42 The Americas The EconomistJune 1st 2019
2 waste-dumping and land-grabbing in São
Bento, but blames it on the mayor’s office.
He says he has “never heard about militias”
there. The mayor’s office argues that giving
out titles deters illegal construction.
Militias in Duque de Caxias have also
been accused of stealing sand (for building
work) and petrol from government pipe-
lines. On April 26th a leak from an illegal
tap left a nine-year-old girl with third-de-
gree burns; she died in hospital. Militias in
some places hold auctions where drug
gangs bid for the right to sell their wares on
militia turf. In Nova Iguaçu, a city that bor-
ders Duque de Caxias, militiamen recently
started extorting money from taxi drivers.
The drivers were already paying off drug
dealers and corrupt cops. “So who do you
report it to?” one driver asks.
The government’s plans may end up
strengthening militias. Sérgio Moro, the
justice minister, has introduced a bill that
would shield from prosecution police who
kill criminals because of “excusable fear,
surprise or intense emotion”. Mr Bolsonaro
has expanded the right to own and carry
guns, suggesting people need them to pro-
tect themselves from criminals. “We’re re-
turning to the origin myth that fuelled the
militias,” says Tarcísio Motta, the leader of
psolin Rio’s city council.
However, the militias’ links with Mr
Bolsonaro’s government may provoke a
backlash. There was an outcry after the
murder in March last year of Marielle Fran-
co, a city councilwoman from psol. In
March two former cops were arrested for
her murder and accused of belonging to a
militia in Rio’s West Zone. One lived in the
same condo as Mr Bolsonaro; his daughter
had dated the president’s son. Another of
Mr Bolsonaro’s sons, Flávio, a senator from
Rio, employed the wife and mother of a fu-
gitive police officer accused of leading the
same militia. Flávio and the aide who hired
them are under investigation for money
laundering, involving real estate deals. On
May 29th President Bolsonaro’s wife’s un-
cle was arrested on suspicion of ties to an
allegedly land-grabbing militia near Brasí-
lia. All deny wrongdoing.
Mr Ferrando of dracoadmits that mili-
tias were “not a priority” in the past. Now,
he says, police, prosecutors and regulatory
agencies will use lessons from Brazil’s Lava
Jato anti-corruption investigations to at-
tack the militias’ economic activities. This
“follow the money” strategy will be put to
the test in Muzema, a favela in Rio’s West
Zone where two apartment buildings col-
lapsed in April, killing 24 people. The ille-
gal properties had been built by the militia
thought to be responsible for Ms Franco’s
murder. In the days after the tragedy, rela-
tives watched as firefighters pulled bodies
from the rubble. The sound of their pneu-
matic drills blended with those at new con-
struction sites all around. 7A
s you walk down Rua Teixeira Ribeiro,
a commercial avenue in the Complexo
da Maré, Rio de Janeiro’s biggest favela, you
barely notice the open-air drug markets
guarded by teens with ak-47s. There are
also pet stores with exotic fish, restaurants
with better service than most Copacabana
bistros and a hipster barbershop with
mood lighting and retro décor. And now,
for the first time, they have been counted.
An unofficial census conducted by more
than 100 local people over a period of six
years found that the Maré includes 660
bars, 307 beauty salons, 138 supermarkets,
69 computer stores, 21 ice-cream shops and
8 dental offices. In total, 3,182 licit busi-
nesses employ 9,371 people.
The census was organised by two ngos,
Redes da Maré and Observatório de Favelas.
Later this month they will publish a 112-
page book of their findings. The idea is to
put a part of the city that until recently was
mostly uncharted onto the map. Despite
being home to some 140,000 people,
roughly the same as the more famous Co-
pacabana, this informal settlement was a
blank spot on Google and city maps. Such
invisibility “makes it easier for the govern-
ment and society to treat favela residents
like they don’t exist”, says Everton Pereira
da Silva, one of the census-takers. His
grandfather moved to the favela in the1960s from Brazil’s north-east and worked
on its electricity grid; now he is working on
its informational grid.
The national government conducts a
census, too; the most recent was in 2010.
But its universal survey had only a couple
of dozen questions. The unofficial census,
led by Dalcio Marinho, a geographer, and
Eliana Sousa Silva, the founder of Redes,
had many more and reached 93% of Maré
residents. Some results were expected.
Some 26% of Maré residents were born in
Brazil’s north-east, 62% identify as black or
mixed-race and 60% root for the football
team Flamengo. But others have spurred
the government to tackle problems it had
long overlooked—for example, proof that
the Maré has lots of children skipping
classes has helped convince the city to
build 25 new schools.
The data created by the mapping have
been shared with Google, and now the
Maré’s streets and businesses are visible
online and recorded by the city govern-
ment. In 2016 more than 530 street names
entered the official register, the largest col-
lection in history. Their residents gained
postcodes, which enabled them to sign up
for bank accounts and receive letters.
The results illuminate how the favela’s
economy works. Around 13% of businesses
close each year but owners often start new
ventures. The Maré has no physical bank,
so startup capital usually comes from sav-
ings earned from jobs in the formal econ-
omy; only 15% of favela entrepreneurs have
any debt. Businesses that are obsolete else-
where thrive. Getúlio Tolentino, who runs
a dvd-rental shop for some 6,000 clients,
benefits from the fact that newly ubiqui-
tous Wi-Fi is still too slow for streaming.
(He also has a side business, selling sex
toys and providing “erotic lessons”.)
Similar mapping projects are now tak-
ing place in more than 200 of Rio’s 1,018 in-
formal settlements, home to 23% of the
city’s population. The hope is that they can
bring about similar changes. But although
counting encourages the government to
pay attention, it cannot restore order. On
May 6th police helicopters started shoot-
ing over the Maré just as children left
schools. In the first four months of this
year, cops in the state gunned down 558
people. A city councilwoman, Marielle
Franco, the first person elected to office
from the Maré, was murdered last year.
At the Museu da Maré, a humble institu-
tion housed in an old ship-building fac-
tory, exhibits show how life has improved.
There are pula-pulas, barrels once used to
haul water from the nearby Guanabara Bay.
Nowadays 98% of residents have running
water. Each year more attend university.
“We thought the violence would disappear
once we got electricity, water and trash col-
lection, but we were wrong,” says Lourenço
Cezar da Silva, the museum’s director. 7COMPLEXO DA MARÉ
A new census shows how a favela
really worksMapping favelasTerra cognita
In for the count