Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

by Bryan McCann

Beginning in the late 1970s, activists from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro challenged the conditions—such as limited access to security, sanitation, public education, and formal employment—that separated favela residents from Rio's other citizens. The activists built a movement that helped to push the nation toward redemocratization. They joined with political allies in an effort to institute an ambitious slate of municipal reforms. Those measures ultimately fell short of aspirations, and soon the reformers were struggling to hold together a fraying coalition. Rio was bankrupted by natural disasters and hyperinflation and ravaged by drug wars. Well-armed drug traffickers had become the new lords of the favelas, protecting their turf through violence and patronage. By the early 1990s, the promise of the favela residents' mobilization of the late 1970s and early 1980s seemed out of reach. Yet the aspirations that fueled that mobilization have endured, and its legacy continues to shape favela politics in Rio de Janeiro.

Genres: Brazil, History, Politics, Urban Studies, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The moronic text of a governmental priest that loves the god that takes money from the poor and showers him with a nice sinecure, a good wage, probably a decent school for his children and a not very violent police force to protect all the goods he acquired over the years with taxpayer money. McCann hence will blame the victims themselves, the favela dweller who turns into a drug dealer and the law abiding citizen who watches powerless as the militarized governmental troops kill his family and neighbors to protect the same citizens they are shooting at. For McCann there is a change somewhere and it's the poor who are at fault for refusing to die faster so that the new dictators will have nicer cities to sell to rich White tourists like McCann.

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

As first got the book when it came out in 2014, but I didn't really get to reading it until last summer for a week when I read the first third and then I picked it up again in April. It reads as something of a civic tragedy as McCann weaves the tale of how reforms in Rio de Janeiro's favelas during the transition to democracy fell apart. The most heartbreaking chapters are the last two as he focuses in on how the favela associations buckled under the weight of drug traffickers and police corruption while city and state officials vied for power.

This is a book that I'll surely revisit when I prep a unit on Rio de Janeiro for one of my courses.