Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: analysing the political discourse on favelas

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Sage in Discourse & Society, available online: http://das.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/0957926514541346

Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: analysing the political discourse on favelas

Daniel S Lacerda Lancaster University, UK; Capes Foundation, Brazil Abstract This paper analyses the discourse on favelas produced by Brazilian society and consumed in the political field of local administration. The ideological conception of favelas (slums) determines the creation of public policies that reinforce the prejudicial notion of favelas. This work employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) so as to analyse several texts extracted from mass media stories and press releases of the Rio government. It shows that state praxis reproduces the understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached from the rest of the society. This alienated vision impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1); perpetuating poverty (analysis 2); and reinforcing exclusions (analysis 3). Keywords Favelas, slums, political discourse, critical discourse analysis, discourse historical approach, dialectical relational approach, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Corresponding author: Daniel S. Lacerda, Charles Carter Building, Lancaster University, LA1 4YX, UK. Email: [email protected]


Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: analysing the political discourse on favelas

Introduction

Brazilian society is strongly marked by class issues, thus yielding a “social apartheid”

legitimized by discursive praxis (Resende, 2009). Favelas (Brazilian slums) are

arguably the strongest representations of such segregation, and analysing the

constructed imagination of favelas helps to reveal that. If we consider them as a social

phenomenon, providing a definition of a slum or a favela entails considerable difficulty.

Davis (2007) recovers multiple definitions of slums, mostly related to moral judgments

which see them as loci of criminal activities, and depicts, according to the UN

Population Division, such territories as places of disease, overcrowding, insecurity,

informal housing and poverty. In Rio de Janeiro, as in many other places, favelas are

referred to in terms of their physical and social deprivation (“lack of”), and this deficit

perspective is usually used to describe them (Davis, 2007; Neuwirth, 2005). But beyond

the technical definition of favelas, what is at stake here is how favelas are discursively

constructed and reaffirmed.

The hegemonic understanding of favela has been challenged in the past decades,

and favela is today a changing place. However, its biased account is still part of the

imaginary of many people, and is especially present in political utterances (arguably to

collect electoral dividends and financial support from the elite who funds elections).

Such accounts are often impregnated of a moralising content in terms of the codes for

urban occupation. The appeal to hegemonic moralising discourses to address material

class-based differences is a recurrent political strategy, which has also been identified in

other contexts (Bennett, 2013). In general, they are part of a discursive logic of

Urbaniza-se? Remove-se? Extingue-se a pau e fogo? Que fazer com tanta gente [...] Cadastrá-los e fichá-los para fins eleitorais? Carlos D. de Andrade (Favelará:

Urbanise it? Remove it? Quench it by thwack and fire? What to do with so many people? […] Register and file them with electoral purposes? Urbaniza-se? Remove-se?, 1979)


exclusion. As stated by Wodak (2007: 643), "the practices and politics of exclusion are

inherently and necessarily rooted in language and communication". This paper assumes

not only that language is the main arena of dispute where ideological clashes take place,

but also that social struggles and structural contradictions (e.g. affluent zones depending

on cheap labour force but providing no suitable accommodation or transport for them)

are dialectically related to the political organization of state (Gramsci, 1971). For this

reason, my paper analyses the political discourse on favelas, which represents an arena

of dispute on the meaning of favelas over the whole city of Rio, and beyond. This

process involves revealing the ideology imbued in political discourses, which are

related to the reproduction and abuse of power (Dijk, 1997; Wodak, 2011).

In Rio, the present time is historically important for this analysis. In what seems

to be the first time in more than 100 years, favelas are the focus of the main public

programme of the state government. Through the programme for “pacification” of

favelas, the state-level administration acts together with the other two jurisdictional

levels of government (city and federation) in a rare political confluence that aims at

breaking the “logic of violence” existing in many parts of the city. This political turn

remains contested in terms of underlying motivations, though, especially considering

the upcoming major events of the Olympic Games and World Cup (Cunha, 2011;

Fleury, 2012; Lacerda and Brulon, 2013; Leite, 2012).

This paper analyses the discourse produced in Brazil and consumed in the

political field of local administration, with emphasis on their context of production and

consumption. In light of this objective, the following questions were formed and guide

this paper: (1) How does Rio’s government understand what constitutes favelas? (2)

How differently does the government see slum inhabitants in comparison to residents of

wealthy areas? (3) How are favelas acknowledged on the political agenda of the

government in Rio? To address these questions, this work, employing CDA

methodology, uses several texts extracted from mass media stories and press releases of

the city administration.

There are clear features that characterize CDA, for example the interest in

unravelling and scrutinizing power relations and intricate ideologies composing


discourse. This work will rely on two different CDA traditions: the Discourse Historical

Approach (DHA), which focuses on the political field and draws upon argumentation

theory (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001); and the Dialectical Relational Approach (DRA),

unfolding from the Marxian tradition and exploring relations of dominance, difference

and resistance (Fairclough, 2001).

Following the three proposed objectives, I will try to demonstrate in three

separate analyses what the current discursive practices of the government represents to

favelas: (1) criminalization of poverty, (2) a divided state, and (3) the reinforcement of

exclusion. In doing so, I expect to contribute to understanding the current political

manoeuvres to hide favelas and their poverty, and reveal the dynamics of exclusion that

occur even within the public programs for favelas. The paper begins with the historical

context of favelas in Rio. Then it presents the methodology used for the current study

and proceeds with the analysis of utterances in three different sets of texts. Finally, it

offers a critical assessment of the impact of such vision on the materiality of favelas.

The context of favelas

Slums are a world phenomenon. The increasing urbanisation of cities in countries such

as Brazil, India and China created mega-cities in the world and, in 2007, for the first

time in human history the urban population outnumbered the rural (Davis, 2007). The

analysis of this dynamic is presented by Davis (2007: 26) to contextualize the

impressive numbers of slum creation: more than 200,000 slums in the world house more

than one billion people. Brazil contributes greatly to this figure. According to IBGE

(2013), 20%i of Rio city’s 6.2 million inhabitants live in favelas.

The discussion about favelas is associated with inequality and income

distribution. This is a material consequence of favelas being inhabited by the poorest.

As explained by Hulme, Kanbur and Addison (2009), poverty research needs to focus

on poverty dynamics, and examining its evolution over time is shown to be crucial to

understanding the processes of poverty persistence. In this case, it means also to

examine the perpetuation of inequality that is attached to this poverty. Let me now

proceed to a short description of the historical trajectory of favelas in Rio. Rio’s


landscape is strongly marked by the presence of favelas and, in the recent decades, they

were brought to the spotlight in the issuing of public policies, particularly in the field of

public security.

The first catalogued favela in Rio was Morro da Providencia, which housed ex-

soldiers that had fought against a national riot (Guerra de Canudos) in the state of

Bahia, at the end of the XIX century (Oliveira, 1985). In the first half of the 20th

century, slums used to be depicted as places of ‘bums’, smugglers and vagabonds.

Morro da Providencia was occasionally called “social hell” by the elite (Valladares,

2000: 7), as if it were occupied only by bums and criminals, even though the first

census in 1950 showed that more than 90% of its population were active and productive

labourers (Valladares, 2000: 24), which showed already then the high disparity between

prejudice and reality.

The first popular settlements were more widely known as ‘cortiços’, and were

also a solution for housing thousands of ex-slaves who were freed only in 1888, and still

had no means to live their freedom in an unfamiliar territory (Valladares, 2005). Since

their very origins, slums in Rio have been places for the most excluded of society.

Slums assumed the geography of favelas as their predecessors (‘cortiços’) were

destroyed and targeted by hygienist evictions. Thus, since their early presence, favelas

had also been regarded as socially invisible and were marked by their nature of

“illegality”.

According to Oliveira (1985), only by the 1940s had favelas come to be

acknowledged as an “existent” urban phenomenon, probably because of being too big to

remain ignored. This period coincided with the productive transformation that the

Brazilian economy underwent, shifting labour power from rural activities to industries

and concentrating more and more people in the cities. Unsurprisingly, the city was

unable to offer housing for these people, and, in 1950, 7% of the city population were

already living in the favelas (Oliveira, 1985: 11). During this period, favela becomes the

object of intervention by the State and Civil Society (e.g. Church, political parties). For

Valladares (2000), this period particularly marks the beginning of an official knowledge

about favelas, when different professionals started to study favelas, and the university


adopted favela as an object of study. From informal ‘solution’ to the issue of lack of

accommodation, the status of favela changed into being characterized as a social

‘problem’.

In 1937, a law forbade the creation of new slums for the first time. It was the

beginning of the overt criminalization of such spaces. Historically, since this first

enactment, the recurrent public policy regarding favelas had been precisely to control

their growth (Oliveira, 1985), thus resulting in massive campaigns for evictions and

demolition of poor houses. Such initiatives characterized the main governmental picture

for these dwellers, especially during the 1960s: the era of clearances, in which many

actions of evictions were performed by the government. The dwellers waged resistance

from the 1950s to the 1980s, organising communities and building concrete houses.

They fought against the homogenization of favelas as spaces of deficits, as not only

realized in collective thinking but also even transposed to official public reports for

decades (Silva, 2002). This prejudicial perspective of favelas took away their urban

legitimacy, in a time when policies for eviction needed to be justified, particularly

during the non-democratic period (1964-1985).

Since the end of the 1980s, slums have increasingly acquired the legal right of

existence, and the word ‘urbanisation’ – initially regarded as the provision of public

services and infrastructure – has been more and more associated with favelas. This

process was supported by the acknowledgement that the favela is the producer of its

own culture, and the comprehension of their way of organizing has altered the

understanding of their nature. Favelas could no longer be technically defined as the

absence of urban order that had to be cleared out, and their relations with the city

became much more complex. The various processes that contributed to this change, “for

the good and for the bad”, were: the expansion of public and private services within the

favelas; the growth and verticalization of favelas; the popularization of new educational

and cultural practices; the advance of social, economic and cultural heterogeneity;

privatization of the residents’ associations and the increased power of drug dealers

(Silva, 2003).


The first urbanization programs oriented to favelas started in the 1980s

(Valladares, 2005: 23). Probably the biggest program of the 20th century was ‘Favela-

bairro’, which was launched in the 1990s and was partly funded by the World Bank.

Despite many achievements and public apparatuses deployed because of this program, it

was not fully successful due to the lack of political articulation, fragmentation of

interventions and nonexistence of a security program at the state level to cope with

emerging criminal gangs (Fleury, 2012: 197–198). Because of increasing segregation

and the lack of state control, slums were gradually being dominated by drug traffickers

and militias, who saw in the oppressed population and in the fragile institutional bonds

of favelas the perfect environment to create their own ruling system. With this

developing process, the term favela also carried a depreciative meaning of violence and

criminality, as well as the prejudicial vision of poverty it contained already.

In the last decades, the term favela has been replaced by euphemistic

alternatives, such as Hill (Morro) and Community (Comunidade). The former derives

from the fact that most favelas in Rio are located on hillsides, while the latter is linked

to the word that dwellers use to call their own village. The objective of this

transformation is to avoid, by any means, the original term associated with poverty and

violence by the media and films, which recurrently represented these specific issues of

favelas to the rest of the city (Ramos and Paiva, 2007: 77–97). An example of such

manoeuvre was the case when the municipal government required Google to ‘hide’ the

information about favelas from Google Maps (Antunes, 2011). Subsequently, the

company started a project to “prioritize” and “qualify” the information shown on the

maps of the city, displaying the names of the zones and removing any references to

‘favela’ on the first zoom level. These lexical-semantic strategies resemble the early

period of the favelas, when they could still be hidden from the city.

The mentioned strategy is part of one of the big priorities of the current

administration: to take advantage of the historically favourable conditions of the

economy and political alliances with the federal government, and reorganize the city for

the upcoming mega events, preparing it to welcome foreign capital. The biggest

political program, UPP (Unidades de Policia Pacificadora – Pacifying Police Units),


promises to “consolidate the state control on communities under the influence of

criminal groups” (Law 42787, 2011). The possible real intentions underpinning this

manoeuvre have been discussed by several authors (e.g. Fleury, 2012; Lacerda &

Brulon, 2013), and the arena for the battle to recover state control is also ideological.

The following section explains the method that was employed to reveal the basis on

which the government enacts public initiatives on favelas (the discourse on favelas).

Method

In order to reveal the discourse on favelas from the perspective of political

administration, this paper contemplates three different manifestations, applying Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA) in three separate analyses. As suggested by Wodak and

Meyer (2009), the collection of data and contextual information depends on research

questions. The investigation starts with the identification of the problems, which are

defined below in terms of three different research questions. These questions drive the

analysis of the involved social practices and their relationship to the associated semiosis

(e.g. public policies being enacted). So, for each of the following research questions, a

different approach to analysis has been used, to best fit the selected dataset:

1. How does Rio’s government understand what constitutes favelas?

2. How differently does the government see slum inhabitants in comparison to

residents of wealthy areas?

3. How are favelas acknowledged in the political agenda of the government in Rio?

To address question 1, the texts analysed are: a) a newspaper story (886 words)

describing the new city program for the favela urbanisation, based on speeches by the

mayor and his secretaries (available at http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/prefeitura-lanca-

novo-plano-para-favelas-que-preve-controle-gabarito-conservacao-choque-2974915);

and b) an interview with the city mayor who was running for re-election: an excerpt (2

minutes) containing the questions and answers regarding favelas has been transcribed

(available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glZpIYKG7DE). Given the nature of

these texts, the Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA) (Wodak, 2006, 2009, 2011) was


used, along with the commonly associated techniques of Argumentation Analysis

(Eemeren and Garssen, 2012; Neagu, 2013; Toulmin, 1969).

DHA also informs the whole paper when providing a historical perspective on

the construction of discourses on favelas. This approach is usually applied to studies of

exclusions in the field of politics, providing insightful analyses of political discourses.

The following section explores the intertextuality of the two texts (the newspaper story

and the interview) and identifies the discursive strategies used: nomination (including

categorization, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche), predication (stereotypical and

evaluative attributions), argumentation (fallacies and topoi of arguments),

perspectivation/framing (reporting, description, narration or quotation of events) and

intensification/mitigation (of the illocutionary force).

For question 2, the relevant texts are: a) an official state press release A (327

words) explaining the services to minimize the impact of government works (available

at http://www.rj.gov.br/web/imprensa/exibeconteudo?article-id=715592); and b) an

official state press release B (236 words) about the work of the Public Defender’s

Office preventing slum evictions (available at http://www.rj.gov.br/web/dpge/

exibeconteudo?article-id=1425418). Because of the contradictory dialectical relation

between the two texts, the Dialectical-Relational Approach (DRA) (Fairclough, 2001,

2009) was used. This approach is grounded in the work of authors such as Antonio

Gramsci, Karl Marx and Michael Halliday, and its methodological objectives focus on

grand narratives (i.e. macro discourses that subjugates the meaning of social practices).

DRA views semiosis as an irreducible part of material social practices, in which

all practices are practices of production, and for this reason it is an important instrument

for analysing social exclusion and structural domination, such as in the case of favelas.

This analysis is performed at three levels: text (structure, cohesion, grammar,

vocabulary), discourse (interdiscursivity, production and consumption processes) and

social order (dominant and marginalized ways of making meaning).

The analysis juxtaposes these two similar texts (as described above, official

press releases extracted from the official government portal), to distinguish the different

discourses that pervade them when referring to different “classes” of citizens. Many of


the discursive devices analysed by DHA are also explored by Fairclough(2001: 116–

126), who, nevertheless, focuses on the link between discursive strategies and social

order, through the relationship of two important elements: ideology (construction of

reality that is enacted in various dimensions of discursive practices, contributing to the

relations of domination) and hegemony (power over society exerted by the ruling class

in alliance with various social forces in a condition of unstable equilibrium).

Finally, for question 3 the headlines and leads (summaries) of official press

releases extracted from the state government official website were compiled into a

corpus. The search was performed with the keywords comunidade (community), favela

(slum) and morro (hill), for stories published from 15/2/2013 to 11/3/2013, which

resulted in 128 stories. Repeated and non-applicable stories were excluded, leaving a

corpus of 45 different press releases on favelas and their programs (corpus compiled

from http://www.rj.gov.br/web/imprensa/listaconteudo? search-type=busca). Then, each

story abstract was analysed to define: the favela/community to which the story referred,

whether it was pacified or not, and the topic.

The third analysis establishes the basis on which the cohesion of the

communications about favelas is established over several stories. The relatively small

size of the corpus allowed the manual annotation of each entry, without the support of

concordance software, using the following codes: name of the favela object of the story,

pacified (yes/no), topic of the story (event, publication of results, new investment), and

whether there were residents involved (yes/no).

The approaches described share similarities and differences. Their selection is

not random; rather, it aims at the articulation of perspectives deriving from multiple

theoretical standpoints but pointing towards common discursive practices. The data

used here is in Portuguese, but the result of the analysis has been translated to English.

Data analysis: discourse on favelas

Part 1: criminalization of favelas


Text 1a (newspaper story) was published on 15/7/2010 by the most widely read

newspaper in Rio (O Globo), and one of most famous in the country. It describes the

new Morar Carioca public program, which in 2014 was still one of the main policies of

the city administration in office during 2008-2016, and which replaced the previous

program (Favela Bairro) for favela urbanisation. The text has the following structure:

the first half summarizes the policy, focusing on the plan for eviction and containment;

the second half starts with the financial details of the plan and concludes by giving

voice to statements of the mayor and his secretary of housing which also focus on

aspects of policy reinforcement. The text assumes the genre of neutral journalistic

coverage of facts, appealing to epistemic claims and objectifying events. Its main

discursive structures are presented below.

One of the devices for providing cohesion to the text is the repetition of the

words "removed" (5), "urbanization" (3) and "order" (3), which, associated with the

repetition of “favelas”, “communities” and “city council”, illustrates how the city

administration understands its own role in terms of the new policy: to urbanize the city

by removing communities of favelas to provide order. This conclusion is supported by

how favelas are constantly nominated, i.e. as counted instances. No community is

referred to by their name; they are always generalized in terms of numbers or areas, as

illustrated in the following example. Thus, they assume the status of things, impersonal

and inanimated (Fowler cited in Billig, 2008).

Extract 1: newspaper story, lines 14-19

14 The plan, which was defined by the city administration as a social legacy of the 2016 15 Olympic Games, previews the removal by 2012 of 123 communities 16 where at least 12,973 families are currently living in risk areas. Of this total, 17 4,900 have already been moved off. The number of slums to be eradicated is 18 similar to what [the newspaper] anticipated in January (119), when the then Secretary 19 of Housing, Jorge Bittar, announced a series of removals.

As can be seen in Extract 1, the main object of the text – the new government

policy – is predicated (“defined by the city administration”) as a social legacy of the

Olympic Games to the city. The text does not refer to this claim again at any point,

failing to explain in what sense the Games are providing a legacy for slums, since no


extraordinary investment is provided because of the Games. This is a very common

strategy of Brazilian politicians to justify their public interventions: linking their

political actions to the requirements of the Olympic Games or presenting them as their

“legacy” to the city, regardless of the nature of the action. The new public policy is

actually about slums removal. The recurrent actions that enact the policy in Extract 1

are “moved”, “removal”, “eradicated”; lexical items that point to the topic and most of

the times do not have social actors.

This objectification of the process of removal/eviction is a form of mitigation

(here a case of concealment), and is applied in about one third of the text, which is

dedicated only to the economic aspects of the program. In the other parts, when

describing the removal/eviction of families from their houses, the text systematically

appeals to mitigation devices, inter alia the meiosis with understatement of the action

("moved off" rather than evicted), minimisation through the use of reduction words

("only" 416 houses evicted), hasty generalisation of implicit mitigating circumstances

(“houses being constructed” as if it were necessarily going to be used by evicted

residents), and the passivization of the sentence to conceal the main actor of this process

(“have been moved off” rather than “the administration has moved the families off”).

As illustrated by Extract 1 and also present throughout the text, the topos, i.e. the

contextual mental place in which a set of assumptions leads to an argument, of “risk

areas” is associated with favelas as a justification for removing them. This has been a

common practice since immemorial times by the city administration: these buildings

should be demolished because they have been built in areas regarded unsafe for

construction. This almost deictic reference is a tricky rule that opens the theoretical

possibility for risky areas that could be urbanised. Context explains this possibility. The

hilly geography of the city of Rio accommodates many other mansions built in wealthy

(Jardim Botanico, Joá, Quinta, etc.), and arguably risky areas, but that are not

controlled with the same rigour. It is remarkable, yet, that favelas are associated to a

word (risk) ontologically close to a hazard, a threat, that they would represent not for

themselves but for the outsiders (after all, favela is still considered a police issue). The

text subsequently explains that, so far, “only 416 houses” have been demolished. The


qualifier “only” understates the action as not having a significant impact, and the nature

of these evictions is not discussed: in fact they are compulsory, determined by official

subjective assessment and usually not notified in advance (see Brum, 2011, pp. 66–

153).

When further claiming that the removed families are not abandoned by the city

administration, the text also uses a fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam, i.e. an

appeal to the desirability of the consequences. It states that “the number of projected or

under construction houses comes to 54 thousand, which would be enough to house the

removed families”. The premise is already fallacious, i.e. that all the planned houses

will be built and offered to the evicted families, and is grounded on the desirability of

this consequence that the final claim is true. This last appeal to consequences is

associated with another common argumentation strategy, i.e. the use of different

modalities in epistemic claims. Arguments referring to the execution of the public

policy affirm stances with high-valued modality, i.e. close to the centre of certainty,

such as “[the plan] previews the removal of”. In contrast, whenever the events are

solutions offered to the affected residents, the epistemic claim shifts to low-valued

modality, i.e. speculations of likely truth, such as “[it] would be enough to house the

removed families”.

The claims with high-valued modality (certain truth), together with deontic

claims, also lead to usually to ludic fallacies, i.e. the misuse of models in a real life

situation, by ignoring other constraints or resistances to the full application of the plan.

One of the fallacious premises is that all favelas will be controlled and inspected. This is

contested by the historic of resistance against authoritative policies in favelas, but it is

also contradicted by the text itself, which shows that the roles of local secretaries toward

favelas are still loci of disputes. The mayor states that every secretary would assume

their role also in the favelas, admitting that favelas were previously disregarded in usual

duties. However, the only roles explicitly predicated to the nominated professional

anthroponyms (e.g. secretaries) were: "to eradicate new favelas", “to stop expansion",

"inspect new buildings" and finally "replacing lamps" (see Extract 2).


Extract 2: newspaper story, lines 69-74

69 The mayor added: 70 – If the strategy is to integrate communities to the roads [rest of the city], we need 71 identical treatment of public services. Seop [public order] will have a more intense role 72 in the repression of unruly expansion, while the 73 Secretary of Conservation will assume activities such as replacing 74 lamps

Road (“asfalto”) is a synecdoche commonly used in Rio to refer to what is

outside the favelas (which, in turn are referred to as hill – “morro”). This shows the

imaginary of segregation between the two. But what is qualified in the text as an

“identical treatment of public services” is rather only an identical imposition of legal

obligations. Desirable public services, such as education and sanitation are not qualifiers

of these claims, and what this strategy produces is arguably the separation between the

communities and the rest of the city. One of the strategies that allow this distribution is

to predicate favelas as illegitimate occupations, relegating them to an outlaw position.

The legitimacy of occupations should be judged on the light of the fact that the shortage

of housing obligates the dwellers to settle wherever they are able to. However, framing

them as law offenders allows justifying a certain pattern of action from the government.

This can be seen for example in the applied epistemic intensifications. In the

example of Extract 2, Seop will have a “more intense” role in the repression of “unruly”

expansion. The qualifier used implies that the previous role was not diligently

performed or, at least, not intensely. And the classification of expansion as “unruly” is

one of the various predications of favelas as lawless environments. One of the fallacies

involved is equating favela occupied areas to “invasions”, an epistemic intensification

that implies they are all illegal: "inspections […] of occupied areas, in order to identify

new invasions". This is associated with the topos of public order, greatly present in the

interview. In many passages, the story presents favela communities as being in

opposition to the formal city. The duty of protecting the formal city is given to the city

administration, which speaks through the government representatives. The mayor and a

secretary are directly quoted, as in Extract 2, but the access to the process of discourse

production is controlled here and no voice is offered to the families that were evicted.


Text 1b (interview) is a transcription of an excerpt from an interview broadcast

on 18/9/2012 by the most watched TV channel. It comes from a section of the daily

news show in which each candidate running for mayor in the 2012 municipal elections

is interviewed. The excerpt transcribed contains the discussion in response to the

following question: “you’ve said before that you have been reducing the total area

occupied by favelas […] isn’t it pointless to control the area whilst favelas are growing

vertically?” The intertextuality of the two texts is evident in the direct reference to the

program “Morar Carioca” in the video, the use of the common topos of “risky areas”

and the production of the discourse on favela orbiting around the central issue of direct

control and containment of growth. The turn that defines the theme of the conversation

challenges the recurrent claim that the government is successful in reducing the areas of

favelas. Extract 3 shows the beginning of the mayor’s response.

Extract 3: interview, turn 2

Look, this is a difficult task, isn’t it? Rio for a long time had only expansion, expansion, expansion, harming the community dwellers themselves. Besides, many times in risky areas.

The answer offered by the mayor is not the answer to the posed question.

Digressing from what is asked is a common device in political speeches (Wodak, 2011).

The mayor appeals to many fallacies in his argumentation as strategies for mitigation. In

Extract 3, two of them are illustrated. First, the argumentum ad nauseam, i.e. argument

from repetition, by stating that for a long time there have been only "expansion,

expansion, expansion". Even though the claim may be true (at least for some territories),

the repetition suggests that this is a continuous and deliberate process. With the same

strategy, the mayor insists many times on the increase of slums, always associating it to

illegal actions. The quoted clause followed a non sequitur formal fallacy, in this case an

epistemic fallacy, in "harming the community dwellers themselves". The fallacious

premise is that expansion is harmful to residents, when in reality people from outside

favelas would be majorly affected by their expansion.

The claim that for a long time favelas have only grown is followed further by the

claim that his administration was able to reduce the area of favelas. One of the ways of


obtaining legitimation for this control is, again, the use of the topos of risky areas

(discussed previously). It is arguable whether the topos of slum control and risky areas

are produced by the civil society and incorporated by the governmental actions or

whether they are directly produced by the historical acts of the government.ii In any

case, there is a dialectical relation between these practices.

Extract 4: interview, turn 6

[…]What I can say is the following, Edmilson: the city administration now does not stand still when there is an irregularity, it goes and combats this irregularity, this is not what used to happen in the past. Then, we are urbanizing the favelas in Rio, “Morar Carioca” brings dignity to the residents of favela. But, not growing is also crucial, even for this urbanization to be worth it.

The construction of “us vs. them” in the mayor speech is marked by the

opposition between “trouble-shooters” (us) and “offenders” (them) in the applied

perspectivations: control vs. unruly expansion, restraint vs. growing, urbanization vs.

favelas expansion. The trouble-shooters are agents of the city administration, always

reported as main actors of active processes (e.g. they act whenever denounced, they do

not stand still whenever there is an irregularity, they combat the irregularity), which are

related to tackling “irregularities”. The agency disappears when the goal of the action

are not irregularities but evictions (“not growing is also crucial”). In addition, the use of

material processes to describe one’s own actions (e.g. act, combat) is also a strategy in

political discourses to convey the idea of dynamic and achiever agent (Wodak, 2011).

This imagination of the dynamic administration is in constant opposition to an apathetic

previous administration (“not what used to happen in the past”).

One of the argumentative devices used to construct a desired perspective of

narration is the straw man fallacy, i.e. distorting the opponent’s standpoint idea by

magnifying what has been left unexpressed. The question was whether favelas had been

growing vertically, but the mayor rejects the construction of an idle administration,

which is a common popular image but not part of the interviewer’s question. The

digression from the main topic is reinforced also with the reference to the policy “Morar

Carioca”, which according to the mayor brings dignity to the residents of communities.

This is again a fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam, an appeal to the desirability of


the consequences (bringing dignity) that is unsound and flawed. The use of this fallacy,

especially when combined with other rhetorical operations, is often very effective in

convincing the other part, for the ordinary arguer is usually not aware of this manoeuvre

(Eemeren et al., 2012).

The claim of an active and diligent administration is supported by the process of

tackling "irregularities". This carries the premise that expansions of favelas are always

violations, in a new reference to the imagination of an orderly city. The intertextuality

of the two texts, given for example by the shared use of “order”, “regularity” and

“rules” is strongly associated with the topos of “public order”, also present in many

political speeches of the current administration to leverage a valuable political asset that

led them to the election in previous polls. Exploring this topos is also motivated by the

interest of the dominating media. Whereas the newspaper story concentrates almost

exclusively on the discourse of evictions, in the interview the mayor is compelled by the

interviewer to explain the increase of slums.

The text genre (TV newscast) presupposes a production of discourse oriented to

all citizens of the city, more than one fifth of them being residents of favelas (see above)

and the majority in similarly poor conditions (IBGE, 2013). However, the interviewer

vocalizes the demand of prospective voters as if preventing and controlling the increase

of favelas was the most important mission of the government concerning these areas. As

previously shown, the governmental actions towards favelas in Rio are historically

associated only with containment and control, leading in some periods to policies of

removal. In the interview, the mayor predicates such “expansions” as “irregularities”

against which the administration will “engage”. Thus, this utterance is oriented to the

general voter, rather than to the “benefited” slum inhabitant. The materiality of such

“expansions”, fallaciously associated to the active decision of residents, is in fact the

struggle of common citizens to find a place to live.

If, by contrast, the perspective of dwellers were taken, the discussions would

concern urbanisation and improvement of the living conditions. However, the use of the

term “urbanisation” has been semantically appropriated as a political discourse

indicating “intervention on favelas”, focused not on the provision of public services but


rather on the establishment of “public order”. The question to be posed then is: order to

whom? From a CDA perspective, the idea of public order can be regarded as an order of

discourse. It articulates discourses based on various topoi (such as risk areas and public

order) and enacts public actions (inspections, fines, evictions) that are dialectically

related.

This is only possible because the speech is tied to a specific ideology, which is

grounded in specific topoi. The overall analysis of the argumentation of the text in

Toulmin (1969)’s terms, as suggested by Wodak and Meyer (2009), shows that a

combined claim of the two texts would be the need to remove favela settlements,

qualified by the belief that the containment of favela growth is the most important role

of government regarding favelas. The grounds for this claim are backed by the historical

warrant (i.e. implication about the data that makes the claim legitimate) that such spaces

are loci of illegality and everybody must be equally regarded as accountable for the

compliance with laws. Dominant representations of social order, particularly in Brazil,

relate to the equal accountability of people, as if residents of informal settlements could

choose whether they comply or not with public regulations concerning constructions.

This assumption is possible only within the ideological position whereby all people

must be made equally accountable for their acts, regardless of their social and economic

conditions. However, many would agree with a completely opposite concept of justice:

to treat differently the ones that are different, in order to provide equal opportunities

(Barry, 2005).

Part 2: from divided city to divided state

The following two analysed texts are press releases. This is a specific genre generally

characterised by condensed summaries of larger reports, which presuppose factual

evidences and high assertiveness when transmitting official information of public

interest. However, more pragmatically speaking, it should be contextually regarded as a

media channel used to carry a range of rhetorical objectives (Lassen, 2006). The

following two texts illustrate this second definition of different communicative

purposes, illustrating the communication of public services of very different natures


with different interests, despite their production originated from the same department of

the same administration (2006-2014).

Text 2a (press release A) was published on 15/12/2011 during the execution of

works for the construction of a new subway station in a wealthy zone of Rio de Janeiro.

The headline reads “Works on subway: services to minimize trouble caused to the

dwellers of Ataulfo de Paiva Street”. In six paragraphs, the text describes in detail how

the new service would work: a parking valet service would be made available 24x7 to

the residents of the affected street. Probably, the service follows from complaints

expressed by those dwellers that had already objected to the construction of the subway

station, as this would increase traffic in the area. Extract 5 introduces this text.

Extract 5: press release A, lines 1-3

1 Dwellers of residential and commercial buildings 2 that hold a parking space and will be unable to use it during the works will be provided

with a 3 24x7 valet service.

Text 2b (press release B) was published on 28/1/2013, in a period of intense

activity of government works (the approaching mega events and the timing between the

2012 and 2014 elections are possible explanations). This release also explains a public

service aimed at mitigating the impact of public works, but the type of service offered

and the discourse employed in the text are remarkably different. The story entitled

“Public Defenders get decision that suspends demolition in Tabajaras Community”

narrates, in five short paragraphs, the technical details of the legal trajectory of three

lawsuits aimed at the protection of slum dwellers against evictions. Extract 5 introduces

the text.

Extract 5: press release B, lines 1-3

1 On Tuesday, 22, the Coordination of Land Regularization and Tenure Assurance obtained a

2 decision during judiciary night shift, determining the suspension of demolitions occurring at

3 Ladeira dos Tabajaras, under the allegation that there 4 could not be any act of property seizure against the assisted people until […]


The cohesion of both texts is established by the reference to each provided

service (service vs. legal process) and to the users of each process (resident vs. assisted).

The nominalization of the participants in both cases is the strongest evidence of the

difference between them. Dwellers of the affluent zone are directly nominated and

qualified to the provision of the service: “the residents of commercial and residential

buildings”. The nomination of slum dwellers, on the other hand, is a concealment of

their existence, represented as goals of a passive sentence: “the assisted people”. The

social condition of the assisted people is known only because of the nature of the

service (prevention of house evictions).

Expanding the transitivity analysis (Halliday, 1985) reveals significant

differences when comparing the two texts: in press release A, the citizens are active

subjects (e.g. “whenever they need the vehicle, residents should notify the porter, who

will warn the valet team” (lines 5-6), foregrounding the users of the service and

empowering them as agentic participants of the process. These features contrast with

the case of press release B, in which the public defenders (service providers) are the

active participants (actors) of the narrative (they obtained, notified and visited), whilst

the actual users of the services (poor citizens) are the passive participants

(goals/recipients) or indirect objects of the actions: “the assisted people did not have

access to the administrative procedure which ordered the demolitions” (lines 7-8); “the

community received public defenders from the coordination for a meeting in which the

assisted people’s doubts were cleared” (lines 10-11); “a decision obtained as

preliminary injuction still protects the dwellers against possible removal” (lines 12-13).

In addition, considering the words density of the texts, the users in press release A are

mentioned twice as frequently as those in press release B.

Nominalizing the original public works that motivated the provision of the

explained services was also a concern of the animators in the process of production.

Public works that affect dwellers from press release A are mitigated by the euphemistic

metonymy of “interventions”, which is only once referred to, giving space to focus on

the description of the service itself. According to the text, they will be communicated in

advance to the (again individuated) “dwellers and marketers of the region”. On the other


hand, the public works in press release B were already taking place. In the process of

discursive production, there was no concern with avoiding the overt clarification of the

impacted works: “house demolitions”, which produced “evictions”. These were

mentioned in every paragraph of the text.

There is a strong difference also in the representation of the office that provides

the services (providers) and their recipients (users). In the first case, the executive

branch of state government (formed by elected representatives) provides the service, but

no institution is nominalized. By omitting state as the participant of the process, no

separation is claimed between users and providers (us). In the second case, the

Legislative branch of the state government (formed by public tenders) provides the

service, and the exact secretary is specified. The distinction between the attorney’s

office (us) and the assisted people (them) is made very clear. Table 1 summarizes the

linguistic contrasts between the two texts.

Table 1. Linguistic contrasts between press release A and press release B.

Object of utterance

Press release A Press release B

Nomination of dwellers

“dwellers of commercial and residential buildings”

“the assisted [people]”

Nomination of public works

“Interventions” “demolitions”

Nomination of service provider

Not specified (State in general)

Coordination of Land Regularization and Tenure Assurance

Services provided to alleviate effects

Valet parking for car use Legal representation against house demolitions

Predication of the service

24 hours; “parked at private parking lots”; carried by “trained professionals”; requested by phone.

Not specified

As shown in Table 1, the discursive structures in the two texts are very different,

even though they have been posted by the same agency and describe services motivated

by similar situations (prior public works). The main distinction is the description of the

service itself. Both texts show public efforts to minimize the impact of necessary works

for the city, but there is a huge gap in the level of rights assurance: whilst for the


wealthy zone the right to parking the car is assured by a high standard service, in the

slum, dwellers are still struggling legally to save their own houses from demolition.

The analysis of the discursive production shows that press release A

incorporates elements of the genre of private advertising: the service is foregrounded,

the text functions as a mechanism for persuasion, targets its audience and provides

instructions for consumption/acquisition (Bex, 1993). The text appropriated the

discourse of advertising with focus on exclusive services. The press release specifies

that no car will be parked on the streets, as they should be taken to private parking lots,

demonstrating caution to assure safety and integrity of the residents’ properties. In

addition, an exclusive caring line was created to provide exclusive care. The

“exclusivity” of the telephone service could be regarded as a metaphor for the

exclusivity of the government as a whole. Public offices are dedicated in providing and

communicating exceptional services for this class of citizens, which is not the case in

most of the services and was certainly not the case in text B.

In press release B, the concise description of the facts resembles the classical

definition of the genre of press release, highlighting the lawsuits and hiding the actual

citizens involved in the story. The defenders serve three communities, and in all cases

the focus is the work performed by the defenders rather than the service offered to the

assisted residents. The kind of service provided to the citizens is not described. We

don’t know, for example, if there have been meetings with the residents or if any

channel for contacting the attorneys has been made available.

While text B is produced with a rough technical vocabulary, the sound and

logical description of the service in text A demonstrates an anticipation for the wide

distribution of its content: while the defence of evicted slum dwellers is reproduced only

by websites of law and juridical news, the announcement of the valet service was

reproduced by at least ten other referencesiii. Following the same careful preparation of

political speeches, the text concludes with the appropriation of common political

discourse to justify the unpleasant event and claim for a shared compromise of interests:


Extract 5: press release A, lines 1-3

1 […] The contractor 2 will promote constant and effective dialogues with the community, study case by case

the impact of the 3 interventions in each of the residents and marketers so that, together, [they] can find

suitable alternatives to 4 minimize impacts, which are inevitable to the development of the city.

As commonly found in political discourses (Wodak, 2011: 36), this claim pre-

empts the debate over what is inevitable to the development of the city. It is not up to us

to discuss the concept of development and its consequences; it is given by the producer,

i.e. the political society who plans the interventions. However, in the quoted example of

press release A, forms of alleviating the impact of the “interventions” are granted to the

individuated citizens, who – according to the text – together will find a suitable

alternative constructed “case by case”. No restriction in the scope of the service to

mitigate the impact is posed at any level, and it is for us to infer that an alternative is

assured to respect the right of the citizens. This example illustrates the points discussed

above: individuation of the public, exclusivity of the service and euphemistic

nomination of the impact. However, looking again at press release B, none of these

elements are present, and the assurance of rights is not offered with the same

predisposition in the service aimed at poor citizens.

The production of these discourses is based on the need of the capitalist social

order to maintain this division. As suggested by Fairclough (2009: 134), the social order

“needs the problem”. Silva (2012) proposes the concept of “divided state” as a

reformulation of Zuenir Ventura’s “divided city”iv. Silva views the city as traditionally

occupied by all classes, but receiving different treatments from the government. Even

though the citizens are full individuals in their social performance, the state is “cloven”,

focusing the distribution of resources on the wealthiest zones and neglecting the poorer

areas (especially slums), thus reproducing inequality.

Part 3: reinforcing exclusion through metonymical transgression


Text 3 is a corpus of 45 different press releases published in the interval of one month in

the first quarter of 2013. Analysing official press releases is a way of exposing the

discourse legitimated by the ruling class, which is attached to government. For this

reason, the corpus has been compiled, including headlines and leads (summaries) of

official press releases extracted from the state government official website. By the time

of extraction, the main public policy regarding favelas (the security program of

“pacification” – UPPs) had been implemented in 24 territories (corresponding 30 units)

where 153 different communities were installed. Even though this is a considerable

evolution, it still covered only about 20% of all favelas in Rio (IBGE, 2013). The 48

analysed headlines correspond to 16% of the overall corpus of published stories in the

relevant period.

There were three identified topics of communication in the press releases: events

organized or funded by the government (e.g. “UPP at Batan celebrates fours years with

a party to residents”), new public investments (e.g. “State starts enlargement of streets

at Cantagalo”); announcement of results in different levels of the programs (e.g.

“Lieutenant of UPP at Vidigal celebrates the pacification in the community where he

was born”). The interdiscursivity among different texts is pre-determined by the criteria

of its creation, i.e. the cohesion achieved through the repetition of the keywords

“favela” and “community”. However, there are other unforeseen interdiscursive

elements in the corpus, namely the recurrent mention of the participation of residents

(“resident” is the word of highest occurrence and 40% of the stories contained instances

of “residents”, “children” or “leaders”) and the celebration of anniversaries of the

implementation of UPPs in three communities (16% of the corpus). These recurrent

instances are intended as a response to two common critiques made to the program: the

lack of involvement of the affected dwellers in the design and execution of the public

policy and the suspicions regarding the long lasting of the program.

If slum dwellers are victims of exclusion by the established order, the most

alarming fact in the categorized corpus is the emphasis of state attention to a subset of

slums in the city: only 1 out of 45 stories (2%) about slums referred to events,

investments or results promoted in “non-pacified” communities, even though the non-


pacified communities represented two thirds of the total number of communities (66%).

In addition, the focus of attention and resources does not concern only the distinction

between pacified vs. non-pacified communities: only four communities – Rocinha,

Coroa/Fallet/Fogueteiro, Manguinhos and Barreira do Vasco – accounted for almost

half of the mentioned communities in the stories.

Therefore, the filtered corpus depicts a huge focus of governmental attention,

which has been reproduced by the mass media in the creation of a synecdoche to re-

signify favela (slum). In the texts, as in other sources, favela is semantically referred as

“pacified slum”, rather than slum in general, ignoring the others just as they all were

ignored at the beginning of the century. The discursive concentration follows also the

spatial concentration of the program in the most affluent zones and their accesses, and

this strategy supports the Olympic project of Rio’s State as an enlargement of the

capitalist hegemony of the elite (Gramsci, 1971).

In this process, the order of discourse (as appropriated in Fairclough, 2001) is

not only a crucial determinant force for constituting what is regarded as a relevant

favela in the public policies, but also here the discourse dialectically determines the

semiosis of the word for the overall society, which may result in further exclusion of the

“non-pacified” favelas. This cycle sustains the mechanism by which favelas are

recognized as legitimate only as far as they serve to support the interest of a given

group. At the same time, the success of the UPP program is what assures the peace for

wealthy zones and the votes for the administration that has implemented it. This

arrangement is not totally unexpected if we consider that the social order “needs” the

problem, it “inherently generates a range of major problems which it needs in order to

sustain itself” (Fairclough, 2009: 126).

Concluding remarks

According to Fairclough (2001), there are two important elements for the analysis of

social order: ideology and hegemony. Ideology is the construction of reality that is

enacted in various dimensions of discursive practices, contributing to the relations of

domination. Actions are oriented by ideologies, which subsist in the structures. Ideology


is intimately related to the concept of hegemony, which is the power over society

exerted by the ruling class in alliance with various social forces in a condition of

unstable equilibrium. The hegemonic struggle is highly discursive. The observation of

hegemony should support the identification of the ways of making meaning that are

dominant or marginalized.

The discourse on favelas reproduced by the political society is a product of

hegemonic production, which is part of the project to attain and maintain power: “there

can, and indeed must, be hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and that one

should not count only on the material force which power gives in order to exercise an

effective leadership” (Gramsci, 1971: 215). The elite of the city of Rio, which for

Gramsci is the ruling class exercising power on government, is accountable for the

production of such discourses. And in that sense it is not difficult to understand the

perspective from where these discourses are enacted. However, such discourses are also

social practices, and the dominant ways of making sense can and should be challenged.

Favelas (slums) are a convenient solution for the issue of lack of housing, an issue

created by the same social order where they are included, and should not be seen as the

problem.

In the cases analysed, slums are a problem to be tackled by the government (via

provision of security and public order). The common backdrop in the three analyses is

the state praxis reproducing a biased understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached

from the rest of the society. The focus on the precariousness of favelas ignores the cause

of their condition, that is, the inequality in the overall wealth distribution. This alienated

vision impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1), perpetuating

poverty (analysis 2) and reinforcing exclusions (analysis 3). The aggravating factor of

these findings is the nature of the utterances, extracted from political fields, for which

they are likely to shape future public policies on favelas.

These characteristics are not new in the history of the city, as shown in the

beginning of this paper. Favela residents have been blamed by their own conditions for

the first half-century of their existence, and the politics to reinforce exclusions were

strongly practiced until favelas acquired their legal right to the city. However, these


victories are more symbolic than practical. As the present and other investigations on

favelas reveal (e.g. Brum, 2011; Lacerda and Brulon, 2013; Leite, 2012), the general

discourse on favelas perpetuates their struggle in the social arena.

More than the controversial equality of revenue distribution, what slum

inhabitants can concretely demand is equality of access to their rights. Urbanisation of

the current settlements has become the aimed solution in the last decades. The

remaining question is what type of urbanisation will prevail in the struggle between the

political engagement with the city and the managerial planning of its wealth. More than

one fifth (22%) of Rio's population live in favelas already, and the public policies

directed to this population must acknowledge their right to the city as much as for the

rest of the population. In concluding this paper, then, any future policies should aim at

providing opportunities as a condition for demanding compliance, by means of

redirecting investments to the most deprived areas, regardless of their media impact.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to Capes Foundation (Brazil) for funding this research (proc.

1028/12-0). I would like also to thank João de Almeida and professor Ruth Wodak

(Lancaster University UK), the anonymous reviewers, and professor Van Dijk (editor)

for their encouraging and helpful comments on early versions of this article. However,

responsibility for the content is incumbent on the author.

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Author Biography

Daniel S. Lacerda is a PhD candidate in the department of Organization, Work and

Technology at Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on discursive and spatial

production of favelas by organisations. Recent works explore the sociological aspects of

the recent program of pacification in the Brazilian favelas.

i Considering the set of “aglomerados subnormais (non-normal territories)” as classified by IBGE

[Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica] Census. ii As Gramsci (1971) would argue, the distinction between civil society and government does not exist, as

the enlarged state incorporates civil society with strong participation of media for culture production, and

the mentioned topos is probably produced dialectialy in both spheres. iii Among the sources available online at the moment of the analysis. iv In this classical work, Zuenir Ventura depicts the city of Rio as composed by two separate fragments:

that of rich people and that of poor people, operating distinct processes, services and social spaces.

Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: analysing the political discourse on favelas

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