Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How Pacification Failed Rio" video.

  1. Brazilian here. This reality is reflected in most brazilian capital cities, quite unfortunately. But Rio is probably an extreme example. The World Cup, Olympics and subsequent bankrupting of Rio's state made things even worse, but it should be pointed out that it's far from being the root cause. Good to note too that tons of brazilians, if not most brazilians knew that these events would only make things worse beforehand. The problem in Rio is decades old, potentially centuries old. For those who don't know, Rio de Janeiro was historically Brazil's capital city during colonization times up until 1960, when it moved to Brasilia, a planned city. So, it has historically been a city that is pretty rich. Tourism is big in Rio... most foreigners will probably have an image of Brazil that looks like Rio, despite Brazil being a huge country with states that look nothing like it. Rio also has most of brazilian TV production, large companies and corporations, and whatnot. Cultural production is big in the city. But the city's geography is very peculiar, and part of why it is the way it is. Relative to the population size, the city of Rio is a pretty tight area surrounded by mountains and national parks. What happened in the history of the city is that the richness of the city attracted tons and tons of people to make a living there. Being a rich city, it had tons and tons of construction and development over the years, but as it happens in most countries, people going there to work often find themselves without work and without money at some point in time having to deal with things as best as they could. That lead to favelas. I think one of the big distinctions between the concept of favelas and the general term sometimes used - slums, is that most favelas are composed of illegal occupation of areas that were supposed to be for preservation, often in unsafe terrain, built from the ground up irregularly. This is why favelas look the way they look - labyrinthic stairways and streets serpenting around shacks, houses and small buildings all seemingly haphazardly built without planning. It just so happens that this sort of geography also makes favelas pretty similar to ancient fort cities... like say, Toledo in Spain. It's extremely hard to go in and out, navigate, or locate things in there. Since they are also not an official sanctioned part of the city, stuff like electricity, sewage and water came very very late to favelas, and they are also not maintained or monitored - because they weren't supposed to be there in the first place. All of this unfortunately makes favelas the ideal place for criminals to hide, do business, take control of, escape when running from police, and as a defensive fort for criminal factions. While I definitely do agree with accusations of corruption and involvement with criminal factions when it comes to Rio's police force, it's also true that being part of police or military making incursions in favelas is no joke. They are underpaid, underequipped and ill prepared to get into places that have essentially become criminal faction fortified cities. The complain the drug trafficker made about not being able to live with minimum wage there? That's what the police force and military also have to live with. So much so that lots of those policemen and soldiers... actually live in favelas, trying to hide their professions not to be targeted by criminal factions. Is it all about race? It is partially about it, because much like the US, during colonization times slavery was also a thing here. But at the same time Brazil is a more diverse mixed country, it has some implicit racism but not as much as some other countries. I think it's still pretty bad, but the lines are not as clear cut as people may think. It is more about inequality, most definitely. And the worse economy gets here, the worse things become. The vast majority of the brazilian population is poor, and depends on public services. While we do have public healthcare, public schools, and social programs, they are all in bad shape and always become worse when the country's economy isn't doing well, like how it is today. We have an economy that is still, from colonization times up to now, highly dependent on primary resources exports. We also have very poor technological development, which is dumbly amplified by brazilian protectionism, which all becomes a never ending encirclement of poverty hell. And that's of course not even getting to the biggest brazilian problem since forever - corruption. It'd be more accurate to say we have a corrupt governmental system with bits of politics spread out rather than a political system that is corrupt. From colony to republic to military dictatorship to democracy times up to now, brazilian people have been repeatedly hearing and voting in politicians and leaders who talked about eliminating corruption in Brazil. It just does not happen. Corruption is synonymous to politics in Brazil. There is no hope, no solution, no escape route from this. It's hard to change something when the very foundations of it are already corrupt. You wanna see some of the biggest most absurd wages in Brazil, you'll find it in the political class. You add up the wages, extra payments taken from public coffers to pay for anything from clothing (suit), secretaries, housing or rent, travel expenses, food and a list of other 20 things or so, a politician in Brazil makes something like 20 to 50 times more than your average working class brazilian - and that's all legal, before we get to corruption schemes. This situation obviously creates an impenetrable bubble. Politicians in Brazil cannot ever see the reality of the majority of brazilian citizens because it's just entirely disconnected.
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  2.  @jakel8627  asset nightmare, I'd say. :P
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