Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

A great many cities sit beside the sea, but no other integrates the ocean as Rio does. You can imagine San Francisco located inland, or Boston minus its harbor, but to imagine Rio without the waterfront is like imagining New York without skyscrapers, Paris without cafés, L.A. without celebrities. The landscape has an almost Venetian urgency. “If you don’t go to the beach, you don’t know anything that’s happening,” said the artist Vik Muniz. “No matter if you have Twitter or a cell phone, you have to go to the beach every day from four o’clock until sundown.” Beaches are inherently democratic; when you socialize in public wearing only a bathing suit, money loses its copyright on glamour. Though the beaches in Rio remain considerably segregated by class, because the color of your skin and the brand of your bathing suit and sunglasses mark your status, much of what you show at the beach is your body, your skill at volleyball, your aura of cool. The social implications are significant. It takes effort to be a snob in Rio.

The topography has dictated another social anomaly. People of privilege live in the flat seaside areas, which are not prone to landslides, in the Zona Sul (the Southern District), which encompasses the famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. Those neighborhoods are punctuated by abrupt hills, which have been settled by the poor over the past century or so. Although home to nearly a quarter of Rio’s population, these steep districts, known as favelas, do not appear in detail on most maps of the city and historically have lacked utilities, garbage collection, closed sewers, and police protection. Even in the exclusive Zona Sul, you are never more than five minutes from a favela. Muniz said, “You’re sitting in Saint-Tropez surrounded by Mogadishu.”

Building inside the favelas is unregulated, and when the rains come, houses collapse. Walled off from the city proper, these gang-dominated enclaves have been the setting of endless violence. Most cities have slums, but in many—including many others in Brazil—these are on the outskirts of town or in a single, contained enclave. Rio’s favelas are dotted all through the city like the chocolate chips in a cookie. The city’s peculiar geography is such that shantytown gunfire is audible even in the most affluent neighborhoods. The social distances in Rio outmeasure the geographic ones.

Much of Brazilian culture originated in Rio’s favelas. Samba evolved there, and the new funk music, too. Many soccer stars hail from the favelas, and some of Brazil’s famous models. Carnival in Rio—the biggest pre-Lenten festival in the world, with 2 million people a day partying in the streets—depends largely on the “samba schools” of the favelas, which compete to put on the most glittering displays. French aristocrats never say that France would be nothing without the slums of Paris, and most upper-class Italians are embarrassed by the Mafia; hip-hop culture notwithstanding, most Americans opt for the suburbs. But in Rio de Janeiro, those who have privilege admire those who don’t. José Maria Zacchi, one of the architects of change in Rio, told me that in nineteenth-century Brazil, little distance separated the manor house and the slave quarters, and not much has changed in that regard. “The educated upper middle class loves to mingle with the people, loves it,” the poet and critic Italo Moriconi said. “It’s part of the Carioca culture.” (The word Carioca refers to people or things from or of Rio.) Yet Brazil remains one of the most unequal societies in the world—a place, as the anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz said, of “cultural inclusion and social exclusion.”

Carioca pride began its slip in 1960, when the capital was moved to remote Brasília and the government functionaries skipped town. Previously a federal district on the order of Washington, DC, or Mexico City, Rio was folded into the surrounding, undeveloped state for administrative purposes. Business shifted increasingly to São Paulo; Rio was deindustrialized. Violence from the favelas threatened rich and poor. Wealthy people employed private security forces, drove bulletproof cars, and stopped wearing jewelry. Drug gangs fought one another and an incredibly corrupt police force. The gangs sometimes put their enemies into towers of tires and set them on fire—a method of execution known as the microwave oven, similar to the South African atrocity called necklacing.