Families' agony as 30,000 are evicted from their homes in £11bn slum facelift
Rio ... slums being cleared for sporting events
Alexandre Cappi
Published: 18 hrs ago
IN tree bark skirt and macaw feather head-dress Tobi Itauni waves an impaled deer’s skull at the builders working on the Maracanã soccer stadium.
“I’m warding off evil spirits,” the wide-eyed Amazonian Indian tells me as he murmurs a chant to ancestors.
“If I concentrate hard enough it might stop FIFA too.”
Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã is in the midst of a £377million re-fit to make it a fitting sporting centrepiece — hosting not only the 2014 World Cup Final but the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies two years later.
The cost of the 2014 World Cup has tripled from initial estimates to £2.3billion. Meanwhile the 2016 Games are conservatively estimated to cost Brazil £8.7billion — a total of at least £11billion.
But the mud huts owned by Tobi and the 20 or so other indigenous people who live permanently in the shadow of the stadium are not part of the gleaming new image Brazil wants to project to the world.
Indian elder Xamakire, 47, says he was told by the authorities two years ago that their huts would be knocked down to build a shopping centre selling souvenirs.
According to local forum the Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics, 30,000 people in Rio will be evicted from their homes because of the two events.
Eight thousand have already been removed. They say nationally 170,000 people will be evicted — because of the World Cup alone.
A crocodile tooth dangling from his neck, Xamakire gestures at the workmen on the Maracanã’s vast concrete stands, and says: “We feel a deep pain.
“We love football. Our people played with balls made from rubber in the Amazon for centuries.
“But there are malls all over the world. We should be allowed to stay and show the world our culture. This World Cup shouldn’t be just about the rich of Brazil.”
Kicked out ... Kelly da Silva and her kids miss old home
Louis Wood
It is a message echoed in the poverty-blighted Metro Mangueira shanty town or “favela”. A huge mural of a tearful boy in the famous yellow strip of Brazil dominates the entrance to the town.
The graffiti message scrawled on the painting in this nation where football approaches a religion is stark. “You’re going to destroy my community because of the Cup,” it says. “Thank you FIFA.”
Like the indigenous people’s mud huts, the slum dwellers of Metro Mangueira say they aren’t part of booming Brazil’s image as an emerging economic power.
The town is a rabbit warren of winding alleys where urchins play seemingly constant games of street football.
Many of the ramshackle homes — which families have often built themselves and lived in for decades — have already been pulled down.
Graft ... Manuel Fidele goes back for work
Louis Wood
President of the residents’ association France Souza, 44, revealed: “They are moving us because we make the World Cup look ugly.
“The council is trying to do a clean-up to show the world there is no poverty here. It’s a lie.”
The mum-of-two — who survives on her mechanic husband’s meagre £310-a-month wages — says 107 families from the close-knit favela have been moved 37 miles away to the suburb of Cosmos.
Snack bar manager Eomar Freitas, 36, was one who refused to move. Now his three-story self-built home is surrounded by mounds of rubble that were once his neighbours’ homes. “Brazil’s World Cup is bringing us nothing but humiliation,” he insists. “It’s not for us, the poor people.”
We took the 95-minute drive to Cosmos to witness the new lifestyle of the families shunted out to Rio’s distant suburb.
Bitter ... France Souza and anti-World Cup mural at entrance to town
Louis Wood
Driving through the swish beachfront district of Barra, close to where the Olympic Park will be built, it is easy to see how this stunning city was picked to host both Olympics and a World Cup final in the space of two years.
But Olympic tourists are unlikely to stray to the new apartment blocks of Varese in graffiti-strewn Cosmos where some of the former slum dwellers from the Metro favela have been housed.
Security guard Manuel Fidele, 56, had a home in Metro — which was bulldozed. Now he travels the three-hour round trip from his new apartment in Cosmos back to the favela every day for work. “There are no jobs out in Cosmos for me,” he complains. “We were given no choice but to move.”
It is a poor district, patrolled by a ruthless “militia” called Justice League formed from off-duty or former police and military who control gas services, cable TV and “private security”.
Hated ... the new homes in cosmos are unpopular
Louis Wood
They are led from a maximum security prison cell by brutal former military police officer Ricardo Teixeira da Cruz — or Batman as he likes to be known.
Cosmos residents are terrified of speaking on the record about him and his thugs. He is behind bars after being re-arrested in 2009 following his escape from a maximum-security prison.
Figures from the Homicide Division show that 45 per cent of the murders in Rio de Janeiro in 2010 were committed by militias. One local told us: “Batman is a cold-hearted guy, a bandit. We have to pay £10 a month to the militia for so-called security. He controls everything. If he thinks you’re wrong and he’s right about something then you’re a dead man.”
In the last 20 years over a million people have been murdered in Brazil. Rio’s police say they have arrested 726 militiamen since 2007 — including nine politicians. A spokesman said the arrest of militia leaders has led to smaller paramilitary gangs which are “very difficult to combat”.
Gone ... graffiti blames FIFA for wrecking lives in Metro
Louis Wood
It is yet another problem the poor have to endure. Although their flats in Cosmos seem more comfortable than most in the old slum, all the residents we spoke to still pine for their old life in the Metro favela.
Mum-of-two Zelma Dos Santos, 39, said: “I cry all the time. We have sacrificed our lives for the World Cup. We were forced to move here. I’m unemployed.
“There’s no work for me in Cosmos, we are prisoners out here.”
Kelly da Silva, 29, and her four children all swathed in the colours of Brazil, says she misses the close-knit community of the favela.
“It’s split the family up,” she explained. “My in-laws are back in Metro. Now the only way I can get help looking after the kids is to pay.”
Rio’s Municipal Housing Department insists the resettled families were evicted from the favela because of Metro’s “precarious conditions without any sanitation or infrastructure”.
A spokesman said: “Families who went to housing developments in the Cosmos did so consciously by choice.”
Back in the shadow of the famous Maracanã, Tobi and the other Indians are still invoking the spirits of their forefathers.
“Just because we’re from the forest doesn’t mean we don’t have rights,” insisted feather head-dressed Xamakire.
“We have been fighting for our rights for 500 years.
“We will keep on fighting.”
Can Brazil Pull Off World Cup-Olympic Double? — See Sun tomorrow
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/features/4504942/Riover-and-out.html#ixzz24lHX5YYo
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