House prices in the Dona Marta favela overlooking Botafogo beach in Rio de Janiero have quadrupled in the past year. Part of the reason is Brazil’s booming economy, probably more is President Lula’s policy of Bolsa Familia (providing a cash safety net of cash to the poorest Brazilians) but mostly it is because Dona Marta was the first in a pilot programme to take back the favelas from the drug dealers.
For years, drug lords have ruled Rio’s hillside favelas. Large swaths of the city were free from government control. The police might stage a raid from time to time, but after a bit of bang bang, they would retreat back to their secure police stations, leaving the favelas to the gangs. It seemed the natural order of things, inevitable unchangeable. Perhaps the police could control the asphalt below, but the gangs would always rule the hillsides.
That seems to be changing. A year ago, the State Police of Rio de Janiero had a new idea. Instead of showy and ineffective raids, now they grab some land in the middle of a favela, use it to establish a police station and staff it with rookie police officers just out of the academy—officers new to the force and thus not implicated in its culture of corruption. Today, the police regularly patrol these favelas, both day and night. Consequently, crime has gone down and house prices have gone up.
If this strategy sounds familiar it is because it is pretty much what General Petraeus did in Iraq in 2007. For the first few years after the invasion, the US army would stage raids, use its massive firepower to kill or capture “bad guys”, and then go home to sleep on their large and secure bases. Petraeus’s insight was that control of an area required “boots on the ground”, that a raid followed by withdrawal did nothing but confirm the insurgents’ day-to-day domination of the neighbourhood.
Establishing a presence, whether in the favelas or in Sadr City, is harder and more dangerous than just conducting showy raids but is also more effective. Today, Rio feels safer. Affluent Cariocas (residents of the greater metropolitan area of Rio), who used to complain incessantly about crime, now tell me things are getting better. Perhaps the primary difference is political. For the first time in a generation, the same party controls the Brazilian federal government and the Rio de Janeiro municipal and state governments. Furthermore, with Rio hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, it needs to show the world that it can control crime.
In the early 1980s, some friends of mine lived on Avenue C and 3rd Street in Manhattan’s East Village. Back then the police almost never patrolled the area. The only reason outsiders would visit was to buy drugs. Today, you can buy $800 dollar lamps in boutiques that used to be shooting galleries. The police came back, so did the neighborhood.
The moral from Rio, Baghdad, and Manhattan’s Lower East Side is that the abandonment of government authority over an area is a political decision. At the time, it may seem that re-establishing control is impossible. It is not. The State, Thomas Hobbes reminds us, always has the potential to be more powerful than any other actor. Rio favela’s that still don’t have a police presence, like Rocinha, are still ruled by the drug dealers. The lesson of Dona Marta is that as long as the Rio government maintains its political will, it can control all its territory. Drug lords, beware.
The surge comes to Rio's favelas
January 20, 2010
