August 5, 2016, the Maracana is celebrating. Fireworks burst above the legendary stadium, at the end of the dazzling opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, followed by 78,600 amazed spectators. But while the Olympic world celebrates Brazil and its history, some of the Cariocas (the inhabitants of Rio) complain of being the victim of a form of social exclusion.
The new Olympic Park, built in the nouveau-rich district of Barra da Tijuca, is the best illustration of this. On the other hand: brand new arenas, a new metro line between Ipanema and this district about twenty kilometers away. On the flip side: many residents of poor neighborhoods asked to look elsewhere.
The choice of Rio by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2009 was seen as a great political and diplomatic victory by the Lula government, especially since Brazil was also going to host the Copa America (American Cup). South Football) and the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
Plan to reduce the surface area of favelas
The town hall is not wasting time. In 2009, it launched its “strategic government plan”. It includes a reduction in the area occupied by favelas of 3.5%, which would concern around a hundred of them, according to forecasts made at the time by a university working group. A collective of NGOs calls into question “the vacillating rhetoric of the town hall (Who) in fact aims to conceal economic motivations responding to the demands of large construction companies for land development purposes, in order to eliminate annoying neighbors and modify the profile of the neighborhood’s inhabitants..
This is the case of the Vila Autódromo favela which has the greatest impact. This neighborhood, originally a fishing community, is located between the Jacarepagua Formula 1 circuit and the lagoon of the same name, and close to the future Olympic Park. The town hall then maintains that the favela is located in a risk zone, vulnerable in the event of flooding… and proposes to rehouse the residents in a new HLM, located a kilometer and a half away.
“There has been a big effort to reduce risks in areas where landslides can occur in storms, which unfortunately happens often. We can see that Rio has made progress in this area”still defends today the urban planner Washington Fajardo, who was then advisor to the mayor of Rio. «There was a widespread discourse at the time that rehousing populations was not a positive way of reducing risk, but presented a problem in itself. »
The more than 700 affected families resisted, including by organizing cultural festivals in the neighborhood to defend their way of life. After a long conflict, at the opening of the Olympic Games, around twenty of them were still living there. The authorities had already evicted residents from other favelas deemed troublesome, such as Vila Harmonia, Recreio and Restinga. The case of Vila Autodromo, which resonated well beyond Brazilian borders, has become emblematic of a form of pre-Olympic “social cleansing”.
“A form of spatial segregation in Brazil”
However, the problem was not limited to the Olympics and had much deeper roots in Brazil. “It is part of the old neo-slavery approach of making the poor invisible, and of the progressive approach of putting them very far away, in sort of HLM”explains political scientist Giuseppe Cocco, from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
“I don’t think we can talk about “social apartheid” or the expulsion of residentsestimates Washington Fajardo. But there is indeed a form of spatial segregation in Brazil, because we do not have a housing policy based on urban inclusion, but on access to private property. » Against the backdrop of the role of large construction companies, at the origin of numerous corruption cases in Brazil, particularly in connection with the Rio Olympics…
