Dictatorship: The Struggle Between Eviction And Racism

The police in Rio de Janeiro regularly takes bribes from drug lords, abuses favela citizens, and sells back drugs and firearms to the drug trade. Because of this, the favela becomes scared of the police, which can make some places dangerous to be at which can make it easier for people to be killed.

In conclusion, reading about Carolina’s life has had a huge impact on my learnings of Brazil. While reading this book, I was able to reflect on what we learned and discussed about life in the favelas in class. When I hear of Brazil, I always hear of the wealthy places, pretty women and beautiful sites to visit. However, the favelas and life of the poor people living in Brazil is rarely mentioned and talked about. Reading Carolina’s diary gave me a different image of the country and showed Brazil in another light. Carolina’s diary gave me more insight on what the daily life of a favelado is like and what people who live in the favelas experience on a daily

Thousands of tiny, cliffside houses surround the city, climbing up into the verdant hills, packed together like brightly colored sardines. These are the favelas, home to hundreds of thousands of the poorest people in Brazil. Many of Rio’s favelas remain dangerous and unstable, but in the past several years the Brazilian government has begun a movement of pacification. Where once police would simply invade, battle a gang and withdraw, they are now permanently stationed to ensure the safety of neighborhood residents. This safety, however, brings with it a new kind of danger: as the favelas are pacified and begin to develop,

It is impossible to think of the modern history of Colombia without images of drug warlords, impoverished citizens, and corruption coming to mind. The history of Medellin, Colombia perfectly embodies this narrative. Once known as the “City of Everlasting Spring” due to its beautiful climate and landscape, Medellin was plunged into decades of terror in the 1980s when Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel rose to power. As Escobar led his campaign of violence and narco-trafficking, recruiting an army of adolescent assassins, Medellin became the most violent city in the world, with nearly 400 homicides per 100,000 people in the early 1990s. Impoverished children in the barrios of Medellin found themselves forced into lives of crime. Even the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993, while symbolic, did little to slow the tide of war, as the pendulum was already set in motion. When one criminal organization fell, another rose to take its place. As recently as 2002 the government was forced to deploy helicopter gunships and soldiers in the barrios in an effort to regain some semblance of control. “To put it in a word: fear. Medellin was living in fear”. Sergio Fajardo, mayor of Medellin from 2004-2007, faced the daunting task of revitalizing Medellin. Fajardo conquered endemic violence, corruption, and inequality through extensive planning and the execution of a strategy known as “urban acupuncture”, where he targeted critical areas of the city with architectural projects that serve

Guerilla warfare and drug gangs in the “favelas of Brazil” pushed many families to emigrate to the United States and Canada; separating families (“Latin America” 3). The people of Latin America love pursuing human contact, so those families that did stay found themselves in the cites. That is because opportunity lied in the city, and no longer on the country-side; therefore, leading to a constant flow of people from rural to urban areas. The author says, “In Latin America, urban culture was not created by industrial growth; it predated it” (“Latin America” 4).

The following offers an analysis of both sides of this subject as well as an analysis of how this issue affects Brazilian society.

The first of these three is the government’s indifference to what is happening. The governments of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro don’t care about what happens in the favelas as long as the gangs pay them and give them their support. This allows the gangs to have even more power in the favelas. They tell the residents of their favela who to vote for and the residents have no option but to vote how they are told or risk being beaten or killed by the gang. The second of these ingredients is that the police do not provide protection for those residents of the favelas because they cannot protect them. In fact, in 1985 Leonel Brizola, the state governor, forbade the police from entering a favela (175). When the police finally started to enter the favelas again, the gangs had become well-organized and a lot harder to fight as the topography of favelas makes them by nature very easy to defend. The final of these three ‘ingredients’ is that the police are underpaid, understaffed and left unaccountable for their actions. The fact that the police are underpaid makes them easily corruptible. Being understaffed the police means that they have a hard time fighting the drug lords that rule their region. Lastly being unaccountable for their actions allows the police to kill and torture residents of the favelas with impunity from the law. They don’t know the

Brazil is currently undergoing a large wave of gang-related criminal activity that has resulted in backlash towards the police for their inadequate response. Rohter from the New York Times described how the prison gang, First Capital Command, has escalated their crimes to terrorize law enforcement. This pressure has caused the Brazilian national government to act by moving the gang members to maximum security prisons hundreds of miles away from the capital. The decision to separate the members motivated the street affiliated members to increase terror on law enforcement. It was not until the government officials met with the gang leader, Mr. Camacho, to negotiate a peace offering, that the gang called a cease-fire on government officials. To

Starting in 1501, white Portuguese men enslaved over five million Africans and brought them back to Brazil to work on sugar plantations, creating a power dynamic that has lasted for centuries. After nearly four hundred years of slavery, freed black men and women were left with no education, place to live, or family, placing them at an economic disadvantage from the beginning. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following emancipation, white men began to procreate with indigenous and African women, creating a mixed or mulatto race, which led to the false identification of Brazil as a country with a “racial democracy.” However, darker-skinned individuals still remained at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, facing systems of social, economic, and educational discrimination. The racial inequalities, products of historical legacy, have resulted in a society that has severe racial stratifications and continues to subject Afro-Brazilians to prejudice, poverty, and police brutality. Although racial discrimination in contemporary Brazilian society is pervasive, particularly noticeable in the lack of economic and social mobility, discrimination is not a new phenomenon in Brazil, but rather the culmination of 500 years of historical inequities rooted in slavery, eugenics, immigration policy, the process of miscegenation, and the myth of racial “democracy”.

In conclusion, statistics show that the majority of those living in poverty in Brazil are of African and mulatto descent and, correspondingly, the course readings give a clear understanding that, not only are black and mixed-race Brazilians lacking access to basic necessities such as medical care, they are also discriminated against socially and economically. Classism and racism go hand-in-hand and therefore in a classist society there can be no racial

The article talks about the life inside these favelas. For tourists, these slums may be seen as a place of unique interest, but to the Brazilian people, these slums are the most dangerous places in the country. But the question arises that why can 't the government do anything about these slums. The article describes that these favelas are so dangerous that even the Brazilian armed police are often scared to launch any

Most obviously, Tarsila spotlights the black and brown skin tones of Carnaval em Madureira’s figures to say that positive emotions exist in Brazilian communities of color. Many viewers might be predisposed to assume that favela neighborhoods are frustrating places to live, with high unemployment and brutal racial profiling of local residents by military police. However, Carnaval’s figures work together on daily activities with heads held high and not a frown in sight. As Fatima Brecht claims, Tarsila has “figures of humans...inhabit th[is] scene…[to] express...Afro-Brazilian vernacular culture” to viewers. With this painting’s vibrantly colored skin tones and active bodies, Tarsila shows that favela residents might feel proud to live in this working-class area. Furthermore, the piece lacks harsh negative “social criticism” towards the aforementioned favela inequalities. Here, Tarsila tells foreign viewers that Brazilian people of color should not be stereotyped as

Brazil and Rio in particular, experiences pervasive and institutionalized forms of violence: police corruption, gang warfare, and military brutality. Despite its rich natural resources and tourism developing in recent years, Brazil represents one of the most economically divided countries in the world; a very small wealthy class exists above the majority - poor and underclass so that the social status has more to do with wealth than with colour. Brazil’s contemporary national cinema “reveal[s] a continuity of concerns with local themes, stories and traditions, including a recurrent focus on emblematic spaces of national identity such as the impoverished sertão and the favelas (Heise 63).” As Teresa Caldeira notes, ‘democratic’ Brazil is known for its high level of tolerance for police abuses (Caldeira 235).

From the formation of these slums, the government never paid much attention to the welfare of these residents. The members of these favelas began to work together to provide medical care, methods of transportation and other necessities to one another. They lived in silence in the first half of the twentieth century until they began to attract political attention near the second half of the twentieth century. Due to the favelas being located near Rio’s most affluent neighborhoods, the Brazilian government attempted to eradicate the favelas. However, they failed to address the root causes of Rio’s poverty-stricken areas and the favela population maintained their expansion unwaveringly through the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. The government lost hope in the evacuation of the favelas and abandoned their endeavor in the late 1970s.

Rio de Janeiro is a seaside city in Brazil. It is the second largest city in Brazil and third largest metropolis in all of South America (Encyclopedia). Rio de Janeiro is widely known for their favelas, which are the slums in Brazil within its urban areas. Favelas were created at the end of the nineteenth century, when Brazil was transitioning from a monarchy to a republic (Brown University). By the 1920s, the city had become an important industrial center with a population exceeding one million people (Advameg Inc.). By the 1940s, the population of Rio had nearly grown to two million people and the government could no longer control urban growth, as skyscrapers and large apartment buildings were eradicated replacing the older, smaller community