Brazil slum housing needs lcoal solutions and long-term renovation

Demostenes Moraes, Katerina Bezgachina – The Guardian, 01/03/2013

In October 2012 citizens across Brazil followed the news as police officers, backed by armoured cars and helicopters, moved to take control of two Rio de Janeiro slums notorious for drug crime. These raids were part of a policy known as “pacification”, designed to help state authorities gain a greater presence in the country’s shantytowns. At the same time, Brazil has been trying to clean up its most dangerous regions ahead of the 2014 football World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games.

It’s no secret that slums and informal settlements are one of the biggest global housing problems and as the rate of urbanisation continues to rise we will face even bigger challenges in our largest cities. Recent surveys ranked São Paulo as the 10th most expensive city in the world, with Rio de Janeiro in 12th position. At the same time, Brazil has up to 8 million fewer residential properties than it needs, with the poorest communities feeling the impact of this housing deficit.

It is estimated that more than 50 million Brazilians live in inadequate housing. Most of these families have an income below the minimum wage of R$675 (about US$330) a month. Roughly 26 million people living in urban areas lack access to potable water, 14 million have no refuse collection service and 83 million are not connected to sewerage systems.

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Brazil gang’s slaughter of police sparks fightback

Shasta Darlington – CNN, 11/25/2012

Marta Umbelina pulled up in front of her house with her 11-year-old daughter. When she stepped out of the car, she was shot 10 times in the back.

Umbelina was an office worker at Sao Paulo’s Military Police Northern Command — and she is one of nearly 100 cops murdered in Sao Paulo this year, roughly 50 percent higher than 2011.

Most were ambushed while off duty, part of a deadly battle between police and Brazil’s biggest criminal gang, the First Command of the Capital or PCC by its Portuguese acronym.

“Marta was my friend, my colleague, she knew everything about me,” said Simone Mello, a police officer who worked with Marta at a desk job.

“Why her? Why Marta? We’re just very sad,” she said.

In a bid to rein in the PCC, Sao Paulo launched Operation Saturation at the end of October.

The government sent at least 500 police troops into the city’s biggest shantytown Paraisopolis, or Paradise City.

They arrested dozens of alleged gang leaders, confiscated arms and drugs and even found a list with the names and addresses of 40 military police on it.

But police aren’t the only casualties in this escalating war.

The number of homicides in Sao Paulo has jumped to almost 1,000 so far this year, largely concentrated in favelas or slums. For January to October 2011 there were 869 homicides, according to Sao Paulo government figures.

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Mean streets, revisited

The Economist, 11/17/2012

BETWEEN 1999 and 2011 São Paulo’s murder rate fell by almost three-quarters, turning what had been one of Brazil’s most dangerous states into one of its safest. Now the violence is rising again. In the past two months more than 300 people have died in the state capital in an undeclared war between police and the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), a drugs gang, twice the tally for the same period last year. More than 90 police officers have been slain since January; the total for 2011 was 56. This year looks certain to close with the state murder rate back at over ten per 100,000 residents: epidemic level.

At first the state government claimed the rise in killings was a blip. It refused to mention the PCC, apparently for fear of glamorising it or causing panic. That made it look complacent. In October the federal justice minister said he had offered São Paulo reinforcements, but been refused. They were not needed, huffed Antonio Ferreira Pinto, the state’s prickly security secretary. His federal counterpart, Regina Miki, suggested that São Paulo should learn from Rio de Janeiro, which uses federal forces to expel gangsters from its lawless favelas (though Rio’s murder rate remains double São Paulo’s).

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Threat of new police, gang war loom over Sao Paulo after informal truce appears to collapse

Bradley Brooks – Associated Press/The Republic, 11/15/2012

A tenuous six-year truce between police and gang members is over in Sao Paulo — that much seems clear to shopkeeper Vanuza Alves da Silva, who has seen a surge in killings in her slum neighborhood.

Seven people were killed in a single night last week in Silva’s Vila Brasilandia shantytown, including a police officer. Days later, gunmen shot up a bar, killing a 13-year-old boy and three adults.

Blood isn’t flowing just in her slum. Sao Paulo, which is to host the World Cup opening match in 2014, has seen nearly 150 homicides over the past two weeks and 94 police executed this year.

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Drug dealers say no to crack in Rio

Juliana Barbassa – Associated Press, 8/18/2012

Business was brisk in the Mandela shantytown on a recent night. In the glow of a weak light bulb, customers pawed through packets of powdered cocaine and marijuana priced at $5, $10, $25. Teenage boys with semiautomatic weapons took in money and made change while flirting with girls in belly-baring tops lounging nearby.

Next to them, a gaggle of kids jumped on a trampoline, oblivious to the guns and drug-running that are part of everyday life in this and hundreds of other slums, known as favelas, across this metropolitan area of 12 million people. Conspicuously absent from the scene was crack, the most addictive and destructive drug in the triad that fuels Rio’s lucrative narcotics trade.

Once crack was introduced here about six years ago, Mandela and the surrounding complex of shantytowns became Rio’s main outdoor drug market, a “cracolandia,” or crackland, where users bought the rocks, smoked and lingered until the next hit. Hordes of addicts lived in cardboard shacks and filthy blankets, scrambling for cash and a fix.

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Brazil’s economic slowdown so far leaves many unscathed

Vincent Bevins – Los Angeles Times, 08/13/2012

If the Brazilian economic boom is over, that’s news to Maria da Conceicao Souza, who is standing in the scorching winter sun in Paraisopolis, Sao Paulo’s largest slum.

In the last six months, Souza has been able to set up her own beauty salon in the favela, shortly after bagging her first real job in her 36 years.

Business has been increasing steadily, she says, driven by customers from Brazil’s new middle class, whose rise out of poverty has been one of the most potent symbols of the country’s emergence as an economic power.

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Brazil is stamping out favela violence – now on to trash collection and education

Julia Michaels – Christian Science Monitor,8/1/2012

Ever since pacification began in Rio de Janeiro, in November 2008, we’ve been hearing (and saying) that social needs must also be met. As the number of UPPs, or police pacification units, grow (now at 26, employing 5,000 men and women, with a goal of 40 by 2014), State Public Safety Secretary José Mariano Beltrame – and many others – repeat the mantra about the other side of the coin.

The Social UPP got off to a shaky start, with Governor Sérgio Cabral’s political needs shoving it out of the state nest in December 2010, into the municipal one, under the aegis of the Pereira Passos Institute. From day one however, it’s been run by Ricardo Henriques (who next week hands his post over to former municipal finance secretary Eduarda La Rocque, who is to keep on current director Tiago Borba) and a growing team, in partnership with the United Nations Habitat program.

Centuries of neglect and the mantra repetition have led to the general perception in Rio that police pacification is dangerously outpacing the city’s ability to meet social needs.

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Brazil’s 2016 Olympics could uproot residents of Rio slum

Alex Angert – The Miami Herald, 06/21/2012

RIO DE JANEIRO — It didn’t take Inalva Mendes Brito long to react when she got the word at a meeting in a cramped government office in Rio de Janeiro that the home and neighborhood she’s occupied for 30 years would have to come down to make room for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

“No to Injustice, Yes to Vila Autodromo,” declared a sign she unfurled with her husband.

Brito, a 65-year-old schoolteacher, is among thousands of residents of Vila Autodromo and other neighborhoods who are being asked to sacrifice their homes to accommodate Olympic facilities and infrastructure for the 2016 Games.

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Problems in pacifying Rio de Janeiro slums

Juliana Barbassa – The Miami Herald/AP, 05/01/2012

Jose Martins de Oliveira has lived with plenty of weapons and violence during his 45 years in the sprawling hillside shantytown of Rocinha. For most of that time, it was drug traffickers who controlled the giant slum with brutal force.

Now, it’s the police he’s worried about.

Since November, several police officers sent in to save the neighborhood have been accused of taking bribes. Another was murdered in a shootout. And just last week, three were charged with rape.

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Rio Olympics: rugby reaches Rio’s favelas

BBC, 03/05/2012

When the Olympic Games come to Rio de Janeiro in 2016 two sports will make a comeback after a long absence.

Golf will be appearing for the first time since 1904.

The other newcomer is rugby sevens – the full 15-a-side game last appeared at the Paris Games of 1924. The BBC’s World Olympic Dreams series producer Kevin Bishop was in Rio to find out if the sport is catching on there.

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