Beauty and fear in Rio de Janeiro

Well, unfortunately Brazil nor Argentina made it to the World Cup final this year, but I did get to witness a caravan of beeping cars filled with Italian vacationers in Rio de Janeiro. I watched the round of penalty kicks in the warm open ocean air right next to the white-sand beaches, so though I missed out on what could have been the biggest party atmosphere in my lifetime would Brazil have been champions, I am certainly not complaining. This city is soul-stirringly beautiful, the food, fruits, music, dance all intoxicating.

I flew into Rio late Friday night and spent the weekend meeting students coming in principally from New York and Chicago. We have a group of approximately twenty including undergraduate and graduate students, several Brazilians, and assisting alumni of this course about Human Rights and Media. Monday morning we hit the ground running with an overview of the major human rights issues found here. Remember Michael Moore´s documentary, Bowling for Columbine, and building up to the statistic that the US sees approximately 10,000 homicides a year? That was supposed to knock us off our feet compared to the much lower count in other countries. Well, with half of US´population, Brazil registers 40,000 homicides a year. One of the principal reasons for this, in addition to the large quantity of arms on the street, is inequality. After two African countries, Brazil ranks as having the largest gap between the haves and have-nots.

In Rio de Janeiro, this manifests as what is essentially a civil war between those in the impoverished mountain shanty-towns, named favelas (approx 700 of them), and the police. The favelas are ruled by drug lords, and everyone living in these communities follows their rules, including a nightly curfew and required behaviors to demonstrate respect to these leaders. The police do not enter these areas unless they are declaring war. Our professor in this course, Peter Lucas, talks of the Friday night he was in the favela when the police launched an attack. He remembers peering out the door of the house he was in to find the children fleeing the police cars... his reflection echoes in my head: "What kind of a world are we living in?"

We have been gradually been going deeper into this sad reality, but are also visiting organizations that are working in amazing ways to bring a positive light into these favelas so that youth may choose an alternative route to drugs and violence. This morning we visited an organization called Kabum! which is a school that teaches young people art and technology; one of the recurring themes thusfar is of providing favella-dwellers with a means to express for themselves who they are and what kind of realities they experience on a daily basis as opposed to being represented in mainstream media as the perpetrators and terrorizors of Rio. Technology is certainly providing means for the typically dismissed and forgotten to voice the realities of their situations.

I find it difficult to not walk through the streets with fear, as much as I reject conceptually its presence in me... hearing testimonies of police violence against innocent individuals makes me feel especially vulnerable. But I firmly believe we cannot let this culture of fear overcome us. We must not let our emotions spin out of control to the point where we lose compassion, love, respect, tolerance, and all those qualities that make this world worth living in... it is a battle for each of us to wage, I suppose, and I am in that with each step I take here in Rio.