The Astroturf on the football pitch in Rio de Janeiro’s Penha favela complex is torn and covered with litter, while graffiti on the bullet-ridden, pockmarked walls vows “death to the police”.
It started as a way for kids from Brazil’s new middle class to hang out. Crowds of young people, mostly of color, descended on a mall in São Paulo in December.
Now these gatherings, called “rolezinhos,” have turned into a social protest movement that’s spreading around Brazil. Ramón Cesar was one of a handful of young people who responded to the call for a rolezinho in the most exclusive mall in the Brazilian city of Recife.
Ramón, 18, slender and soft-spoken, says he’s tired of the way he gets treated whenever he goes into a mall.
Flamengo is a picturesque middle-class neighborhood in Rio that sits on the Guanabara Bay with tree-lined streets and upscale apartment buildings. There’s a big park on the water filled with joggers and bikers, and soccer games going on at all hours of the day and night. In this area, you can catch breathtaking views of the bay and Sugarloaf Mountain, and Corovado looming above the water. But on Jan. 31, a Flamengo resident came upon a completely unexpected sight in this neighborhood – a sight that sparked national furor. It was a young black man stripped naked, beaten, and chained to a post with a bike lock around his neck.
It wasn’t only shocking, but it brought to mind the type of scene you’d see during the slavery age. And like the rolezinhos, the incident represents a perfect storm related to issues of race, class, and security.
As Brazil’s economy powered forward over the last decade and millions rose out of poverty, shiny new shopping malls popped up as testament to a more prosperous society.
In these temples of consumption, well-to-do families and couples stroll gleaming hallways, popping in and out of stores to browse $300 boxes of macaroons or shoes costing thousands of dollars. The only dark-skinned faces present, in a country where more than half of the people identify themselves as black or brown-skinned, have been those of security guards, workers or the women busing Burger King trays at the food court.
But now, the high-end malls are the focus of heated political protest and, for some, proof of how far the country still needs to go to overcome centuries-old racial and class divisions.
Hundreds of people were forced from their ramshackle homes in the heart of São Paulo this month, as legions of garbage men dismantled informal shelters scrap by scrap. The city government decided to break up the shantytown just blocks from the municipal theater where the symphony plays. Referred to commonly as Cracolandia, or Crack Land, it takes up several downtown streets in this city of 11 million. Some 400 displaced squatters will be funneled into motel rooms and a state-run treatment program called Operation Open Arms.
But the timing of the initiative – and the nine-month duration of the subsidy and treatment regimen – has some critics accusing São Paulo officials of focusing more on beautifying the streets before the June kick-off of the World Cup than providing this population with long-term solutions for rehabilitation, job training, and housing.
“By taking down the structures, you’re not solving the problem,” says Marcela Pontes, a young physician working at an area clinic, and charged with tracking down many of her patients in the shantytown. Brazil‘s public health system recruits community health teams to follow up on the most at-risk patients. HIV and tuberculosis is rampant in this population, so offering treatment is a priority. Plenty fall through the system, though.
THE Shopping Metrô Itaquera, a gleaming mall amid the favelas (shantytowns) of eastern São Paulo, gained notoriety on January 11th, when the police used rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse a rowdy crowd of 3,000 youths. The youngsters were participating in a rolezinho, a gathering of tens, hundreds, and sometimes thousands of youngsters which is convened via social networks.
The point of a rolezinho is “to hang out, chill, buy nice things, meet people,” explains Vinicius Andrade, a 17-year-old from Capão Redondo, a favela in western São Paulo. Vinicius counts 18 big rolezinhos in the city so far. He has taken part in all of them and helped organise a few, drawing some of his 89,000 Facebook followers. His 15-year-old girlfriend, Yasmin Oliveira, a rolezeiro sweetheart with 94,000 fans of her own on the social network, says that shopping centres make good meeting-places because they are safe—an important consideration in a crime-ridden city.