When I told Brazilian friends I was planning to research the microenterprises in the favelas, they all gave me the same advice: don't do it. It’s not safe, day or night, to go into the higgledy hilltop settlements made up of homemade houses, forming their own separate and unregulated cities. They’re a place of poverty, misery and murder. Even Google omitted these vast communities from its maps. But the problem with relying on these kinds of views was that none of them had actually been into a favela themselves. It was all perception based on mainstream media reports. So I went to Rocinha (which translates as ‘Little Farm’), the biggest and most famous of the favelas, stretching up a steep hill to the south of the centre of Rio de Janeiro. More than 200,000 people are believed to be living there, with those who do earn any money are thought to be living on just $2 a day. I made sure I didn’t go at night, and didn’t just wander. I was always on my way to somewhere in particular, to an arranged appointment with a member of the community. First referred to in formal Building Law in 1937 as “illegal constructions”, the Rio favelas grew rapidly in the 1970s as people from poorer, rural areas of the country moved into the cities. Despite their unofficial status and lack of state organisation, all kinds of informal associations have come together over the years, allowing areas to organise access to key services like water and electricity. There are well-organised religious, social and arts groups. But most of all, the biggest organisations are involved with drug trafficking, run by what are known as the comandos. In theory the favelas have been under the control of ‘Pacifying Police Units’, first introduced at the time of the 2014 World Cup (but since my research was carried out, have become practically non-existent), rather than any local government. But this was more a case of occasional raids and interventions rather than constant patrols, and inhabitants of the favelas associate the police mostly with bringing violence and prejudice. You know when a confrontation between Special Operation Battalion police and drug gangs are going to happen, with the possibility of gun battles, because the drug gangs will set off fireworks as a warning. The problems with sanitation, pollution and poor diets mean that mortality rates are high; even without the regular gang shootings. Despite this extreme context, people were making money. Not by going into the city centre – which is really another universe to a favela, home to the super wealthy and a large proportion of affluent middle class families – but using their own wits and networks of people. In my first visits I wasn’t sure what to expect, and went without any preconceptions about how enterprises were being formed and run. I ended up spending a number of weeks of my visits into Rocinha getting to know fascinating entrepreneurs and being referred on to other people, learning about their lives and how they manage to keep going, and the research snowballed. 6 |
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