Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro by Bryan McCann (review)

McCann’s vibrant study surveys the recent political history of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas—the mostly unplanned urban neighborhoods where the working poor built, bought, or rented housing. He starts with the high watermark of the favela-association movement that emerged to represent residents threatened by favela removal projects toward the end of Brazil’s military government (1964–1985). He argues that the favela associations challenged the divide between the formal city and its informal favelas.

Most favela associations mobilized their constituents to elect the socialist politician Leonel Brizola as Rio de Janeiro’s state governor in 1983. Brizola promised to halt favela removal and to give residents legal title to their property. His campaign spurred many to invade land and quickly construct a home because they anticipated that, once in office, Brizola would legalize their property rights. McCann argues, however, that Brizola’s election removed the threat of removal, which led favela residents and their leaders to reconsider land titling because it would require residents to make regular payments and to pay property taxes. Brizola’s “One Lot Per Family” program titled only 2 percent of the 1 million plots announced as the program’s goal. A subsequent municipal program that bypassed favela associations, dealing directly with individual residents, was more effective at regularizing title to land, but its successes were piecemeal. Brizola’s efforts to provide basic infrastructure, access to public education, and municipal jobs for favela residents were much more effective than attempts to regularize land tenure.

Economic downturn, hyperinflation, and the criminal organizations that began to occupy favelas during the 1980s and 1990s to distribute and profit from cocaine sales checked the autonomy and influence of the favela associations. The drug lords that began to run many of the favelas clipped the local association leaders’ wings. In response, some neighborhoods formed militias for protection, but these militias often were as oppressive as the drug gangs. These developments had a chilling effect on efforts to end police abuse of favela dwellers. Residents of the formal city stereotyped favelas as sites of crime, violence, drug abuse, and corruption. Nazareth Cerqueira, Brizola’s chief of police, attempted to alter the relationship between the police and favela residents with community policing, but his initiatives gave way to militarized police action in subsequent administrations. The stated goal of Mayor César Maia’s more recent Favela Bairro Program was to end the distinction between neighborhoods (bairros) and favelas. A municipal program with international funding, Favela Bairro, provided new favela infrastructure, but it did not address problems of security, nor did it expand land entitlement. In McCann’s words, it “could not address the deeper political separation between favela and bairro” (176).

McCann ably demonstrates these larger trends with concise analyses of changing conditions in specific favelas and with reference to compelling histories of specific politicians, bureaucrats, drug lords, priests, lawyers, activists, policemen, real-estate developers, and favela residents themselves, among others. He utilizes a wide array of sources from archives to oral history. What could have been a dismal tale of violence and corruption overrunning a grassroots social movement is lightened by McCann’s epilogue in which he describes a return to some of the ideas of the early favela-association movement. Rio de Janeiro’s police have returned to Nazareth Cerqueira’s methods of community policing, coupled with investment in municipal services. Since 2008, the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (upps, Units of Pacifying Police) have been banishing drug lords and occupying key favelas with police trained to work with local residents. This modicum of security has allowed more favela residents to benefit from broader economic growth that is more evenly shared in twenty-first-century Brazil.

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