Inside Brazil's Most Dangerous Neighborhood (Extreme Slum)
Very tight, look. Hard to breathe. Very young on 覧. Any change if he's still in the 覧. The ones we love never die. Lots of 覧.
Do you know how new these 覧 are? Oh, a couple days ago. Look the view, swimming pool for swimming. Somebody like me, coming up here alone, would be the most stupid thing I could ever do? Alone, you're 覧! So welcome back to another day in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, absolutely beautiful city. Today we're going to a favela, I'm not sure what I'm going to be able to capture. We did go to a favela in the last video, but apparently the one we're going to today is a bit more on edge, a bit more dangerous, they're not really used to seeing any foreigners or anything around there, so it might be a bit more tense.
And then we're gonna go to the millionaire neighborhoods, the rich areas, and try and get a grasp of the disparity in wealth, the lower class and the upper class. So, let's jump in the car, meeting up with my friend Guilherme today again and we're going to explore this magical city of Rio, let's go! Okay, so we've driven near Copacabana Beach, the famous Copacabana Beach. You can see behind me, there's a favela up there, in a really interesting position between the buildings.
It's going to be an interesting climb going up, we're going to go right into the middle. We have to be very careful, there's people right near me doing 覧, 覧 right now, it's quite an extreme atmosphere. I'm going to have to put the camera down, there's apparently lots of 覧 and 覧 activity we're gonna be seeing. Met up with a local guide, so I've got two local guides, one local guide who knows Rio well and then one from the favela itself, so, let's see how things go. Very young on 覧, very sad.
Very bad. No, they're going to get 覧 now. Very young. How do you know? I know the way they look like, they're like desperate, they are not sleeping, you feel the atmosphere here is heavier than Rocinha, it's heavier. I like it, I like it.
You can see this wall here, there's lots of 覧. This favela is definitely a lot more tense than the one we went to in the last video, for sure. Do you know how new these 覧 are? 覧, AR-15s. But I mean, how new they are? When did they happen? Oh a couple days ago.
Right, it's recent? Some, some not. It's always happening then. Always happening. The ones we love never die, only depart before us.
So, if you saw the last video, you'll know that all this electricity is actually hijacked from the main system, which means that the residents of Rio have to pay a further 30% of their power bills to cover the power of the favelas and they also tap into the pipes for running water and they take that illegally from the system. Here with Guilherme again, Guilherme, and this favela is significantly more tense than the last... More tense, absolutely.
We just walked some... past a guy with a big 覧 just hanging out. But we've got a local guide Fernando here and he was just sharing some interesting points about, like 覧, how it's not allowed, it's obviously not what the news reflects. It really depends on which 覧 覧 represent the slum, so, we're talking about three 覧 覧 so, they have their own rules, so one of the rules is like, people that are over 18, they're not allowed to date girls under 18.
This one, they allow to use 覧. Oh they do? They do. But other places they don't allow it? Some of them, but now most of them they allow because it's a way to make more money. This one is more intense because we consider it not a commercial slum.
They are not like Rocinha, the other day that we went, because it's located in the South Zone of Rio, a lot of money is involved. So, other 覧 覧 wanted to take the territory, that's a lot of money man, you're in Copacabana, right. Yeah, this favela fuels the kind of 覧 trade of the domestic tourism. Absolutely, I would say all the slums from South Zone of Rio, the South Zone that's where all the hotels are, all the upscale neighborhoods so, that's where the money is and eventually is the most dangerous part of the city because that's where we live. That's where the money is.
The money is, exactly. So, people are keeping an eye on it, they already know we're here? Oh, they know because Fernando need to ask for permission and tell the guys like: "Hey, I'm gonna lead a group today" I love this place because keep me awake, give me... Get your heart rate going, right? Exactly, unpredictable.
You never know when something could pop off, right? You never know. It could be an open fire in any minute. We're here right now, all of a sudden the police can come, open a fire and we have to go to one of these houses to hide ourselves and wait until it finishes and sometimes it lasts long 12 hours, 10 hours. Crazy, crazy. Somebody like me, coming up here alone, would be the most stupid thing I could ever do? Alone, you're 覧 man, you're 覧. You see the first place, they'll be like "man what are you doing here with this camera?".
They don't know who you are, you could be an enemy, you could be a police. 覧 civil war in Rio kills more than Syria. Really? So, we have more 覧 people, here we have the Gaza Stripe. Strip.
Strip, sorry, Gaza Strip. We have a favela here we call "Faixa de Gaza". Really? Yeah, back in the days used to 覧 more people than Syria war. Lots of machine 覧, 覧, 覧, 覧, 覧. So, it's just been invited into a house, just to give a bit of a tour of a house here so, we're gonna meet the lady here and check it out.
Very tight, look. Very, very narrow. Very narrow, yeah. Hard to breathe. Yeah, my head is touching the roof here. This is the bedroom.
Bed ... There's a sink over there Some ornaments. Okay. It's not cheap to buy a house or to rent a house, you know. So, here you might pay a hundred dollars man, a month. And what would be the income of somebody, if they're paying a hundred dollars a month how much they...
They make the minimum wage, almost eleven hundred reais. They buy things on credit cards, with credit. So they get into debt? Always, Brazilians always live with the debt. So, we're in the favela, but you can see how close the main city here. They're so close but they're worlds apart. So, we just come up to this viewpoint here, very beautiful, as always in this country.
It's the beauty mixed in with the tense atmosphere, but we just walked past a bunch of guys, there was 覧 覧, 覧 and 覧 sitting on the ground and then dudes holding heavy weapons. The interesting part is though, is that you have that... You have these really intense scenes that you're kind of heart pumping and you just look to the... You look straight you don't look at them, sometimes they put their hand out to first bump you which is pretty cool but I try to just look forward, I think that's the safest thing to do. But then, you have these areas with restaurants and clothes shops that are actually quite developed looking they're selling different kinds of sports equipment and things, it's really intriguing, there's mobile phone fixing shops obviously. I'm capturing as much as I can, but I have to listen to the guides, obviously, and only lift up the camera when I can lift up the camera.
And now's one of those times, but yeah, we'll continue up and see what we can film. So, one of the main issues here is the sewage. Poor people in unprivileged areas, they don't want to fix it because they don't get votes, they don't get money, they would have to spend a lot of money. And all these buildings are illegally built, right? These are all illegally built, yeah no permission, no. So, you can see this world-class view here again, one of the most famous beaches in the world, Copacabana.
Sugarloaf Mountain behind it there, it's just absolutely unreal views amongst this absolute tense but full of love and struggle and so many things wrapped into one in these favelas. Scary, fascinating, charming. Look the trash. They just throw the rubbish off here? Look how much.
I was asking if you were a handsome guy. Yeah Because you have a different beauty they love. Cool, so we've come into a local shop here and we've met a lovely lady, Taiani? Taiane. Taiane, sorry. Is this your shop? That's, her daddy.
It's a family business. Family business, yeah. Do you enjoy living here? You love it? She loves it, she loves, she gets so excited, she got a big smile, she's very proud to live here. Why are you so proud? It's a marvelous place to live, it's "tranquil", it's quiet Quiet and peaceful? Quiet and peaceful, yeah peaceful. Where I come from these places have a reputation to be the opposite, so what would you say about that, would you say it's not true, it's actually quite safe and secure here? You guys didn't have the opportunity to come here and to change the way you guys thinking about, the concept, the meaning of a favela.
Stop watching the news. Right. Fake news.
Right. I agree with her, people from the favelas are happier than the people from the street, because they have money, they want to purchase material things and they don't have anything but they have... Each other. Yeah man, and they're always hoping for a better future and we always tend to complain "I want to buy a new iPhone, I want to buy me a new car, I want to buy a new pair of shoes" So, at this stage I had an opportunity to fly the drone, but I couldn't fly the drone directly over the favela itself. You'll be able to see it on the right hand side, on the side of the hill there.
The reason I couldn't fly it over the favela is because they told me that it would get shot out of the sky with a machine 覧. Like I say again, you can see Taiane there, she's saying safe and peaceful but on the other hand things can pop off, there are conflicting sides, there are lovely people, but obviously you can't hide from the fact that it's a very dangerous place. The reason they would shoot the drone out of the sky is because they think it's a spy from either police or a rival 覧 覧. Okay, so we've met a young rapper, gonna do some rapping for us. He's 21, he's pretty gangster.
They're all the boys from the United States. Right. He wants to change his life, he doesn't see any change if he's still in the 覧. Young boy. So, he wrote these lyrics? He wrote these lyrics.
Does he have an instagram I can share? Yeah. What's the name? I'll write it. We just took a bit of a trek through the trees, absolutely unreal viewpoint, to be fair. All the major landmarks of Rio that you see in the postcards.
Christ the Redeemer up there, Copacabana and Sugarloaf. And the only way to come up here is to go through the favela and without the guides, again, it's not possible. So, this is a viewpoint of Rio that's... we're very lucky to see this. So, we've come into a gym here, for boxing and things and they've got all these famous boxers. I just thought it would be cool to show that there's these social projects here, they've also got surf school, arts and theater and a bunch of different things.
There are things for the kids here, many kids playing behind the camera here and they were doing a training and everything, so, it's a cool way to get the kids on a good direction in life. So, Kelly Slater came here? Kelly Slater came here, Sakuraba, all these guys. Look the view, swimming pool for swimming. Did Kelly Slater teach the children surfing? No, no, he just came because he used to come here for surfing competitions, he got invited to come to see the project. The owner of this gym, which is this guy here, Claudio Coelho he's with this guy, Ken Shamrock, so, all the big guys from UFC. So, we've come down the hill a bit and we've got this incredible backdrop here with all the favelas on the hillside, we've just hiked to the top of that hill and came down.
We're here with Fernando, who's been helping us out here. You grew up your whole life living here? He's born in Rio, in some area around here, he joined the community from 83 to 86 and then from 86 until 2006 he was just doing several shows in Israel. Dancing show. He's a professional dancer? He's a professional dancer. His work visa got expired and then he had to go back to Brazil. What countries did he travel to? Israel, Portugal, Spain, France, Japan, Austria, Belgium.
You've been to a lot of European countries, what would you say is the main difference between Rio specifically? Especially black people, right, they feel a lot of racism, especially in Spain. So, he felt discriminated... Discriminating, yeah. They're running towards him in the subway station. Towards or away? No, no, towards.
What do you mean? Discrimination in the subway station, calling him as monkey, things like that. Seriously? Yeah. And what did you like about Europe? People really took care of him because he was an artist, kind of a celebrity because he was doing some cool art that people there were not used to. The most country that he really loved it was Israel.
Number one in the world for him. And you speak hebrew? Yes. I love you. Okay, so we've just come down, I have to make this quite quick, we're at the bottom here, there's people doing 覧 right next to us but yeah there's some intense things that we just saw that I can't necessarily talk about. I'll talk about more in the end of the video. Super intense, we just went past a house with like 100 people doing 覧 in it.
Right now we're going to the millionaire neighborhood, so you can see the contrast. Okay, let's get out of here. Can you just explain a bit about this neighborhood? Yeah, this is the port area, this neighborhood is called Leblon. So, CEOs of companies, bankers, celebrities, really wealth people.
That's a gated community, right? Gate community, yeah. So, there's extremely strict security? Yes, yes, this guy for example, a guy that brought the Olympic Games to Brazil, to Rio. He campaigned for it? He campaigned. And how much would a house here cost? A couple millions of dollars, some of the houses have elevators. We just came from the favela and now we're here and it's in the same city, only 10 minutes apart but it's basically another country, right? Yeah, Rio it's a city of big contrast, the wealth people live in one side, in crosstree from these wealthy neighborhoods, people from the favela live, right. Easily walk around these streets at night, no problem.
Here no problem, here there are a lot of cameras a lot of private security, it's a private neighborhood inside Leblon District, you get so impressed with the size of the houses, the size of the wall, the gates, the doors, just crazy. So, where are we exactly now? Yeah, here it is called "Piscin? de Ramos" I kind of joke around, it's like Rio's Dubai. It's like a fake beach. What's the safety situation in this part of town, is it quite dangerous? It's quite dangerous not exactly where we are but around us, a lot of slums.
Right. And from different 覧 覧, and there's always conflict between them because they want to dispute 覧 territory. So, a lot of people from the lower class neighborhoods come here to enjoy? Yeah.
Like a day out, so a lot of the people here will be from surrounding favelas? Yeah, because it's far away to go to the beach from here. So, the government created this? They created. That's quite nice, right. It's very nice, I think here's the real people of Rio. Right.
The hard work people, I love it, I love it. Can you just tell me what you were saying before, about how the people in the favelas are human and they're only growing up in their product of their environment? Yeah, imagine man, you're born, your father is 覧, your mom is a 覧, right, and you're born seeing kids using 覧, having motorcycles, cars, girls. So, that's the main reference you have, the other good reference the positive side that you have, soccer players, artists, so that's a good reference but we don't have enough players for you to have as a hero, right. So, usually they focus on this negative side. There were many things that I could not show and many things that were very extreme.
How do I say this? There's a lot of things I can't tell you, it is the truth. The amount of weapons we saw today, the amount of 覧 覧 use that we saw was extreme. The amount of internal security that we saw, we got assessed by people of the 覧, we had prior clearance, we had to stop, wait, they had to assess us. There were times where it got a bit uncomfortable between people, luckily we were with Guilherme and he is smooth and he is very good talker, he knows how to handle situations where many would freeze, he jumps in there and things go well when they could go very south, very quickly. Diego, my friend that I'm traveling with, grown up in S? Paulo, the biggest city, he's just told me to please tell you guys how shocked he was.
He's grown up in this country, you've seen it's like countries within a country, it's so much disparity. You've seen the million dollar neighborhood, all that extreme wealth, but even just driving between these places, 覧 is high here, I'm not gonna try and portray it in any other way because that's reality. I'm not at all trying to put a bad light on Rio or in Brazil in general. I'm coming here documenting, this is what I've seen, I'm sharing with you. I'm not trying to put any kind of spin on it, but what we saw today was...
We saw some of the top guys, I'll say that, and we saw a lot of 覧 and even things more than that. I can't go into specifics because it's not fair on the people who make their living here and the people that we've interacted with, it's not at all fair, but we saw some things. I'm gonna have to leave it to your imagination, I'm really sorry I would love to share it but it's just not, it's not the right thing to do and it's not wise, I'm sure you can understand. I don't want to get anybody in trouble, I don't want to start any kind of flare up or anything because you never know who's going to see this video. Something that was really shocking was the police station and the 覧 are very close as stones throw away, less, they're right next to it, the 覧 with the 覧 and...
I don't want to say too much, so... So, a huge thank you to Guilherme and his partner Rafa, you guys are legends, great getting to know you. I'll leave their channel below, food and travel videos, anyway, I'm sure I've got more to say but it's been an ex... I mean I don't have to say, it's been overwhelming, it should be obvious. Still got much more of Brazil to see, Brazil is becoming one of my favorite countries I think. Rio is probably one of the most beautiful cities I've been to, white sandy beaches, the mountains right there on the beach and then you've got this craziness mixed in with it.
People are amazing, the food is delicious, such hospitable people, this country's really capturing me. Still more videos coming from me from Brazil, join me on this journey. It's wild. Thank you so much for watching and in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2021-02-25 00:11
