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What is the relationship of the set of favelas of maré and the Guanabara Bay?

By Lorena Froz

To contextualize, we will need to talk about the history of Maré. The occupation of this space began around 1940, along with the process of removing favelas from the city center and the migration of the population from the Northeast Brazil to Rio. Here, most of the occupations took place very spontaneously and with little or almost no government participation, so the entire sanitary structure (piped water, sewage pipes, etc.) exists because of the local population, who managed to fight for these rights, and often had to get their hands dirty to make things happen.

Our Bay, so resistant, also has its history of struggle. It has an area of ​​approximately 400 square kilometers, depths beyond 40 meters and contains about 3 billion m³ of water. It has 55 rivers, but only 5 of them are not completely polluted, being considered a true open sewer. Located in the heart and postcard of the city of Rio de Janeiro, the Bay should be more preserved and valued, but what we see is the opposite. What we have today is a region forgotten by the government and that is only remembered at election times. About 2 billion reais have already been allocated through the Guanabara Bay Depollution Program (PDBG) and until today it has not fulfilled its promises since its launch, in 1994. There is also another plan that had never been completed, which is the Environmental Sanitation Program for the Municipalities around the Guanabara Bay (PSAM), created in 2011, aimed to bring sanitation to all these locations around the Bay. In Maré, the objective was to place a collector trunk so that we could finally connect with the Alegria Sewage Treatment Station, which is next to the set of favelas.

Thus, it is clear to understand the real need for urban planning, a sanitary sewage plan; this is the minimum to generate a little comfort for the population that lives in the region.

Because we don't have a sanitary sewage system, all the sewage generated in Maré, by about 140,000 people, is dumped daily into Guanabara Bay. There is no Bay that would stay clean. To be clear, everything you flush, everything you throw down the drain, doesn't disappear, it ends up in the Bay.

This lack of urban planning is one of the major causes of the numerous floods we face. It only takes a drop of rain for the favela to simply stop. With good management, we would have enough culverts at strategic points to optimize the flow of water, especially in regions that are historically swampy, as is the case of Nova Holanda, for example, which is below sea level. The culverts we have today are not enough for the volume of rain and floods that we have here, in addition, many of them are clogged because of the garbage that ends up there. The drain box cleaning service (name given to one of the services to unclog drains) is carried out by COMLURB, which in our region is also scrapped, with a number of employees far below the necessary to serve our territory, and the equipment also has numerous problems.

Speaking of garbage, because of all the problems mentioned above, we still have a very inefficient collection of garbage that doesn't speak to the reality and dynamics of our community. The mixture of garbage, sewage, flooding that takes time to drain is the perfect recipe for the transmission of numerous diseases, this attracts different types of vectors (such as rats and cockroaches) and we end up coming into contact with many bacteria and diseases. Recalling that for the peripheral population, access to health is terrible because we are going through a serious process of dismantling public health.

Just as Guanabara Bay has been receiving projects and government officials who swear they will clean it up for years, there are also projects to improve the sanitary conditions in Maré, but people forget that these stories intersect and go hand in hand. The history of both is intertwined, because there is no point in cleaning up the Bay while 15,000 liters of untreated sewage fall into it.

Another factor that is not so much commented is that we still have, even today, in the favelas of Parque União and Marcílio Dias, colonies of fishermen who live in this Bay, where all their culture and development are due to this place that is being deeply forgotten and every day more contaminated.

So, when we talk about all the issues, we are talking about how complex these problems are and how they are linked to each other, because along with all this, we have the process of intensifying the climate changes, each day more notorious, each day with new catastrophes. Because of this, the level of rain in many places can increase a lot and in others decrease so much as to make the region unbearable. We need to understand that this is not a risk, but a reality. The way we fight for our rights is by keeping informed, knowing that they exist.

Lorena Froz is a mobilizer of the Territorial Development axis of Redes da Maré and creator of Faveleira (@faveleiraa), a social communication and environmental education business, which aims to bring understanding about environmental issues.

Rio de Janeiro, January 18, 2022.