The Other War Zone

Poverty and Violence in the Slums of Brazil

Emilia R. Pfannl, May, 2004

“We ask people for money and they say ‘I don’t have anything’.  You point a thirty-eight at them and then you see how fast they come up with some.” [1]

City of God, a recently released movie, is based on a true story of violence in an area of concentrated poverty in the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the slums, young children live in extreme poverty, and violence is part of their everyday lives. The movie makes us aware of a world in which children grow up in cultures of violence, where guns and killings are a central part of their experience.

Poverty appears as both the cauldron for violence and the result of the violence exerted by society on the weakest, most vulnerable of its members. In situations of hopelessness, without work or any chance for upward socio-economic mobility, people become desperate. As in real life, the poor Brazilian children in the movie grow up in desperation, and violence often appears as the way out.  It becomes the means of survival – and of its opposite.

Desperation, the utter hopelessness of extreme conditions of poverty, continues to plague most of the world today and especially the underdeveloped countries. Those who suffer under such unjust conditions are liable to – and do – fight back, often with violent and criminal acts. When the poor feel – and are – forgotten or neglected, when inequality – ever present – has no horizon of equal opportunity in sight, violence becomes a way of life, a means of dealing with the desperate and miserable conditions that appear inescapable. People in these conditions will kill and risk death for something to eat or for a single material possession. The aggression they themselves are the object of – cruel injustices and violent repression – causes their own violence. Victims of society that they are, in their impotence they themselves become victimizers – as a defense mechanism and out of a deep feeling of frustration, anger and resentment that takes over their lives.

Violence does not originate from poverty. It is poverty, rather, that is produced and sustained by direct and indirect violence. When poor children are abandoned by society in their most basic needs of care and decent education, this constitutes an extreme form of violence, albeit indirect, exerted by society. Without the opportunity to go to school and receive quality education, there is no hope for personal advancement or a better future. Children of poor, often illiterate parents who are incapable of helping them with school later become parents who cannot help their own children succeed, and thus the vicious cycle of generational poverty continues, creating an underclass of severely disadvantaged people.

It is the desperation before what appears to be insurmountable injustice, more so than the extent and brutality of the poverty itself, which breeds and reproduces violence. Galtung describes structural violence as the violence that is, “built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.”[2] He points out that, “if people are starving when this is objectively avoidable, then violence is committed, regardless of whether there is a clear subject-action-object relation.”[3] This deep, structural social violence that sustains systemic poverty in so many areas of the world leaves people with hardly any choice but resorting to violence as a means of survival, or as what appears as the only way out. It is, therefore, absolutely necessary to address poverty in order to seek true, sustainable social peace.   

To emphasize the extent to which poverty and indirect structural violence can produce cultures of violence even among young children, let us analyze the case of the favelas or slums of Brazil and explore what can be done in the slums in order to contribute to peace.

The Brazilian Favelas

Brazil is one of the countries with the most inequality in terms of the gap that exists between the very wealthy and the extremely destitute. A huge portion of the population lives in poverty. According to the World Bank, “one-fifth of Brazil’s 173 million people account for only a 2.2 percent share of the national income. Brazil is second only to South Africa in a world ranking of income inequality.”[4] This in effect leaves millions of Brazilians with little influence, recourse or hopes to deal with their dire situation in society. In big cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, a third of the population lives in the surrounding slums, and social conditions for the poor are terrible. In 2001, the country’s official unemployment figure was 6.4%, but, in the slums around the largest cities, employment is much worse and likely not fully recorded in government statistics.

The lack of educational opportunity for poor in Brazil only aggravates extreme inequality among the country’s citizens. The poorest 25 percent in urban areas have completed less then four grades of schooling, while the wealthiest 25 percent have completed on average ten years of schooling.[5] While people living in the slums frequently state that education would help give them the skills to get better jobs, they maintain that for them it is either a matter of working and having food to eat or going to school and starving. As one slum resident put it, “You have to choose between working and studying because you can’t do both. And if you choose to study, what are you going to eat?”[6]

In addition, according to the World Bank, the country has the world’s highest murder and homicide rates, due mainly to drug-related violence in the slums. Brazilians living in slums claim that every day they have to deal with, “theft, vandalism, muggings, rapes, gang fights, murders, and organized crime.”[7] “People are very hostile here.  They even have knife fights over soccer.”  “People get killed at parties and on their way to and from parties.”[8]

A recent article in the BBC news compared the situation in the slums surrounding Rio de Janeiro to a war zone. There are an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 armed children in Rio alone.  Statistics also show that over the past 14 years guns killed a total of 4,000 children under the age of eighteen. Many claim that this happens because the authorities have abandoned the slums, making them similar to war zones where gangs and drugs rule the scene.[9]

Currently there is talk of creating a ten-foot wall around two of the main slums in Rio, Rocinha and Vidigal, where gangs and drugs appear to authorities to be getting out of control to an intolerable degree. Authorities claim that the wall will help the security forces to control the area better. However, human rights groups around the world are condemning this idea, saying that, “the wall would penalize innocent people and is unlikely to be effective.” In addition, it would, “create social apartheid when what is needed is investment in poor communities.”[10] It would seem clear that social and economic investment in the poor communities is what is lacking. And because of the lack of options and opportunities for people living in the slums, gangs, drugs and arms trafficking tend to become the way of life, a means of survival in a sea of social intolerance and neglect.

Children and Violence

Perhaps what is most tragic about the violence and poverty in the slums of Brazil is the effect on the lives of children. It has been estimated that about 30 million children live in conditions that are subhuman and inadequate for their development.[11] They also experience violence at the hands of authorities, and there are countless human rights violations regarding street children by police officers and other adults. “Violence against and by street children is a part of the fabric of life in which these victims and perpetrators dangerously live… Violence is an aspect of identity as tragically indelible as the scars that crisscross their bodies.”[12]

Indirect – or more or less direct – violence against street children in the slums can be gauged through the infant mortality and illiteracy rates, and in general the subhuman living conditions prevailing. The number of young children with arms or involved in gangs and drug trafficking, or simply the way that they use violence to get food and clothing, are concrete indications of the violence that breeds in such brutal socio-economic conditions. 

A recent study by the International Labor Organization shows that crime by children related to drug abuse and trafficking in Rio has increased during the 1990’s.  Also, by the year 2000 the children’s age of entry into drug trafficking and other related crimes fell from 15-16 to 12-13.[13] Children involved in this type of violence share some characteristics. The study shows that they belong to the poorest families in the slums, and that they have less than the country average of 6.4 years of schooling. When asked what they thought the best solution to the problem was, slum residents responded that investment in education and generation of employment and income were.

The exact number of street children in the cities of Brazil is unknown. Some of these children have families that live in the slums while others are orphans. Most of them are ‘roaming vendors,’ selling odds and ends on a day-to-day basis. Other children resort to begging. When interviewed, a thirteen-year-old stated, “I don’t have any other future, so I sell candy. I’d like to work at a real job, like being a doorman, a guard in a bank, or carrying boxes of olive oil.”[14] However, other children who were interviewed sometimes would, admit reluctantly that they sporadically engage in illegal activities – stealing, drug trafficking and prostitution – in order to ‘make a little extra’.”[15]

Through the interviews we also learn about their pessimistic views on life and survival. Many children living in the slums do not expect to live long lives and have few hopes of growing up to become adults. To emphasize this point, Tobias Hecht (1998), author of At Home in the Street, writes about the story of a young girl who was raped and found dead on a beach in Recife, Brazil. No one claimed her body and she became known as the “Girl without a Name.” Hecht claims that the suffering of this girl, “doubtless resonates with street children’s outrage at their own conditions, at the ruthlessness of the violence they endure and at the prospect of being left to die anonymously and unclaimed in streets that are both their home and their worst enemy.”[16]

This most direct violence is not the only thing killing children. In the slums, hunger, malnutrition and disease are possibly even larger threats to the survival of these children. These deaths certainly weigh in on the mortality statistics; UNICEF reported that in 1993 over 226,000 Brazilians less than five years old died.  In these conditions, it is not surprising that children grow up with little hope for survival or of improving their situation in life. 

Tobias Hecht (1998) tells the story of a boy who robbed a woman in the street but, when she began to cry, decided to return the money to her. Hecht states, “A number of street children told me stories like this, and I interpret them as indications that the children often feel deeply remorseful over what they do.”[17] Street children in Brazil will often say, “We are sufferers” (A gente é muito sofredô). 

Nancy Scheper Hughes (1992) addresses the issue of structural indirect violence in Brazil by stating that it is the “mundane violence of everyday life that goes largely unnoticed, ignored by all except those who endure it and who must watch their children slowly starve.” There comes a point when a person begins to see his or her situation in such living conditions as intolerable. People under duress in subhuman conditions in the slums of Brazil see the extreme inequality around them and often conclude that there is no way to deal with things except to resort to violence and survive by whatever means possible. 

“Street children are a reminder, literally on the doorsteps of rich Brazilians and just outside the five-star hotels where the development consultants stay, of the contradictions of contemporary social life: the opulence of the few amid the poverty of the majority, the plethora of resources amid the squandering of opportunities. They embody the failure of an unacknowledged social apartheid to keep the poor out of view… They are painful reminders of the dangerous and endangered world in which we live.” [18]

Moving Towards Peace

From the day they are born children in the slums of Brazil are unable to live as children and must deal with surviving in a world where all of the cards appear to be stacked against them. The slums in many areas of Brazil have become such terrible places that the police are afraid to enter and authorities are thinking of isolating them with walls. 

Achieving peace in such extremely violent settings is a very hard challenge that cannot be pursued without removing the root causes of poverty. These causes involve an economic and social system that is not producing jobs or providing education adequately, and that therefore presents itself as aggressive and violent to the downtrodden.   

The International Labor Organization study on children in Brazil proposed four policies to be implemented in order to deal with the issue of children and violence in the slums: generation of income and employment for families of children involved in drug trafficking; investment in education and social protection instruments; integrated actions in popular spaces embracing generation of income, leisure, education, urbanization, etc.; and measures in the legal field, such as discriminating between different drugs.[19]

Fernando Reimers maintains that the best way to deal with inequality, which in turn leads to violence, is through education. “Education is a fundamental gate to social opportunity and, therefore, essential to shrinking the opportunity gap between rich and poor.”[20] Moving towards more equal educational opportunities would constitute a solid foundation for the reduction of the profound inequality in Brazil, and would thus promote a significant reduction of violence. Without education and other ways of abating income inequality, poverty and violence will persist through generations, leaving no hope for a better future for millions.

Yet, going to school is impossible if there is no money to buy food. The problem of hunger must therefore be dealt with first, or at least in parallel, so that the children do not have to work as a vendors, beg or resort to stealing or drug trafficking in order to feed themselves and help their families, thereby making school no longer an option. 

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva promised to eliminate hunger by the year 2007 when he was elected, but hunger still affects the lives of too many Brazilians. There is no doubt that the attitude towards the problem has changed since the massive killings of ‘overabundant’ street children a decade or so ago. But recent data on Rio de Janeiro shows that 15 percent of the population lives below the poverty line of $27 a month. Because of this situation, “The conditions on the outskirts of big cities remain grim, with youths hanging around doing nothing, an explosion in violent crime and a severely deficient police and judicial system.”[21] A successful war on hunger that may allow for schooling, and better educational opportunities appears as the principal challenge for moving towards social peace.

However, the cause and effect relationship between education and reducing inequalities and violence in society may appear to be somewhat indirect, not to mention remote in time, and could be quite problematic in social settings dominated by poverty. To add to the lack of food and the nutritional problems, extremely low and undependable incomes, broken families and homelessness, schooling is typically not viewed and has seldom been a means of achieving upward mobility in such awful socio-economic conditions. This is largely due to the fact that the schools simply replicate the social environment, in that they are very inadequately funded and are generally poor in quality. It is in this context, but only in such a context, that schooling has little effect on bettering the lives of children.

Despite these challenges, without addressing the issue of education, there will be no way out of poverty, which in turn means that the violence that exists as a result of poverty will continue without any hope for a peaceful future. What is required is a strategic approach that shifts the weight of society’s resources to allocate them decisively to social investment generally, and especially in education, away from a repressive and violent attitude. From such a perspective, it is possible that Gandhi had something more than a faraway future in mind when he said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Endnotes