Rio de Janeiro's largest slum has halted construction of a much-criticized wall in exchange for ecological and recreational corridors between the impoverished neighborhood and a city forest.

Work begins on eco-paths in Rio's Rocinha slum. - Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

This may also be an answer for other slums, known in Brazil as “favelas”, where high walls have been planned. Many see such construction as an attempt to create a sort of apartheid between the rich and poor of this coastal city.

To reach the highest point in Rocinha, where a government agency is beginning to build the eco-boundary, one should climb aboard a motorcycle-taxi, the best way to get around the narrow, curving streets of the slums, which are mostly spread across the sides of the “morros”, the hills that give Rio its signature look.

When the Portuguese conquistadors reached these lands some 500 years ago, they saw the Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica, in Portuguese), which stretches across another 16 eastern Brazilian states. It is one of the planet's most biodiverse biomes, but today just seven percent of the original forest is still standing.

At Rocinha's summit, the shacks hanging precariously over the ravine and the still-abundant vegetation mark the limit of the slum. This is where the cutting and burning of trees ended, at the edge of this community of 200,000 residents, one of Latin America's largest slums of this type.

With the declared goal of halting deforestation and preventing construction in areas at high risk of landslides, the Rio government had proposed building 15 kilometers of three-meter-high walls in 14 of the city's favelas.

But the project, which began to take shape with a wall of steel and concrete in the southern favela of Santa Marta, triggered a great deal of anger.

The wall is “an offensive metaphor that is a blow to the favela residents,” said Silvia Ramos, coordinator of the Center for Studies in Security and Citizenship (CESC), in an interview for this article.

It is a “kind of cage,” in the opinion of information technology worker Nadson Ribeiro, resident of Santa Marta. The “bars” of the cage are the police, who “constantly keep watch over the area” from below, and the wall above, he said.

That image is a reality in Rocinha.

While an impressive deployment of police destroys the sales carts of the informal market in the lower areas of the favela, above, among the trees, the drug traffickers ply their trade. The dense vegetation provides an escape route, and many believe that is the true reason behind the wall construction plan: to fence in the drug trade.

Icaro Moreno, head of the public works agency, rejected the comparison with apartheid. “The border used to be virtual, and now it is physical. What the government did was to say, 'if you cross it or break it, you will be violating public property',” he said.

But some in Rocinha told him “no” to the “eco-boundaries” as well. “Any wall is separatist,” said Antonio Ferreira de Melo, president of the Rocinha Neighborhood Association, in an interview.

The mobilization of this community, and of the Favela Federation of Rio de Janeiro, has led at least to a truce.

The government accepted the Rocinha proposal to substitute the walls with a combination of stretches of nature paths, including handrails for people with mobility problems, bicycle and skating paths, and playgrounds, alternating with stretches of walls — but which stand no higher than 90 cm.

The three-meter walls will be built only in areas at risk of landslides.

The Association also proposed training forest rangers from the community who would ensure respect for the established boundaries.

Ocimar Santos, content editor for Rocinha's official website, is satisfied with this solution. “It wouldn't interrupt the right to movement and the nature park will benefit the community,” he said.

In his opinion, the community knows that its disorderly expansion creates problems, such as in sanitation and garbage collection. But the idea of the wall “is not a positive symbol in any part of the world,” he noted.

For the governor of Rio de Janeiro state, Sérgio Cabral, the walls are intended to “protect” the communities, who receive in exchange benefits from the government, such as basic sanitation, education and urban planning.

It is a way for these investments, “over time, are not lost in the unregulated expansion of the community,” said Cabral, member of the PMDB, Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, allied with administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The doubt now lies in whether the agreement reached in Rocinha will be extended to other favelas in Rio.

Reactions have come from beyond even national borders. Jurist Álvaro Tirado Mejía, of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, challenged the “geographic discrimination” of the walls.

Luisa, a Rocinha resident, summarized it this way: “The wall isn't for separating the trees, it's for separating out the poor.” She is not convinced either that the nature paths are the best option.

“They say it's a park, but down there, in the city of middle and upper classes, the nature parks aren't cages,” Luisa said.

The alarming loss of Atlantic Forest had contributed to the idea of the wall, which had also been proposed by previous governments.

The Atlas of Forest Remnants of the Mata Atlântica, produced by the SOS Mata Atlântica Foundation and the National Institute for Space Research, revealed last month that the state of Rio de Janeiro alone had lost 176,714 hectares of this ecosystem since 1985.

According to the study, the annual rate of deforestation nearly doubled in the last three years. Today, Rio has just 18 percent of the forests that once stood in that state.

Fires, urban expansion and human occupation are the main causes of deforestation in Rio, SOS Mata Atlântica director Marcia Hirota said in an interview for this article.

But the Foundation does not believe that the “pressure on the native vegetation” comes only from the favelas. There are also luxury condominiums and homes, hotels and inns, as well as “other types of occupation that suppress the native plant coverage,” Hirota said.

A study by the municipal Pereira Passos Institute indicates that half of the city's 750 favelas, which are home to 1.5 million people, doubled in size between 1994 and 2004.

Pressed between the hills and the ocean, the city and its favelas, as well as its mansions and middle class neighborhoods, keep growing into the forest.

Hirota believes in raising awareness among the people “who live in urban areas… about the importance of protecting the native flora.”

Furthermore, she said it is essential to plan urban expansion and establish “systematic control by the public authority with society's participation,” Hirota said.

The CESC's Ramos agrees that without establishing “an environmental culture” among the local population, the effort is worthless.

Many Rio governments have tried, unsuccessfully, to reforest the hillsides of the favelas, even attempting to include the residents.

There are additional problems: Brazil has a deficit of eight million housing units, especially in the southeastern states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais.

“When the government decides to build a wall, it's because it doesn't want to invest in low-income housing, for example,” said Marcelo Freixo, a state lawmaker of the opposition Party of Socialism and Liberty.

Freixo believes the wall “is truly absurd,” and “the government is once again saying that the favelas are a problem.”

The government's aim is “to control the poor communities” and to try to prove to the southern part of Rio de Janeiro, where the middle and upper classes live, that the authorities do indeed “govern”.