Yes, I know that my parents have done their share of traveling. I am aware that Mom has hitchhiked across more countries than I’ve even been to in my life, and of course I’ve been on enough trips with Team Armstrong to know that the parental units are more than capable of handling missed flights, last-minute changes, and surly customer-service personnel.
Which of course doesn’t mean that I am at all convinced that I should let them out of my sight when they come to visit me in Rio. I’m excited to see them and I’ve been thinking about where I should take them while they’re here, especially considering they’ll only be in the city for 3 days (will the museum strike be over? what if it’s cloudy or smoggy on the day they want to see the Cristo? will we have time to go to Niteroi? do I want to risk totally grossing out the vegetarians in the group with a churrasco or traditional feijoada? will they want to fight the weekend crowds on Ipanema Beach?). But planning this kind of thing in Rio feels a little different — and even though I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, that’s mostly because of the complicated and difficult relationship that anyone who lives here has with violence and crime.
On the one hand, the “Rio as a violent city” myth is both a simplification and a distortion of what someone who lives here is likely to actually experience. If you based your impressions of Rio on what you read in the newspaper or saw on TV, you’d soon begin thinking that you should invest in a bulletproof vest to wear to work. The truth is that much of the more extreme violence — gunfights, police-gang shooting, etc — is very localized and usually confined to the favelas. To say that Rio has a lot of areas that locals avoid after dark is true, but come on — how many people would really volunteer to wander some of the sketchier neighborhoods in, say, Detroit at night? And if you’re in the Zona Sul, it is nearly impossible to accidentally wander into a favela. Believe me, it will be very, very obvious if you’re about to; to leave, turn around and walk back downhill.
I guess the thing about Rio that tends to shock people from the States is the spatial proximity of the poor and rich areas. Whereas in most US cities you might expect to find a dodgy urban area (perhaps the center) surrounded by middle- or upper-class suburbs (by contrast, in developing countries the center is usually the nicest area and the peripheries are very poor), Rio’s history and various urban “planning” decisions have formed a city where in many cases the most well-to-do areas are literally backed right up against the poorest. It is a fascinating and saddening juxtaposition of human inequality, and a graphic illustration of the magnitude of Rio’s social problems.
Poverty breeds despair; inequality breeds violence. Especially if the poverty and inequality are linked to a powerful and extremely well-organized international drug trade. It is inevitable, in a situation like this, that violence is not always confined to the favelas. There are robberies, carjackings, break-ins, and occasionally other types of disturbances. These make headlines, they are the subject of water-cooler conversations, but the irony is that the crime that you should be most concerned about by far if you are a tourist is a simple mugging or pickpocketing. And the little-known fact is that as a tourist, you are probably much less likely to be bothered in, say, Rocinha favela than in Copacabana.
But on the other hand, to say that Rio is not a violent city is also a misrepresentation of how things work here. I read a letter to the editor in O Globo shortly after I got here in which a tourism worker complained about Rio’s image problem and said that people should stop talking about the issue so that tourists don’t get the wrong impression. Well, no. Pretending that Rio doesn’t have problems — and failing to warn tourists about them — would be irresponsible, period. So with my family’s visit coming up fast, I compromised. I put together a mini-itinerary and then attached a list of avisos that would have made the State Department proud.
Basically, your best bet to avoid being bothered is to do what you should be doing anyway as a tourist, in any big city in the world. Don’t be stupid, and to the best of your ability, avoid looking like a target. Don’t take large sums of money out with you on the street, and especially don’t flash it around (in other words, learn what reais look like in different denominations so you don’t have to wave a whole wad of them when you’re trying to find the correct change). Be aware of your surroundings, look like you know where you’re going, don’t wear fancy jewelry, don’t talk loudly in English, and don’t walk alone at night, especially in deserted areas and double-especially on the beach. And if you follow all that and still get mugged, realize that it happens to everyone, and just. don’t. fight. back.
After writing all that (and more), I wanted to pass on some print articles so that they’d better understand the context and the city, but so far I’ve been very dissatisfied with everything I’ve read. That New York Times article on the PanAm games and Rio? Not so much. All those articles on the favelas? Again, falling dramatically short of nuanced analysis. And unfortunately, some of Brazil’s most famous favela-scholars are also renowned for doing the bulk of their research while avoiding the favelas themselves.
Okay, as the New York Times says, maybe “it is no secret that Rio is crime-ridden and quite violent”. But what all these articles miss is that your relationship to that violence is going to very, very different depending on who you are. If you live in a favela, you will likely experience that violence in the form of tiroteios during police raids, or in the jockeying for position between rival gangs. Living in the asfalto of the Zona Sul, you might have your cellphone stolen, your car broken into. As a tourist, you might be targeted for small-time robbery (often by quite young boys), be held up at an ATM (why are you taking wads of money out after dark? Didn’t we already talk about this?!?), or be hassled by a corrupt police officer. In other words, violence — like many things in Rio — is a very situation- and class-based matter.
Is it, as the NYT article claims, getting worse? I don’t know. It’s quite possible, I suppose, since Rio’s stark inequalities aren’t getting noticeably better. But while people complain about the violence and lament the inefficacy of the government, the lack of security, and how the world is generally going to hell in a handbasket, most people who live in Rio wouldn’t trade the city for anything. There is something about Rio — about its beauty, yes, but also its contradictions, its diversity — that has me, at least, completely captivated. Someday, maybe, I’ll even begin to understand it.
