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.

Our new invisible enemy “makes us see and speak” (Deleuze, 1986) about these inequalities. The big media started to publicize the solidarity actions and the government was strongly pressured to approve measures of attention to the favelas. In the House of Representatives, bills such as PL 1000/2020, which would institute the Covid-19 Attention Program in the Favelas; as well as the struggles for Emergency Aid, are signs of the dispute for the dignity of families in different spheres. Especially in the case of the city of Rio de Janeiro, a study dated September 9 revealed that if one compared the number of deaths per 100,000 inhabitants per Covid-19, if it were a country, the city would have the worst rate in the world (Brasil, 2020; Santos et al., 2020).

Invisible and exceptional the coronavirus was initially considered a “democratic virus”—an expression that composed many writings and TV news at the beginning of the spread. A widely spread disease that would reach everyone in an equal way, initially evidencing an evaporation of the nobility's security and, the fear of its contamination, overtook territorial and economic borders, with an idea of communion, of a possible world of greater solidarity where the virus would overcome the capital and the competitiveness entangled in it. “This virus is democratic and does not distinguish between poor and rich or between statesman and ordinary citizen” (Zizek, 2020, p. 25).

However, how can a virus be “democratic” (Zizek, 2020) in such an unequal country? The reality of Rio de Janeiro outskirts and slums shows itself to be another compared to noble areas; the orientations of epidemiologists, sanitarians and other scientific experts are incompatible with the material, financial and social structures that they possess, without basic conditions to follow food, isolation and hygiene prescriptions, not to mention that information about care often arrives biased and demoralizes the seriousness of the disease, treating it as a “little flu” (Löwy, 2020). Controlling contamination in so-called democratic countries could be a challenge, points out Sousa-Santos (2020), since each person is “free” to decide about their movement and other aspects of the operationalization of life. Just as, for Brazilians, access to information and public health services, for example, are also for everyone. A utopia, we know. “De-mo-cra-cy” four syllables and an elaborate phonetics, but that sometimes does not articulate and is inefficient to represent the right to equality and free and participatory exercise of life in the most different social classes (Bicalho, 2013).

It is important to point out that Brazil has one of the highest rates of social inequality (being in 10th position in comparison with other countries in the world, with an increase in inequality between the extremes of labor income distribution in 2019, according to the Institute of Applied Economic Research)6. To maintain the capitalist order, social Darwinism still permeates as an explanatory ideology to this phenomenon and massively affects the poor, blacks and working class, historically exploited by colonialism (Bolsanello, 1996). Those strongest, capable of adapting to the environment (and, here, surviving the pandemic) will survive—an addendum only to affirm that there is a government policy that dictates how some can live and others must die.

As Achille Mbembe points out, “My concern is with those forms of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy, but ‘the widespread instrumentalization of the human species and the destruction of bodies through terror in specific populations’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 11). Politics that instrumentalizes us to better explain contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 36).

The specificities of the slums and peripheries are not something new. In the city of Rio de Janeiro, 763 favelas (IBGE, 2010)7 are officially accounted for, according to the Census conducted still in 2010, these have very different realities, but there are inequalities of access to basic rights as a common point, as there are places where the water supply is irregular and garbage collection is practically non-existent.

Slums, peripheries, communities in social vulnerability, places where poor people live, do not receive investments from the State on an equal basis like other regions of cities. Investments are lacking in essential areas, such as health, education, housing, lighting, among other services (Botelho et al., 2020, p. 4).

As described in the online newspaper Maré de Notícias8 —one of the media vehicles for the events and daily reality of the Complexo de Favelas da Maré in Rio de Janeiro, where more than 140,000 people live—it highlights that in the slums most houses are small with few rooms and many people, without air circulation, making it difficult to respect the prevention measures proposed by national and international health agencies.

The initial orientation to social distancing already warned about the risk of social upheaval in the slums, with the perspective of marked impoverishment: seven out of 10 families would have their incomes compromised in a first analysis9. There are many reasons for this, including precarious, informal, autonomous, outsourced labor relations or services provision through platforms. Such precariousness, as Assunção-Matos and Bicalho (2016) point out, is a process that articulates itself with poverty.

As Forrester (1996) states:

We live in the midst of a masterly decoy, a world that has disappeared that we persist in not knowing as such and that certain artificial policies intend to perpetuate. Millions of destinies are destroyed, annihilated by this anachronism caused by reluctant stratagems, destined to present our most sacred taboo as imperishable: work (…) we participate in a new era without being able to observe it. Without admitting and not even realizing that the previous era has disappeared (p. 7)

In this sense, small businesses in these territories have been quite affected by the effects of the pandemic, influencing the reduction of work and of family income itself, considering that 46% live off the income of their own business; and 15% have opened a new business in the last 12 months, mostly out of necessity. Due to a high number of informal establishments, accessing credit lines is more difficult. In fact, there is an entire service based economy that supports many of the families in these locations: manicures, bricklayers, bakers, housekeepers. Immediately, an obstacle to the guidelines of quarantine and social isolation, since “the bread of each day” depends on daily work. All this reality, exposed by the coronavirus, has always existed in these places. As Dornelles (2017) points out:

What happens, especially in times of barbaric capitalism, as adopted by the neoliberal order, is that the human contingents that are in a situation of vulnerability, of social exclusion, are increasing all over the world. They make up a multitude of human beings who are now identified as enemies of order and dangerous, whose existence and living conditions are not treated as a result of this model of capital accumulation, but rather as segments to be criminalized and punished (p. 123).

The majority of favelas arise from an unequal reality that imposes itself on workers in a brutal way, limiting their access to fundamental rights such as the right to housing (Valle et al., 2015). And there have been many attempts in the history of the slums where the residents have held the public power responsible for improvements, but there have also been many times when the public power has acted tirelessly in the destruction of slums, in the demolition of houses, and in the rupture of democratic dialogues with the population. The understanding of the slum as a problem to be extinguished or at least controlled in the context of its population growth has been present in public authorities since the beginning of the 20th century (Melicio et al., 2012). Thus, the logic of “we for us” is reigning in many of these territories, not as a dead word, but as a daily practice of invention of a world where life is possible to be lived—a philosophy of existence that is guided by sharing, by the strengthening of the collective, which enforces the principles of “ubuntu,” an African philosophy that points to an ethos of solidarity and interdependence with others. When the cobwebs unite, says an Ethiopian proverb, they can tie a lion.

Ubuntu situates individuals within a web of relationships that is born of identifying with others and acting in solidarity. It is by sharing a way of life with others that individuals' come into existence'. We exist because our social connections remain strong, extending beyond family to embrace our clan, village and entire community (Seifu Estifanos et al., 2020, p. 1).

The new coronavirus not only causes sanitary and economic changes, but it also makes visible what has been put as a priority and challenges humanity in the construction of a new reality; in this sense the pandemic can be considered as an event, in the Foucaultian vision, and the threat of contagion by SARS-CoV-2 as a powerful device. Foucault (2008) affirms the event as that which when it erupts, causes discontinuities in the field of knowledge-power, turning certain discourse possible by changing the epistemic of an time. And as for devices, they are machines, networks, always partial, momentary (never universal and eternal) that respond to certain effects as they are in a continuous process of object production (Barros et al., 2009). A device, therefore, that questions the right to life, the right to dignity (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948), and questions the function of the State, our empathic capacity, and our processes of choice in the face of the death threat. The coronavirus gives visibility to the different realities marked by social inequality, as in the case of Brazil. As the Portuguese philosopher Gil (2020) points out, the pandemic is not about the fear of death, but above all, the fear of absurd death.