RIO DE JANEIRO: Glorinha rarely leaves her rickety wooden shack. But, sat in the shade of a towering banana tree that flanks her house in southern Rio de Janeiro, the 68-year-old still has memories to help her while away the days. They are of her Portuguese father, one of the founders of the Vila Alice favela perched on the hilltops above the middle class borough of Laranjeiras; of the 14 children she has raised in her makeshift home; and of the hours spent nurturing the fruit trees that encircle it.
By next month memories may be all she has. After a 12-year court battle with residents of a nearby apartment block, which owns the land on which Glorinha’s father built his wooden shack nearly 100 years ago, Vila Alice’s residents are preparing for eviction. “I won’t leave here without being given compensation,” she says. Glorinha, whose full name is Gloria Roque Adriano, slumped into a battered classroom chair outside her home. “What will I do? Sleep in the road?” Across Rio, hundreds of impoverished Brazilian families, like Glorinha’s, are now facing the threat of eviction, as the idea of favela remoção (removal) gains increasing currency among better-off sections of Brazilian society. Fourteen shantytowns, the majority in upper-class boroughs such as Gávea and Jardim Botânico, were recently earmarked for removal by Rio’s public prosecutor, while there has been a recent jump in the number of legal battles, like the one over Vila Alice.
José Nerson de Oliveira, vice-president of the Federation of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro, believes as many as 70 communities could be at risk. “We won’t let them come into the favelas that we have built with our blood and sweat and destroy everything we have managed to achieve,” he told the Guardian. The official reasons for the evictions vary from ownership disputes to attempts to protect the environment and concerns over the safety of those living in the hilltop favelas. But for those fighting removal, the motivation is simple. “It isn’t about land or trees or anything like that. They don’t want the poor close to them,” said Sebastião Machado, 47, a community activist and odd-job man involved in the battle for Vila Alice.
Rio’s wealthy benefit from the cheap labour provided by the favela, he says, but at the same they don’t want to live with their poorer neighbours. “They want two things at the same time. Isn’t it me who fixes things in the bacana’s [rich kid’s] house? Doesn’t it look good when I do?” he jokes. The idea of remoção is nothing new to Rio de Janeiro, where nearly 20 per cent of the population, a million people, now live in about 750 slums. During the 19th century, town planners forced thousands from the slums of central Rio in a bid to turn the city into a “tropical Paris”. In the 1960s, the politics of removal again came to the fore as favelas were bulldozed in the city’s south zone and their residents sent to the housing projects on its outskirts. Forgotten by the city’s politicians, many of the projects, like Cidade de Deus or City of God, underwent a process of favelização or “favelisation”, and are now controlled by drug-trafficking gangs.
Now, after a campaign by sections of the Brazilian media, the question of favela removal has been thrust back on to the political agenda. Those in favour of removal, like the councillor Leila do Flamengo, whose proposals to reintroduce remoção are being considered in Rio’s Assembly, see it as a way of preserving Rio’s natural beauty, while creating bairros populares (popular boroughs) further away from the city centre that would offer good quality, low-cost housing to the city’s poorest citizens.
“The decadence of public power has allowed Rio de Janeiro to become a city without laws,” she says. “This is called urban disorder ... The destruction of the environment here is leading us to an environmental catastrophe and people are joking about it. “Since so many politicians have electoral bases in the favelas, it has been more convenient to allow this destruction of the physical beauty with which Rio de Janeiro is blessed.”
Leila do Flamengo argues the rights of the taxpayers in the nearby apartment block are more important than those of the “squatters” in Vila Alice. Sectors of the tourist industry also back removal. With Rio hosting the Pan American Games in 2007, several partial removals are being planned around venues in the suburb of Barra da Tijuca, although compensation has been offered to those affected. “I’m absolutely in favour of removal,” the president of the Brazilian Association of Travel Agents, Carlos Alberto Ferreira, recently told Globo newspaper, arguing that without the favelas blighting the landscape, tourism levels would rise, the profits of which could be channelled into fighting poverty.
