Mudslides in Rio: A Response to the Wall Street Journal

In Rio de Janiero, the official death toll from days of heavy rains rose to 169 as of Thursday afternoon. Bodies were still being recovered and rescuers still digging through to find missing people. A major landlside in the Rio suburb of Niterói may have killed almost 200 people. In that town, a favela, or shanytown, called Morro do Bumbo gave way into the ravine below.

Rio de Janiero gets its beauty from the lush and spiny hills that surround the Copacabana and Ipanema beaches. Rising up into those hills are the favelas—homes of millions of people and families—they’re lives are being washed away with the rains. The Wall Street Journal called the favelas “ramshackle slums” but this is a Western misunderstanding of Brazilian and Latin American life. The people who live in those slums are the heart of Rio de Janiero. The music, the easy-going culture of Rio, was born in those hills.

The people who live in those slums may be poor but everyone in Rio de Janiero knows the favela codes (a list of rules to protect the innocent and to preserve justice even amongst poverty). Articles like the one in the Journal show why Western countries do not understand many of the BRICKM nations.

To say poverty ‘haunts’ Rio de Janiero is preposterous. Poverty is not a pejorative in Rio de Janiero, it is elemental—like weather—like struggle. The people that live in the favelas are not ramshackle or even uneducated. Many of the people who live in slums go to college, there are even decent-sized schools within the favelas, there are chain restaurants within the favelas.

I have to wonder: if all the houses on the California coast washed into the sea, would we write about them like they were squatters?