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Rio de Janeiro. The man holds a grenade in his hand. Around him, young men cruise around on motorbikes showing off their guns and laughing loudly. Police cars patrol the main road of Cidade de Deus 500 feet away, but here, at the end of a small street, drug dealers rule. The man with haggard eyes nervously asks questions. Don and Mingau, two rappers from the lower-class neighborhood located in the Western zone of Rio de Janeiro, reassure him and he finally lets them go through. Rio de Janeiro, 25 March 2008. Name: Rodrigo Nogueira. Age: 26 years old. Activity: journalist. Ambition: to change the image of the Rio de Janeiro slums in Brazil and in the rest of the world. In the last 7 years, the Viva Favela website has been covering the favelas (slums) of Rio de Janeiro to try to report about other news than the ones available in mainstream media. Rodrigo Nogueira says his team gives a voice to the people of the slums. “There is so much more than violence in the favelas, he says. There is a rich culture life and incredible people in the slums”. In March 2008, Jean-Cosme Delaloye did in a feature story in the Cidade de Deus (City of God) of Rio de Janeiro. In this neighborhood marred by violence and infested by guns, people like the rappers Don and Mingau work hard to turn things around. In March 2008, Jean-Cosme Delaloye did a feature story in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and met with journalists Viva Favela, a website which aims to convey a different image of the slums. Kingston. Janice has been beaten up for being a lesbian. Sitting in the small windowless room in an anonymous house in uptown Kingston, the 31-year old Jamaican shows a scar above her left eye. She says she never leaves her house without her knife nowadays. She claims she used it “a couple of times for self-defense”. When she speaks about her life as a lesbian in Jamaica, one can feel the pain in her angry eyes. She left home as a teenager because her family never approved her sexuality. : « I was 14, she says. My sisters had boyfriends, and I didn’t want any. So, I told my mom I was not going to have any boyfriend and any kids because I was different. She did not accept it ». Kingston / New York. What is happening in Jamaica? Every day, the crime rate is skyrocketing on the Caribbean island. On December, a cop was murdered in Montego Bay. He is the second killed there in a week. According to estimates published by the Jamaican Gleaner, 51 people were killed in the last week. Earlier this week, the death toll reached 1446 people killed. By the end of the year, the country could have beaten the infamous 2005 record, when more than 1500 people were murdered in Jamaica. Kingston. While trying to avoid the potholes on the streets of downtown Kingston, Dig, the taxi driver suddenly comes up with a request. He wants to be paid before he drives into Trench Town, Kingston’s notorious slum where Bob Marley once grew up. “You should never show any money in Trench Town”, he says. In Jamaica, the neighborhood is considered to be the birthplace of reggae music but also one of the most dangerous places on the island despite the fact that crime recently declined there. Kingston. Trenchtown looks like a war zone eight days after the passage of hurricane Dean in Jamaica. Power lines are still down in this slum in Kingston, where Bob Marley grew up. People are trying to clear the debris from the middle of the streets. Last week, winds blowing at 230 km/h have destroyed a lot of the weaker structures in the neighborhood. «It’s ghetto man, says Clifford Bent, a 45-year old rasta man. We cannot rely on the government to help us. We have to do it ourselves». Montego Bay. The fight will be uneven. Jamaicans who could afford it, boarded up their houses on Saturday to face Dean, a monstruous category 4 storm. Others like Nelson, a man living in Orange Bay, on the western Coast of Jamaica, are forced to rely on their good fortune. « I have not boarded up my house, he says. There is nothing we can do. We can only wait and hope. Everything is going to be ok». Caracas. From the hole in the wall he uses as a window, he can almost see all of Caracas. A strange picture, in which the misery of the slums and the opulence of the Venezuelan capital are intertwined. Benito Anzola, 46, carries his past as a former local boxing champion on his broad shoulders. He lives with his wife and three children in Petare, a huge and violent barrio overlooking Caracas. Every night around 11.00 pm, he walks down the hill, using the steep and dark path that winds its way through the shackle houses, to take up his job as a security guard in one of the posh neighborhoods of downtown Caracas. |
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