Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [75]
Many favela residents are from the Nordeste. Dejacir Alves, whom I met on a stairway in the favela Do Morro dos Cabritos, is typical. He migrated to Rio from Varjota, up in Ceará. “I came here to work, about twenty years ago. My family was in farming. We have a big family, but only two of us still work the land. They do subsistence farming. It is very hard to survive there, and now it is getting harder; there is so much drought there.”
Alves has done “all sorts of work” in Rio—construction, services, taking tickets on a bus. Talking on this concrete-covered hillside, inlaid with walled paths and a warren of hand-built homes, he wears flip-flops and a green football shirt; farming and the land seem far away in the past.
In colonial times the Nordeste hosted a coastal plantation economy and cattle industry. Then, droughts in the late 1870s and early 1880s provoked the steady outmigration of the region’s poor. During much of the twentieth century, Brazilian agriculture remained backward and underdeveloped. Unlike many Latin American countries, such as Mexico and Bolivia, Brazil never had a proper bourgeois revolution to check the power of the feudal landed oligarchy and impose land reform. The redistributive programs of the 1930s Estado Novo only affected urban workers and the middle classes.7 The military takeover of 1964 brought a government-led program of rapid modernization in agriculture, but that did not include land redistribution.
To this day, about 3 percent of the population owns about two-thirds of all farmland.8 Agricultural modernization in the form of the Green Revolution and mechanization caused rising rural unemployment, thus a mass outmigration to the cities. By 1972, major crops, like wheat and soybean, were nearly 60 percent mechanized. Displaced rural workers moved to the cities and built the favelas.9 In 1940 only 15 percent of the country’s population lived in cities; by 1970 that ratio had reached 50 percent. 10 Today, over 80 percent of Brazilians live in cities. And now, we see harbingers of a new wave of migration driven by the strange weather of the unraveling climate system.
Repression in the Megaslums
Social pressure in the cities—driven to some extent by socioclimatological crisis in the rural Northeast—is expressed as criminal violence and state repression. After leaving the favelas to fester for decades, the state is moving to retake them. The strategy runs as follows: First, Rio’s military police special forces—known by their Portuguese acronym, BOPE—invade the favelas and suppress the gangs. Then regular military police units establish permanent bases and begin patrols. Once an area is secured, government services—such as health care, education, cultural facilities, and civil courts—move in. Or that is the plan. They call it pacification; it is classic counterinsurgency except the enemy is a specter, an amorphous threat, a milieu of crime, gangs, and chaos rather than a coherent insurgent foe.
When I was in Rio in early 2010, about ten of the city’s roughly one thousand favelas were undergoing pacification. The people of the favelas were of a mixed mind about the occupations. The gangs, however, were not pleased, and they were taking revenge on the larger society by firebombing commuter buses down “on the pavement,” as nonfavela Rio is called. “Whoever has the guns is the law,” explained Claudio Carvalha, president of the resident association in Do Morro dos Cabritos. For years this favela was subject to a constant struggle between the CV and a rival gang, Amigos dos Amigos (Friends of Friends).
“When one of theirs was wounded, they would dump the guy—bleeding, half dead—at the association, and we were expected to take them