is a struggle for social
justice.35
It is precisely this systematic approach that Jacarezinho activists are beginning to adopt as the plans for the Zinzun Center are developed. While obstacles in the way of this project’s fruition often seem overwhelming, the black
transnational alliances developing through the collaboration between blacks in
Los Angeles and Rio have embraced the challenges. In the process they are
utilizing new political tools and organizational possibilities generated by the
same globalization process that, paradoxically, contributes to furthering their
marginalization (Barlow, 2003; Bello, 2003; Sivanandan, 2003). The crucial
grassroots critiques of the role of race and urban space in the consolidation of
historical forms of marginalization against blacks in the African diaspora—
while in need of necessary and additional analyses that incorporate gender,
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
71
sexuality, and age, just to name a few crucial variables—have already produced strategic angles for opposing the worst effects of local and transnational
forms of racialized exclusion.
NOTES
1. While O Dia quoted Gabriel as saying that the cameras had been bought with NGO
funds (Braga, 2001: 4), Folha de S. Paulo quoted him as saying that they had been “donated
by a group of Gypsies” (Petry, 2001). I use the latter version because it is the one I heard from
the activists.
2. Ribeiro and Telles (2000) show that 70 percent of the population residing in Rio’s
favelas in 1991 were of African descent (brown or black).
3. In the Brazilian context, I understand “black” to mean race and not color. Drawing on
ethnographic work in one of Rio’s favelas, Sheriff (2001: 45) argues that while for many of
the inhabitants of such poor communities there are many terms to describe one’s appearance,
there are only two true racial categories: black and white.
4. Countrywide sample survey research conducted by Folha de S. Paulo/Datafolha (1995:
13) indicated that whereas 89 percent of Brazilians polled said that there was racism in the
country, only 10 percent admitted to being racist. The same research, however, led to the conclusion that 87 percent of nonblack persons revealed some form of prejudice (1995: 17). One
problem with this research is its refusal to engage with the concept “race” and its relationship
to the multitude of color categories. Such a dynamic, whereby racial awareness is both prevalent and repressed, conforms to what I have elsewhere called the hyperconsciousness of race
and its negation, according to which racial hierarchies protect and perpetuate the myth of racial
democracy (Vargas, 2004b).
5. Studies have revealed the relationships between urban space and social class (Caldeira,
2000; Holston, 1989; Kowarick, 1988), race, gender, and sexuality (Gilliam, 1992; Goldstein,
2003; Twine, 1998), and race and life-chances (Hasenbalg and Silva, 1999; Henriques, 2001),
but there are few studies directly examining how urban space and race are connected in Brazil
(Telles [1992; 2004] and Oliveira [e.g., 2002] are the exceptions). These works support the
premise that race is an independent variable that explains residential segregation as a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to social class alone. Reproducing an argument put forward by
Massey and Denton (1993), Telles (2004: 208) affirms: “Residential segregation among whites,
browns, and blacks cannot be accounted for only by socioeconomic status; moderate racial residential segregation occurs among persons of similar income in . . . five metropolitan areas
[Salvador, Feira de Santana, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Barra Mansa–Volta Redonda].
Thus economics itself cannot explain racial segregation in Brazil.”
6. The police’s preemptive stance regarding black communities is paralleled in the United
States, especially in moments of social unrest (e.g., Gooding-Williams, 1993; Miller, 1996).
On murders committed by Rio police in favelas and the apparent support for such acts among
the general population, see Human Rights Watch/Americas (1997) and Mitchell and Wood
(1998).
7. While “space” and “place” are indeed mutually defined (Grossberg, 1992; Tuan, 1977),
“place” indicates the most immediate area defined by specific social interactions as distinct
from the larger, more impersonal urban space that frames various places.
8. “Jacarezinho Fechado a Cadeado. Inspirada nos condomínios da Zona Sul, segunda
maior favela do Rio instala portões nas vielas e câmeras de vídeo em pontos estratégicos. Só
72
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
que o inimigo é outro: os abusos da polícia, segundo as lideranças. Iniciativa é polêmica por
deixar os traficantes ainda mais protegidos em seus guetos.”
9. Rumba’s story offers a window into the challenges that black community organizers critical of the police and drug dealers face. He spent some time in asylum in the United States, at
the Center for African and African-American Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the
Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, where he had time to
reflect on and discuss his experience with fellow Afro-Brazilian activists, among them Diva
Moreira, Athayde Motta, and Joel Zito Araújo. Shortly after his return to Brazil, in January
2002, he was arrested on charges of involvement with drug dealers in one of the massive sweeps
conducted by Rio de Janeiro’s governor. In the absence of proof and under pressure from a
broad movement that included concerned organizations and persons in Brazil and the United
States, the case against him was dismissed and he was released in late 2002. He was arrested
again in 2003 in another police sweep that included famous singer Belo, and once again, after
many months of incarceration and hearings, he was released for lack of evidence.
10. Jacarezinho, of course, is not the only favela with a history of progressive resistance.
Favela organizers in Rio made alliances with the Communist party and labor organizations that
were proscribed during the military dictatorship (Mendonça and Benjamin, 1997).
11. Some students of favelas, following a pattern that is the norm among academics and
officials in Rio, are often quick to connect activists to drug dealers. For example, Arias (2004:
8) states: “In Rio’s Favelas, . . . criminal groups are strongly connected to some civic leaders
and government agents.” Goldstein (2003) is more attuned to the role of the police in controlling favelas and, indeed, the way drug dealers and police often work in combination. Pioneering
work by Zaluar (1985; 1994) has pointed to these connections.
12. Rio newspaper clippings for the period between December 1990 and September 2003
are replete with descriptions of extortions, kidnappings, and fatal beatings and shootings,
mostly of people of African descent, committed by police officers. My first full day in Rio in
2001 was spent downtown protesting one such death. A young man, an exemplary student and
worker, had been shot in the back of the head while sitting with his girlfriend on the porch of
his family’s house in the Andarai favela. The 1,000-plus-person demonstration gathered early
in the crisp July morning in the Largo do Machado, and from there we marched to then
Governor Anthony Garotinho’s Laranjeira official mansion a few miles away. As had become
customary, there were rumors about drug traffickers’ involvement in the demonstration, but
Gabriel and other neighborhood-association leaders and politicians (among them Jurema
Batista, city councilperson for the Workers’ party) made sure that the demonstration’s spirit
and its constituency—mostly young people from various favelas—were communicated to the
powers that be and the news media. Listing and analyzing all such cases of police brutality and
misconduct would constitute another study, which I am now beginning to undertake. The
newspaper articles collected for this period include pieces from O Dia, Extra, O Globo, and
Jornal do Brasil—the major dailies in Rio—as well as reports from Inverta, a socialist weekly,
and Viva Favela, a web site devoted to Rio’s favelas.
13. The high point of Rio police demoralization took place on July 19, 2001, when a videotape was shown on prime-time national television of a group of police officers receiving money
from drug dealers in the favela Morro da Providência. “In times of war the corrupt police officers would have been executed,” said the military police general-commander, Wilton Ribeiro.
His words, printed in the largest letters, were on the first page of O Dia on July 20, 2001, next
to photographs of the officers receiving money from dealers.
14. In the 1950s and 1960s, the racial democracy myth was questioned to a degree by
ethnographic research funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization. Studies produced by Bastide and Fernandes (1955), Cardoso and Ianni (1960),
Harris (1956), Hutchinson (1957), and Wagley (1952) emphasized the role that race played in
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
73
producing social inequalities. Still, the myth remained insofar as this body of work tended to
emphasize social class as the ultimate determinant of social hierarchies and project the resolution of racial differences as an epiphenomenon of the inevitable development of capitalist
social relations toward socialism. In other words, in the march of history, racism would disappear along with class inequalities (see, e.g., Fernandes 1965; 1972). It was only in the 1970s,
when U.S. civil rights claims began to resonate in Brazil and the military dictatorship initiated
its slow retraction, that Brazilian racism and the centrality of race in the polity were first conceptualized and challenged (e.g., Hasenbalg, 1979, Nascimento, 1977; 1989). The Workers’
party, in spite of numerous often laudable attempts to institutionalize antiracist policies, is still
trying to come to terms with these latest theoretical developments.
15. For a historical account of the role of the police in maintaining the exclusion of black
Brazilians, see Holloway (1997). For a contemporary examination of the role of racism and
violence in perpetuating racialized social inequalities, see J. Silva (1998).
16. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the relationship between favelas and the
church and the public administrations (both local and state) has been marked by successive
attempts by the latter to assert control over favela organizations, ranging from plans to eradicate
the favelas through co-optation of the local leadership to transforming favelas into neighborhoods by providing basic infrastructure and public services. In 1957 favela workers organized
the Coligação dos Trabalhadores Favelados do Distrito Federal (Favela Worker’s Coalition of the
Federal District); in 1963, they organized the Federação da Associação de Favelas do Estado da
Guanabara (the Federation of the Favela Association of Guanabara State) (Burgos 1999: 33).
Jacarezinho was formally transformed into a neighborhood by City Law 35/92 in 1992, but
the resolution “did not bring any benefits to the place. No one knows for sure how many houses
there are in the community, much less how many people live in the second-largest favela in Rio”
(O Dia, June 4, 1999).
17. Benedita da Silva, a black woman born in one of Rio’s favelas, is a former senator and
governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Affiliated with the Workers’ party since its foundation
in the early 1980s, she began her political career in the favela Morro do Chapéu da Mangueira
in the 1950s and 1960s. Mendonça and Benjamin’s (1997: 52) biography is an important
source of information concerning the military repression that began in 1964.
18. There were, of course, favela residents who desired to move out of the favelas and,
through government programs, own their homes (Perlman, 1977), but my point is to call attention to the dramatic authoritarian measures taken by the military and the negative effects of
such measures on the favelas’ organizing efforts. Removal often contributed to a family’s
financial difficulties—especially when the new housing projects were far from their work or
located in areas where new jobs were difficult to obtain—and effectively destroyed social networks that depended on sharing the space of the favelas. Since relocation was based on income
and not place of origin, most new housing projects were composed of people who had no prior
knowledge of each other. Still, as studies have shown, residents of the new housing projects
eventually built new social networks, samba schools, neighborhood associations, and soccer
teams. Cidade de Deus, one of the largest projects, is a case in point (Zaluar, 1985: 71).
19. For the classic study on the manipulation of clientelistic relationships among Rio’s poor,
see Zaluar (1985). On the strategies of resistance adopted by favela organizers, see Mendonça
and Benjamin (1997: 54).
20. The role of the media in consolidating the image of people of the favelas as racialized,
cruel, and less than human cannot be overstated. Focusing on specific individuals, the press and
the televised news programs fed on and furthered the fears that were increasingly associated
with the “drug wars.” Buzunga, a young black man in his early twenties in the mid-1980s, was
shown with his automatic assault rifle and a few bags of cocaine around his waist as he bragged
about his assassinations and sexual adventures and the control he had over the Rocinha favela.
74
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
Rival dealers eventually assassinated him. Historical and structural considerations, of course,
were absent from the media’s rendition of what was taking place in the favelas. The unprecedented volume of cocaine available in Rio was connected with the reconfiguration of the global
market as a result of the United States’s repression of the cocaine trade and its supporting networks (http:// www.starnews2001.com.br/drogas.html 2000; see also Webb, 1999).
21. Robinson (1998/1999) provides an insightful analysis of the impact of the 1980s
neoliberal globalization policies on Latin American countries, convincingly connecting them
with the increase in inequality, polarization, impoverishment, and police brutality in Brazil.
22. For a collection of groundbreaking essays on the political economy, popular representations, and perspectives of the favelas and housing projects in Rio de Janeiro, see Zaluar (1994).
23. In Jacarezinho, for example, it is estimated that the number of people involved in the
drug trade does not exceed 100 while the total population is 150,000.
24. For an analysis of the political motivations behind Operação Rio, see Soares (1996).
25. I am well aware of the ongoing debate between those who defend Brazil’s unique modality of race relations vis-à-vis that of the United States and those who are attempting to develop
an analytical framework stressing correspondences between the two racial formations (for
example, Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1999, and Hanchard, 2002). In their critique of Hanchard’s
“U.S. imperialist reasoning,” however, Bourdieu and Wacquant fall victim to the same problem
they identify in the U.S. scholar’s work by proposing a “French” solution. Their lack of knowledge about Brazilian society has been pointed out by French (2003). As argued elsewhere
(Vargas, 2003; 2004b), there is much to be learned from U.S. racial history, critique, and analysis not because they provide models to be mindlessly emulated by Brazilianists and antiracism
activists but because they present us with the possibilities and shortcomings of strategic forms
of racial solidarity. For further views on the debate and on the theoretical and political possibilities of a comparison of race in the United States and Brazil, see Cunha (1998), French (2000),
Fry (1995), Segato (1998), and D. Silva (1998).
26. More time in the favela is taken here as less social mobility.
27. This same phenomenon was noted by Jacqueline Britto Pólvora (2004), reporting on a
favela in Porto Alegre in which blacks systematically occupied the worst and more isolated
residences, had the most unstable and low-paying jobs, and had more health problems.
28. Gilliam (1992) and Goldstein (2003: 120–135) describe the way gender, sexuality, and
race intersect. These multiple intersections serve as expressions of and windows into the
deeply unequal social hierarchies in Brazil and the corresponding obstacles in the way of
racial awareness among the black and the poor.
29. In 1979, after discovering that CAPA had been infiltrated by police agents, its members
and those of other progressive organizations that had documented the presence of spies in their
headquarters sued the Los Angeles Police Commission for violation of their constitutional rights
to assembly, privacy, and association. Assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the 131
plaintiffs agreed in 1983 to a $1.8 million settlement that included the imposition of nine resolutions upon the city of Los Angeles Police Department (see Vargas, 1999). In 1986, after being
beaten by Pasadena police officers and losing the sight of one eye, Zinzun won $1.2 million from
the city, and in July 1994 he was awarded $512,500 to settle a dispute with Los Angeles Police
Department’s Assistant Chief Robert L. Vernon, who had accused him of terrorist acts.
30. It is intriguing that, although 76 percent of people polled in Rio and São Paulo believe
that policemen are active in death squads (Human Rights Watch/Americas, 1997), there is little
if any support for organizations and events that protest police brutality outside the favelas. This
may suggest public awareness that this brutality is vital for the preservation of social and racial
hierarchies.
31. Rather than Zinzun, however, the “Panther” whose photograph appeared immediately
below the headline was me. While the rest of the article was correct in describing my occupation
Vargas / WHEN A FAVELA DARED
75
as an anthropologist, my ongoing collaboration with CAPA, the organization’s roots in the Black
Panthers, and a brief description of how the Panthers offered armed resistance against police
oppression (July 8, 2001), the damage had been done. From that day on I had an unmarked police
car parked in front of where I was staying, on the far west side of Rio, for most of the day.
Interestingly, the same person who sat impassive in the car would invariably be waiting for me
each time I scheduled an appointment with one of the activists downtown. Save for a now laughable incident in the airport on my way back to the United States, when the same agent tried to
prevent my boarding, claiming that I had not passed through security inspection, nothing else happened besides the obvious passive intimidation. All the favela activists I reported the fact to had
no doubt that the car and the agent were part of the civil police. They instructed me to seek assistance from the federal police if this agent attempted to intimidate me. I followed the advice during the airport incident. Upon my request, a federal police officer confronted the agent and the
security guard, who, under pressure, had until then been saying that she did not remember inspecting my belongings. In the presence of the officer, however, her memory was refreshed, so to
speak, and I was allowed to board the flight. Rather than exemplifying the noncorrupt nature of
the federal police vis-à-vis the local military and civil police, this incident revealed that the federal police are, by definition, less involved in municipal conflicts and struggles for power. This
fact was recognized by the Jacarezinho militants, hence the effective advice that they provided me.
32. In the full-page article about the favela-condominium, O Dia featured a large photograph and a piece on elite condominiums’ use of gates. The narrative strategy was to juxtapose
lawfulness to lawlessness. This juxtaposition can of course be expanded to nonpoor/poor,
white/black, nonfavela/favela, citizen/noncitizen, and human/subhuman.
33. Inspired by critical studies of Brazilian race relations (e.g., Araújo, 2000; D’Adesky, 2001;
Da Matta, 1981; Dzidzienyo, 1971; Gilliam, 1992; Guimarães, 1999; Hanchard, 2002; Hasenbalg,
1998; Munanga, 1999; Nascimento, 1989; Telles, 1999; Twine, 1998), I have developed this concept in Vargas (2004b).
34. The struggle is against the multifaceted assaults on blacks in the Americas. Police abuse
and residential segregation are only two of the many forms of oppression that marginalize, dehumanize, and kill blacks in disproportionate numbers. The 1996 official Pesquisa Nacional por
Amostra de Domicílios (National Household Sample Survey) observed that in the richest
Southeast region (consisting of the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Espírito
Santo), whereas infant mortality for whites stood at 25.1 per thousand infants born alive, for
blacks the rate was 43.1. In the country as a whole, whereas barely 50 percent of black households
are connected to a sewage system, the rate is 73.6 percent for white households. The United
Nations’ Index of Human Development, a measure of life quality on a scale of 0 to 1, stands at
0.796 for the Brazilian population as a whole but at 0.573 for Afro-Brazilians (Henriques, 2001).
Salary disparities confirm the white-black gap. In São Paulo’s metropolitan region, blacks make
an average of R$ 2.94/day and whites make R$ 5.50/day (INSPIR/DIEESE/AFL-CIO, 1999: 39).
All socioeconomic data reveal that “non-whites are subject to a ‘process of cumulative disadvantages’ in their social trajectories” (Hasenbalg and Silva, 1999: 218) that blocks their social mobility. Whites are markedly more successful. The process is tellingly similar to what happens in the
United States (see, e.g., Oliver and Shapiro, 1995, and Brown et al., 2003).
35. “CAPA sees not only the necessity of organizing against police abuse, but also the need
to link increases in police abuse to the rising economic crisis presently taking place in the United
States. In other words, if workers strike for higher wages, who is called? The police. If you
can’t pay your rent and refuse to move into the streets, who is called? The police. And if you
organize demonstrations against a corrupt and unjust system, who is called? The police, whether
with force or as undercover spies. CAPA believes the police are a necessary element in the
maintenance of a system controlled by a few millionaires and politicians who put profit before
people” (CAPA, n.d.).
76
LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES
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