The man holding onto his front door in a flattened favela

Homes are being torn down and pests and squatters are taking over the rubble of Favela do Metrô, but hundreds of families remain with nowhere else to go From the roof of his home in the Favela do Metrô, Eomar Freitas enjoys one of the best views in town. Look south and you see the Christ the Redeemer statue towering over Rio’s mountains. To the north stands the green and pink headquarters of Mangueira, the city’s best-loved samba school. And in between, one of the world’s top sporting venues, the blue and grey Maracanã stadium, which will host the final of the 2014 football World Cup. “We worked hard to build this place,” said Freitas, 35 and unemployed, whose family moved to Rio from Brazil’s impoverished north-east 20 years ago. They built a four-storey home where their wooden shack once stood. “It was a great place to live,” he said. Not any more. Since February, nearly all of the buildings surrounding Freitas’s home have been levelled as part of work to revamp the city’s infrastructure before the World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Redbrick shacks have been cracked open by earth-diggers. Streets are covered in a thick carpet of rubble, litter and twisted metal. By night, crack addicts squat in abandoned shacks, filling sitting rooms with empty bottles, filthy mattresses and crack pipes improvised from plastic cups. The stench of human excrement hangs in the air. “It looks like you are in Iraq or Libya,” Freitas said, wading across mounds of

Posted by on April 26, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.