Favelas, Landslides, Traffic: More Consequences of Brazil's Social Inequalities

Before I came to Brazil, my wife would comment on how hard it rained here and how flooded the streets would get, but I had started to believe she had exaggerated. It had rained here since I got here, and it had rained hard, but I'd never seen anything of the Biblical proportions that she would describe to me.

However, that rain happened last week. In the course of about 3 hours, parts of Rio saw 4 inches of rain. Streets were so flooded that the water came up to the bumpers (and over them) of cars in some parts of Rio. The three-lane road I live on became a one-lane road, as cars could not safely drive in either the left nor right lanes due to the flooding. And, in the biggest mess, there was a giant landslide that blocked off the Rebouças Tunnel (a nearly mile-and-a-half long tunnel), which goes right under Corcovado (the mountain with Jesus on it), and is one of the major north-south arteries in Rio, closing the tunnel for over a week and resulting in the kind of traffic jams and packed subways I've never seen in my life (one day, traffic was backed up for at least 8 miles along multiple roads.

Rebouças has since reopened, but the problem of landslides continues. Not only did Rio's right-wing mayor, César Maia, apparently stop 64% of the land-containment projects that would stop such landslides. However, there has also been a consideration of how urban growth has factored into the risk of landslides here. As is known, Rio's favelas have spread out along the mountains of the cities, where the high-rises of the wealthier cannot be reasonably built. The problem is real enough that even O Globo (the largest media conglomerate of Brazil and the bastion of right-wing middle- and upper-class ideology) deigned to write about the favelas beyond the simple narrative of drug "wars". However, the approach is not surprising. The article frames the question simply - the growing number of favelas can, is, and will continue to affect the way the environment is impacted (though the point is in no way stressed in environmental terms) and will result in future landslides like the one that slowed the city down for 10 days.

Of course, this ignores the larger issue at hand: why the favelas are growing. It's no secret that the wage gap in Brazil is one of the worst in the world (regardless of how you're measuring, it falls in the top 3 worldwide, and often is number one). It's also no secret that, since the 1950s, the rural-urban exodus has been massive (going from 30-70% urban rural to 70-30%). With the wealth increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, not just urban but rural as well, the rural poor have been forced to move to the urban centers to try to survive. However, the options in these urban centers (particularly Rio and São Paulo) are not great, based on existing classist and racist structures (while it's not universal, let's not forget that, in Brazil, oftentimes the poorer you are, the "browner" or even black you are). Thus, the poor, over the last 50 years, have increasingly become poorer, and have increasingly concentrated in urban centers.

(And, while it's tangential to my concerns here, let's not forget the impact this growth has environmentally. Not only do many of these favelas lack basic sanitary services. They build upon mountains, resulting in deforestation on the micro-level, which in turn not only can lead to more landslides but also damages the very delicate balance of the gradually-recovering Atlantic rainforest, which even exists here in Rio, where the Tijuca forest is the world's largest urban forest. Thus, these are not strictly economic and social problems; their environmental impact is longterm and damaging as well).

And yet this kind of consideration of the basic economic structures and inequalities in Brazil are not emphasized or investigated, in the media or by society at large. The growing favelas are not a symptom of the economic and social problems facing Brazil; they are a cause of transit problems in Rio. I know I've hit on this repeatedly, but it's worth emphasizing once again, and this article sheds light on yet another example of Brazil's refusal to ask questions and deeply consider the problems of poverty, race, and class here. But, as much as the media, the middle class, and the elites, here in Rio and elsewhere, may want to ignore it, the simple truth remains that, until society can try to reduce the wage gap and offer humane conditions to all of its citizens, these (relatively minor yet scandalous to the wealthy) transit problems will never go away.