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By Root 1585 0

Marta and delivered a speech declaring it his test-bed for favela transformation: “We are working in a way that the state is present in the day-to-day life of poor people … In the past it was only the police intervening with lots of brutality … [now] we have the biggest investment program of shanty-town urbanization, basic sanitation and house building that Brazil has ever had.”22 The president opened a funicular railway providing transportation to the top of the favela, a modern daycare facility, a technical college providing training in job skills, a lighted football pitch at the top of the mountain (the first recreational program the slum had ever seen). Government workers installed a street-lighting system, a WiFi network, and a garbage-collection system and began a large-scale program to rebuild all the houses in solid brick designs with proper sanitation and mudslide-proof foundations. The police force, rather than raiding and leaving, set up a fortress at the top of the hill and moved in permanently, practicing something they called “community-based policing,” albeit a version that involved assault rifles and full body armor. All at once, in a community that had never seen any face of government except in the form of police raids, the physical benefits of the state were delivered. This is the sort of program that Kenya’s government couldn’t afford to attempt in the Kibera slum: It upgrades all the slum homes, and the infrastructure around them, to developed-world standards, without moving anyone out.

Less visible but more significant were changes imposed on the fabric of Santa Marta in early 2009. In effect, this was a shock-and-awe effort by Lula’s government to do in a few months what functioning arrival cities accomplish over decades: a full integration into the life of the city. First, a crew of statisticians and cartographers moved into the slum, setting up shop in the new training college at the base of the mountain. They conducted a detailed census and made a map showing each property, its physical condition, and its needs. Then Santa Marta residents were given two things they had never possessed before: a birth certificate and a street address. Together, these made them official citizens, able to receive benefits and work in the legitimate economy, and also to pay taxes and electrical bills (both were the subject of shocked complaints from favela residents, who had never paid for such things, and in some cases could not afford them). A high wall was built on the far side of the favela, to delineate its existing boundary and provide clear property-ownership deeds to those who lived there.‖ The labor secretariat set up an office that linked favela residents with factories and businesses in Rio looking for work. “Mainly what we’re doing here is building trust in the state,” says Vera Lucia Nascimento, the project’s chief social worker. “People had only ever worked informally, selling whatever they could on the streets and throwing their garbage out the window. We’ve had to come in and give them ways to be real, formal citizens and organize their lives. With real ID and addresses, so much more is possible. Without that, the only way the state is represented in the favela is through police raids. Now it’s all about education, small business, jobs. They come to feel like part of the city.”

Among the residents here, there is great fear and suspicion of the new government presence: fear, mainly, that they’ll be gone in a few months and the Red Command will move back in. But there is also a palpable pride—in a community that previously had invested whatever small scrap of pride it could muster in its flamboyant and funky contribution to Carnival. Devanil no longer talks gloomily about a future as a traficante; rather, he boasts that his mother “works for the training college at the bottom of the hill.” She has a job cleaning floors at the center, but mere presence in this building is a badge of legitimacy and a foothold in the broader city, which the people of Santa Marta have spent two decades struggling to gain.