The poverty I’d seen in Zaire was completely different from what prevailed here. In Africa, there is at least some kind of subsistence economy always at work: barring prolonged droughts, people are usually able to grow enough to feed themselves. But I’d never seen anything like São Paulo. This was poverty on an unimaginable scale, an epidemic in its own right, which had transformed whole parts of Rio and São Paulo into hideous slums, fertile breeding grounds for violence as well as for lethal pathogens. I was told that the population in the slums of Säo Paulo, known asfavelas, which sit on the
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