Alessandro Flor de Souzas, known as “Biru”, sees the visitor arriving from afar. Quickly, he opens the iron door of his house, lets him in and closes the door pronto. On this early August morning, the weather is fine and there are people in the street. But the Parque Fluminense neighborhood in Belford Roxo, a suburb north of Rio de Janeiro, is surrounded by favelas. For this 40-year-old man, owner of a small local bar, there is no question of letting his guard down: “Here, anytime, day or night, you can get shot!” »
Sheltered behind his gate, “Biru” begins to whisper. ” Walls have ears. » Young men on motorbikes, drug dealers, guns clearly visible in their belts, regularly pass through his alley. Concerning them, the drinker is “for the death penalty”. If he had the means, he would buy a gun and take the law into his own hands. “A disarmed people is at the mercy of thieves, like gazelles facing a lion. If I had a gun, I would have killed at least four! »
An absolute no-place
Logically, “Biru” voted in 2018 for the champion firearms candidate, Jair Bolsonaro. Around here, he is far from the only one. In the so-called “Baixada Fluminense” region, a gigantic northern suburb of Rio, made up of thirteen municipalities, and where nearly 4 million inhabitants live (i.e. a quarter of the metropolis), the former far-right captain achieved some of its best national scores: over 68% of the vote at Belford Roxo (515,000 souls). A performance that he intends to repeat during the presidential election on October 2 which will oppose him to Lula, the leader of the Brazilian left.
Seen from here, forty kilometers from the beaches of Copacabana or Ipanema, the charms of the “wonderful city” seem very far away. Belford Roxo, wedged between jade peaks and a polluted bay, is an urban chaos. An absolute non-place, without center or periphery, a shapeless patchwork of favelas, cement hovels and wastelands, where banana trees and wild grasses grow. The streets are everywhere potholed and the sidewalks strewn with garbage. It’s the paradise of Vira Latasthese “garbage dumper” street dogs, who patrol together in the heat of the oven.
Uncontrolled urbanization
It is hard to imagine that these places, named in homage to a 19th century engineere century, Raimundo Teixeira Belfort Roxo, were once rural. land of the cultivation of sugar cane and oranges, the Baixada has suffered the pangs of uncontrolled urbanization. In the 1950s, the government decided to industrialize Rio, which was still the capital. Foreign companies are encouraged to settle in the northern suburbs. In Belford Roxo, it will be the Germans of the Bayer company who open a large agrochemical park.
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