Rio reality check – Frank McNally on visiting Brazil’s biggest favela

Well-meaning, middle-class residents of Rio de Janeiro warn you to stay away from the favelas, slum neighbourhoods in which at least 20 per cent of the population lives.

One friendly local, while professing his love for Rio and saying he would never leave, told me it was a city “out of control”. Poorer suburbs were effectively privatised, with everything from drugs to public utilities in criminal hands. Don’t even think about visiting them, he cautioned.

But among a mostly Irish gathering in a bar last weekend, the company included an expat who had a Brazilian friend living in the city’s biggest favela: a friend, it emerged, who would be happy to give us a tour.

Was it not dangerous, we asked? “Not at all,” said the expat; “you’ll be grand.” And so it was that, on Monday morning, a pair of nervous tourists were collected from our Ipanema hotel and driven, by the expat’s friend, into Rocinha.

Bird on the wire – Frank McNally on a great reporter’s last hurrah

---

Stand and deliver — Brian Maye on the ‘gentleman highwayman’ James Maclaine

---

On the case – Tim Fanning on Armagh detective James McParland and his battles with the Molly Maguires

---

General selection – Frank McNally on national stereotypes, Greek (and table quiz) heroes, and a stamp of greatness

---

Like most favelas, this one started as a shanty town, housing the poorest of the rural migrants who flocked to Brazil’s cities in the later 20th century.

Today, Rocinha is a densely populated inner suburb of Rio, climbing a steep hill above Ipanema and other touristy parts of the “asphalt” – the downtown areas – where many of its people work.

Not only is it Rio’s biggest favela, it is also Brazil’s. It is among the most developed too. Houses are brick-built, if functional. There are plenty of shops, even a bank.

But the first thing you notice is the electrical wiring, which is chaotic, branching out from poles in 100 different directions, none of them legal. Nobody pays electricity bills here. They take power unofficially from the city’s main supply, or pay others to take it for them.

Similar freelance arrangements extend to most utilities, including water, cable TV, and sewage, with greater or lesser efficiency. The usual social contract does not apply.

But behind the uneasy official tolerance, if it is that, there may be a cruder contract. The city needs places like Rocinha at least as much as places like Rocinha need the city.

In Ireland, our tour guide would have been described as a friend of a friend. In Rocinha, this term needs careful qualification. The neighbourhood is controlled by the Amigos dos Amigos (“Friends of Friends”), a criminal organisation that also runs several smaller favelas.

Our guide was not one of those friends. He’s just one of the estimated 100,000 residents crammed into this square kilometre of hillside, working elsewhere while living cheaply enough to afford the nice car he was driving us around in.

We were not the only visitors on Monday. As we stopped at a bar overlooking the city – Rocinha being on a hillside, its attractions include dramatic views of Rio – a green, canvas-covered truck pulled in, with several tourists on the back.

It looked like they were on safari, and the joke seems to have been intended. “We hate that,” our guide said. “People here are not animals.”

But since the events of 2017, poverty tourism is not as popular as it used to be here. In September of that year, a Spanish visitor to Rocinha was killed in the crossfire of a police shoot-out with the Amigos, which had themselves split into feuding factions.

The main gang leader was arrested soon afterwards, in an operation involving 3,000 soldiers and police. His successor now rules from an eyrie near the top of the hill, protected by the warren of pedestrian alleyways that radiate from the only road in and out.

Such is the ubiquity of gunfights between criminals and police in Rio generally, there are popular Twitter accounts dedicated to reporting their locations, like AA Roadwatch bulletins warning of traffic build-ups.

But Rocinha was peaceful when we were there. Children queued for school buses. Adults shopped and worked, many travelling as pillion passengers on the ubiquitous motorbike taxis. Although the streets were grim, with overflowing refuse bins and many other signs of neglect, there was no sense of danger.

Had I walked in alone, I asked the guide, would a mugging have been guaranteed? No, he said. So long as I stayed on the main drag, no-one would have bothered me. Only if I wandered into the alleyways would it eventually attract attention, and that would be from men who wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there.

Some years ago, in another Rio favela, two journalists and their driver went undercover for an attempted exposé. They thought it was safe because that neighbourhood was controlled by a militia, with links to official law enforcement.

Their trust was misplaced. The militias, by then running many of the favelas, were as bad as the gangs. The undercover trio were kidnapped, tortured, and threatened with killing before being released on condition that they didn’t identify their captors, one of whom had revealed himself to be a police officer.