Stereotyping Brazil

The Dutch quality newspaper Trouw reported two messages about Brazil last Saterday. The first one was titled: ”also the garbage man should just drive through the favela”, about the lacking of public services in São Paulo’s favelas, the other one reported that Rio de Janeiro is the happiest city in the world, according to research done by business magazine Forbes.
Interesting is that both reports are about stereotyping in different way: in the case of the favela about segregation between the favela and the rest of the city. These neighborhoods are stigmatized my the media, says sociologist and UN-reporter Raquel Rolnik. ‘In the favela happen a thousand things. But the reports about these neighborhoods are always about the violence. Because of this the impression emerges that it is correct to eliminate everybody.’ Police violence is a big problem in Brazil.
The other report, about Rio de Janeiro as the most happy city in the world, is also based on meaningless stereotypes. The main reason why people consider Rio as the most happy city is because of its carnaval: ‘it’s a classic image people have of Rio, and it’s an image of happiness’, says Simon Anholt, researcher for the fourth biggest market research company: GfK Custom Research North America. In this message no single word about violence, favelas, street people. Maybe you just forget about all these aspects if you sell statics for potential consumers. And if you have to sell newspapers: good news is no news.

City of Walls: Summary Chapter 1. TALKING OF CRIME AND ORDERING THE WORLD

Caldeira explains that in São Paulo the talking about crime and violence started to change the urban landscape and the public space. This kind of talking has a simplistic characteristics, ‘relying on the creation of clear-cut oppositional categories, the most important of which are good and evil.’ She explains that the experience of violence can change your entire vision about society and the city, the fear is something that can stay the rest of your life. The world becomes divided in a ‘before’ and a ‘after’ the crime where the ‘before’ is strongly romantisised and the ‘after’ is ‘life like hell’.
‘Crime offers a language for expressing the feeling related to changes in the neighborhood, the city an Brazilian society.’
The thinking in categories and stereotypes is in many cases simply not correct. However, the people use it in order to symbolically reorder the world they live in. People don’t understand anymore the situations they have to deal with, and because of that they use simplifications of criminals such as ‘nordestino’, ‘people from cortiços’ or ‘favela’s’. Maybe this ‘talk of crime’ ‘generates order, it is no a democratic, tolerant egalitarian order but its exact opposite. Democracy is about openness and the indeterminacy of boundaries, not about enclosures, rigid boundaries or dichotomies. In the field of crime, barriers are embedded not only in the discourses but also, materially, in the city’s walls, in the residences of people from all social classes, and in technologies of security. Prejudices and derogations not only are verbal but also reproduce themselves in rituals of suspicion and investigation at the entrances of public and private buildings.’ The building of walls in São Paulo has the strongest connection toward the process of democratization after the military dictatorship.
‘From the 1940s to the end of the 1970s … Brazil became a modern country through a paradoxical combination of rapid capitalist development, increased inequality, and lack of political freedom and respect for citizenship rights. São Paulo epitomizes [Dutch: belichamen, JvB] these paradoxes. … São Paulo has become a symbol of a poor but modern industrial consumer society, heterogeneous and deeply unequal.
The drop in fertility rates, that already started in the 1970s effected also the growth of the population in the city. Growth rates dropped from 4.5% in 1940s, 3.8% in 1970s, 2.0% in 1980s, between 1991-1996 0.4%. [We can say that SP is a consolidating metropolis in matters of growth.] One of the possible explanations for this is the accessibility to mass media that exposes the ‘model of a modern middle-class family with a working wife and a few children’.
[For interesting data about the distribution of wealth see p47,48.]
Caldeira merciless breaks the image of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ into pieces: ‘the income of people of color is only around 65 percent of that of the white population’, ’68 percent of the urban households below the indigent line had either a black or a prado head of household, while black or prado households represent only 41% of all urban households’.
‘The increase in violence, the failure of the institiutions of order (especially the police and the justice system), the privatization of security and justice, and the continuous walling and segregation of cities’ shows that the process of democratization after the end of military dictatorship is ambiguous in its outcome. One the one hand there are free elections, freedom of expression, end of media censorship, ect, but on the other hand violence had increased. ‘This increase in crime and violence is associated with the failure of the justice system, the privatization of justice, police abuses, the walling of the cities, and the deconstruction of public spaces. Caldeira is convinced that it is violence and the talk of violence ‘counteracts democratic tendencies and helps sustain one of the most unequal societies in the world’.

Caldeira, T.P.R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation and Citizenship in São Paulo, University of California Press, 2000, p19-52.