Writing today's essay has been a strange experience: I set out to write a celebration of the capital of Brazil on its 51st birthday because I genuinely enjoy living here and yet the deeper I have looked into the history and current situation of the city, the darker the picture has become.
Near the town where I was born in Wales there is a cave with prehistoric remains. The town itself has Roman and mediaeval features and the surrounding district seems to have been inhabited for several thousand years. In total contrast, for the last 15 years I have lived in Brasilia a city which, on 21st April, celebrated the 51st anniversary of its inauguration. Obviously, indigenous peoples lived in this area long before the Europeans arrived and on our occasional wet and rainy days I often wonder what life was like for them, building whatever protection they could from the bushes and trees in the local scrubland known as the cerrado.
But it is the modern city that dominates the landscape today - no one knows or cares what happened to the original inhabitants. The abundant greenery of other parts of Brazil provided building materials for large-scale communal dwelling places and also the colourful feathers to create the headdresses of the indigenous groups that appear on picture postcards. The relative inaccessibility of their lands also provided a certain inviolability, whereas the cerrado provides less game to hunt, less foliage suitable for building and less protection against human predators, so tribal societies in the Brazilian Midwest were always more sparse and precarious.
As far back as the 18th century there was talk of moving the capital of Brazil towards the centre of this huge country and in the mid-1950s President Juscelino Kubitschek finally committed his reputation and the country's finances to planning a functioning capital where there was nothing but miles of virgin scrub, a few farms and, in the words of one of the first pioneers: "More snakes than you could shake a stick at". Even more striking is the fact that to all intents and purposes the place was up and running within three years after construction started.
Of course, there was a cost to all this. The country ran up huge amounts of debt and safety regulations for the mainly unskilled labour force were rudimentary to say the least. Two fascinating films: Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra, by Vladimir Carvalho and O Romance doVaqueiro Voador by Manfredo Caldas show the lives of the labourers brought in (mainly from the Northeast of Brazil) to build the city. Translating the phrase Vaqueiro Voador - Flying Cowboy - is an example of Brazilian black humour referring to the northeasterners, many of whom had been cowboys before becoming unskilled construction workers, falling from the high-rise office blocks they were building. Local folklore has it that the bodies were buried in the foundations of new buildings.
One particular incident stands out in both films: at the time of Carnival in 1959 men working for the Pacheco Fernandes Dantas construction company staged a protest against the quality of their food and also against the water being cut off in their living quarters, thus preventing them from washing after work and going to Carnival dances in nearby towns, as well as their pay being withheld for the same reason. Carnival or not, work had to go on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. On 8th February a protest about bad food in the dining hall led to altercations with the catering staff and a general breaking of furniture, which led to the GEB (Special Brasilia Guard) being called. This was a police force that had been put together because police chiefs in the then capital, Rio de Janeiro, did not want to lose their men by sending them to what was to be the new capital.
As the men of the GEB attempted to beat up the ringleaders of the protest, they were in turn set upon by others from the 1,300-strong workforce and had to beat a humiliating retreat. That night, a stronger force of GEB, allegedly armed with machine guns, appeared in lorries and proceeded to shoot indiscriminately into the living quarters of the construction workers. It is not known how many casualties resulted from this action: claims of numbers of deaths range from one to 120. Incredibly, there was almost no news coverage of the event because at that time Brazilian newspapers closed down for two days during Carnival and in any case they were more interested in covering the visit to Rio of the American film star Jayne Mansfield. One anti-Kubitschek newspaper from Minas Gerais did send a reporter and even tried to follow the story up a month later, when it discovered that the eyewitnesses had mysteriously disappeared.
We do have a statement from a socialist politician, Salvador Lossaco who, as well as being in favour of building the new capital, also supported those working there. He denounced the violence of the GEB and with respect to this incident he claimed that 50 law-enforcement officials fired machine guns, resulting in the deaths of 14 workers and serious injury to 37 others.
For those who speak Portuguese, I recommend viewing on Youtube the following excerpts from the film Conterrâneos Velhos de Guerra that show interviews with Lúcio Costa, the urban planner of Brasilia and Oscar Niemeyer, its main architect. Costa claims that he knew nothing of the incident but goes on to say, in essence: "Even if I had known I would not have cared because it was the Wild West out there and we had a job to do". Niemeyer at least has the decency to look uncomfortable (‘shifty’ might be a less charitable description) and tries to close down the interview when pressed. The clips can be viewed at:
What I find interesting is that Niemeyer has always claimed to be a Communist and indeed shows his true Stalinist credentials in making no protest against the sacrifice of workers for the Greater Good.
And this brings us to the paradox that makes Brasilia such a perfect place to live in: despite initial cosmetic attempts to provide different levels of accommodation for different income groups, it soon became clear that the new capital was attracting inconveniently large numbers of people with little or no income and these migrants were accommodated in the satellite towns that are now known as the Entorno. These settlements follow the classical American pattern of shabby, low-rise, low-cost houses served by dirt roads that are gradually paved over time. Given the immense problems of unemployment and drug trafficking in Brazil, violence levels are at a level that countries like Iraq would consider unacceptable.
(Conversation some years ago between me and my then maid, who lives in one of the satellite towns:
Self: So Maria, you're from the Northeast, right?
Maria: Yes.
Self: So do you have your family here?
Maria: Well, my father was here but he was murdered 12 years ago. I still see the bloke who did it walking around town but he was never brought to trial.)
The situation is reminiscent of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, in which the Eloi live a perfect life on the sunlit uplands until nightfall, when the Morlocks emerge from their subterranean factories to capture members of the Eloi to eat. This situation is mirrored in Brasilia in recorded cases of armed thugs raiding domestic dinner parties in houses in the elite sector of town.
So, what started out as a pleasant reflection on a remarkable achievement in a developing country has unfortunately turned into a rather more critical observation. If Lúcio Costa were still alive, he would probably put the problems down to ‘growing pains’, but given that the Federal District politicians were recently videotaped pocketing bundles of cash payoffs it is difficult to see the social and financial imbalances between the Plano Piloto and the satellite towns being reduced in the near future. In fact, Costa's enlightened social views are reflected in this form of social apartheid. I would say that I am going to cultiver mon jardin except that the safety risks involved in living in a house with a garden force my wife and I to live in an apartment.
No comments:
Post a Comment