A Favela Tour

Trip Start Nov 21, 2008
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Trip End May 29, 2009


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Flag of Brazil  , State of Rio de Janeiro,
Wednesday, May 13, 2009

With all this controversy surrounding the favelas I decided to take a tour of the largest favela in Rio, Rocinha, home to an estimated 200,000 people. The favela's are discreet areas of very densely packed housing that are growing at an incredible rate, some of them doubling in size every year. The housing is built without permission of the government, without ownership of the land and without any sort of regulation and are built on the sides of the rocky Brazilian mountains that surround Rio city so collapses are common.  It isn't however, easy for the government to regulate either the growth, or the building standards of these favelas as each are "protected" by the local drug lord and any police entering the area are shot. The locals don't oppose this as they don't pay any building taxes or local government taxes and the drug lords are fiercely intolerant of violent crime within the favelas themselves as this attracts police attention.  The result of this is discreet areas of housing that are out of government control, over 900 of them in total surrounding Rio city, some of them right next to the wealthier areas and the police will sometimes raid these areas in an attempt to control the drug lords.  When this happens it is brutal, the police raid, often up to 200 fully armed police officers strong, storm the favela and the shooting begins. The gangs run by the drug lords have an arsenal of weapons from fully automatic machine guns to hand grenades and are often better equipped than the police themselves and so the scale of devastation can be extreme and with their poorly built houses the people that suffer are the locals as they are caught in the crossfire.  None of this however was evident as we entered Rocinha and jumped on the back of a motorcycle for the long winding journey to the top of the hill for a total of 2 Reals. The tour then took us down through the narrow alleys visiting the sights of Rocinha while the guide explained the detail of the situation.  The favelas contain everything that you could possibly need to live including internet cafés although while there is sporadic running water and electricity in some of the favelas, the sanitation isn't great especially when you get toward the bottom of the hill where the rubbish and effluent tend to collect leaving a terrible stench.  Saying that however, the conditions are better than what I have seen in India or China and so it's hard to argue that the drug gangs aren't at least looking after the basic needs of the people where the government has failed to.
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