Bryan McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City.

From Dictatorship to Democracy in the

Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2014

McCann starts by referring to the struggles against removals in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro
during the military dictatorship (1964-1985). “The favela association movement became a
vanguard in the national mobilization against the dictatorship, pressuring the regime to speed its
transition toward redemocratization. The favela movement, however, heralded something more
than a mere return to electoral democracy: it held out the promise of a new imagination of Rio de
Janeiro, one in which the gulf between rich and poor could be bridged and the children of Vidigal
and Leblon would attend the same schools and share the same opportunities. […] The wave of
mobilization for urban reform unleashed by Vidigal’s success helped pressure the military
government to legalize the formation of political parties in 1980, and to hold democratic elections
for state governors in 1982.” (p. 5).

The other side of the coin: favelados negotiating with the workers responsible from removals.
There were disagreements within the community about it. Even in the government there was not
a single position about evictions.

After the end of the dictatorship, the plans for the favelas had not been fulfilled. The city was in
bankrupt so the social programs couldn’t be run. Drug traffickers targeted the favelas as center of
operation, what affected the community’s mobilization. Self-defense militias appeared to face
traffickers but ended up becoming another threat for the residents. Nevertheless, material living
conditions improved when removals were less likely to happen, although life deteriorated
dramatically. At the end: “The spirit that had characterized favelado mobilization in the late
1970s dissipated or was hollowed out by the bogus communitarian claims of drug traffickers and
militias. The battle of ideas between individual familial security and communitarian defense that
had characterized the late 1970s was not so much settled as exhausted: neither option seemed
attainable for favela residents by the early 1990s.” (p. 11)

Global, regional and local changes they passed through: wave of urbanization in the Global
South, a right-wing dictatorship that organized removal or suffocated popular mobilizations in
order to content popular animosities in the growing cities, and the redemocratization that
followed what expanded the political rights for urban poor. Urban violence became normal in the
Global South.

The book covers four major moments in the favelas’ trajectory from the dictatorship toward the
democracy:

1. Mobilization: From the 1970s to the 1980s, residents struggled against “the insecurity of lands,
the limited access to formal employment and public education, and the expectation of routine
harassment by the forces of law and order –demanding equal rights to the city. In a rush of
Mobilization, they built a movement that redrew the political map of the city and helped push the
nation toward redemocratization.” (p. 15)
2. Reform: Thanks to the support they conceded to left-wing governor, they joined forces with
them to transform the favelas, a purpose that came to fail because of the disagreements between
the ruling political parties, the city bankrupt, national economic recession, urban violence, etc.
The mobilization received few support, and the middlemen leaders became targets of corruption.
In general, “these reforms did not unite favela and city, but reconfigured the boundaries that
separated them.” (p. 15)

3. Breaking point: Through the mid-1980s, criminal turf mobilization had become “the new
expression of the barrier between favela and the city.” (p. 15)

4. Unraveling: Things got worse with the expansion of drug traffickers’ networks who
intimidated and coopted local political and civil representatives. Defense militias, originally
intended to defeat traffickers, became themselves criminal.

At the end, the long struggle to achieve legal recognition of favela was a success, but with the
urban violence, favelados lost the right to manage their own communities, and ended up being
even more segregated from the rest of the city.

“Mobilization and Reform had offered an opportunity to erase the boundaries between the favela
and city. After reaching the Breaking Point and enduring the Unraveling, that opportunity seemed
more distant than ever, and favelas were perpetuated as zones of exception, where the rule of law
and guarantees of citizenship did not apply.” (p. 16)

The nexus of the favelados with the city’s institutions is critical to understand the trajectory of the
communities. Because of that, “most of this book is devoted to the rise and evolution of political
leaders within Rio’s favelas and their interaction with civil servants, elected officials, and public
intellectuals.” (p. 16)

Some lines about the epilogue, focused on the current circumstances of the favelas: “Although
the reforms of the 1980s failed, the dream of the extension of full and complete citizenship to the
residents of Rio’s favelas did not die. […] Over the last several years, they have seized a new
opportunity to build a Rio de Janeiro that lives up to its democratic promise and to its nickname:
the Marvelous City. The strategies they have crafted explicitly seek to revive the animating vision
of the reforms of the 1980s while eliminating the design flaws that undermined them in their
earlier incarnation. Like those earlier efforts, current experiments are both hugely promising and
risky.” (p. 17)