Santa Marta

In Rio de Janeiro, there are nearly a thousand favelas, shantytowns built illegally with salvaged materials on the city's hillsides. During a visit to Rio in 2013, I went to the Santa Marta favela. Pacified in 2008 following a government program, it stands out as an exception compared to the others where violence remains rampant. Located high up in a non-building zone overlooking the Botafogo neighborhood, it is inaccessible to motorcycles and cars. You have to take a funicular from a residential area of the city to get there. After a 15-minute ride, the view is breathtaking: as far as the eye can see, the hills and the famous beaches of Ipanema and Leblon. Then the colorful houses, painted during an Erasmus project a few years earlier, immediately catch the eye. They are the favela's main attraction, along with "Michael Jackson Square," which has paid homage to the King of Pop since he filmed the "They Don't Care About Us" music video there in 1996. Getting around requires navigating the winding, intersecting dead ends. Traffic zigzags up narrow staircases with uneven steps in a labyrinth of haphazardly built dwellings, one on top of the other. Few streets are properly named; you have to find your way, as a passage can disappear overnight. At the very top, it's a dead end: a wall was built by the government to contain the favela. More than 5,000 people live here. Housing in Rio has become as expensive as in Paris, so two-thirds of city dwellers who work "down below" return to the favelas at night to sleep, because they don't earn enough to pay rent. As a form of protest, they write messages on the houses, addressed to those sleeping in the wealthy neighborhoods below. We pass a woman's stall selling all sorts of things, idle men, and laughing children. Like everywhere else in the country, there's a soccer field. This one offers a breathtaking view of the bay and the beautiful, light-colored, perfectly maintained buildings of the Botafogo neighborhood—a stark contrast to the chaos of the favela.

Since I took these pictures, the government program has failed and the violence has resumed. Santa Marta is once again under the control of drug traffickers, and shootings can erupt at any moment. Now, police officers wearing bulletproof vests and armed with assault rifles stand guard in "Michael Jackson Square."