Letter
from Lhasa, number 270. Politics of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro. …The Apartheid
Society!
by
Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Perlman, J., Favela. Four Decades of Living on the Edge
in Rio de Janeiro,
Oxford University Press, 2010.
(Perlman 2010).
Janice E. Perlman
This study covers various
decades, from the 1960s until nowadays.
Favela[s] is the Brazilian word
for shantytowns and squatter settlements. Favelas are one of the consequences
of urbanization.
“If urban migrants could not build during the day,
they built at night; if they could not live in legal housing, they invaded
land; if they could not get an apartment permit, they doubled up with relatives
(leading to massive underestimation of the population of Moscow for years); and
if they could not obtain a rice ration, they shared with other families or
became part of the vast ‘floating population’ of Chinese cities.”
(Perlman 2010, p. 44)
Everywhere
in the world, in all times, if people cannot afford or leave in normal housing
they create or use different one. It is a normal, adaptive, behaviour. If exceeding
people cannot be simply eliminated, they integrate in the existing environment
transforming it.
If these new settlements are
not fully and really accepted and regularized, if the existing power prefers
not to really integrate it since other, evil, reasons, they are made to become
a source of all kind of other problems. There are precise policies in this
matters, not only and not overall casual aspects. The same weapons’ and narcotics’
markets are State/government markets and businesses.
Brazil, as the other Latin
American States and societies, are apartheid States and societies. Not only everything
is over-bureaucratized. An additional aspect of this over-bureaucratization is
that vast areas have not an official address. So there are people with no
official address. And without official address they cannot have other documents
necessary for claiming or using various normal rights. Or even if they have an
official address they are discriminated, even if they apply for public
positions, since the area where they live.
There are also other forms
of discrimination in Brazil. However, the first discrimination depends on where
you live. There are areas considered respectable and areas making one not
accepted in the social or in the legal life. Your address may not be considered
valid for receiving bills. Consequently you cannot access certain services. All
societies are in same way apartheid societies. However, in Brazil and Latin
America, that is particularly evident.
It is not a question of the
form of the State, of a specific political order or regime. ‘Regimes’ change,
but the people and their views are always the same.
“While the
redemocratization may have granted the urban poor de jure citizenship, they do not feel that they have de facto citizenship. They remain
pseudocitizens. The majority of our sample—79% percent of original interviewees—said
“the end of the dictatorship had no
significant impact on their lives.”” (Perlman 2010, p. 203)
“Generally,
people felt the most helped and the least harmed by city or state government,
but the majority said that government made no difference in their lives. The
children of the original interviewees were slightly less negative in their
assessments, but even among them, more rated the federal government and
international institutions as harmful rather than helpful.” (Perlman 2010, p. 205)
Not
casually, in Brazil there is not the right not to vote. Brazil is the country
of forms, claimed forms, where actually nothing works. It is a nazi-fascist
country, and remained such, which joined the Allies’ side when and because it
was winning WWII. However it is a kind of 100% underdevelopmental nazi-fascism.
It is
Brazil. It is NOT Germany!
Whatever
you may buy “made in Brazil”, it will break just bought. Such is Brazil.
Protectionism defends a genetic inability to compete and a careful preservation
of its inability to compete. If in the nazist Taiwan, or in the nazi-communist
PRC, one may find a proliferation of schools and libraries, in Brazil one may
find only the arrogance of ignorance. Latin American is everywhere the same and
it is carefully preserved in this way from the [U.S. and British] Empires.
From the
other side, Brazil and the other Latin American States, differently from the East
Asian ones, are totally incapable to exploit their prostitution to the Empires.
So they remain genetically under-developmental and underdeveloped. The
arrogance of ignorance and the arrogance of underdevelopment are a macabre
aspect of that.
No real and substantial education,
no real apt professionals, no debureaucratization, no vast plan for popular
housing, absence of whatever managerial skill, wide spreading ignorance, brainwashing
of people making them to believe that Brazil be becoming a world power. It is
normal nothing really change or not in better.
“The difference between all
the favela residents and all the nonfavela residents in Rio is significant, and
not easily diminished, but the differences within favelas and among favela
residents can be washed out in a generation or less.” (Perlman 2010, p. 238)
“In the years since the end
of the dictatorship, Brazil has attained middle-income status by worldwide
standards, though much of its population has clearly been excluded. In fact,
Brazil has the highest degree of disparity between rich and poor of any large
country in the world. As I’ve shown, the poor of Brazil have been
systematically prevented from achieving their full human potential and have
been denied the dignity of full citizenship—but I have not yet explored the
economic consequences of such a disparity.
“Undoubtedly, this level of
inequality has set limits on economic growth by depriving the country of the
intellectual capital, productive and consumer potential, and political
participation of a third of its urban population.”
(Perlman 2010, p. 250)
“During the period of my
restudy the city of Rio had lower rates of growth (in GDP/capita) and upward
mobility than the city of São Paulo, the state of Rio, all of the major regions
of the country, and Brazil as a whole. Although Rio’s GDP per capita is
relatively high, Rio’s cost of living is even higher—and Rio’s level of
inequality is worse than that of Brazil in general (exhibiting a Gini
coefficient of 0.616 compared with 0.593). According to the ratings of the Human
Development Index, Rio’s quality of life ranges from levels comparable to that
of Belgium (in Gávea, an upscale neighborhood in the South Zone, ninth in world
ranking) to that of Vietnam (in the Complexo de Alemão, in the North Zone, 108th
of 177 countries in the world). This extreme inequality presents an obstacle to
social mobility.”
(Perlman 2010, p. 251)
Brazil has no hope. What is
even worse is that it cannot realize that. On the other side, Brazilians
normally live ‘fucking’ each other. They are happy in that way. Everybody cheats
everybody, even oneself.
Perlman, J., Favela. Four Decades of Living on the Edge
in Rio de Janeiro,
Oxford University Press, 2010.
