http://www.bostonreview.net/world/moran-thomas-rio-favela-tourism-teleferico-world-cup
Everyone piles out at the last stop. At the station exit, children peddle water from battered styrofoam coolers hung on straps around their necks. I already have a water bottle in my hand, so the lanky preteen selling them asks if he can just have some money anyway. The younger girl with him is not wearing shoes, and I find myself equally embarrassed to say yes or no. A nearby orange sign reads, “MILITARY POLICE: WORKING FOR YOUR SECURITY” (“POLÍCIA MILITAR: TRABALHANDO PARA SUA SEGURANÇA”). Other tourists photograph the distant view, or browse among stands selling jewelry and shiny purses plaited from recycled snack wrappers. My colleague Megan buys us a couple of açaí-flavored popsicles from a kiosk. The fenced-in lot attached to the station is guarded by three UPP officers carrying machine guns. Megan and I mill about awkwardly.
The sun is close to setting by the time we return down the line during rush hour. We watch a stream of commuters coming from the opposite direction alight at the final station, some wearing uniforms or carrying briefcases. A few vendors transport wares and vegetables. Residents of Alemão get free passes, once up and once down the steep hills each day. The gondola has made transportation much faster and easier than the lengthy ride along switchback roads. Most locals appreciate efficient public transportation.
But it comes at a price. We are the price—a carousel of strangers rotating above people’s homes and lives, tourists watching and photographing with zoom lenses through gondola windows.
Some officials suggest that by lifting travelers off the ground, this gondola system will help to circumvent the ethical gray areas of favela tourism, where foreigners’ concern for injustice can quickly blur into transient curiosity, even voyeurism. Yet perhaps the teleférico is not a solution to the problem of poverty-gazing, but instead a novel part of its circuitry. From the cable car’s height, the trash in alleyways and open pits below has no stench or health effects. Instead it appears as a mosaic of debris, bright with colorful plastics and glinting metals like in a Gustav Klimt painting. Sometimes the scene below can be uncomfortably intimate, as a panorama of favela life glides by: a toddler flying a kite while two men drink beers on plastic chairs; a woman hanging laundry on a rooftop, four blue soccer jerseys (same team, different numbers) drying on a line; two police cars stopped side-by-side with their red lights flashing between crumbled buildings connected by a labyrinth of stairs. Only a watchful alien graffitied on a wall below stares back. He points up beyond the passing cars. The inversion is striking: If the alien is an insider at home on the bricks of a rooftop, terrestrial and domesticated, then which kind of skyborne strangers—traveling in what sort of craft—are we?
This is somewhat unsettling from the perspective of the rights of the accused but also from the unstable and painful juxtaposition of order and chaos. The usual images of a breakdown in order imply something much like the Watts riot or the LA Rodney King riot. In Brazil, rampant lawlessness resulted in a handful of generally secure neighborhoods serving as base areas for the police, civil society, and the productive elements of society who funded the state. The poor and unpatrolled neighborhoods were subject to gangs where little government presence outside social services was allowed. Brazil really became two countries with two competing social models. That the police have finally established a serious presence implies that the yawning social divide will be addressed.
This being Latin America, the question is if there will be much in the way of rule of law to constrain the power of the police or if the police will be vulnerable to the harassment of gangs and their ideological allies.
