Rocinha, Rio’s largest and most vibrant favela, in Brazil on May 7, 2008.
I am sitting at a bus stop with Sandra listening to deafening music pour out of a massive wall of loudspeakers erected on the street of a small favela. Sandra is a Brazilian friend whom I first met years ago in New York City before she moved back to her native country. During one of her previous visits to Rio’s largest shantytown she met R (name withheld to protect his identity), who guides foreign visitors through Rocinha. Without personally knowing the ‘rulers’ of the favela, who are the foot soldiers of one of Rio’s notorious drug gangs, it would be extremely dangerous if not impossible to venture inside this otherwise seemingly peaceful settlement.
A young armed man, member of a drug trafficking group, stands on guard inside an abandoned building in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 9, 2008.
The party on the street goes wild soon after its starts. Although it is already 2AM no one seems to complain about the noise. Most of the boys who organized the party are in their late teens and besides the board shorts and havaianas, semi automatic rifles hang off their shoulders. We are visiting a friend in Vidigal, a small favela closest to Rio’s famous Ipanema beach. The area is controlled by the same gang and some of R’s friends are on duty tonight guarding a spot where drugs are being sold.
Girls dance at a baile funk party in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, on May 5, 2008.
We are more than welcomed to hang out but photographing the illegal trade and its players is most of the time off limits. Due to my frequent visits to Afghanistan I grew a beard much longer than I would feel comfortable with. Although it is essential if you would like to blend in amongst Afghanistan’s Pasthun population it does very little in my favor in Brazil, that is until I found out that R is introducing me to his friends as a prominent representative of the Afghan insurgency. From then on the mood changed. After describing tactics insurgents use to attack NATO convoys patrolling villages, the crowd of young men unanimously scream, “this is exactly how we fight the police here if they dare to enter our territory.” After they learn the guns they fight with cost a hundred times less in Afghanistan, talk of lucrative business deals ensue and I am soon led to a small favela where the local gang leader, a 24-year-old ‘veteran’, explains how he lost almost all of his childhood friends after 15 years of working in this business. He shows me around the tiny hill under his control and invites me to target practice with a gun he bought from a friend who serves in the Brazilian Army.
A member of a drug trafficking gang fires his gun inside a small favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 10, 2008.
I remind myself of the main purpose behind visiting the favela, to understand how people cope with the dire living conditions and the lack of access to safe water and proper sanitation.
Kids play on the street in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro on May 9, 2008.
The rapid and chaotic urbanization process in Brazil often led to uncontrolled metropolitan growth and many consequent problems in huge cities like Rio de Janeiro. The first illegally built settlement on squatted land appeared on the outskirts of Rio approximately one hundred years ago. Currently, about one-fifth of the city’s residents live in such slums despite several official attempts to eradicate these often lawless shantytowns. Most buildings in the favelas are built without proper planning and authorization and sewage and water pipes are mostly laid and maintained in an improvised manner, forcing those who live here to solve many of their own infrastructure problems. The natural flow of water from the mountains is collected and stored in small makeshift reservoirs from which a tangled network of plastic pipes supply water with questionable quality to the settlement below.
Makeshift plastic water pipes run along an open sewer in Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro on May 8, 2008.
With growing media attention around the upcoming 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, the government has begun implementing substantial plans to give the county a new face in time for the games. Although former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that investing in running water and other basic services was the best way to beat organized crime, it took three more years before elite police units backed by armored military vehicles and helicopters took action against the parallel governors, the drug lords of Rocinha.
An elderly woman carries buckets of water at the recently pacified Dona Marta favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on September 25, 2009.
Today police forces stormed Rocinha and pacified the infamous slum. Looking at the first images transmitted by the wires I see police tanks patrolling a place where only a few years ago gun-toting youngsters were selling drugs at an improvised checkpoint simply called “little-Gaza”. It’s anyone’s guess when the government plans to act on their word and start improving water and sanitation services promised to the millions living in Rio’s favelas.
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See more of my images on Daily Beast and read Mac Margolis’ Newsweek article profiling Rio’s Public Safety Secretary José Mariano Beltrame and providing a glimpse into Brazil’s “shantytown counterinsurgency.”
Boys play in a small favela in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on May 9, 2008.
