Mauricio Lima for The New York Time
Published: November 10, 2013
SALVADOR, Brazil — Baroque architectural gems grace this city. Musicians enthrall audiences with high-octane performances reflecting Salvador’s status as a bastion of Brazil’s popular culture. Luxury residential towers overlook a stunning harbor. The industrial park on the city’s outskirts contains cutting-edge plants opened by Ford and other multinational corporations.
Salvador, the largest city in northeastern Brazil, a region that is still posting enviable economic growth even as the national economy slows, should have the wind at its back. But the boom here is producing another outcome: Instead of celebrating Salvador as its residents have long done — the writer Jorge Amado once called it a laid-back place of “eternal beauty” — many people here are increasingly revolted by their city.
In what may serve as a cautionary tale for other cities in the developing world, Salvador’s rising prosperity, on display in new shopping malls, sprawling megachurches and well-guarded gated communities, exists alongside a troubled reality. A surge in violent crime has transformed Salvador into Brazil’s murder capital, motorists grapple with traffic that ranks among the most chaotic and violent of any South American city and resentment festers over the metamorphosis of once-elegant seaside districts into crime-ridden areas with abandoned buildings best described as ruins.
“Our political leaders are of such mediocrity that it is hard to comprehend,” said Antonio Risério, a writer and historian who has chronicled Salvador’s origins as Brazil’s first capital, from 1549 to 1763, and the cradle of African-Brazilian culture. “We’re not a failed city, but we’re a place where the middle class lives in fear,” added Mr. Risério, among the most acerbic critics of how Salvador has recently changed.
Salvador now has more homicides each year than any other Brazilian metropolis, including the megacity São Paulo, which is four times as large. The security breakdown has grown so acute and surreal this year that murder victims are being found beheaded,
as in the case of a body found on a road to the airport, and tortured by mobs,
as in the case of a rape suspect ambushed by residents in a slum called Bairro da Paz.
While
inequality has persisted, rising incomes and access to credit helped double Salvador’s car fleet over the past decade to more than 750,000. But with highway projects stalled or nonexistent, and parts of Salvador still filled with colonial-era cobblestone streets and alleyways, road rage is intensifying.
This city of 2.9 million (the metropolitan area has almost five million) was stunned in October by a
traffic skirmish in Ondina, one of Salvador’s most exclusive residential districts, as video cameras captured a 45-year-old ophthalmologist in an S.U.V. running down two siblings on a motorcycle, crushing them to death against the fence of a hotel.
Complicating Salvador’s mobility challenges are the public transportation debacles symbolized by a lavishly expensive subway system that somehow has never functioned. Brazilian construction companies began building the subway’s huge pillars of reinforced concrete, designed for commuter trains imported from Asia, in 1997.
The Brazilian authorities spent hundreds of millions of dollars of public money on the project and auditors found big cost overruns, but it was not completed. Sixteen years after construction began, officials finally said in October that they would spend $600 million more to get it running, but only after the 2014 World Cup when other Brazilian cities plan to showcase new transit systems.
Faced with such disarray, some in Salvador try to deflect criticism by noting statistics that show other cities in northeast Brazil, including Maceió and João Pessoa, with higher per-capita murder rates. And Salvador’s cultural offerings remain sublime, fitting for a city that propelled some of Brazil’s greatest singer-songwriters, like Caetano Veloso, and filmmakers to fame.
But many here bemoan comparisons with Recife, another city in the region that is the political base of Eduardo Campos, a contender in next year’s presidential elections, and has a lively cultural scene that produced “Neighboring Sounds,” Brazil’s critically acclaimed submission in the Oscar race for the best foreign film.
Salvador’s malaise is tainting its once vibrant tourism industry. In Barra, a waterfront area where surfers still catch waves off sun-kissed beaches, an Italian owner of a small hotel was
bludgeoned to death in late 2010. In October, a 15-year-old Brazilian tourist
was killed in the old city center by a stray bullet from a gun battle.
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