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7 Afterword Frontiers without Borders When Michael Jackson wanted to make a video of his social protest song “They Don’t Care about Us,” he went to Brazil. He wanted to find a thousand poor people in the most abandoned place in the developed world. It was 1996, and to do the shoot he went to Rio de Janeiro, one of the few places on earth where misery lives besides luxury. One such place is the favela Doña Marta, a shantytown of more than 17,000 ramshackle huts, some built on top of each other, without running water or electricity, except for the occasional bare wire snaking in from a roof. In those houses, bathroom facilities consist of a ditch that simply drains through the streets of the slum. Of course there are poor people in many other places, but Doña Marta lies inside the exclusive neighborhood of Botafogo, beside Copacabana Beach. People living in Doña Marta can see the opulence of the wealthy, who in turn had learned to ignore what they saw every day when they looked at Doña Marta from their homes. But Michael Jackson was mistaken when he said “They don’t care about Doña Marta.” On January 5, 2009, the Brazilian company Vento Sul Engenharía (VSE) signed a contract worth 981,744 reals with the state entity Empresa de Obras Públicas do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EMOP). Their goal was to build a wall 10 to 13 feet high around the Doña Marta favela within 120 days. Construction started immediately, with cement slabs erected on a concrete base. More than a third of a mile long, the wall looks like the security barriers the Israeli government uses to isolate the Palestinians. Clearly, Doña Marta matters to Rio’s authorities—of course, not in terms of eradicating illiteracy or improving sanitation. What matters is to keep a tight rein on it, to restrict it, to close its entrances and exits, just because its inhabitants are poor. This is the largest internal city wall in the world. The man who dreamed up the wall is Sergio Cabral, who was elected governor of Rio de Janeiro in 2006. Public security was one the main 136 Chapter 7 themes of his campaign, and when he was sworn in, he promised a “tough” response to the “cowards” who had unleashed a wave of violence in the city that caused 25 deaths the previous week. After increasing the police budget and giving police officers carte blanche, Cabral only succeeded in having Human Rights Watch designate the Rio police as “the most dangerous in the world.” Human Rights Watch reported that the Rio de Janeiro police had killed 7,611 people between 2003 and 2009, or an average of three people per day. According to the 122-page report, in nearly all the cases, “Police report the killings as legitimate acts of self-defense in response to gunfire by criminal suspects, what they call resistance killings. However, close analysis of case files, officers’ statements and statistical data strongly suggest that a substantial portion of these cases are in fact extra-judicial executions.”1 Early in 2009, Sergio Cabral decided that it would be easier to confine the criminals inside their neighborhoods than to kill them. Perhaps it was enough for the governor to be spared looking at the city’s slums, or favelas, to have them out of sight and out of mind. The fact is that Sergio Cabral had the idea of fencing in his city’s favelas. His plan included building 9.3 miles of 10-foot-high walls around 14 of Rio’s favelas. It occurred to him to call it the “EcoLimits Project,” and to present it as an attempt to stop the favelas’ expansion at the expense of the area’s trees. After the Doña Marta favela, the next one to be fenced in was Rocinha, which, with its area of about 9,300 square feet, had grown into one of South America’s largest. It is so large that in 1993 it received the administrative status of “neighborhood.” Rio de Janeiro is the joyous city of Carnival and the beaches of Ipanema and Copacabana; the 2016 Olympics will be held there, amid the caipirinha cocktails and the samba. But Rio de Janeiro also has the highest level of urban inequality in the world. While part of the city enjoys the same standard of living as...

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