The Naturalisation of Social Violence

The Jardim de Paraguay, 2002, a makeshift linear city constructed under a motorway flyover in São Paulo and home to 20,00 people

It is very difficult to write about Brazil without resorting to innumerable cliches about the incomprehensible and the unimaginable, the unforgettable, and indescribable. It is a country that elicits the language of extremes and superlatives. Exuberant riches lie in bed with malnutrition. Spectacular beauty rubs up against the grotesquely disfigured, and for every sweet mango there is an iridescent rainbow caterpillar, so venomous that a single touch can kill.  

I first visited Brazil over thirty years ago with my wife and elder daughter. Considerably younger and wide eyed, it simply left me stunned from the moment that a friend drove us across São Paulo. I could talk endlessly about the beaches, the caipirinhas, the Sunday market next to my mother in law’s house that sells primeval looking fruit, but what made the greatest impression on me, was the juxtaposition of wealth and poverty. I thought I had seen misery in the schemes of Glasgow and the rundown neighbourhoods of London. But nothing prepares the first time visitor to Brazil for the visual shock of a fortified luxury tower block separated by crenelated walls and electric fence from a shack made out of recycled cardboard, wood, and scavenged bits of tin. In advanced capitalist countries, inequality is often masked by the dislocation of poor working-class communities to the periphery of cities. Here, there is no hiding. Social and spatial inequality is open and overt. At first you are appalled. Then angry, then irritated, after which you shrug your shoulders and eventually walk on by tacitly accepting the naturalisation of social violence.