“The operation was a success. It was done without using firearms, no violence at all, without deaths or injuries,” Rio de Janeiro Security Secretary José Mariano Beltrame said.

Participating in the operation were 526 police officers and 105 marines, who were backed up by an armed helicopter and 21 armored military vehicles, Beltrame said, adding that the operation was completed in a little over two hours.

The forces entered the nine favelas in central Rio early in the morning, meeting no resistance from the drug gangs that operate in those neighborhoods.

The criminals who occupied the zones could have been “intimidated” by the heavy presence of security forces or even could have fled in the days before the operation, but Beltrame said that the troops who occupied the slums would now try to locate them and capture them.

Officers will carry out raids on several homes and other sites that, according to anonymous tips received from local residents, are used by the drug gangs to store arms and drugs, Beltrame said.

In the nine neighborhoods live an estimated 20,000 people who “have been definitively liberated” from the drug gangs that had set themselves up in those areas thanks to the “absence of the state,” which now “has returned to stay,” Beltrame said.

Officials plan to deploy special police units in the favelas and set up permanent police posts designed to guarantee the security of the residents. The federal government has promised Rio do Janeiro aid to complete the “law and order recovery” operations with strong investment in infrastructure, including schools, clinics, pharmacies and local forums where neighbors can make public their concerns.

Last November in the Complexo do Alemão, which includes several favelas, considered havens for drug traffickers in the city, were occupied by some 2,600 police and soldiers with air and armored vehicles support after two days of clashes.

The operations are part of an ambitious “fumigate” the ring of favelas surrounding Rio do Janeiro from drug dealers and organized crime in anticipation of major events such as the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

Mercopress

Brazil’s Ministry of Cities will implant the Habitar Brasil (Inhabit Brazil) program for the urbanization of favelas (shantytowns)  in over 30 locations throughout the country, including Rio and São Paulo.

The contracts have already been signed, and infrastructure projects in areas such as water and sanitation, together with home improvement, are expected to get underway in the second half of the year, benefiting 24 thousand families.

The plan is to spend US$ 118.2 million (313.5 million reais). Through this effort the program will expand to reach 400 thousand people who live in 119 shantytowns in 25 Brazilian states.

Since 2003, resources from the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) have financed investments of US$ 222 million (R$ 589 million) in the program.

According to the director of the Department of Urbanization and Precarious Settlements in the National Secretariat of Housing, Inês Magalhães, besides bettering the infrastructure, the project intends to encourage social mobilization.

She affirmed that through the program it is hoped that families will achieve emancipation, through the generation of jobs and income, community organization, and environmental sanitary education.

Urban Growth

82% of the Brazilian population currently lives in cities. Urbanization has picked up in the country over the last 50 years – up to the middle of the past century, the majority of the population resided in rural areas.

The urbanization process in Brazil was rapid and chaotic, and, nowadays, a third of the country’s population is concentrated in only nine metropolitan regions, while only 20% of the population occupies the great majority (72%) of the country’s more than 5 thousand municipalities.

This uncontrolled urban growth has caused problems, such as the lack of housing, transportation, and sanitation. To face the problem the federal government created, October 2003, the National Council of Cities, with representatives of society and municipal and state governments. The goal is to give these segments greater participation in the formulation and implantation of government policies.

The council is be made up, principally, of representatives of all social segments present in the cities, such as popular movements and representative entities of workers, businessmen, and public and private concessionaries, according to the Ministry of Cities.

Housing

The shortage of housing in the Brazil amounts, currently, to 6 million dwellings. In just 10 years, between 1980 and 1990, the number of people living in shantytowns all over Brazil more than doubled, from 2.2 million to 5 million. Currently, 98% of the cities with over 500 thousand inhabitants have shantytowns.

Areas of risk – trashfills, watersheds, hillsides (which can topple), and riversides (which can flood) – end up providing alternatives to the lack of housing.

Over the past 15 years, over 1.3 thousand people have died in 45 Brazilian cities alone as a result of landslides during rainy periods, according to data from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).

Another consequence of the housing shortage is the illegal occupation of public and private land. Most land developments are occupied by low-income residents, but, in recent years, irregular condominiums for the wealthy reveal the other facet of the absence of control over public land.

Sanitation

Approximately 60 million Brazilians do not have access to sewage removal services. Around 15 million people also lack treated, piped water, and another 16 million do not have garbage collection.

The treatment of wastes is precarious, doing damage to the environment and to the health of the population. According to data from the Ministry of Cities, nearly 75% of sewage in Brazil is released into rivers and on beaches without any treatment.

The treatment of garbage also represents a challenge to urban planners. Around 64% of the municipalities deposit garbage in open-air dumps, and many municipalities have no urban sanitation service at all.

Transportation

The lack of efficient public transportation has led to an increase in the number of private vehicles and irregular means of transportation, especially in the big cities. As a result, urban centers are facing growing problems of traffic congestion. Besides increasing the time spent on travel, this adds to pollution.

The great concentration of vehicles and the lack of investment in infrastructure, road maintenance, supervision, and educational campaigns are the chief causes of traffic accidents.

According to a survey done by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea), over 20 thousand people were killed in traffic accidents in 2001. Of Brazil’s more than five thousand municipalities, fewer than 10% have departments to supervise traffic.

Agência Brasil

It’s midmorning in Morrinho. Three figures peer down from a concrete rooftop at the favela’s entrance; one babbles into a walky-talky; either side stand men with rifles strung across their chests, all three wearing flip-flops. None is older than 20.

Morrinho, a sprawling complex of 15 favelas in Rio’s south zone, has been at war since 1998. Soldiers armed with AK-47s and AR-15s stalk its alleys; lookouts scan the urban landscape, waiting for the next invasion.

A police Special Forces truck rattles past on the motorway – BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Especiais – Special Operation Batallion), its feared and detested initial, painted onto the side alongside the image of a skull.

“You get it all here,” says filmmaker, Fábio Gavião who has worked in Morrinho since 2001. “Corruption, police violence. There was even an evangelical pastor killed here recently – he talked too much.”

Morrinho is typical of many Rio favelas. Split between three warring drug factions, its streets are a Far West in the south of Rio. At the entrance to one community, local graffiti artists capture the mood with a single phrase: “Colombia style.”

But Morrinho is no ordinary slum. For a start the houses around here are smaller than most. A three-story shack, for example, measures no more than 10 inches. The average Morrinho dweller is little over three centimetres tall, and made of plastic.

Morrinho (literally ‘little hill’ or ‘favela’) is Rio’s answer to Lego Land. The miniature city was founded in 1998 by a group of local boys and is located in Pereirão, a favela perched high above the upper class Laranjeiras neighbourhood.

“Before there was pretty much nothing to do around here,” remembers Paulo Vitor, 17, one of Morrinho’s founders. “So a few of the guys came up with the idea of turning the land here into somewhere we could play.”

The miniature city, made from a mixture of bricks and Lego, sprung up on what was once a rubbish dump, used by some of Pereirão’s 3,000 residents. It began as just one favela – Cidade de Deus, or City of God, the Rio slum made famous by Fernando Mereilles’ blockbuster film.

Like the real life Cidade de Deus, whose population continues to be bolstered by immigrants from the northeast, Morrinho quickly grew.

Swiping bricks from construction sites and recycling rubbish, the boys added a further 14 communities to the Morrinho complex.

A donation was even made by Pereirão’s then drug lord, who was apparently impressed by the kids work.

Fame only came to Morrinho in 2001 when a local social worker took filmmaker Fábio Gavião on a tour of the area. Gavião put together a documentary and word quickly spread.

As the favelinha’s reputation grew, visitors started to roll up in Pereirão from as far a field as Venezuela and Italy.

In 2003 Morrinho’s juvenile governors were invited to exhibit their work in a nearby museum – Santa Teresa’s Parque das Ruínas.

Rapper Gabriel, O Pensador and singer Fernanda Abreu have even recorded clips amongst Morrinho’s brick patchwork.

To its creators Morrinho’s is far from being a film set. In fact the muddy slopes are the setting for an ongoing role-playing game (RPG) in which Rio’s notorious drug wars are acted out on a daily basis.

Each participant controls a different favela, and is responsible for that community’s drug trade. It is a kind of South American Monopoly in which the players are cocaine barons not estate agents.

“For four rocks of weed you pay 100 reais,” explains Paulo Vitor, who administers the Formiga favela – in reality one of Rio’s most notorious. “And Coke is 100 reais for three rocks,” he adds, picking up a handful of chalk, used to represent cocaine in the Morrinho.
 
In the fantasy world of Morrinho it’s not a question of not passing ‘Go’ and failing to pick up your $200, but a question of life or death.

“It’s so real that you’ll even find couples getting it on in the motel,” says Gavião.

“When I asked the kids if the models used condoms, they laughed. ‘They’re already made of plastic,’ they said.”

Morrinho is so true-to-life in fact that the police tried to destroy it – mistaking it for a war plan.

“The police told us to take it down,” explains Paulo Vitor. “They thought it was a model being used by the traffickers to plan invasions of other morros (slums).

Fortunately some of them liked it and came here taking photographs. They convinced the others that it was just kids’ stuff.”

Kids stuff it may be, but Morrinho paints a brutal, and very real, portrait of twenty-first century Rio de Janeiro.

“A few weeks before the Tim Lopes murder one of the kids acted out a virtually identical scene here,” remembers Gavião.

In 2002, Lopes was executed in horrific fashion after traffickers caught him filming undercover at a baile funk (funk music ball) in Rio’s Complexo do Alemão.

Having been quartered with a samurai sword, his body was burnt in a so-called micro-onda (microwave) – a makeshift crematorium of car tyres often used to dispose of enemies.

As Gavião puts it: “There are no superheroes here. Here they only represent reality.”

Paradoxically, given the make-believe violence acted out here, Pereirão is one of Rio’s calmest favelas. Its last dono (drug lord), known as ‘Portuguese’, was killed during a police invasion five years ago.

Since then, Pereirão has transformed from a community controlled by the Comando Vermelho (Red Command) drug faction to what Cariocas (Rio residents) refer to as a ‘Comando Azul’ (Blue Command) one – in which police and not traffickers rule the roost.

“Pereirão is tranquillity incarnate. Total Peace,” says Gavião, in between phone calls preparing for the following day’s baile funk, organized on a concrete court at the foot of the community.

“Back in 1998 it was barra pesada (heavy shit), absolute war,” explains Paulo Vitor, whose grandparents arrived in the community over 50 years ago. “But this is all part of the past.”

“Every now and again the police come in here on training exercises, all dressed up in green and with helmets on, but it’s pretty peaceful.”

The sound of car engines below is barely audible and only the occasional plane coming into land at the Santos Dumont airport breaks the silence.

Unlike in the surrounding favelas of Fogueteira, Querosene and Prazeres, it is blood hungry mosquitoes – not drug traffickers – that pose the greatest threat in Pereirão.

Yet Pereirão suffers from other problems common to the poorer parts of Brazilian society.

Though an incongruous block of new houses built by the government’s Favela-Bairro project crown the favela, unemployment here remains as high as schooling levels are low.

The only politician Paulo remembers seeing in the community is Benedita da Silva, a favela resident turned governor of Rio, who was for a time in President Lula’s cabinet, before engulfing herself in a scandal involving use of public money.

“But she doesn’t count,” he explains from the top of the hill, beneath which Rio’s spectacular landscape spreads out before the eye. “She’s got some family who live down at the bottom.”
 
Life like in almost every other way, Morrinho’s local government is apparently not much cop either.

“More or less,” sighs Paulo, when asked how impressed he is by Morrinho’s make-believe prefeitura (City Hall).

Behind him at the entrance to Morrinho a quote from Bob Marley, has been scrawled onto a plaque, welcoming visitors to the embattled community. “My music is in favour of justice and against the set of rules that day a man’s colour should decide his fate.”

Tom Phillips is a British freelance journalist who has lived in Brazil for two years. He writes for the Independent and the Sunday Herald and has had his work published in newspapers around the world. You can contact him on: atphillips@gmail.com