Brazilian favela - a special way of life for millions of people

"Favela" - this beautiful word is somewhat reminiscent of the name of luxury villas, its soft sound, however, does not at all mean a partial person. Everyone who is more or less interested in international news knows that America is two worlds. There are rich USA and Canada, and there is another, Latin America, where noisy poor people live by their own laws and rules, where poverty abounds with a lurid luxury, and drug-barons and arms dealers fill this "carnival". Favela is a place of concentration of lawlessness (from the point of view of official authorities) and special territories, which will be discussed in this article.

House of cards

Initially, the favels were buildings built by the poor, populating the outskirts of cities. Houses were built from nothing, no projects of buildings, plans, let alone permits, were not available. Rapid urbanization, which was a response to the industrialization of the Latin American economy in the late nineteenth century, resulted not in beautiful and ennobled quarters with identical houses and wide streets, but in grotesque buildings stacked one on top of another.

The most famous are the Brazilian favelas, numerous and very colorful, they no longer stand for individual buildings, but become the name of entire districts, the number of inhabitants in some of them exceeds hundreds of thousands of people.

The construction method is simple and assumes that the architect makes an elementary frame of metal rods around the perimeter of the future house (or floor, because now the favela grows not in breadth, but in height). The step between these supports is 2-3 meters, and the inter-beam space is laid with a hollow brick. Such designs are fragile and unreliable, and the fact that houses are constantly growing up adds to them even greater shakiness. Some buildings already consist of 4-5 floors, and each top can be a bit wider than the previous one, as a result, the houses look like horseless inverted pyramids.

The owner of the upper floor sells his roof to the new owner, and he makes his home there at his own discretion and opportunity. Favelas - this housing is mostly illegal, talk about any communications in such houses became possible only in recent years, they began to conduct electricity and do normal sewage.

Rich beggars

The first settlers of the slums were several categories of people: the inhabitants of the countryside, who are forced to move to cities in search of a better fate, those who found themselves at the bottom due to inability to earn, and runaway slaves.

By the fate of the favela of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife and other Brazilian cities have become a haven for thousands, millions of inhabitants of the country. Judging by the statistics, at the moment there lives every fifth Brazilian. Official data strongly underestimate the population of favelas. The thing is that controlling births and deaths in these areas is simply unrealistic: illegal housing blocks, in which a large number of people peacefully and not very close, perfectly hide their secrets.

For the sake of justice it is worth noting that some favelas are no longer a haven for society's dregs, but quite suitable micro-districts for living, in which the authorities managed to get rid of chaos and complete lawlessness.

Legitimate anarchy

Favelas occupy huge areas, which it is simply impossible to ignore. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, the bulk of the country's criminals live there. Very often these areas are associated with drug traffickers and bandits, there is some truth in this. However, in fact, there are not so many large dragdiilers there, units fed by small bipods have settled at the feeders.

Secondly, the Brazilian favelas do not perceive the power of the country. Their inhabitants are used to surviving on their own. An interesting fact is that among the unspoken rules in these territories there is one that prohibits communication with police representatives.

In Brazil, there is a special method for determining citizens, confirming their belonging to a solvent and trustworthy class. For this, not only identity documents (passport, driving license) are used, but also receipts for payment of bills. They are a guarantee that a person is attached to a certain place of residence, makes deductions to the budget. Otherwise, it is difficult for a resident of the country to obtain assistance from the state, even an elementary address to a hospital can be a problem.

Politics of pacification

Dangerous for the rich areas of the country's capital and tourists, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are slowly becoming more peaceful. In the city there are almost a thousand (according to various sources, from 750 to 1200). In each of them can live a different number of people, large are those whose population exceeds 5 thousand people. To organize order there, the authorities decided to conduct a so-called program on pacification of the population and demilitarization on the territory of the favel.

It is forbidden to have weapons in the country. According to the law, they can only be owned by police and military, nevertheless the arms trade is flourishing, getting to Rio is not only guns, but also more serious "units". During sweeps by special forces between representatives of the authorities and local residents there are hot wars, and then the two opposing sides suffer significant losses.

However, thanks to such a rigid method of combating crime, the slums in Brazil cease to be unmanageable territories, where it is terrible to walk in the dark. In addition to punitive operations, the authorities, as far as possible, organize the normal life of the inhabitants of the favelas. Here, a large-scale electrification was carried out, the gutter drains were replaced by a modern water supply system and its diversion.

Equally important is the fact that medicine, education and public transport have become more accessible to people. It is not yet possible to provide the favela with all the amenities of the residents: the architecture and location of the streets simply do not leave any possibility for this, but the state programs are not designed for one year, and slum upgrading works are ongoing.

May it be so

Despite attempts by the authorities to curb the demeanor of the poor in the neighborhoods, life in the favelas is still under the control of drug lords and obeys their laws. To say that this is bad, it is impossible: local "kings" assert their own foundations, for insubordination violators are severely punished. The disadvantage of this method of self-government is that each favela - it's kind of like a separate republic, a country in the country, and what one can not do to the inhabitants of one district, in another it is committed practically with impunity.

Within its favela, you can not steal, kill, rape and even get parasitic. Penalties for offenses are very cruel: you can lose limbs, be burned alive or banished. Bosses do not regret even children and adolescents. This dictatorship suits the locals, as it obviously gives them at least some guarantees of tranquility.

Is there a future?

What awaits the inhabitants of the Brazilian slums in the future is unclear. The tendency to absorb favelas by civilization is obvious, but this process is too slow. Corruption, bureaucracy, chaos and disorder do not allow the authorities to quickly implement their plans. In addition, Brazil, like the rest of Latin America, can not enter a qualitatively new level of the economy. In addition, there is another reasonable question: do the slum-dwellers themselves want to get out of the shadow of lawlessness and live by universal rules and norms?