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Stephan Lanz
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Urban myth has it that the first favela in Rio de Janeiro originated in 1897 (1): The authorities permitted soldiers returning from the Canudos war against the religious movement of Antonio de Conselheiros to settle in Morro da Providencia adjacent to the central barracks: In remembrance of the site of their victorious battle, they renamed it to Morro da Favela. Starting in 1920, local newspapers began calling irregular settlements, which had started to spread in the wake of the radical redevelopment of the city under prefect Pereira Passos, favelas. Following the Parisian example, this "Baron Haussmann of the tropics" cut broad lanes through the historical fabric of the city and had the workers' housings, which were called cortiços (beehives), demolished, resulting in 20,000 homeless people. Many of them could not afford new dwellings in the suburbs and started to build huts with the materials they found. Since Passos had banned self-construction in the suburbs, the labourers were forced to settle up in the steep, undeveloped morros. The origin of the favelas, then, already places the common notion that they had evolved independently and uninfluenced by the state in the realm of myths. Quite to the contrary, the phenomenon of the favela was always causally linked to state institutions and official politics. But the favelados were by no means helpless victims: They gradually established finely meshed comunidades that cunningly defied the society which was hostile to them. Finally, after a one-hundred-year struggle, the favela has triumphed, the anthropologists Alba Zaluar and Marcos Alvito (1998: 21) say, only to qualify that assertion by stating that in face of the only slowly progressing urbanization projects, the terror of the drug gangs and the police, as well as internal social conflicts, the struggle is far from over. But what can it mean, under these circumstances of a sustained, "limited, hierarchized and fragmented citizenship" of the favelados, to posit that the favela has triumphed (Machado da Silva 2002: 221ff)? In the following, I shall examine the political battles waged over the favelas by highlighting several historical and contemporary developments and discuss this question. Crusades in the favelas Only as late as the 1940s did a social debate on
the morros commence, which grew rapidly due to the influx
of rural migrants. The favela, labelled as a sickness, a
plague or a "cancerous tumour", was now grasped as a moral
problem, as a voluntary and deliberate denial of civilization (Pfeiffer
1987: 67ff). The "Estado Novo" (New State) of President Getulio Vargas which was oriented towards Italian fascism wanted to create a new Brazilian man (Pandolfi / Grynszpan 2002). This self-appointed "father of the poor" established a populist politics that addressed the favela in a clientelistic manner, vacillating between socio-political measures, political control and repression (Dietz 2000: 156f). The municipal building code of 1937 already paved the way for this inconsistent political triangle: The favelas were to be eliminated and replaced by minimum-sized dwellings; all self-construction was banned. At the same time, the city council considered controlling the influx to Rio and sending persons from inferior social backgrounds back to where they came from. While the samba schools, which were banned until shortly beforehand, were included in the official carnival programme, the social policy of the "Estado Novo" excluded persons without formal jobs, denied illiterate persons to vote and sought to transform the favelados, who were considered "rascals loafing about", into "hard-working people" (Pandolfi / Grynszpan 2002). For the first time, four favelas that were in the way of the growing, noble southern zone were demolished, and three parques proletários were erected as a countermove. These makeshift barrack settlements counted as a model for resolving the question of housing for the lower classes. However, only persons who could vouch for a "decent lifestyle" and prove that they had a job in the southern zone were allowed to move in. A rigid re-education programme was associated with the residential complex: Like in a camp the administrator possessed absolute authority and imparted moral lessons via loudspeakers each evening. The fenced-in settlements, which only persons with a pass were allowed to enter, closed their gates at 10 p.m. (Leeds / Leeds 1978). Despite the promise to urbanize these "parks" in a regular manner, they had to make way for new waves of speculation years later. As an unintentional side-effect of this state intervention, the first favelados began organizing themselves as political actors (Baumann Burgos 1998). Starting in 1945, residents committees offering resistance to the threat of eviction were established in the Pavão / Pavãozinho, Morro do Cantagalo and Morro da Babilônia favelas that still exist today in walking distance from the tourist attractions Copacabana and Ipanema. The favelados frequently compensated their lack of a political threat potential with subtle measures. For example, they gave new favelas names that sounded official or were connected with prestige so as to ward off the stigma and the threat of eviction: "Parque Proletario Acari", for instance, is the name of a favela founded in 1942 in the industrial northern part of the city (Alvito 2001: 281). When Brazil returned to parliamentary democracy in 1945 residents committees for the first time drew up a catalogue of social rights for their settlements. In the local elections in 1947, the communist party came in third. The urban middle classes now also feared the favela as a political threat and - as a slogan of the time went - deemed it "necessary to climb up the hill before the communists come down from there". Since the political parties started to recognize the electoral significance of the favela, repression was replaced by more pacifying measures that tolerated its existence. At the same time, the favelados started to form an identity, the central reference of which was not based on poverty or the position in the production process but on the housing conditions subject to external laws as regards legal-institutional (illegality) and moral criteria. (Machado da Silva 2002: 228). The illegality of land occupation, in particular, defined the favela much more than urban development or social criteria, because illegality necessitates regulating the inner conditions in one's "own, parallel or informal system of laws and norms" (Karsch 1997: 78) separated from the civil society. At the same time, favelados have no civil rights whatsoever in regard to their place of residence, they are second-rate citizens. There is no clear duality between the official city and the illegal favela, though, but instead a number of quasi-legal, paralegal or pseudo-legal grey areas (Pfeiffer 1987: 75f, Souza 1993: 220f): Rio's largest favela, Rocinha, for instance, emerged from a legal plotting of land that only flouted a few administrative regulations. Private owners often incite the occupation of their worthless estates (swamps, hills) using straw men who then sell the occupied plots, circumventing state regulations and thus generating profit. Politicians, in turn, have often given pieces of public property to their clientele to "buy" votes, and government-owned companies later also provided "illegal" favelas with power and water. Since the favelados usually pay for their right of abode in the exploitative, often criminal real-estate market that formal illegality produces, they do not view themselves as being in an illegal situation. As early as 1940, the daily paper correio da manhã reported that most favelados had to buy property from donos da favela (masters, owners) without being given official documents (Pfeiffer 1987: 67). The reason was that these donos were frequently pseudo-owners, called grileiros, who didn't own the land - a practice of exploitation lasting until today. From 1945 on, the political conflict between the camps of the left and the right escalated over the issue of the favelas. The Communist Party, which was again banned in 1947, initiated various residents associations. Their name, "Union of Workers Favelados", underscored the fact that the PCB activists wanted to mark the problem of the favela as an integral part of the labour movement. The city council and the Catholic Church, in turn, established the Leão XIII foundation in 1946 to "financially and morally support" the inhabitants of the morros. The foundation indeed provided several dozen favelas with water, sewage disposal and power, and simultaneously set up residents associations. As extensions of state apparatuses, these associations did not organize the interests of the favelados, but were instead meant to control them and channel imminent protests in advance. Their leadership was integrated in clientelistic bartering (Leeds / Leeds 1978). According to Marcelo Baumann Burgos (1998: 29), Leão XIII replaces "the struggle for access to public goods by assistancialism, the organic intellectual by the formation of traditional leaderships". Janice Perlman reveals in her study "The Myth of Marginality" from 1977 that official institutions responsible for the favela policy spread and reinforced the ideology of the marginality of the favelados so as to legitimate the politics of exclusion. For example, a report of the Leão XIII foundation says: "The families arrive from the interior united - whether legally or not - in a stable way. The disintegration commences in the favela as a consequence of promiscuity, bad examples and financial problems. The children are present during sexual intercourse. Girls are seduced and abandoned [...] alcohol and drugs serve to deaden the disillusions, humiliations and lack of food in the life of the favelas. The night belongs to the criminals" (Perlman 1977: 125). The Catholic Church understood its mission in this context as a moral crusade. They christened a second foundation "Crusade of Saint Sebastian" that starting in 1955 under the future liberation theologian Dom Helder Camara erected the first low-cost housing project - today a slum in the wealthy southern zone - along the lines of an equally paternalistic policy to resettle the inhabitants of the destroyed favela Praia do Pinto (Dietz 2000: 161). Clientelism emerged as the hegemonic pattern of all favela policies. It is based on a type of personal relationship of dependency between "ruler" and "people" dating back to the times of colonialism. In the northeast, Brazil's poverty zone dominated by feudalist latifundia from which most urban immigrants stem, this pre-capitalistic mode of rule characterized a large part of the 20th century: Controlled by a regional ruler called coronel (colonel), a so-called herd of economically dependent peasants traded their votes for tangible goods. The modern, urban version of this political barter as opposed to rural coronelismo is based on voluntary agreements between patron and client. Tangible goods range from grocery packages up to the promise to lay water conduits and transmission lines in the respective favela if the election is won. Politicians up for elections set up intermediaries - so-called cabos eleitorais (2) - who function as mouthpieces. Respected personalities of a favela can usually be recruited against pay for instrumentalizing their authority to personally oblige their clientele to vote in a certain way (Pfeiffer 1987: 106ff). From the viewpoint of the favelados who do not posses full civil rights, clientelism was the only chance to exert political influence on their places of residence; until today it dominates the political relationship between favela and the state.
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