InSecurity, Part I.

São Paulo is the first city in the world to fulfil Bill Hicks’ dystopian vision of what will happen to us if we live with ‘the eyes of fear’ rather than ‘the eyes of love’. That’s right, folks: the security presence is so strong here that pizzas are indeed delivered through our mailboxes. Most apartments round here have one: a delivery slot built into the entrance gate. Here’s ours:

The thinking here is that the pizza delivery guy can hand you his wares and you can hand over your money without ever having to feel at risk of viewing him as another human being. No, he’s socially inferior and therefore a potential criminal and we must treat him as such. Who knows, his poverty may even be contagious. Unfortunately no one's found a way of entirely eliminating human contact from the process – at least, not yet.

It’s disgusting, of course. But it’s hard not to let yourself get sucked into the fear bubble which pervades everything you do here. To get an idea of how deep these paranoiac delusions go, all you need to do is take a walk around a wealthy enclave like Pinheiros or Jardins. As you do, you can carry out a sort of imaginative archaeological dig in which you use your surroundings to peel back the layers of recently accreted history and see for yourself how the city used to be and how it has changed.

Along those winding tree-lined streets, where the palpable hush is the sound of money whispering to itself, you’ll see elegant townhouses built during the fifties and sixties. At the time of their construction, all these houses made some concession to security whether by high walls or spiked wrought-iron fences or spy holes in the front door. But the designers seem to have been too idealistic, too optimistic in their estimation of their city’s future because, over time, these precautions have evidently been deemed inadequate. Now additional layers of security have been improvised over the top of them: the wrought iron fence today has three filaments of electrified fence running across its top, the wall has coils of razor wire all across it, and the front door has an electrically-controlled gate to vet all entrants. I would provide you with a photo of this, but if I tried to take one, I’d probably get tasered.

Then there are the hastily constructed plastic and breeze-block shelters which have been plonked down on the streets themselves. Every street in wealthy areas like Jardins or Interlagos has one, and each is inhabited by a 24-hour security detail whose vigilance is subsidised by each household on the street. It’s the same story in Pinheiros, where we live, only with apartment buildings: each one has a man sat in a little cabin all day and all night, watching over a row of security cameras, buzzing in residents and maids and workmen and pizzas. Here, again, is ours.

It’s only a single gate, because our place isn’t that fancy. Lots of blocks have got two sets of gates, each one of which you are buzzed through because no one is allowed their own key to this gate, presumably to prevent an enterprising mugger taking it off you and then entering the property under false pretences.

Then there are the car ports; you can just about see ours to the left of the picture. These generally consist of a double set of automatic gates with a twenty foot cordon between them, like the bailey of a medieval castle. I guess the thinking here is that, if you’re an enterprising car jacker, you’re likely to get penned in between the first and second gates, whereupon the security guards will pour hot oil on you. Of course, when I first got here, all it did was remind me of Indiana Jones, and every time a gate closed I had the urge to wait until the last possible moment and then roll under, rescuing my fedora with a desperate grab. I don’t know what would have happened to me then. Severe beating? Taser? Sexual assault? Nothing good, anyway.

The high levels of car paranoia are justified, however. Cars are extraordinarily expensive here and they hardly depreciate in value over long periods of time. There is consequently a huge car-theft industry, with cars being taken from rich areas into parts of town where the police can’t even travel, and then smuggled out of the country via loose border control areas such as Foz do Iguaçu. As a result, one of the things you learn never to do here is sit in a stationary vehicle. We have a friend who broke this rule along with her boyfriend, and was car-jacked (and hit in the face with a pistol) as they were sitting directly outside her apartment. Scary.

Another friend was car-jacked and taken at gunpoint on a trip round the banks to empty her accounts. The guy in the front seat sounds like a character from a Coen brothers' movie. He seemed cheerfully amoral and insisted on giving this woman helpful tips during the course of the journey. ‘Why were you parked by the side of the road, talking on your phone? That was silly. You should be more careful, you know. You could get hurt.’

Of course, drivers still have to stop when the traffic stops. But people have developed a defensive strategy here as well. What they’ll do, many of them, is leave a wide gap between themselves and the car in front of them whenever they stop. That way, if they feel threatened, they can make a quick get-away. Or, more realistically, drive back and forth until the car-jacker gets really tired and wanders off, complaining that it's just not fair. 

All this fear made our recent road trip pretty hair-raising. It was fine once we made it out of the city. Unfortunately, we had the loan of a sat nav (shat-nav) which refused to let this happen. It kept directing us down ever narrowing roads, into suspiciously empty, scary looking areas where small children and old women looked at us with hungry, knowing expressions. We couldn’t stop to check what the fuck was wrong with the bloody GPS at this juncture, despite being hopelessly lost, because stopping would have made us vulnerable. Eventually, when we found ourselves in a car park which the sat nav was insisting to be the Ayrton Senna Highway, we switched the damn thing off and just drove and screamed (and screamed and drove) until we found ourselves back on a main road. Ah, Brazil.

Comments

[AKA]

Have you seen LA ZONA? This sounds startlingly close to that movie, just one-step removed: http://bit.ly/dz8Q1F