Rio de Janeiro has fully entered the trial to host the 2014 World Cup and Olympic Games 2016. Safer streets, expansion and modernization of its transport network, plotting new ways to decongest and redistribute the heavy traffic, construction and renovation of sports facilities, more and better hotels ...
all this is strictly necessary in a city whose infrastructure and services have excelled in recent decades for its deficiency. But improvements are coming to most tourist capital of Brazil accompanied by controversies, including alleged human rights violations, according to the UN and Amnesty International.
The most emblematic case is that of Metro favela, near the legendary Maracana stadium, which will host the ceremonies stellar sporting events. During these days, bulldozers and workers sent by the city of Rio are busy in demolishing the illegal settlement over 30-year history. The intent of government is to tear down the slum, develop their land and resettle 700 families in their housing complex, in some cases newly built only a few hundred meters from the old location.
A priori there should be room for criticism because evacuees receive in compensation a new housing complex built-up correctly. The problem is that so far only half of the affected families have been resettled, while the rest live a waiting distressing. Metro is now a neighborhood kind of ghost, a terrain more typical of an earthquake or bombing.
There are streets on which you can only move dodging piles of rubble. Many houses have been demolished or remain miraculously standing waiting for the final push for tractors. At times, the smell of excrement and garbage accumulated becomes unbearable. The rains and standing water have brought insect pests that threaten to turn the place into an outbreak of dengue, and nests of rats multiply with the passage of time.
Neighbors say that at nightfall crack addicts take refuge in the dark (light have also cut much of the neighborhood) to get high in the abandoned ruins or directly steal everything they can in the houses that still stand erect amid a sea of debris and rubble. Anarchy has installed in an area already very depressed.
The UN and the NGO Amnesty International sounded the alarm in recent weeks. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, Raquel Rotnik is worrying "lack of transparency, consultation, dialogue, fair negotiation, participation of affected communities in the evictions carried out or planned under World Cup and Olympics.
" This complaint was added shortly after Amnesty International in its 2011 report on the status of human rights in the world devotes a paragraph to vacate grueling Metro: "Residents were threatened repeatedly (...) eviction. without there being any information, consultation or negotiation, said municipal workers to spray paint the houses that were to break down.
They told residents to be relocated to housing complexes in Cosmos, about 60 kilometers on outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, or temporary accommodation, and they were not going to give any compensation, "says the NGO. Indeed, there are painted in many of the doors of the houses that still stand.
"They are acting without any respect. They came here as if the house were his, without asking permission or explaining anything. With a spray painted on my door the initials SMH [in Portuguese acronym habitação Municipal Secretariat] and the number 95" Eomar regrets Freitas, who owns a three-storey building stoically survives surrounded by mountains of rubble.
"We do not live as people, but like rats", repeated like a mantra to be unemployed living for 18 years in the metro community. "Our struggle is to get the mayor Urbanic community so no one has to go, but we've been told this is impossible. No one has shown us the blueprint of what we want to do in these areas, but we know that FIFA (International Football Federation) and IOC (International Olympic Committee) have demanded that this community disappears near the Maracana.
It is clean, "he says bitterly Francicleide da Costa Souza, president of the Neighborhood Association of Metro. "The eviction process is being followed is clearly illegal and violates international standards," says Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International. In the municipality of Rio, however, reject this.
"All actions for the resettlement of families are being developed with deep respect, dialogue and with enough information," he told El Pais Housing Secretary, Jorge Bittar. "This community is in the middle of the street, in a totally inappropriate. We have already transferred half of the families and hope to relocate to the other in less than a month, although it is obviously difficult to make an omelet without breaking eggs" , gives the head of one of the most difficult portfolios Rio City Council.
More than 340 families have been relocated to housing units, most within walking distance of Metro. 340 others refuse to leave their homes without first getting the keys to another apartment to move. "Some neighbors, instead of another house, they offered financial compensation ranging between 8,000 and 12,000 reais (between 3,500 and 5,200 euros) to abandon their homes," Wilcken complaint.
Although neighbors say Metrô ignore them, the mayor's plans for this area include a landscaped walkway, two sets of machine shops and restaurants, and a great cultural and training center nearby. This will help to enhance and give luster to a neighborhood that now lives in obvious decline, but within three years become the epicenter of world news.
The objective seems legitimate. Not so much the means to achieve it. 
all this is strictly necessary in a city whose infrastructure and services have excelled in recent decades for its deficiency. But improvements are coming to most tourist capital of Brazil accompanied by controversies, including alleged human rights violations, according to the UN and Amnesty International.
The most emblematic case is that of Metro favela, near the legendary Maracana stadium, which will host the ceremonies stellar sporting events. During these days, bulldozers and workers sent by the city of Rio are busy in demolishing the illegal settlement over 30-year history. The intent of government is to tear down the slum, develop their land and resettle 700 families in their housing complex, in some cases newly built only a few hundred meters from the old location.
A priori there should be room for criticism because evacuees receive in compensation a new housing complex built-up correctly. The problem is that so far only half of the affected families have been resettled, while the rest live a waiting distressing. Metro is now a neighborhood kind of ghost, a terrain more typical of an earthquake or bombing.
There are streets on which you can only move dodging piles of rubble. Many houses have been demolished or remain miraculously standing waiting for the final push for tractors. At times, the smell of excrement and garbage accumulated becomes unbearable. The rains and standing water have brought insect pests that threaten to turn the place into an outbreak of dengue, and nests of rats multiply with the passage of time.
Neighbors say that at nightfall crack addicts take refuge in the dark (light have also cut much of the neighborhood) to get high in the abandoned ruins or directly steal everything they can in the houses that still stand erect amid a sea of debris and rubble. Anarchy has installed in an area already very depressed.
The UN and the NGO Amnesty International sounded the alarm in recent weeks. According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to housing, Raquel Rotnik is worrying "lack of transparency, consultation, dialogue, fair negotiation, participation of affected communities in the evictions carried out or planned under World Cup and Olympics.
" This complaint was added shortly after Amnesty International in its 2011 report on the status of human rights in the world devotes a paragraph to vacate grueling Metro: "Residents were threatened repeatedly (...) eviction. without there being any information, consultation or negotiation, said municipal workers to spray paint the houses that were to break down.
They told residents to be relocated to housing complexes in Cosmos, about 60 kilometers on outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, or temporary accommodation, and they were not going to give any compensation, "says the NGO. Indeed, there are painted in many of the doors of the houses that still stand.
"They are acting without any respect. They came here as if the house were his, without asking permission or explaining anything. With a spray painted on my door the initials SMH [in Portuguese acronym habitação Municipal Secretariat] and the number 95" Eomar regrets Freitas, who owns a three-storey building stoically survives surrounded by mountains of rubble.
"We do not live as people, but like rats", repeated like a mantra to be unemployed living for 18 years in the metro community. "Our struggle is to get the mayor Urbanic community so no one has to go, but we've been told this is impossible. No one has shown us the blueprint of what we want to do in these areas, but we know that FIFA (International Football Federation) and IOC (International Olympic Committee) have demanded that this community disappears near the Maracana.
It is clean, "he says bitterly Francicleide da Costa Souza, president of the Neighborhood Association of Metro. "The eviction process is being followed is clearly illegal and violates international standards," says Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International. In the municipality of Rio, however, reject this.
"All actions for the resettlement of families are being developed with deep respect, dialogue and with enough information," he told El Pais Housing Secretary, Jorge Bittar. "This community is in the middle of the street, in a totally inappropriate. We have already transferred half of the families and hope to relocate to the other in less than a month, although it is obviously difficult to make an omelet without breaking eggs" , gives the head of one of the most difficult portfolios Rio City Council.
More than 340 families have been relocated to housing units, most within walking distance of Metro. 340 others refuse to leave their homes without first getting the keys to another apartment to move. "Some neighbors, instead of another house, they offered financial compensation ranging between 8,000 and 12,000 reais (between 3,500 and 5,200 euros) to abandon their homes," Wilcken complaint.
Although neighbors say Metrô ignore them, the mayor's plans for this area include a landscaped walkway, two sets of machine shops and restaurants, and a great cultural and training center nearby. This will help to enhance and give luster to a neighborhood that now lives in obvious decline, but within three years become the epicenter of world news.
The objective seems legitimate. Not so much the means to achieve it.
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