541346

research-article2014

DAS0010.1177/0957926514541346Discourse & SocietyLacerda

Article

Rio de Janeiro and the divided

state: Analysing the political
discourse on favelas

Discourse & Society

2015, Vol. 26(1) 7494
The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
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DOI: 10.1177/0957926514541346
das.sagepub.com

Daniel S Lacerda

Lancaster University, UK; Capes Foundation, Brazil

Abstract
This article analyses the discourse on favelas produced by Brazilian society and consumed in the
political field of local administration. The ideological conception of favelas (slums) determines
the creation of public policies that reinforce the prejudicial notion of favelas. This work employs
critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse several texts extracted from mass-media stories
and press releases of the Rio government. It shows that the state of praxis reproduces the
understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached from the rest of society. This alienated vision
impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1); perpetuating poverty (analysis 2);
and reinforcing exclusion (analysis 3).

Keywords
Brazil, critical discourse analysis, dialectical relational approach, discourse historical approach,
favelas, political discourse, Rio de Janeiro, slums

Introduction
Brazilian society is strongly marked by class issues, thus yielding a social apartheid
legitimized by discursive praxis (Resende, 2009). Favelas (Brazilian slums) are arguably
the strongest representations of such segregation, and analysing the constructed imagination of favelas helps to show this. If we consider them as a social phenomenon, providing
a definition of slum or favela entails considerable difficulty. Davis (2007) recovers
Corresponding author:
Daniel S Lacerda, Lancaster University, Charles Carter Building, Lancaster LA1 4YX, UK.
Email: d.lacerda@lancaster.ac.uk

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multiple definitions of slums, mostly related to moral judgements which see them as loci
of criminal activities, and depict, according to the United Nations (UN) Population
Division, such territories as places of disease, overcrowding, insecurity, informal housing and poverty. In Rio de Janeiro, as in many other places, favelas are referred to in
terms of their physical and social deprivation (lack of), and this deficit perspective is
usually used to describe them (Davis, 2007; Neuwirth, 2005). But beyond the technical
definition of favelas, what is at stake here is how they are discursively constructed and
reaffirmed.
The hegemonic understanding of favela has been challenged in the last few decades,
and favela is today a changing place. However, its biased account is still part of the
imaginary of many people, and is especially present in political utterances (arguably to
collect electoral dividends and financial support from those who fund elections). Such
accounts are often impregnated with a moralizing content in terms of the codes for urban
occupation. The appeal to hegemonic moralizing discourses to address material classbased differences is a recurrent political strategy, which has also been identified in other
contexts (Bennett, 2013). In general, they are part of a discursive logic of exclusion. As
stated by Wodak (2007: 643), the practices and politics of exclusion are inherently and
necessarily rooted in language and communication. This article assumes not only that
language is the main arena of dispute where ideological clashes take place, but also that
social struggles and structural contradictions (e.g. affluent zones depending on a cheap
labour force but providing no suitable accommodation or transport for them) are dialectically related to the political organization of state (Gramsci, 1971). For this reason, the
article analyses the political discourse on favelas which represents an arena of dispute on
the meaning of favelas across the whole city of Rio, and beyond. This process involves
revealing the ideology imbued in political discourses, which are related to the reproduction and abuse of power (Van Dijk, 1997; Wodak, 2011).
In Rio, the present time is historically important for this analysis. In what seems to be
the first time in more than 100 years, favelas are the focus of the main public programme
of a state government. Through the programme for pacification of favelas, the statelevel administration acts together with the other two jurisdictional levels of government
(city and federation) in a rare political confluence that aims at breaking the logic of
violence existing in many parts of the city. This political turn remains contested in terms
of underlying motivations, though, especially considering the major events of the 2014
FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games (Cunha, 2011; Fleury, 2012; Lacerda and
Brulon, 2013; Leite, 2012).
This article analyses the discourse produced in Brazil and consumed in the political
field of local administration, with emphasis on the context of production and consumption. In light of this objective, the following questions were formed and guide this
article: (1) How does Rios government understand what constitutes favelas? (2) How
differently does the government see slum inhabitants in comparison to residents of
wealthy areas? (3) How are favelas acknowledged on the political agenda of the government in Rio? To address these questions, this work, employing CDA methodology,
uses several texts extracted from mass-media stories and press releases of the city
administration.

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Discourse & Society 26(1)

There are clear features that characterize CDA, for example the interest in unravelling
and scrutinizing power relations and intricate ideologies composing discourse. This
work will rely on two different CDA traditions: the discourse-historical approach (DHA),
which focuses on the political field and draws on argumentation theory (Reisigl and
Wodak, 2001); and the dialectical-relational approach (DRA), unfolding from the
Marxian tradition and exploring relations of dominance, difference and resistance
(Fairclough, 2001).
Following the three proposed objectives, I will try to demonstrate in three separate
analyses what the current discursive practices of the government represent to favelas: (1)
the criminalization of poverty, (2) a divided state and (3) the reinforcement of exclusion.
In doing so, I expect to contribute to an understanding of the current political manoeuvres to hide favelas and their poverty, and reveal the dynamics of exclusion that occur
even within public favela programmes. The article begins with the historical context of
favelas in Rio. It then presents the methodology used for the current study and proceeds
with an analysis of utterances in three different sets of texts. Finally, it offers a critical
assessment of the impact of such vision on the materiality of favelas.

The context of favelas

Slums are a worldwide phenomenon. The increasing urbanization of cities in countries
such as Brazil, India and China created world mega-cities, and in 2007, for the first time
in human history, the urban population outnumbered the rural (Davis, 2007). An analysis of this dynamic is offered by Davis (2007: 26) who presents the impressive numbers
of slum creation: more than 200,000 slums in the world house more than 1 billion people. Brazil contributes greatly to this figure. According to Instituto Brasileiro de
Geografia e Estatistica (IBGE, 2013), more than 20%1 of Rios 6.2 million city inhabitants live in favelas.
Any discussion about favelas can be associated with inequality and income distribution. This is a material consequence of favelas being inhabited by the poorest. As
explained by Hulme et al. (2009), poverty research needs to focus on poverty dynamics,
and examining its evolution over time is shown to be crucial to understanding the processes of poverty persistence. In this case, it also means examining the perpetuation of
inequality that is attached to this poverty. Let me now proceed to a short description of
the historical trajectory of favelas in Rio. Rios landscape is strongly marked by the presence of favelas and, in recent decades, they were brought into the spotlight in the issuing
of public policies, particularly in the field of public security.
The first catalogued favela in Rio was Morro da Providencia, which housed exsoldiers who had fought against a national riot (Guerra de Canudos) in the state of Bahia
at the end of the 19th century (De Oliveira, 1985). In the first half of the 20th century,
slums were depicted as places of bums, smugglers and vagabonds. Morro da Providencia
was occasionally called social hell by the elite (Valladares, 2000: 7), as if it were occupied only by bums and criminals, even though the first census in 1950 showed that more
than 90% of its population were active and productive labourers (Valladares, 2000: 24),
highlighting even then the high disparity between prejudice and reality.

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The first popular settlements were more widely known as cortios, and were also a
solution for housing thousands of ex-slaves who were freed in 1888 and had no means of
living out their freedom in an unfamiliar territory (Valladares, 2005). Since their very
origins, slums in Rio have been places for the most excluded of society. Slums assumed
the geography of favelas as their predecessors (cortios) were destroyed and targeted
by hygienist evictions. Thus, since their early presence, favelas have been regarded as
socially invisible and were marked by the nature of their illegality.
According to De Oliveira (1985), only in the 1940s did favelas come to be acknowledged as an existent urban phenomenon, probably because they were too big to remain
ignored. This period coincided with the Brazilian economy undergoing a productive
transformation that shifted labour power from rural activities to industries and concentrated more and more people in the cities. Unsurprisingly, the city was unable to offer
housing for all these people, and in 1950, 7% of the city population were already living
in favelas (De Oliveira, 1985: 11). During this period, favelas became the object of intervention by the State and Civil Society (e.g. the Church, political parties). For Valladares
(2000), this period particularly marks the beginning of official knowledge about favelas,
when different professionals started to discuss favelas, and the favela became an object
of university study. From informal solution to the issue of lack of accommodation, the
status of favelas changed to being one characterized as a social problem.
In 1937, a law forbade for the first time the creation of new slums. It was the beginning of the overt criminalization of such spaces. Historically, since this first enactment,
recurrent public policy regarding favelas has been enacted to control their growth (De
Oliveira, 1985), thus resulting in massive campaigns for eviction and demolition of poor
houses. Such initiatives characterized the main governmental picture for these dwellers,
especially during the 1960s: the era of clearances, in which many actions of eviction
were performed by the government. The dwellers waged resistance from the 1950s to the
1980s, organizing communities and building concrete houses. They fought against the
homogenization of favelas as spaces of deficit, as not only realized in collective thinking but also even transposed to official public reports for decades (Silva, 2003). This
prejudicial perspective of favelas took away their urban legitimacy in a time when policies
for eviction needed to be justified, particularly during the non-democratic period
(19641985).
Since the end of the 1980s, slums have increasingly acquired the legal right of existence, and the word urbanization initially regarded as the provision of public services
and infrastructure has become more and more associated with favelas. This process
was supported by an acknowledgement that the favela is the producer of its own culture,
and a comprehension of its way of organizing has altered the understanding of its nature.
Favelas could no longer be technically defined as the absence of urban order that had to
be cleared out, and their relations with the city became much more complex. The various
processes that contributed to this change, for the good and for the bad, were the expansion of public and private services within the favelas; the growth and verticalization of
favelas; the popularization of new educational and cultural practices; the advance of
social, economic and cultural heterogeneity; privatization of the residents associations;
and the increased power of drug dealers (Silva, 2003).

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The first urbanization programmes oriented to favelas began in the 1980s (Valladares,
2005: 23). Probably the biggest programme of the 20th century was Favela-bairro,
which was launched in the 1990s and was partly funded by the World Bank. Despite
many achievements and public apparatuses deployed because of this programme, it was
not fully successful due to the lack of political articulation, a fragmentation of interventions and the non-existence of a security programme at state level to cope with the emerging criminal gangs (Fleury, 2012: 197198). Because of increasing segregation and the
lack of state control, slums were gradually being dominated by drug traffickers and militias, who saw in the oppressed population and in the fragile institutional bonds of favelas
the perfect environment to create their own ruling system. With this developing process,
the term favela also carried a depreciative meaning of violence and criminality, as well
as the prejudicial vision of poverty it contained already.
In the last few decades, the term favela has been replaced by euphemistic alternatives,
such as Hill (Morro) and Community (Comunidade). The former derives from the fact
that most favelas in Rio are located on hillsides, while the latter is linked to the word that
dwellers use to call their own village. The objective of this transformation is to avoid, by
any means, the original term associated with poverty and violence by the media and
films, which recurrently represented these specific issues of favelas to the rest of the city
(Ramos and Paiva, 2007: 7797). An example of such a manoeuvre was the case when
the municipal government required Google to hide information about favelas from
Google Maps (Antunes, 2011). Subsequently, the company started a project to prioritize and qualify the information shown on maps of the city, displaying the names of
the zones and removing any references to favela on the first zoom level. These lexicalsemantic strategies resemble the early period of the favelas, when they could still be
hidden from the city.
The mentioned strategy is part of one of the big priorities of the current administration: to take advantage of the historically favourable conditions of the economy and
political alliances with the federal government, and reorganize the city for the upcoming
mega events, preparing it to welcome foreign capital. The biggest political programme,
UPP (Unidades de Policia Pacificadora Pacifying Police Units), promises to consolidate the state control on communities under the influence of criminal groups (State
Executive Order no. 42787, 6 January 2011). The possible real intentions underpinning
this manoeuvre have been discussed by several authors (e.g. Fleury, 2012; Lacerda and
Brulon, 2013), and the arena for the battle to recover state control is also ideological. The
following section explains the method that was employed to reveal the basis on which
the government enacts public initiatives on favelas (the discourse on favelas).

Method
In order to reveal the discourse on favelas from the perspective of political administration, this article contemplates three different manifestations, applying critical discourse
analysis (CDA) in three separate analyses. As suggested by Wodak and Meyer (2009),
the collection of data and contextual information depends on the research questions. The
investigation starts with the identification of the problems, which are defined below in
terms of three different research questions. These questions drive the analysis of the

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involved social practices and their relationship with the associated semiosis (e.g. public
policies). So, for each of the following research questions, a different approach to analysis has been used, to best fit the selected data set:
1. How does Rios government understand what constitutes favelas?
2. How differently does the government see slum inhabitants in comparison to
residents of wealthy areas?
3. How are favelas acknowledged in the political agenda of the government in
Rio?
To address question 1, the texts analysed are: (a) a newspaper story (886 words)
describing the new city programme for favela urbanization, based on speeches by the
mayor and his secretaries;2 and (b) an interview with the city mayor who was running for
re-election: an excerpt (2 minutes) containing questions and answers regarding favelas
has been transcribed.3 Given the nature of these texts, the discourse-historical approach
(DHA) (Wodak, 2006, 2009, 2011) was used, along with the commonly associated techniques of argumentation analysis (Neagu, 2013; Toulmin, 1969; Van Eemeren and
Garssen, 2012).
DHA also informs the whole article in providing a historical perspective on the construction of discourse on favelas. This approach is usually applied to studies of exclusion
in the field of politics, providing insightful analyses of political discourse. The following
section explores the intertextuality of the two texts (the newspaper story and the interview) and identifies the discursive strategies used: nomination (including categorization,
metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche), predication (stereotypical and evaluative attributions), argumentation (fallacies and topoi of arguments), perspectivation/framing
(reporting, description, narration or quotation of events) and intensification/mitigation
(of the illocutionary force).
For question 2, the relevant texts are: (a) official state press release A (327 words)
explaining the services to minimize the impact of government work;4 and (b) official
state press release B (236 words) on the work of the Public Defenders Office in preventing slum evictions.5 Because of the contradictory dialectical relation between the two
texts, the dialectical-relational approach (DRA) (Fairclough, 2001, 2009) was used. This
approach is grounded in the work of authors such as Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx and
Michael Halliday, and its methodological objectives focus on grand narratives (i.e. macro
discourses that subjugate the meaning of social practices).
DRA views semiosis as an irreducible part of material social practices, in which all
practices are those of production, and for this reason it is an important instrument for
analysing social exclusion and structural domination, such as in the case of favelas. This
analysis is performed on three levels: text (structure, cohesion, grammar, vocabulary),
discourse (interdiscursivity, production and consumption processes) and social order
(dominant and marginalized ways of making meaning).
The analysis juxtaposes these two similar texts (as described above, official press
releases extracted from the official government portal), to distinguish the different discourses that pervade them when referring to different classes of citizens. Many of the
discursive devices analysed by DHA are also explored by Fairclough (2001: 116126),

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who, nevertheless, focuses on the link between discursive strategies and social order,
through the relationship of two important elements: ideology (a construction of reality
that is enacted in various dimensions of discursive practice, contributing to the relations
of domination) and hegemony (power over society exerted by the ruling class in alliance
with various social forces in a condition of unstable equilibrium).
Finally, for question 3, the headlines and leads (summaries) of official press releases
extracted from the state government official website were compiled into a corpus. A
search was performed with the keywords comunidade (community), favela (slum) and
morro (hill), for stories published from 15 February to 11 March 2013, which resulted in
128 stories. Repeated and non-applicable stories were excluded, leaving a corpus of 45
different press releases on favelas and their programmes.6 Each story abstract was then
analysed to define the favela/community to which the story referred, whether it was pacified or not, and the topic.
The third analysis establishes the basis on which the cohesion of communications
about favelas is established over several stories. The relatively small size of the corpus
allowed for the manual annotation of each entry, without the support of concordance
software, using the following codes: name of the favela object of the story, pacified (yes/
no), topic of the story (event, publication of results, new investment) and whether there
were residents involved (yes/no).
The approaches described share similarities and differences. Their selection is not
random; rather, it aims at the articulation of perspectives deriving from multiple theoretical standpoints but pointing towards common discursive practices. The data used here
are in Portuguese, but the results of the analysis have been translated into English.

Data analysis: Discourse on favelas

Part 1: Criminalization of favelas
Text 1a (a newspaper story) was published on 15 July 2010 by the most widely read
newspaper in Rio (O Globo), and one of the most famous in the country. It describes the
new Morar Carioca public programme, which in 2014 was still one of the main policies
of the city administration in office during 20082016, and which replaced the previous
programme (Favela Bairro) for favela urbanization. The text has the following structure: the first half summarizes the policy, focusing on the plan for eviction and containment; the second half starts with the financial details of the plan and concludes by
giving voice to the statements of the mayor and his secretary of housing which also
focus on aspects of policy reinforcement. The text assumes the genre of neutral journalistic coverage of facts, appealing to epistemic claims and objectifying events. Its main
discursive structures are presented next.
One of the devices for providing cohesion to the text is the repetition of the words
removed (5), urbanization (3) and order (3), which, associated with the repetition of
favelas, communities and city council, suggests how the city administration understands its own role in terms of the new policy: to urbanize the city by removing communities of favelas to provide order. This conclusion is supported by how favelas are

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constantly nominated, namely as counted instances. No community is referred to by its

name; it is always generalized in terms of numbers or areas, as illustrated in the following example. Thus, favelas assume the status of things, impersonal and inanimated
(Fowler cited in Billig, 2008).
Extract 1: newspaper story
14
15
16
17
18
19

The plan, which was defined by the city administration as a social legacy of the 2016
Olympic Games, previews the removal by 2012 of 123 communities
where at least 12,973 families are currently living in risk areas. Of this total,
4,900 have already been moved off. The number of slums to be eradicated is
similar to what [the newspaper] anticipated in January (119), when the then Secretary
of Housing, Jorge Bittar, announced a series of removals.

As can be seen in extract 1, the main object of the text the new government policy is
predicated (defined by the city administration) as a social legacy of the Olympic Games
to the city. The text does not refer to this claim again at any point, failing to explain in
what sense the Games are providing a legacy for slums, since no extraordinary investment
is provided because of the Games. This is a very common strategy of Brazilian politicians
to justify their public interventions: linking their political actions to the requirements of
the Olympic Games or presenting them as their legacy to the city, regardless of the
nature of the action. The new public policy is actually about slum removal. The recurrent
actions that enact the policy in extract 1 are moved, removal, eradicated lexical
items that point to the topic and that most of the time do not have social actors.
This objectification of the process of removal/eviction is a form of mitigation (here a
case of concealment), and is applied in about one-third of the text, which is dedicated
only to the economic aspects of the programme. In other parts, when describing the
removal/eviction of families from their houses, the text systematically appeals to mitigation devices, inter alia the meiosis with an understatement of the action (moved off
rather than evicted), minimization through the use of reduction words (only 416 houses
evicted), hasty generalization of implicit mitigating circumstances (houses being constructed as if they were necessarily going to be used by evicted residents) and the passivization of the sentence to conceal the main actor of this process (have been moved
off rather than the administration has moved the families off).
As illustrated by extract 1 and also present throughout the text, the topos that is, the
contextual mental place in which a set of assumptions leads to an argument of risk
areas is associated with favelas as a justification for removing them. This has been a
common practice since time immemorial by the city administration: these buildings
should be demolished because they have been built in areas regarded unsafe for construction. This almost deictic reference is a tricky rule that opens up the theoretical possibility
that risky areas could be urbanized. Context explains this possibility. The hilly geography of the city of Rio accommodates many mansions built in wealthy (Jardim Botanico,
Jo, Quinta, etc.) and arguably risky areas, but that are not controlled with the same
rigour. Yet it is remarkable that favelas are associated with a word (risk) ontologically
close to a hazard, a threat, that they would represent not for themselves but for outsiders

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(after all, favela is still considered a police issue). The text subsequently explains that, so
far, only 416 houses have been demolished. The qualifier only understates the action
as not having a significant impact, and the nature of these evictions is not discussed;
when in fact, they are compulsory, determined by controversial assessment and usually
not notified in advance (see Brum, 2011: 66153).
When further claiming that the removed families are not abandoned by the city administration, the text also uses a fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam, that is, an appeal
to the desirability of the consequences. It states that the number of projected or under
construction houses comes to 54,000, which would be enough to house the removed
families. The premise is already fallacious, in that all the planned houses will be built
and offered to the evicted families, and is grounded on the desirability of this consequence that the final claim is true. This last appeal to consequences is associated with
another common argumentation strategy, namely the use of different modalities in epistemic claims. Arguments referring to the execution of the public policy affirm stances
with high-valued modality, in other words close to the centre of certainty, such as [the
plan] previews the removal of. In contrast, whenever the events are solutions offered to
the affected residents, the epistemic claim shifts to low-valued modality, namely speculations of likely truth, such as [it] would be enough to house the removed families.
Claims with high-valued modality (certain truth), together with deontic claims, also
usually lead to ludic fallacies, that is, the misuse of models in a real-life situation, by
ignoring other constraints or resistance to the full application of the plan. One of the fallacious premises is that all favelas will be controlled and inspected. This is contested by
the history of resistance against authoritative policies on favelas, but it is also contradicted by the text itself, which shows that the roles of local secretaries toward favelas are
still loci of dispute. The mayor states that every secretary will also assume their role in
the favelas, admitting that favelas were previously disregarded in usual duties. However,
the only roles explicitly predicated to the nominated professional anthroponyms (e.g.
secretaries) were to eradicate new favelas, to stop expansion, to inspect new buildings and finally, to replac[e] lamps (see extract 2).
Extract 2: newspaper story
69 The mayor added:
70 If the strategy is to integrate communities with the roads [rest of the city], we need
71 identical treatment of public services. Seop [public order] will have a more intense role
72 in the repression of unruly expansion, while the
73 Secretary of Conservation will assume activities such as replacing
74 lamps

Road (asfalto) is a synecdoche commonly used in Rio to refer to what is outside the
favelas (which, in turn, are referred to as hill morro). This shows the imaginary of
segregation between the two. But what is qualified in the text as an identical treatment
of public services is rather only an identical imposition of legal obligations. Desirable
public services, such as education and sanitation, are not qualifiers of these claims, and
what this strategy produces is arguably a separation between the communities and the
rest of the city. One of the strategies that allow this distribution is to predicate favelas as

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illegitimate occupations, relegating them to an outlaw position. However, the legitimacy

of occupations should be judged in light of the fact that the shortage of housing obligates
the dwellers to settle wherever they are able to. Framing them as law offenders allows
justifying a certain pattern of action from the government.
This can be seen, for example, in the applied epistemic intensifications. In the example of extract 2, Seop will have a more intense role in the repression of unruly expansion. The role qualifier used implies that the previous one was not diligently performed
or, at least, not intensely. And the classification of expansion as unruly is one of the
various predications of favelas as lawless environments. One of the fallacies involved is
equating favela-occupied areas with invasions, an epistemic intensification that implies
they are all illegal: inspections [] of occupied areas, in order to identify new invasions. This is associated with the topos of public order, greatly present in the interview.
In many passages, the story presents favela communities as being in opposition to the
formal city. The duty of protecting the formal city is given to the city administration,
which speaks through the government representatives. The mayor and a secretary are
directly quoted, as in extract 2, but the access to the process of discourse production is
controlled here and no voice is offered to the families that were evicted.
Text 1b (an interview) is a transcription of an excerpt from an interview broadcast on
18 September 2012 by the most watched TV channel in the country. It comes from a section of the daily news show in which each candidate running for mayor in the 2012
municipal elections was interviewed. The excerpt transcribed contains a discussion in
response to the following question: youve said before that you have been reducing the
total area occupied by favelas [] isnt it pointless to control the area whilst favelas are
growing vertically? The intertextuality of the two texts is evident in the direct reference
to the programme Morar Carioca, the use of the common topos of risky areas and the
production of the discourse on favela orbiting around the central issue of direct control
and containment of growth. The turn that defines the theme of the conversation challenges the recurrent claim that the government is successful in reducing the area of favelas. Extract 3 gives the start of the mayors response.
Extract 3: interview, turn 2
Look, this is a difficult task, isnt it? Rio for a long time had only expansion, expansion,
expansion, harming the community dwellers themselves. Besides, many times in risky areas.

The answer offered by the mayor is not an answer to the posed question. Digressing
from what is asked is a common device in political speeches (Wodak, 2011). The mayor
appeals to many fallacies in his argumentation as strategies for mitigation. In Extract 3,
two of these are illustrated: first, the argumentum ad nauseam, that is, argument from
repetition, by stating that for a long time there has been only expansion, expansion,
expansion. Even though the claim may be true (at least for some territories), the repetition suggests that this is a continuous and deliberate process. Using the same strategy, the
mayor insists many times on the increase of slums, always associating it with illegal
actions. The quoted clause follows a non sequitur formal fallacy, in this case an epistemic
fallacy, in harming the community dwellers themselves. The fallacious premise is that

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expansion is harmful to residents, when in reality only people from outside favelas might
be majorly affected by their expansion.
The claim that for a long time favelas have only grown is followed further by the
claim that his administration was able to reduce the area of favelas. One of the ways of
obtaining legitimation for this control is, again, the use of the topos of risky areas (discussed previously). It is arguable whether the topoi of slum control and risky areas were
produced by civil society and incorporated by governmental actions or whether they
were directly produced by the historical acts of the government.7 In any case, there is a
dialectical relation between these practices.
Extract 4: interview, turn 6
What I can say is the following, Edmilson: the city administration now does not stand still when
there is an irregularity, it goes and combats this irregularity, this is not what used to happen in
the past. Then, we are urbanizing the favelas in Rio, Morar Carioca brings dignity to the
residents of favela. But, not growing is also crucial, even for this urbanization to be worth it.

The construction of us versus them in the mayors speech is marked by the opposition between trouble-shooters (us) and offenders (them) in the applied perspectivations: control versus unruly expansion, restraint versus growing, urbanization versus
favela expansion. The trouble-shooters are agents of the city administration, always
reported as main actors of active processes (e.g. they act whenever denounced, they do
not stand still whenever there is an irregularity, they combat the irregularity), which are
related to tackling irregularities. The agency disappears when the goals of the action
are not irregularities but evictions (not growing is also crucial). In addition, the use of
material processes to describe ones own actions (e.g. act, combat) is also a strategy in
political discourse to convey the idea of a dynamic and achieving agent (Wodak, 2011).
This imagination of the dynamic administration is in constant opposition to an apathetic
previous administration (not what used to happen in the past).
One of the argumentative devices used to construct a desired perspective of narration
is the strawman fallacy, that is, distorting the opponents standpoint idea by magnifying
what has been left unexpressed. The question was whether favelas had been growing
vertically, but the mayor rejects the construction of an idle administration, which is a
common popular image but not part of the interviewers question. The digression from
the main topic is also reinforced with reference to the policy Morar Carioca, which
according to the mayor brings dignity to the residents of communities. This is again a
fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam an appeal to the desirability of the consequences (bringing dignity) that is unsound and flawed. The use of this fallacy, especially
when combined with other rhetorical operations, is often very effective in convincing the
other party, for the ordinary arguer is usually not aware of this manoeuvre (Van Eemeren
et al., 2012).
The claim of an active and diligent administration is supported by the process of tackling irregularities. This carries the premise that expansions of favelas are always violations, in a new reference to the imagination of an orderly city. The intertextuality of the
two texts, given, for example, by the shared use of order, regularity and rules is
strongly associated with the topos of public order, also present in many political

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85

speeches of the current administration to leverage a valuable political asset that led them
to the election in previous polls. Exploring this topos is also motivated by the interest of
the dominating media. Whereas the newspaper story concentrates almost exclusively on
the discourse of evictions, in the interview the mayor is compelled by the interviewer to
explain the increase of slums.
The text genre (TV newscast) presupposes a production of discourse oriented to all
citizens of the city, more than one-fifth of them being residents of favelas (see earlier)
and the majority in similarly poor conditions (IBGE, 2013). However, the interviewer
vocalizes the demand of prospective voters as if preventing and controlling the increase
of favelas were the most important mission of the government concerning these areas. As
previously shown, governmental actions towards favelas in Rio are historically associated only with containment and control, leading in some periods to policies of removal.
In the interview, the mayor predicates such expansions as irregularities against which
the administration will engage. Thus, this utterance is oriented to a group of voters,
rather than to the benefited slum inhabitant. The materiality of such expansions,
fallaciously associated with the active decisions of residents, is in fact the struggle of
common citizens to find a place to live.
If, by contrast, the perspective of dwellers were taken, the discussions would concern
urbanization and improvement of living conditions. However, use of the term urbanization has been semantically appropriated as a political discourse indicating intervention
on favelas, focused not on the provision of public services, but rather on the establishment of public order. The question to be posed then is: order to whom? From a CDA
perspective, the idea of public order can be regarded as an order of discourse. It articulates discourses based on various topoi (such as risk areas and public order) and enacts
public actions (inspections, fines, evictions) that are dialectically related.
This is only possible because the speech is tied to a specific ideology, which is
grounded in specific topoi. The overall analysis of the argumentation of the text in
Toulmin (1969)s terms, as suggested by Wodak and Meyer (2009), shows that a combined claim of the two texts would be the need to remove favela settlements, qualified by
the belief that the containment of favela growth is the most important role of government
regarding favelas. The grounds for this claim are backed by the historical warrant (i.e.
implication about the data that makes the claim legitimate) that such spaces are loci of
illegality and everybody must be equally regarded as accountable for the compliance
with laws. Dominant representations of social order, particularly in Brazil, relate to the
equal accountability of people, as if residents of informal settlements can choose whether
they comply or not with public regulations concerning construction. This assumption is
possible only within an ideological position whereby all people must be made equally
accountable for their actions, regardless of their social and economic conditions.
However, many would agree with a completely opposite concept of justice: to treat differently those who are different, in order to provide equal opportunities (Barry, 2005).

Part 2: From divided city to divided state

The following two analysed texts are press releases. This is a specific genre generally
characterized by condensed summaries of larger reports, which presuppose factual

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evidence and high assertiveness when transmitting official information of public interest.
However, more pragmatically speaking, it should be contextually regarded as a media
channel used to carry a range of rhetorical objectives (Lassen, 2006). The following two
texts illustrate this second definition of different communicative purposes, illustrating
the communication of public services of very different natures with different interests,
despite their production having originated from the same department of the same administration (20062014).
Text 2a (press release A) was published on 15 December 2011 during the execution of
works for the construction of a new subway station in a wealthy zone of Rio de Janeiro.
The headline reads Works on subway: Services to minimize trouble caused to the dwellers of Ataulfo de Paiva Street. In six paragraphs, the text describes in detail how the new
service will work: a parking valet service will be made available 24/7 to the residents of
the affected street. The service probably follows from complaints expressed by those
dwellers who had already objected to the construction of the subway station on the basis
that it would increase traffic in the area. Extract 5 introduces this text.
Extract 5: Press release A
1 Dwellers of residential and commercial buildings
2 that hold a parking space and will be unable to use it during the works will be
provided with a
3 24/7 valet service.

Text 2b (press release B) was published on 28 January 2013, in a period of intense

activity of government works (the approaching mega sporting events and the timing
between the 2012 and 2014 elections are possible explanations). This release also
explains a public service aimed at mitigating the impact of public works, but the type of
service offered and the discourse employed in the text are remarkably different. The
story entitled Public defenders get decision that suspends demolition in Tabajaras
community narrates, in five short paragraphs, the technical details of the legal trajectory of three lawsuits aimed at the protection of slum dwellers against eviction. Extract
6 introduces the text.
Extract 6: Press release B
1
2
3
4

On Tuesday, 22, the Coordination of Land Regularization and Tenure Assurance obtained a
decision during judiciary night shift, determining the suspension of demolitions occurring at
Ladeira dos Tabajaras, under the allegation that there
could not be any act of property seizure against the assisted people until []

The cohesion of both texts is established by the reference to each provided service
(service vs legal assistance) and to the users of each process (resident vs assisted). The
nominalization of the participants in both cases is the strongest evidence of the difference
between them. Dwellers of the affluent zone are directly nominated and qualified for the
provision of the service: the residents of commercial and residential buildings. The

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87

nomination of slum dwellers, on the other hand, is a concealment of their existence, represented as goals in a passive sentence: the assisted people. The social condition of the
assisted people is known only because of the nature of the service (prevention of house
evictions).
Expanding the transitivity analysis (Halliday, 1985) reveals significant differences
when comparing the two texts: in press release A, the citizens are active subjects (e.g.
whenever they need the vehicle, residents should notify the porter, who will warn the
valet team, Press release B), foregrounding the users of the service and empowering
them as agentic participants in the process. These features contrast with the case of press
release B, in which the public defenders (service providers) are the active participants
(actors) in the narrative (they obtained, notified and visited), whilst the actual users of the
services (poor citizens) are the passive participants (goals/recipients) or indirect objects
of the actions: the assisted people did not have access to the administrative procedure
which ordered the demolitions (lines 78); the community received public defenders
from the coordination for a meeting in which the assisted peoples doubts were cleared
(lines 1011); a decision obtained as preliminary injunction still protects the dwellers
against possible removal (lines 1213). In addition, considering the word density of the
texts, the users in press release A are mentioned twice as frequently as those in press
release B.
Nominalizing the original public works that motivated the provision of the explained
services was also a concern of the animators in the process of production. Public works
that affect dwellers from press release A are mitigated by the euphemistic metonymy of
interventions, which are only once referred to, giving space to focus on the description
of the service itself. According to the text, they will communicate in advance with the
(again individuated) dwellers and marketers of the region. On the other hand, the public
works in press release B were already taking place. In the process of discursive production, there was no concern with avoiding an overt clarification of the impacted works:
house demolitions, which produced evictions. These were mentioned in every paragraph of the text.
There is also a strong difference in the representation of the office that provides the
services (providers) and their recipients (users). In the first case, the executive branch of
state government (formed by elected representatives) provides the service, but no institution is nominalized. By omitting the state as the participant in the process, no separation
is claimed between users and providers (us). In the second case, the legislative branch of
the state government (formed by public tenders) provides the service, and the exact secretary is specified. The distinction between the attorneys office (us) and the assisted
people (them) is made very clear. Table 1 summarizes the linguistic contrasts between
the two texts.
As shown in Table 1, the discursive structures in the two texts are very different, even
though they have been posted by the same agency and describe services motivated by
similar situations (prior public works). The main distinction is the description of the
service itself. Both texts show public efforts to minimize the impact of necessary works
on the city, but there is a huge gap in the level of rights assurance: whilst for the wealthy
zone the right to park the car is assured by a high-standard service, in the slum, dwellers
are still struggling legally to save their own houses from demolition.

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Discourse & Society 26(1)

Table 1. Linguistic contrasts between press release A and press release B.

Object of utterance

Press release A

Press release B

Nomination of dwellers

dwellers of commercial and

residential buildings
interventions

the assisted [people]

not specified (State in general)

Coordination of Land
Regularization and Tenure
Assurance
legal representation against
house demolitions
not specified

Nomination of public
works
Nomination of service
provider
Services provided to
alleviate effects
Predication of the
service

valet parking for car use

24 hours; parked at private
parking lots; carried out
by trained professionals;
requested by phone.

demolitions

Analysis of the discursive production shows that press release A incorporates elements
of the genre of private advertising: the service is foregrounded, and the text functions as a
mechanism for persuasion, targets its audience and provides instructions for consumption/
acquisition (Bex, 1993). The text appropriates the discourse of advertising with a focus on
exclusive services. The press release specifies that no car will be parked on the street, but
will be taken to a private parking lot, demonstrating caution to ensure the safety and integrity of residents properties. In addition, an exclusive helpline is created to provide exclusive care. The exclusivity of the telephone service could be regarded as a metaphor for
the exclusivity of the government as a whole. Public offices are dedicated to providing,
and communicating about, exceptional services for this class of citizens, which is not the
case for most services and was certainly not the case in text B.
In press release B, the concise description of the facts resembles the classical definition of the genre of press release, highlighting the lawsuits and hiding the actual citizens
involved in the story. The defenders serve three communities, and in all cases the focus
is the work performed by the defenders rather than the service offered to the assisted residents. The kind of service provided to the citizens is not described. We dont know, for
example, if there have been any meetings with the residents or whether any channel for
contacting the attorneys has been made available.
While text B is produced with a rough technical vocabulary, the sound and logical
description of the service in text A demonstrates an anticipation of the wide distribution
of its content: while the defence of evicted slum dwellers is reproduced only by websites
of law and juridical news, the announcement of the valet service was reproduced by at
least 10 other sources.8 Following the same careful preparation of political speeches, the
text concludes with the appropriation of common political discourse to justify the
unpleasant event and claim for a shared compromise of interests:
Extract 7: Press release A
1

[] The contractor

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89

2 will promote constant and effective dialogue with the community, study case by case the
impact of the
3 interventions on each of the residents and marketers so that, together, [they] can find
suitable alternatives to
4 minimize impacts, which are inevitable for the development of the city.

As commonly found in political discourses (Wodak, 2011: 36), this claim pre-empts a
debate over what is inevitable in the development of the city. It is not up to us to discuss
the concept of development and its consequences; it is given by the producer, namely the
political group who plans the interventions. However, in the quoted example of press
release A, forms of alleviating the impact of the interventions are granted to the individuated citizens, who according to the text together will find a suitable alternative
constructed case by case. No restriction on the scope of the service to mitigate the
impact is posed at any level, and it is for us to infer that an alternative is assured to
respect the rights of the citizens. This example illustrates the points discussed above:
individuation of the public, exclusivity of the service and euphemistic nomination of the
impact. However, looking again at press release B, none of these elements are present,
and the assurance of rights is not offered with the same predisposition in the service
aimed at poor citizens.
The production of these discourses is based on the need of the capitalist social order
to maintain this division. As suggested by Fairclough (2009: 134), the social order needs
the problem. Silva et al. (2012) propose the concept of divided state as a reformulation
of Zuenir Venturas (1994) divided city.9 Silva et al. view the city as traditionally occupied by all classes, but with each class receiving different treatment from the government. Even though citizens are full individuals in their social performance, the state is
cloven, focusing the distribution of resources on the wealthiest zones and neglecting
the poorer areas (especially the slums), thus reproducing inequality.

Part 3: Reinforcing exclusion through metonymical transgression

Text 3 is a corpus of 45 different press releases published in the interval of one month in
the first quarter of 2013. Analysing official press releases is a way of exposing the discourse legitimated by the ruling class, which is attached to the government. For this reason, the corpus has been compiled, including headlines and leads (summaries), of official
press releases extracted from the state government official website. By the time of extraction, the main public policy regarding favelas (the security programme of pacification
UPPs) had been implemented in 24 territories (corresponding to 30 units) where 153
different communities were installed. Even though this is a considerable evolution, it still
covers only about 20% of all favelas in Rio (IBGE, 2013). The 45 analysed headlines
correspond to 16% of the overall corpus of published stories in the relevant period.
There were three identified topics of communication in the press releases: events organized or funded by the government (e.g. UPP at Batan celebrates four years with a party for
residents), new public investments (e.g. State starts enlargement of streets at Cantagalo);
and results at different levels of the programme (e.g. Lieutenant of UPP at Vidigal celebrates pacification in the community where he was born). The interdiscursivity among
different texts is pre-determined by the criteria of corpus creation, that is, the cohesion

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achieved through repetition of the keywords favela and community. However, there are
other unforeseen interdiscursive elements in the corpus, namely the recurrent mention of
the participation of residents (resident is the word of highest occurrence and 40% of the
stories contained instances of residents, children or leaders) and the celebration of
anniversaries of the implementation of UPPs in three communities (16% of the corpus).
These recurrent instances are intended as a response to two common critiques made of the
programme: the lack of involvement of the affected dwellers in the design and execution of
the public policy, and the suspicions regarding the long-term nature of the programme.
If slum dwellers are victims of exclusion by the established order, the most alarming
fact in the categorized corpus is the emphasis of state attention on a subset of slums in
the city: only one out of 45 stories (2%) about slums referred to events, investments or
results promoted in non-pacified communities, even though the non-pacified communities represented two-thirds of the total number of communities (66%). In addition, the
focus of attention and resources does not concern only the distinction between pacified
versus non-pacified communities: only four communities Rocinha, Coroa/Fallet/
Fogueteiro, Manguinhos and Barreira do Vasco accounted for almost half of the
mentioned communities in the stories.
Therefore, the filtered corpus depicts a huge focus of governmental attention, which
has been reproduced by the mass media in the creation of a synecdoche to re-signify
favela (slum). In the texts, as in other sources, favela is semantically referred to as pacified slum, rather than slum in general, ignoring the others just as they all were ignored
at the beginning of the century. The discursive concentration also follows the spatial
concentration of the programme on the most affluent zones and their access, and this
strategy supports the Olympic project of Rios State as an enlargement of the capitalist
hegemony of the elite (Gramsci, 1971).
In this process, the order of discourse (as appropriated in Fairclough, 2001) is not only
a crucial determinant force in constituting what is regarded as a relevant favela in public
policies, but also here the discourse dialectically determines the semiosis of the word for
society overall, which may result in further exclusion of the non-pacified favelas. This
cycle sustains the mechanism by which favelas are recognized as legitimate only in so far
as they serve to support the interests of a given group. At the same time, the success of
the UPP programme is what assures peace for the wealthy zones, and votes for the
administration that has implemented it. This arrangement is not totally unexpected if we
consider that the social order needs the problem: it inherently generates a range of
major problems which it needs in order to sustain itself (Fairclough, 2009: 126).

Concluding remarks
According to Fairclough (2001), there are two important elements in the analysis of
social order: ideology and hegemony. Ideology is a construction of reality that is enacted
in various dimensions of discursive practices, contributing to the relations of domination.
Actions are oriented by ideologies, which subsist in the structures. Ideology is intimately
related to the concept of hegemony, which is the power over society exerted by the ruling
class in alliance with various social forces in a condition of unstable equilibrium. The

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91

hegemonic struggle is highly discursive. The observation of hegemony supports identification of the ways of making meaning that are dominant or marginalized.
The discourse on favelas reproduced by political society is a product of hegemonic
production, which is part of the project to attain and maintain power: there can, and
indeed must, be hegemonic activity even before the rise to power, and one should not
count only on the material force which power gives in order to exercise an effective
leadership (Gramsci, 1971: 215). The elite of the city of Rio, which for Gramsci is the
ruling class exercising power on the government, is accountable for the production of
such discourses. And in that sense it is not difficult to understand the perspective from
which these discourses are enacted. However, such discourses are also social practices,
and the dominant ways of making sense can and should be challenged. Favelas (slums)
are a convenient solution for the issue of lack of housing, an issue created by the same
social order in which they are included, and should not be seen as the problem.
In the cases analysed here, slums are a problem to be tackled by the government (via
the provision of security and public order). The common backdrop in the three analyses
is the praxis reproducing a biased understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached
from the rest of society. The focus on the precariousness of favelas ignores the cause of
their conditions, that is, the inequality in overall wealth distribution. This alienated vision
impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1), perpetuating poverty (analysis 2) and reinforcing exclusion (analysis 3). The aggravating factor of these findings is
the nature of the utterances, extracted from political fields, which is likely to shape future
public policies on favelas.
These characteristics are not new in the history of the city, as shown at the start of this
article. Favela residents were blamed for their own conditions for the first half-century
of the existence of favelas, and a politics of reinforcing exclusion was strongly practised
until favelas acquired their legal right to the city. However, these victories are more symbolic than practical. As the present and other investigations on favelas reveal (e.g. Brum,
2011; Lacerda and Brulon, 2013; Leite, 2012), the general discourse on favelas perpetuates their struggle in the social arena.
More than the controversial equality of revenue distribution, what slum inhabitants
can concretely demand is equality of access to their rights. Urbanization of the current
settlements has become the solution to aim for in the last few decades. The remaining
question is what type of urbanization will prevail in the struggle between political
engagement with the city and the managerial planning of its wealth. More than one-fifth
(22%) of Rios population already lives in favelas, and public policies directed at this
population must acknowledge their right to the city as much as for the rest of the population. In concluding this article, then, any future policies should aim at providing opportunities as a condition for demanding compliance, by means of redirecting investment to
the most deprived areas, regardless of their media impact.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joo de Almeida and Ruth Wodak, the anonymous reviewers and the editor,
Teun Van Dijk, for their encouraging and helpful comments on early versions of this article.
Responsibility for the content is, however, incumbent on the author.

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Funding
The author is grateful to Capes Foundation (Brazil) for funding this research (proc. 1028/12-0).

Notes
1.

Considering the set of aglomerados subnormais (non-normal territories) as classified by the

IBGE [Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatistica] Census.
2. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/prefeituralanca-novo-plano-para-favelas-que-preve-controlegabarito-conservacaochoque-2974915
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glZpIYKG7DE
4. http://www.rj.gov.br/web/imprensa/exibeconteudo?article-id=715592
5. http://www.rj.gov.br/web/dpge/exibeconteudo?articleid=1425418
6. Corpus compiled from http://www.rj.gov.br/web/imprensa/listaconteudo?search-type=busca
7. As Gramsci (1971) would argue, the distinction between civil society and government does
not exist, as the enlarged state incorporates civil society with a strong participation of the
media for cultural production, and the mentioned topos is probably produced dialectically in
both spheres.
8. Among the sources indexed online at the time of analysis.
9. In his classic work The Broken City, Zuenir Ventura (1994) depicts the city of Rio as composed of two separate fragments: that of rich people and that of poor people, operating distinct
processes, services and social spaces.

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Author biography
Daniel S Lacerda is a PhD candidate in the department of Organization, Work and Technology at
Lancaster University, UK. His research focuses on the discursive and spatial production of favelas by organizations. Recent works explore the sociological aspects of the recent programme of
pacification in the Brazilian favelas.