Editorial

Culture, politics, faith and poverty in Belem (Brazil)

Not long ago, I was in Belem to attend a partly aca-demic, partly policy-oriented conference on democracyand quality of life in the city. Belem is an Amazoniancity, capital of Para state, with nearly 1.2 million people.It is interesting just to wander about near the shore andobserve people with their wooden boats, who come andgo, and disappear in the river, the sun virtually burningtheir skin. The city lives off of wood, Brazil nuts, herbs,fishery and other products and fruits of the forest. It isalso a service city, concentrating most of federal andstate governments’ employment in Para state. Acrossthe river, from one of the few spots in town where peoplecan go and look, because most of the shore is taken byprivate firms and their docks, you can see the other side,a huge rain forest, virtually uninhabited. You can hardlysee the tiny shacks scattered apart under the trees. Byboat, as you get closer to the other side, you get a betterview of the forest and you can assess the sheer size of theriver. Huge! Exciting! Back home, after some time, I canstill see it all in front of my eyes. It is hardly describable.

During the conference, I met a talkative woman whowas, as she said to me, a ‘community leader’ in Belem.She was also employed by the local government. I donot know in what function, exactly, but allow me to tellyou what she did. To start with, she had worked hard inthe run-up for the local government a couple of yearsbefore, when the mayor, a university professor, attachedto the PT (the Workers’ Party), had been re-elected for anew term. Sensing my interest, she then invited me to govisit her ‘community’. We set to go there on a Saturday,after the ‘river procession’ had taken place.1

I was lucky enough to be there a few days after theconference, a whole week in total, when the city cele-brated their patroness saint day—that of Nossa Senhora

de Nazare—with huge processions in her homage,including the well known Cırio de Nazare. They say itis the largest street procession in the world, gatheringtogether approximately two million people, a massivedisplay of Catholic faith. People come from the interior,small villages along the rivers and islands nearby;Paraenses who live abroad or in other states come backto reunite with family and friends in Belem. At night,back from the conference and after my strolls aroundthe city, I relaxed for a while, watching the news onTV. Dominating the scene—just to put things in con-text—was the first US bombardment of Afghanistan,in retaliation against the attack on the twin towers inNew York.

The main part of the river procession takes place onthe second Sunday of October. However, prior to that,on Friday, the saint’s wooden figure—which is approx-imately 300 years old—is taken to Ananindeua, a munic-ipality of Belem’s metropolitan region, where the Popehad stayed during his visit to the city years back. Thestatuette is taken there in a road procession, accompa-nied by hundreds of cars, and stays overnight. On Satur-day morning, it is taken to Icoaraci, a district of Belem,by the river (Guajara Bay). It is then taken by a Navyboat, in a fluvial procession, with hundreds of otherboats, to Belem town center. The statuette is shippedout at Estacao das Docas, a very elegant, recently rede-veloped complex of converted dock warehouses, kept bythe state government, which now houses restaurants,bars, art galleries, souvenir shops, etc. From there, itgoes to the Gentil Bitencourt School, the place where itstays during the year after the Cırio celebrations areover. Later, a night procession (trasladacao) goes theopposite way of the next day’s main procession, takingthe saint from the school to Catedral da Se. This is al-ready a huge event but nothing near what happens onSunday. Then, by 6 am, a mass is said and, by 7 am,the figure of Our Lady of Nazare is back on the road

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1 The whole thing was all very new to me. While, at the conference, Iwas meeting new people as well as people (and friends) I knew fromother shores, to discuss ‘quite the same old things’, at lunch breaks andin the evening I rushed to see the city, to get to know as much as Icould of the main spots, buildings, neighborhoods, food, faces, thecharming, innocent and sensual Carimbo music and dance, and soforth. Obviously, as an academic, first time in the Amazon, my choiceswere not really typical of most tourists. I wanted to see people andtheir living environment. I wanted to see them walking about, working,partying.

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Geoforum 37 (2006) 159–161

again in the main procession: Cırio de Nazare. It ispulled by a thick rope, measuring nearly 500 yd. Peoplewishing for a grace will position themselves near andalong the rope since the early hours of the day, menand women on different sides. They have to be preparedto walk barefoot, on asphalt, holding the rope, underthe burning sun, for at least six hours. Many people willask for, while others will give, thanks for graces, most ofwhich have to do with good health. In so doing, theycarry wooden or wax modeled parts of the body—theso-called ex voto—as well as bricks or a model houseon their heads, along the procession. (Health and shelterare the two most important needs around.) After theprocession, there is a traditional Cırio luncheon, withloads of regional food, with family and friends. This isconsidered by many the ‘Christmas of Para’; at least,it is a bigger celebration. The party still goes on fortwo weeks, with profane as well as other religious eventstaking place.

Now back to the woman I met at the conference—and the mayor (and, let me add, the state governorand other local politicians). Interesting things happenin politics. We had arranged to visit one of the commu-nities, of which the woman is a leader, on Saturdayafternoon, after the fluvial procession. This is a largefavela area, called Osvaldo de Caldas Brito, by theriverside, quite near the historic center of Belem. I mustsay, first of all, that few times I had seen such poor con-ditions although I was born and lived most of my life inRecife, a city in Brazil’s northeast, the country’s cham-pion of poverty and poor social records. I may be wrongbut poverty in Belem struck me as worse than the pov-erty I had observed elsewhere in the country. The envi-ronment is generally very wet. The wooden houses(huts) are built on piles, three or four metres abovethe river’s low tide water level; there is no regular rub-bish collection; water supply is extremely deficient andthere is no sewage system. Electricity is all there is.Access is very difficult, through wooden bridges as nar-row as a couple of meters wide. These are even narrowernearer the end (towards the river). Children have no-where to play, no schools, no clinics. There is no suchthing as privacy, as the tiny, little (sometimes havingtwo floors) huts open to the narrow streets (woodenbridges). Most people are unemployed, making a livingout of informal activities, especially around the Ver-o-Peso, Belem’s main open market.2

The huts built on piles by the river and floodedareas are the sort of thing that ribeirinhos, people inthe interior of the Amazon, who almost by rule live

near and by the river, bring to town when they movein. Like in other places, the Amazonian rural popula-tion also carry their cultural heritage to the city whenthey move in. The problem, as is often the case, is thatthe high concentration of this practice in the city gen-erates degrading environmental conditions due to lackof infrastructure.

My visit to the favela was, perhaps, my ‘best’ momentin Belem. As an academic, I try to keep detached anddistanced from other people’s problems (for the sakeof science!), however it is hard to see people (includingmany, many children) living in such conditions.

As we were going through the three villas in thefavela—Passarinho, Valerio and Santos—I asked herwhat the size of the local population was. She answered:‘around 4.850 voters’ (my emphasis). We stayed therefor about 2 h, with my new friend introducing us toeveryone she knew. And she knew everyone. From timeto time, she was called to one side to discuss particularproblems, to which she responded by writing short notesto some politician she knew, or promising to deal withthe situation later, a typical client-patron practice,which, in the absence of universal access to infrastruc-ture and services, makes and keeps local poor popula-tions dependent (and thankful!).

Local politics was somehow difficult at this point intime in Belem. In general, there was little cooperationbetween the state government and Belem’s municipalgovernment. They actually competed with each otheras most of the electorate in Para state lives in Belem.The state governor belonged to the Brazilian President’s(then Fernando Henrique Cardoso) party, the PSDB,while the mayor was in what was then the federal govern-ment’s main opposition party, the PT. To make thingsworse, one of Para state’s three senators—also presidentof the Senate—resigned, following charges of wrongdoing during the term he had served as governor.

To finish, a note on globalization and the role of thestate. Globalization has brought some changes to Be-lem, new pressures and conditions upon which the localpopulation has to mould their daily practice to survive.In this respect, Belem is typical of most places. Global-ization has imposed some macro conditions, at a moregeneral level, which, among other things, constrainslocal authorities financial capabilities, while some ‘univer-sal’ concepts have also conditioned policy-makingarenas, as is the case of strategic planning and theiremblematic, state-of-the-art architecture and urban-ism. (I heard the now very fashionable word requali-

ficacao(requalification), said by local governmentemployees, quite a few times during the conference.) Itis thus possible to redevelop the Ver-o-Peso open marketand get rid of prostitution in the area, paving the wayfor tourism development, but that does not necessarilymean that the problems of prostitution and povertyare solved. These are just pushed away to some other

2 The Ver-o-Peso open market had been refurbished by the localgovernment and inaugurated on the week before the Sunday proces-sion. Ver-o-Peso is also one of the city’s main postcards. Before therenovation, the whole area was very degraded, dominated bypickpockets, drug dealers and even infant prostitution.

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spot in the city. Some ‘undesired’ people may, as a resultof that, be moved to more peripheral spaces in the city,but they still have to make a living.

Having said this, although its relationship to lowerlevels of government may have changed, the federal gov-ernment is still ‘alive and kicking’, setting conditionsunder which local politics and policy operate. (In recentyears, this has been in line with globalization.) Localgovernments have to deal with people’s everyday prob-lems more closely. In view of astringent fiscal crisis(dealt with, especially by central government, withabsenteeism or less direct local intervention allied toneo-liberal macroeconomic policies), actions taken bylocal authorities have gained more visibility, howeverfragmented and partial they may be.

The close relationship between the community leaderand local politicians suggests that her actions were

bound to a process of both manipulation and co-opta-tion. With a low level of education, but skilled (andbrave) enough to deal with community problems, shewas employed at the prefecture, following the election.In brief, a combination of political clientelism, co-opta-tion, manipulation—including use of people’s religiousfaith—poverty, low levels of education, and unemploy-ment, with Belem being just one perhaps very acuteexample, help keep Brazil champion of inequality.

Marcio Moraes ValencaDepartamento de Geografia

Universidade Federal do Rio

Grande do Norte072 970 Natal

Brazil

E-mail address: marciovalenca@interjato.com.br

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