Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

There is a great need for organizing, and a great need for organizational tools. Rodrigo Baggio works to bridge Brazil’s digital divide by collecting donations of old computers and setting up community centers in the favelas to provide technical training. Less than a third of Brazilians have Internet access, compared with nearly three-quarters of people in the United States. Baggio’s work began long before pacification, but he’s stepped it up since then. “You are taking away the jobs they were training for, as drug dealers,” he said. “You have to give them some other opportunities to pursue instead.” That analysis makes humanitarian sense; it makes economic sense, too.

Maria Silvia Bastos Marques, the most successful businesswoman in Brazil, took over the National Steel Company in 1999—no mean feat for a woman in a Latin country. She was offered the National Oil Company, but turned it down, and at fifty-five, she is overseeing the business side of the Olympics. She emphasized that while credit for the turnaround in Brazil tends to go to Lula, the process really began with his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The 1980s and the early nineties were a time of appalling inflation. “Rich people don’t suffer so much with inflation; their houses and cars go up in price to keep pace,” Bastos said. “But for poor people, who depend on the money they get each week to live on, it’s a tragedy; the job that paid them enough to feed their family last week doesn’t pay enough to do it this week.”

Even for someone of her stature, the high inflation rate meant chaos. She would work out her company budget for the year, and two months later it had become meaningless. “No one could make plans,” she sighed. Once Henrique had inflation under control, however, planning began to happen. “It changed the whole mentality of Brazil,” she said. The pacification in Rio, in her view, was part of a larger arc of change. She told me that she had always driven a bulletproof car, but that she had recently bought a car with windows that roll down. Her children had never been in such a vehicle before, and they loved it.

The Olympic plan has been controversial. Bastos worked to renegotiate Brazil’s international debt with the IMF in the early 1990s, which spurred internal economic recovery, and she believes that the Olympics will provide a similar “occasion to get our house in order.” Eduardo Paes, mayor of Rio, told me, “The word Olympic refers to something that is hard to achieve. Look, Barcelona was reborn from the Olympics; Athens was nearly bankrupted. It’s not easy, what we need to do. The way I see it, we can let the Olympics use the city, or the city can use the Olympics to achieve permanent goals.” Some poor citizens question the decision to build a system of commuter trains to Barra da Tijuca, the wealthy district that first elected Paes to office. The layout seems designed to reinforce social stratification rather than ameliorate it. Many people are being evicted from their homes—nineteen thousand families in one year—to make way for the new lines.

“We should plan according to the needs of the city, not the needs of the games,” Gabeira said. “Calling them plans for the games means that everything can be rushed through without democratic review.” Actor and activist Marcus Vinícius Faustini said, “If the pacification of the favelas is really just a ploy to attract more tourist dollars for the Olympics, then it will blow up horrifically. The displacement of citizens is a disaster. There is already evidence that the building plans for the games are mechanisms of social control.”

Favela residents do not pay property taxes, and some middle-class voters resent this. As services increase, such taxes seem inevitable. Purified water and reliable electricity will come with water and electric bills. “As soon as the neighborhoods stop being dangerous,” Faustini said, “the residents become subject to all the commercial exploitation that is routine in prosperous cities, but that they are too inexperienced to resist.”