The Economist.
MICHAEL JACKSON BROUGHT Santa Marta a moment of fame. In February
1996 the King of Pop landed by helicopter at the top of one of Rio de
Janeiro’s most notorious favelas. Politicians
tried to stop him, but Mr Jackson had permission from the drug barons
who ruled the slum. He danced down the steep paths between shacks
clinging precariously to the mountainside, surrounded by a cheering
crowd of Rio’s poorest citizens, and belted out his hit single “They
don’t care about us”. The music video was played around the world. It
trained a spotlight on Rio’s poverty and inequality.
Sixteen years later Santa Marta is once again a showcase, but of a better sort. It was the first favela
to be “pacified” under a government plan to wrest control of Rio’s
slums from the drug lords. The place was stormed by the army in 2008. It
now has a police station, and is peaceful. It is a thriving example of
the boom at the bottom of Brazilian society.
Meet Salete Martins, a
bubbly 42-year-old, whose family moved to Santa Marta from Brazil’s
north-east when she was eight. By day she works as a trainee tour guide,
showing visitors around her neighbourhood for a city-financed
non-profit group called Rio Top Tours. At night she studies tourism at a
local college. At weekends she sells Bahian food from a bustling stall
near the favela’s
entrance. And in between she flogs a popular line of beauty products.
Her monthly income is around 2,000 reais ($985), four times as much as
she made selling sandwiches three years ago and more than three times
the minimum wage. She plans to launch her own tour-guide company before
the end of this year.
Ms Martins’s success is striking, even in Santa Marta. But it mirrors
a trend that has swept the whole of Latin America. Poor people’s
incomes have surged over the past decade, leading to a big drop in
inequality. In most Latin American countries the Gini coefficient in
2010 was lower than in 2000. The region’s average, at 0.5, is down from
almost 0.54 a decade ago, and lower than at any time in the past 30
years (see chart 3), though still high relative to other regions.
Judging by evidence from Argentina, the only country in Latin America to
publish statistics on tax returns of top earners, the richest 1% are
still pulling ahead of the rest. But that concentration is more than
made up for by the narrowing of gaps further down the income scale.
