Brazil: Building New Worlds in the Favelas
Brazil: Building New Worlds in the Favelas
Written by Raúl Zibechi
Friday, 08 April 2016 18:54
Source: Americas Program
As the car passes by, it almost grazes two thick, meter-high blocks of cement. One little miscalculation and the paint would be scraped right off the car.
“The caveirão doesn’t go here,” someone says, referring to the armored cars specially built for the Military Police to enter favelas. “Nor do the patrol cars,” says a third, jubilantly. For the forces of repression, entrance to La Comunidad Chico Mendes on the Morro de Chapadão, in the northern zone of Rio de Janeiro, is restricted.
We climb uphill through narrow, well-paved streets, passing simple, but well-kept houses. In minutes we arrive at the headquarters of the Movimiento de Comunidades Populares (MCP), an enormous iron door next to a small, tidy store that sells food and cleaning supplies. “We don’t sell cigarettes,” a woman calls out. Calmly, but firmly, she adds, “They’re bad for your health.”
The door opens onto a wide, covered courtyard with offices and meeting rooms in the back and a second floor with more rooms. An enormous poster warns against the consumption of alcohol; in another corner an even larger poster outlines the ten “columns of the movement” – economy, free exercise of religion, family, health, housing, education, sports, art, leisure, and infrastructure. They are called columns because they are the pillars on which the organization is based, according to the needs of the popular sectors.
A short, stocky man of about sixty offers us fresh water to relieve the tremendous carioca heat and invites us to walk around the facility. It all happens calmly, as if in slow motion, perhaps as a way to counteract the heat. Gelson invites us to sit down as the woman from the store appears. Janduir tells us that they were the first MCP activists to arrive at the favela more than 20 years ago, when there were ramshackle houses made of wood.
A different community
The main difference between la Comunidad Chico Mendes and other favelas is that it was formed by a takeover or invasion, not by the gradual accumulation of families. People here were already organized before they occupied the hillside. They arrived together and began to build the neighborhood, along with houses. They were leftist activists who decided to name the settlement for the most emblematic rubber tapper of the era, assassinated by landowners in 1988.
More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/brazil-archives-63/5611-brazil-building-new-worlds-in-the-favelas
