Social distancing was never going to be easy in the favela da Maré. Some 140,000 people live in this Brazilian slum, perched on a marshy strip of land between Rio de Janeiro’s seafront and its airport. Bounded by low, ramshackle buildings, the alleys are narrow and darkened by the tangles of wires hanging across them. After a period of quiet, they are once more full of life. “People are taking to the streets in all the neighbourhoods… and in Maré it is no different,” says historian Cláudia Rose.
That, says Rose, the director of the Maré Museum, is partly because of the actions of Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro: “In the first weeks, residents reacted well to the lockdown. But Bolsonaro being seen on TV, visiting a fair and shaking people’s hands, was a trigger for people in Maré to leave home too.” This, in a country where the number of daily new cases has doubled in the past week.
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