Covid-19 and the Brazilian Reality: The Role of Favelas in Combating the Pandemic (article)

Authors: Luana Almeida de Carvalho Fernandes, Caíque Azael Ferreira da Silva, Cristiane Dameda e Pedro Paulo Gastalho de Bicalho.

The consequences of coronavirus in favelas in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) point to social inequality as a structuring factor in Brazilian society. The contagion spread and multiple death cases reveal the multiplicity of existence ways that cohabit the urban context, indicating that in many of these scenarios, access to decent housing, drinking water, and minimum income is not a reality and recommendations from international health agencies are challenging to implement. Against government technopolitics that drive different forms of death to the poorest, black communities, and slum dwellers, territorial insurgencies indicate other paths for the construction of a dignified life and access to fundamental rights, targeted solidarity practices, territorial political organization and the construction of specific public policies to deal with the effects of the virus which takes into account the particularities and distinct realities of the territory. The experiences of community organization around Crisis Offices in the favelas, led by social organizations and supporting institutions, have guaranteed (i) food and personal hygiene items distribution, (ii) sanitization of alleys, (iii) dissemination of information on the virus, and (iv) political articulation for disputes in defense of life preservation in the favelas, in opposition of genocidal processes carried out by the state power. Such local spaces represent practices of resistance to the death policies undertaken by the state policies, which most are not configured as spaces for collective construction and disregard inequalities and different needs in these territories. That way, community associations are presented as an inflection point, a deviation from the normal course of modulated subjectivities by the social principles and practices of neoliberalism, with the indication that the most efficient way to deal with social crises is through the strengthening of the collective and the popular organizations.

Introduction

The effects of the coronavirus pandemic in Brazil show the existence of a serious abyss, revealing that social inequality produces violations of rights and dictates who should live and who is destined to die and how their death is going to be. The pandemic process illustrates a death policy adapted by the State, called necropolitics by the Cameroonian intellectual (Mbembe, 2003), and points out some of the challenges for building a world where dignified life is not a privilege of a few, but a right of all.

This article is completed 9 months after the confirmation of community transmission in Rio de Janeiro, the second most populous city in Brazil—currently with more than 6 million inhabitants—and the first death due to the coronavirus pandemic. For us, Brazilians, the news about the outbreak of the disease caused by the new coronavirus, the Covid-19, begin to appear by the end of January 2020 in a massive way and soon after, in early March, the spread of the virus was an international health emergency by the World Health Organization (WHO) and therefore affirmed as a pandemic. The WHO suggested that the world should stop and isolate itself so that the process of contamination would slow down and not overload health systems, given the scarcity of resources to face it all over the world, especially in developing countries, marked by a history of colonization. It is worth mentioning that at the time of submission of the article, no vaccine had yet been developed to combat the virus and one million and 170 thousand deaths worldwide according to Pan American Health Organization1,2—with more than 157 thousand deaths in Brazil alone, a country that occupies the second place in the ranking of mortality by covid-19 despite underreporting, given the low testing of the population—one of the major problems in Brazil, warned by WHO even in the first months of the pandemic3.

The lack of energetic measures to combat the spread of the disease has enhanced a reality of crisis in Brazilian public health system—which has been living in recent years with overload and devaluation by the public power. Santos et al. (2020) point out that the early and cohesive closure of non-essential activities in Brazil has lasted little and the suspension of social distancing measures has been occurring asynchronously. Regarding the increase of contamination cases in Brazil, the study points out that these were the results of multiple factors, “including noncompliance, delayed implementation of social distancing measures, superspread through mass gathering events and the lack of coordinated control measures with neighboring municipalities” (p. 6). The study highlighted the lack of national coordination for the fight against Covid-19, and as the National Confederation of Municipalities (CNM)4 points out, the municipal non-pharmacological actions were prior to state and federal government guidelines, and the Ministry of Health published risk management strategies, risk assessment, guidelines and instruments to support decision-making in response to the Covid-19 pandemic at the local level only on May 11.

In recent years, especially after the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, there have been many setbacks in the field of social rights. The approval of Constitutional Amendment 95 in December 2016, which freezes investments in social areas, we have suffered from the intensification of the decay of our health systems, closure of beds and hospitals throughout the country. For many, the social collapse had already begun by analyzing this issue. The Brazilian Unified Health System is recognized worldwide for its capillarity, diversity of services, organization, especially for its public and free character. Political decisions have direct consequences on the maintenance and quality of services offered by SUS, making it even more difficult for the poorest population to access the right to health. Even in the cities where quarantine and social isolation were being decreed, many people could not interrupt their activities and so many others were forced to stop: given the continental and unequal reality of Brazil, where many work in informality to guarantee what to eat on a daily basis, how to adopt such restrictive measures, especially in view of a negligent government? As the Bolivian psychologist, Galindo (2020) affirms: in Latin America the coronavirus had exposed the colonial order of the world, highlighting that “Here the death sentence was written before the Covid arrived in a tourist plane” (p. 124). Even in the first months, the richest already said that the worst had passed5 even with the growing number of deaths among the poorest, who suffered from the difficulties to have access to any treatment. Costa et al. (2020) exemplify:

In Brazil, the supposed democratic character of the virus is questioned when one observes the data that the black and peripheral population has higher lethality rates than the rest of the population. In Rio de Janeiro, at the beginning of May, the data reveal that the lethality rate in the Complexo de Favelas da Maré is 30.8%, while in the Leblon neighborhood it reaches 2.4% (…). Nevertheless, (…) data (…) indicate that the number of hospitalizations and deaths of black and brown people has a higher rate of increase than that of white people (p. 2).

In a broader analysis, we see that in Brazil, the pandemic has never been about the richest; indeed, it is not about the poorest as well, but it does highlights the cruelty that our form of social reproduction of life imprints on society—for example, the first death by Covid-19 recorded in the country was a black woman, a domestic worker in a neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro's elite. In this sense, this article aims to problematize the relationship between the guarantee of rights and social inequalities in Rio de Janeiro's slums, from the scenarios that emerge with the new coronavirus pandemic, emphasizing that even in the face of government technopolitics that stimulates various forms of death to the poorest, blacks and slum dwellers, territorial insurgencies indicate other ways to build a dignified life and access to basic rights, guided by solidarity practices, territorial political organization and the construction of specific public policies to deal with the effects of the virus considering the particularities and different realities of the territory.