The History Of The Favelas Of Rio De Janeiro

The history of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro begins in the final years of the nineteenth century as Brazil transitioned from an empire to a republic. As the nation continued to undergo dramatic political changes throughout the course of the twentieth century, the slums of its second largest city grew in size and number, in turn experiencing significant changes of their own. Initially, these communities were loosely incorporated squatter settlements that sprang up organically in order to house internal migrants and itinerant laborers. As they became more numerous and increasingly populated by a burgeoning urban underclass, favela residents began to organize internally, forming associações de moradores, or residents? associations. These organizations

Along with the state government for much of the first half of the twentieth century, the favelas began to attract political attention starting in the mid 1940s. During this period, populist politicians ascended to power on both the national and local stage championing a platform of poverty alleviation and national modernization. A central part of their program was providing modern, sanitary, public housing units as an alternative to slums, which were thought to breed not only disease, illiteracy, and crime, but also moral corruption and political radicalism. The proletarian parks of the 1940s, the brainchild of mayor Henrique Dodsworth (1937-1945), set a precedent of favela removal for a series of full-scale eradication campaigns initiated in the 1960s and 70s. These original settlements were intended as temporary housing for displaced favela residents until the city and state government could erect permanent housing

As the Brazilian government gradually moved away from military rule and toward democracy in the early 1980s, the country increasingly became an important hub in the international trade of illicit drugs. By the middle of that decade, favela residents were no longer contending with eviction and relocation, but had only traded that threat for another, that of drug violence and violent police repression. By 1985, not only had Rio de Janeiro become the country?s most important export node for drugs from the Andean regions to the United States and Europe, it had developed a sizeable local consumer market for cocaine that had been virtually non-existent in prior years. This dynamic, however, has undergone significant changes since 2008. In November of that year, the government of Rio de Janeiro launched the Pacifying Police Units program (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora ? UPP), a state-run operation to disarm the drug trade and reclaim the city?s favelas from the gangs that had controlled them since the mid