The Disney Favela Tour

Favelas are slums in Rio and other parts of Brazil. Slums in America usually started as government-sponsored low income housing, but many of the Favelas in Brazil started as squatters camps and grew organically from there. They've grown quite a bit from the origin and they now have roads and many other services.

The favalas are controlled by various drug dealers who function as an organized crime syndicate and they keep the peace in the favelas. Many tour companies in Rio offer group tours of one or more of the favelas, in which they've made some kind of agreement with the local drug militia to allow them to take the tour group through certain parts of the favela.

The favela tour that we took was no more dangerous than the Jungle Cruise ride in Disneyworld.

I have no doubt that there are dangerous parts of the favelas, and dangerous things that happen there. If you've never seen it, you should watch the movie "City of God", which is based on a true story about one boy growing up in an infamous Rio favela during turf wars between rival drug wars in the 1970's and 1980's.

But that was not what we saw on this tour. Our tour guide seemed more scared of the favelas than we were. On the ride from the hotel towards the favela he kept talking up the danger they same way the tour guide on the Jungle Cruise talks up the danger of the mechanical hippopotamuses. "Watch out! You never know when they might charge!" We drove in through a well-paved, well-maintained road to an area where they had street vendors setup to hawk tchotchkes to the tourists. You could tell that it was lower income than other parts of Rio, but most of the buildings were properly constructed, with running water, electricity, phone and cable TV. About the oddest thing we saw here was some guy drive by slowly in a car with ice chests in the rear seat with fish in them, selling fish along the road.

After wasting our time here, they drove us to a different part of the favela where there was a day school setup for children, that the tour company helped sponsor. The school had been sponsored by an family from Italy that lived next door, who worked for the Italian airline office in Rio. I have trouble believing that an Italian expat would live with his family in a dangerous area.

They also took us to an apartment building that had a rooftop with a nice view over the favela. The apartments had been built by a large extended family that worked hard together, and were an example of the rising middle class in the favelas.

I could go on with other examples that they had shown us but there isn't much point. They wanted to show us, with pride, how the favelas had become more normal, more middle class, how they were continuing to grow and develop. That's wonderful, and I'm happy for them, but that's not interesting or worthwhile for us to see on vacation.

We saw this same cycle repeated in other interactions while in Rio. Some people would claim that certain areas or activities were dangerous, and they would never themselves go there. But some other people, even middle class people, would happily go there often without a second thought. At the 4-star hotel we stayed at for part of the time in Rio I happened to ask the one desk clerk about funk dance parties in Rio, which I had heard about. She happily recommended one in a dance club and said how much she enjoys that one, and that she goes often. The other desk clerk standing next to her interrupted the conversation: That place was dangerous, and he would never go there, and he didn't think she should be recommending it to anyone. He said that place was in an old run-down building that wasn't clean. She sheepishly warned me that it wasn't a clean, modern club, but it was clear that to her that was part of the fun and the attraction.