“Favelas” - this beautiful word is somewhat reminiscent of the name of luxury villas, its soft sound, however, does not mean a hospitable essence. Everyone who is more or less interested in international news knows that America is two worlds. There are rich USA and Canada, and there is another, Latin America, where noisy poor live by their own laws and rules, where poverty is adjacent to lurid luxury, and drug lords and arms dealers are running the whole carnival. Favelas are a place of concentration of lawlessness (from the point of view of official authorities) and special territories, which will be discussed in this article.
House of cards
Initially, the favelas were the buildings that the poor erected, populating the outskirts of cities. The houses were built from scratch, there were no projects of buildings, plans, and even less permits. The rapid urbanization, which was a response to the industrialization of the Latin American economy at the end of the nineteenth century, did not result in beautiful and ennobled neighborhoods with identical houses and wide streets, but in grotesque buildings stuck one on top of the other.
The most famous are the Brazilian favelas, numerous and very colorful, they no longer denote individual buildings, but became the name of entire areas, the number of inhabitants in some of them exceeds hundreds of thousands of people.
The construction method is simple and suggests that the architect makes an elementary frame of metal rods around the perimeter of the future house (or floor, because now the favelas grow not in breadth, but in height). The step between these supports is 2-3 meters, and the inter-beam space is laid with hollow bricks. Such designs are fragile and unreliable, and the fact that houses are constantly growing upwards adds to them even more fragility. Some buildings already consist of 4-5 floors, and each upper one can be slightly wider than the previous one, as a result, houses resemble crooked side inverted pyramids.
The owner of the top floor sells his roof to the new owner, and he makes his own home there at his discretion and opportunities. Favelas - this housing is mostly illegal, talking about any communications in such houses became possible only in recent years, they began to conduct electricity there and make normal sewers.
Rich beggars
The first settlers of the slums were several categories of people: rural residents who were forced to move to cities in search of a better fate, those who were at the bottom due to the inability to earn money, and runaway slaves.
By the will of fate, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Recife and other Brazilian cities have become a haven for thousands, millions of people in the country. Judging by the statistics, currently every fifth Brazilian lives there. Official figures greatly underestimate the favel population. The thing is that it is simply unrealistic to control the birth rate and mortality in these areas: illegal housing quarters, in which a huge number of people are peacefully and not very neighbors, perfectly hide their secrets.
In fairness, it is worth noting that some favelas are no longer the haven of the scum of society, but rather habitable neighborhoods in which the authorities managed to get rid of chaos and complete lawlessness.
Legal anarchy
Favelas occupy vast territories, which are simply impossible to ignore. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the bulk of the country's criminals live there. Very often, these areas are associated with drug dealers and bandits, there is some truth to this. However, in fact, there are not so many large dealer dealers there, at the feeders there are units that run small bipods.
Secondly, Brazilian favelas do not perceive the country's authorities. Their inhabitants are accustomed to survive on their own. An interesting fact is that among the unwritten rules in these territories there is one that prohibits communication with police representatives.
In Brazil, there is a special method for identifying citizens, confirming their belonging to a solvent and trustworthy estate. For this, not only identity documents (passport, driving license) are used, but also receipts for paying bills. They are the guarantee that a person is attached to a certain place of residence, makes deductions to the budget. Otherwise, it is difficult for a resident of the country to get help from the state, even an elementary appeal to the hospital can become a problem.
Appeasement policy
Dangerous for the rich areas of the capital of the country and tourists, the faunas of Rio de Janeiro are slowly becoming more peaceful. In the city there are almost a thousand (according to various sources, from 750 to 1200). In each of them a different number of people can live, large are those whose population exceeds 5 thousand people. To organize order there, the authorities decided to conduct a so-called program for appeasing the population and demilitarization on the territory of the favel.
It is forbidden to have weapons in the country. By law, only the police and military can own it, nevertheless, the arms trade is booming, you can get in Rio not only pistols, but also more serious “units”. During the sweeps by special forces between representatives of the authorities and local residents, hot wars arise, and then both warring parties suffer significant losses.
However, thanks to such a tough method of combating crime, slums in Brazil are no longer uncontrolled areas where it is scary to walk in the dark. In addition to punitive operations, the authorities, as far as possible, organize the normal life of favel residents. Large-scale electrification was carried out here, the gutters, along which sewage run off, are replaced by a modern water supply and drainage system.
Equally important is the fact that people have become more accessible to medicine, education and public transport. It is not yet possible to provide all the benefits of favela residents: the architecture and location of the streets simply do not leave any room for this, however, state programs are designed for more than one year, and slum upgrading is ongoing.
May it be so
Despite attempts by the authorities to curb the character of the inhabitants of poor neighborhoods, life in the favelas is still under the control of drug lords and obeys their laws. It is impossible to say that this is bad: local "kings" affirm their own foundations, are strictly punished for disobedience to violators. The disadvantage of this method of self-government is that each favela is sort of like a separate republic, a country in a country, and what residents of one region cannot do is accomplished with impunity in another.
Within its favela, one cannot steal, kill, rape and even parasitize. Penalties for wrongdoing are very cruel: you can lose your limbs, be burned alive or expelled. Bosses do not spare even children and adolescents. Such a dictatorship suits the locals, as it obviously gives them at least some guarantee of peace.
Is there a future?
What awaits the inhabitants of Brazilian slums in the future is unclear. The trend towards the absorption of favelas by civilization is obvious, but this process is too slow. Corruption, bureaucracy, chaos and disorder prevent the authorities from quickly realizing their plans. In addition, Brazil, like other Latin American countries, cannot reach a qualitatively new level of economy. In addition, another reasonable question arises: do slum dwellers themselves want to get out of the shadow of lawlessness and live by universal rules and norms?