OPINION

Published Monday, March 21, 2005
Schools and the 'Parallel Power': Capitulate or Resist?
By Nadejda Marques

If you ever visit any of the 630 shantytowns in Rio de Janeiro, it would not take long to get a handle on the “parallel power.” The term parallel power is a Brazilian euphemism for the powerful drug lords that control or, as some may prefer, administer, the largest slums in the country. In Rio de Janeiro, according to the Instituto do Trabalho e Sociedade (IETS), a Rio based non-profit research institution, some 1.4 million people live in favelas, the Portuguese term for shantytowns or slums, where drugs and trafficking is a daily routine. Some argue that in these places drug lords substitute or replace an often-absent government. The fact is that one cannot enter nor sometimes leave favelas without the permission, or at least the knowledge of local drug dealers. All businesses, transactions and services including religious and educational services are to different degrees “approved” or “authorized” by drug dealers. They provide donations in cash to operate day-care centers. They maintain local sports facilities; provide cheap entertainment, transportation, security and even food to needy families. They often control available vehicles and thus provide ‘ambulance’ services. But are they really the people’s benefactors? Are drug lords the problem or part of the solution in places like Rocinha, the city largest slum with 150,000 residents?

In the midst of a valuable recent move to humanize drug dealers, their lives and context have been included in music, movies and textbooks. Further, in the favelas, school directors and other educational policy makers feel compelled to negotiate and integrate local drug lords in providing a greater and much needed social service: education for children of 20 percent of Rio’s population. Many times, for them, this proximity and interaction with the Parallel Power is a flexible, dynamic and revolutionary way to educate children and teenagers and provide means of a life apart from the drug business. The numbers could be used to support their argument. According to the Brazilian Government National Statistics Bureau (IBGE) for 1991, while 63.2 percent of the population in regular neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro have at least eight years of education, in the favelas, 74.2 percent studied for seven years or less. Dropouts, low passage rates, absenteeism and low esteem are among the recurrent problems in those schools. If these new approaches are not taken by a legitimate intent to provide education in those regions they are taken by violence. The American school, located in Gávea, an upscale neighborhood adjacent to Rocinha, has been obligated in the past to negotiate with drug dealers to allow transit to flow through the public roads. 

Drugs and violence should, no doubt, be in the curriculum.  To do otherwise would be to hide from a powerful social reality in downtrodden urban areas in which disadvantaged children live. However, schools cannot afford to negotiate naïvely nor to integrate local drug lords in schools activities subjecting students, teachers and administrators to common violent gang rivalries as well as urban combat between dealers and the police force. By negotiating with and legitimating drug dealers themselves, educators undermine their own efforts to question the violent lifestyle of narcotics traffickers. This would be true, even if it were not for the ruthless nature of the system of favors that traffickers impose on almost all those with whom they negotiate in favelas. Let’s be clear: for these drug lords, violence and obedience to violence are the organization principles that structure hierarchy and access to benefits and privileges in poor communities. In sum, educators are challenged with the contradiction between their actions and their discourse. How can they promote the values of citizenship while negotiating with and legitimating parallel local authorities who are in fact drug lords?

It is important to note that globalization and the recent increase in violence has altered the networks of criminality in Brazil. Today, technology also facilitates the work of international criminal organizations and a range of lower-level drug gangs in the country. If in the 1970’s and 1980’s drug lords used persuasion—either through self-interested charitable acts or paternalism—today their control of favela residents is more often marked by terror. This aspect is of much importance because it reshapes the notions of citizenship interfering with political and social movements within the favelas that try to change their own reality. For example, freedom of expression, association and protest, basic civil rights, are not the norm in the favelas.

Much of this analysis is based on research into the nature of doing trafficking in Rio de Janeiro, but I admit a great deal is due to my own experience in the city’s hillside shantytowns. When I worked for Human Rights Watch and the Global Justice Center, both human rights groups in Brazil at the time, I frequently had occasion to document terrible abuses committed by police and drug traffickers in the city’s slums. As a special correspondent for the Washington Post, I interviewed scores of favela residents for a range of stories on urban violence. The bourgeoisie’s views on these matters range from the right’s campaigns to exterminate traffickers at all costs, to the left’s tendency to romanticize drug dealers as revolutionary forces advancing the cause of the impoverished. Yet, in this debate, most favela residents, as much as they dislike violent drug traffickers and corrupt police forces, are more worried by their own sense of powerlessness. They feel that the state and society have abandoned them to live permanently under the control of rival gangs of drug traffickers and uniformed thugs.  They aspire to live in communities without drug traffickers and without brutal police – however poor. They would like to go about their business without seeking the approval of the machine-gun toting 16 year old at the entrance point to their neighborhoods or of the local police on the take. It is far from clear that the legitimatization of drug traffickers by educational institutions moves communities any closer to their goal of legitimate citizenship, nor to the transformation from feudal power relations to ones that approximate modern democratic institutions. 

Shouldn’t educational institutions seek to promote integration of favela residents within the broader society, rather than reinforce the segregation of poor urban communities? Such integration is possible; indeed it’s a vibrant aspect of Brazilian social life. Unlike their counterparts in ghettoes in the United States, residents of Rio’s favelas are not now, nor have they ever been totally segregated from the city’s neighborhoods. In Brazil, notwithstanding the push by right-leaning politicians to create barriers to the free movement of city dwellers, either by developing closed condominium communities or proposing walls to enclose the favelas; favela dwellers are not totally segregated from cities. In Rio de Janeiro, they not only provide labor to wealthier Rio residents, but also circulate in social environments, such as artistic, recreational and entertainment spaces. To its merit, the Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae, for example, has used music to integrate residents of two favelas controlled by enemy gangs. Even the elite American School (and other private academies) in Rio now promotes social work and interaction between schools and the favelas. 

This is the cause for some hope--though, no doubt, these institutions and others could do much more to integrate favela residents into public life outside their own communities. Given the potential for spatial mobility, why not invest in schools in the asfalto (asphalted areas of the city), not under the control of drug traffickers, or in programs to integrate favela students into schools located in other neighborhoods?  Why not develop schools in areas immediately adjacent to favelas in way that would provide easy access for the poor and a location that would not make them hostage to the whims of criminal gangs? Why surrender the autonomy of educators and students and submit them to criminal rule in the name of flexibility, innovation or response to complex realities?

Nadejda Marques is a student at Harvard University.