Countdown to Rio: Demolition derby of peoples' homes

RIO DE JANEIRO — The police showed up at 6:30 a.m. on March 8, and by lunchtime her house had been demolished.

Maria da Penha Macena had no choice: she got a notice from the city that her home was in the way of a planned access road for the Olympics. She could only grab her belongings, move them to a church, and make sure to turn away when her home was razed.

"The police arrived and put it down," she says through a translator. "In one day."

It was the same day she was set to receive an award from the state legislature for the way she defended her right to keep her home.

Penha Macena lives in the Vila Autodromo, an impoverished community (or favela) where some 600 families called home. It's only a short walk from where many of the Summer Olympic venues are being constructed in Barra. In order to make way for the arrival of the Games, homes were targeted for demolition and families were offered money to leave.

Some did not leave.

"I love the land, I have the right to be here, and you don't sell your rights," says Penha Macena, who's lived in Vila Autodromo for 23 years.

The confrontation between the city and the favela turned violent last year when armed forces moved in. The mayor's office claimed the residents threw bricks at the police; the residents stated the projectiles came only in response to pepper spray. Either way, Facebook photos of older residents covered with bruises and blood tell a story that the city can't easily defend.

The Vila Autodromo has become a source of international fascination and anger, as a few of Brazil's poor stood up to the most powerful in the nation. The Olympics are often the story of displacement in the name of sport and commerce, and here were some proud people who simply would not be displaced.

More homes are slated for the wrecker. Penha Macena's current lodging, where she sleeps in one room with three relatives, will also be gone soon. The city has promised 25 new homes, including a cultural center, and she is willing to live in a shipping container until the new community is ready.

She is not saying this in jest. Only steps away from her home, there are blue shipping containers near the entrance of the favela.

"It's a fact," she insists. "They're going to put us inside containers. They will pay for new houses, but in the meantime we will live inside containers."

Whether she will actually have to sleep in a blue bin is uncertain, but also uncertain is whether the city will make good on its promise to land her family in a better place. She says she has it in writing, but what good is that promise when the bulldozers have already come?

Penha Macena is older but not frail. She speaks emphatically and assertively, punctuating many of her sentences with a smile or even a laugh. She stands in front of a wooden plank that is essentially her doorstep, leading over a narrow stream to her current home. She doesn't want visitors inside but she offers to show the furniture she still keeps in the nearby church. As she speaks, the reminders of the encroaching Olympics are everywhere around her: the newly built pedestrian walkway only a few steps away; the sports complex in the distance; the construction workers eating and napping in her neighborhood; and the shipping containers. The Games are quite literally closing in.

She has one important card to play if the city lets her down again. She plans to protest if the Olympics begin and she's not settled in a new building. There were protests back in March; these will be more strident, and more vocal.

"That will be embarrassing for the mayor," she says.

Embarrassing is an understatement. The world's media will be here by the first week in August, and reporters won't have to travel far from their hotels to tell the story of the families whose lives have been disrupted by the unyielding maw of the Olympic machine.

Maria da Penha Macena could have easily left, like hundreds of others who once lived here. She chose to stay and fight. She is not only sanguine about her choice; she's confident. She knows that although she was given a deadline to get out, the pressure of the clock is now on the city. In that sense, she's already put the mayor into a corner.

"Why would I be angry?" she asks. "Life is like that, full of highs and lows."

She is hoping for the worst of the lows to be in the past. If not, the world will hear about it.

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