As someone who lived in Brazil for six years, although fortunately that was not my own reality, I know better than most foreigners the scale and the characteristics of the favela or slum situation currently facing the country.
I am horrified every time reports appear in the media of tourists (Germans, Belgians, Americans…) visiting a favela in Rio as if it were a human safari, taking photos of the misery and enjoying the catastrophe. Some people might think that, at least, it is economically beneficial for the neighbourhood, and that these people are spending this money in the area and not somewhere else, but for me, it is morally problematic. Favelas should be something fix, not to enjoy.
2026 is a year that, as has become the norm in recent years, got off to a turbulent start on the international stage. The US launched a lightning raid in Caracas and took away President Nicolás Maduro and his wife away to New York, acting unilaterally and using narco-terrorism as an excuse.
These days, the illegitimacy of the Venezuelan government and the need for change were hardly matters of international debate (after all, nearly 8 million people voluntarily leaving a country that isn’t even at war speaks for itself). But of course, a country where GDP plummeted by 86% in 8 years (2012–2020) isn’t something you see every day. Yet even with all those figures, it is hard to deny that the United States’ arbitrariness and egocentrism in acting, time and again, against a foreign nation without UN approval is worrying. Then Russia comes along in 2022 and invades Ukraine, and the arguments against it ring hollow and hypocritical, to say the least.
