An Olympics opening ceremony is a chance for a country to tell a story about itself. On Friday, Brazil’s ceremony relayed a brisk, harmonious version of its history, celebrating the intermixing that has produced its beautifully diverse population. In the space of a single minute, Portuguese colonists came face to face with indigenous tribes, and African slaves arrived to work in sugar mills. Later the show turned to the nation’s favelas, the informally built neighborhoods where some fifteen million Brazilians live, and dancers performed bendy passinho moves to a soundtrack of bumping baile funk.
Favelas, with their characteristic dull-red cinder block, are a part of every major Brazilian city. They started cropping up in the late nineteenth century, as newly freed slaves fled northeastern plantations. Traditionally, favela residents hardly ever came into contact with the state. Politicians paid attention only during election seasons, when they were trying to secure votes. Police came in only to carry out raids. In Rio, where one in seven residents lives in a favela, the communities didn’t even show up on official maps until the nineteen-eighties.
To enshrine the favela in Brazil’s official Olympic narrative, then, was deeply meaningful—a recognition that a long-neglected population belongs in Brazilian society. The wild version of Carnival that Brazilians now know first emerged from the favelas of Rio. So did samba, that mashup of African drums with Portuguese mini-guitars and ballroom styles like polka. But favelas are a lot more than the sum of such cultural tropes. As Brazil’s economy grew in recent years, many favelas developed into sturdy working-class neighborhoods. I’ve met several young Brazilians from favelas who are the first in their families to attend university.
Perhaps the most dramatic changes came to Rio’s own favelas. In 2008, as the city prepared its bid for the Olympics, special law-enforcement divisions, known as Police Pacification Units, started operating in the city’s favelas, sweeping out drug gangs and establishing permanent police presences in three dozen such neighborhoods for the first time ever. The hope was for law enforcement to forge peaceful ties with these communities and make the city as a whole safer. At first, it seemed to work. Rio’s homicide rate plunged.
But, like so much else in Brazil lately, the program failed to live up to its promise. Among the disappointments was a notorious case from 2013, when pacification officers in the massive favela of Rocinha tortured and disappeared a construction worker named Amarildo de Souza. An epileptic, Souza is believed to have died after being subjected to electric shocks during an interrogation. While twelve officers were convicted in connection with the case, the damage done to the community’s trust has been immense. Pacification officers have since largely reverted to a more traditional, quasi-military role in Rio’s favelas. Police in the city still kill someone almost every day.
The Olympics ceremony made no reference to the age-old tensions between favelas and the state. This wasn’t an accident. The ceremony’s director, Fernando Meirelles, is best known for his film “City of God,” about the troubled life of a Rio favela. In a recent interview, he lamented, “Olympic ceremonies aren’t the place to air a country’s dirty laundry.” But the gap between representation and reality is especially glaring given how officials prepared for the Olympics. Since 2009, when Rio won the bidding to hold the Games, more than twenty thousand families have been evicted from their homes in favelas to make way for arenas and infrastructural projects.
Intent on projecting a modern image for the Olympics, Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, has insisted that those people forced to relocate received indemnities, rent assistance, or new apartments in affordable-housing projects. He has underplayed the fact that, according to the researcher Lucas Faulhaber, of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, many of these twenty thousand families ended up having to move as far as thirty miles from the communities where they had previously made their lives.
On a recent visit to Rio, I met a middle-aged landscaper named Jorge Santos. In 2011, he was forced to move out of his home in a favela known as Vila Recreio II because his house, which he had built himself years before, was located next to an avenue where an express-bus line would be built. Known as the Transoeste, the line now extends west from near the Olympic Park, where most of the venues for the Games are located. Santos hadn’t wanted to leave, but one day he returned home from work to find that his house had been torn down with all his belongings in it. The city paid him an indemnity, he said, of less than twenty-seven hundred dollars. He had little choice but to move to another favela, about a mile away. Unlike his former home, the area where he lives now is dominated by a milícia—one of the city’s many paramilitary gangs, run by former cops and firemen, who make their money by extorting residents for access to basic services. (Paes’s office declined to comment on Santos’s situation.)
Of all the removals tied to the Olympics, the most controversial involved a favela known as Vila Autódromo, on the edge of the wealthy suburb of Barra da Tijuca. In 2010, the favela was slated for demolition to make way for access roads between the Olympic Park and Athletes’ Village, which will be converted into a complex of luxury condos after the Games end. I recently met Delmo de Oliveira, who had lived in Autódromo since the nineteen-eighties with his mother. Like Santos, he had initially refused official demands to leave his home. Thanks to attention from the international press, his family was among the twenty families ultimately allowed to stay in Autódromo, in new homes constructed out of the way of the access roads.
Throughout it all, Oliveira has endured what he describes as frequent intimidation by police. On Friday, he watched the Olympics opening ceremony on television. “Favelas are the soul of Rio,” he told me, sounding pleased that communities like his were being celebrated for the world to see. But, he went on, “they showed a dream favela, a fiction. Meanwhile, Eduardo Paes is destroying favelas. It’s hypocrisy.”
