Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [74]
Roughly the size of New York, Rio has a murder rate six times higher. In 2009 about five thousand people were slain here. The police enter the favelas only for short and brutal raids—arriving at night in armed columns to ransack, torture, and kill. In most slums, they have not established police stations. According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, the Rio constabulary kills more than eleven hundred people every year. Only four Rio police officers have been convicted of abuses in the past decade. But Rio’s cops face other risks: almost ninety died in the line of duty in 2009.
If that weren’t enough, now a third source feeds the violence: off-duty police, firefighters, and prison guards have formed militias to check the gangs. These vigilantes can be just as criminal as their enemies. In 2008 such militias even tortured journalists from the city’s biggest newspaper. The situation increasingly looks like a low-intensity war.
Catastrophic Convergence Urbanized
Why are there so many people in Rio? Why is it so violent? And what will climate change do to places like Rio? I decided to explore this megacity because it reveals how climate crisis in the countryside is expressed as urban violence. One of the most dramatic transformations of the last fifty years has been our planet’s rapid urbanization. The process continues, and climate change is now helping to fuel migration from the countryside to the city. Rio allows us to forecast political issues linked to climate change because, in many ways, it is a city produced by extreme weather elsewhere. A brutal rhythm of drought and flooding hundreds of miles away in Brazil’s arid Northeast, or Nordeste, has fueled Rio’s growth. As weather patterns grow more chaotic and extreme due to global warming, outmigration from the countryside will increase.
Already disruptions in the patterns of the Intertropical Convergence Zone are leading to new weather shocks—prolonged drought punctuated by violent flooding—that are making subsistence farming in the Nordeste even more difficult. Displaced farmers of that region—internal climate refugees—make their way south to the megacities like Rio and São Paulo. There, they become trapped in the favelas, and many of the youth are pulled into the vortex of the sub-rosa economy, that carnival of guns, drugs, money, sex, music, solidarity, and respect. Thus, by displacing people into the favelas, the extreme weather associated with climate change fuels Rio’s crime wars.
Rio, too, faces extreme weather. Just after I visited, a freak storm dropped eleven inches of rain on the city in about twenty-four hours—the worst downpour in its recorded history. The streets flooded with sewage, traffic seized up into daylong jams, slabs of shantytowns slipped away down hillsides, and more that one hundred people died. In January, São Paulo had seen similar weather; two rivers broke their banks, thousands were temporarily homeless, and sixty-four people drowned.4 But the real front line of climate change in Brazil is the dry Nordeste.
New Climatic Normal
Since the 1970s the Nordeste has suffered increased drought; now, it is also regularly hit by flash floods. The summer of 2010 saw devastating floods, as had the year before. They killed almost 50 people, made 120,000 homeless, wiped out 1,200 miles of roads, and destroyed at least 80 bridges. The crisis was bad enough for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to skip a G20 conference.5
This new normal of flooding, drought, and freak storms forms part of a larger pattern of extreme weather that scientists say is the product of anthropogenic climate change and predict will hit northeastern Brazil very hard. Though they are careful to point out that no single weather event can be definitively blamed on climate change, the larger pattern, on the other hand, can be. Consider the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report: “Over the past three decades, Latin America has been subjected to climate-related impacts of increased El