Misdirected Blame for Violence in Favela Tourism

Both Erik and I have made my opinions on favela-tourism clear before, and like Randy, I fully believe that this is still exploitive. But two comments on this story. First, the fact that tourists' lives are suddenly in danger because they are meeting armed narcotraficantes face-to-face is absurd. Quite honestly, if there is any danger (and there probably is - tourists don't know when rival gangs or the police are going to invade a favela, resulting in a gun-battle), tourists have been exposed to it for years. When I first went to Brazil in 2005, some British tourists were telling me how they did this favela tour, and saw three kids walking by with M-16s, and their tour-guide said that they were all under 20, and that one of them was one of the top men in the drug gang, had already killed over 20 people, and was still a teenager. So any notion that there is a new element of danger simply because now tourists can meet these people face to face is ridiculous. The danger's always been there.

Secondly, while I again think the whole practice of favela tourism is disgusting and exploitative, the company owner is right on this:

The tour company has been accused of glamorising criminal activity.
But the unrepentant owner of the agency involved says the presence of armed men in the favelas is the fault of the authorities, and they should clean up their own act before starting to criticise him.

He's unfortunately right - he's neither responsible for the presence of armed men, nor is he guilty of glorifying the drug trade in the favelas. Until the police actually do something productive to combat the drug industry in the favelas (and there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of ways the police could improve here), and until the state actually makes a strong effort to help the poor who live in the favelas (with Sao Paulo offering a good model on how to do this), problems like poverty, gang warfare, and police and drug lords killing innocent people will not go away, and any attempt to force a tourism company to stop these tours in the hopes it reduces violence is blind and only further denies the true social problems at hand.

Sickening Tourism

I am totally disgusted by the idea of favela tourism. Having spent some time in Rio recently, Mr. Trend talked to me about tourists (mostly Europeans) who come to Rio and take a day trip to a favela so "they can know what it's really like." Now, while I think people do need to understand world poverty, this is not the way to do it. Hey!--Let's go spend a night at the bed and breakfast in the favela. Maybe we'll hear some gunshots! Wouldn't that be romantic! Even better, maybe we can score some cheap drugs while we're there!!!

I will give Europeans as a whole a bit of credit in that, as a broad generalization, they seem to know more about the places they are traveling in than Americans. But playing tourism to watch the misery of others is wrong, wrong, wrong.

God knows Brazil has it's problems. Class and racial prejudice are two big ones, and they feed into the divide between the favelas and the rest of Rio. But I'm not sure how this is helping in the least. Rather, these tourists are turning poverty into playtime. New forms of colonialism/imperialism are created every day.