LONG LIVE CONSTRUCTION
Pushing through undergrowth in galoshes and a raincoat, picking off the gnats that stuck to my face, I wondered for the third or fourth time that morning whether this outing was a good idea.
The ankle-deep mud threatened to suck my boots off my feet and I was having trouble sticking close to the man in front of me, a biologist in a chewed-up canvas hat and those funny-looking FiveFingers shoes. Plus, we were looking for jacarés-do-papo-amarelo, or broad-snouted caimans, and I wasn’t quite sure how I’d feel when we found one. These South American cousins of the alligator are extremely territorial and grow to between six and eight feet long. Older males in the wild can reach eleven feet of tough leather, teeth, and muscle, with a bite that could easily crack a turtle shell. Or a shinbone.
This bushwhacking was part of a class given by the biologist Ricardo Freitas. He’s a caiman expert and offered the only hands-on classes on crocodilian handling in the country. Twenty-five academics and wildlife veterinarians had flown from central and northern Brazil to Rio for the chance to learn Ricardo’s techniques. By the end of the weekend, we’d know how to capture, measure, tag, and then safely release the pissed-off, manhandled creatures.
Western Rio was the place to find them. This stretch of the city stood at the foot of a mountain range that included metropolitan Rio’s tallest peak, the Pedra Branca, and was enshrouded in a 31,000-acre forest, the Pedra Branca State Park. Runoff coursed from its heights into the flatlands, where mangrove forests and interconnected lagoons sheltered more than five thousand creamy-bellied Caiman latirostris.
Ricardo was optimistic. It was just a matter of time, he whispered over his shoulder. They loved this narrow, leafy channel that formed a natural bridge between two brackish lagoons. This marshy landscape had always been their home, he said. Jacarepaguá, the neighborhood I’d driven through to meet him, had an indigenous name that meant “place of jacarés.”
But more than that—they had nowhere else to go. Running alongside the walled-in banks of this little canal were residential streets with gated buildings where penthouse apartments sold for a million dollars.
Women wrapped in neon spandex leaned over the railing to watch Ricardo muck around as they headed for their constitutional along the beach less than two blocks away. An elderly couple walking their poodle stopped to ask: was it true the beasts could snack on pets?
The contrast was surreal, but the home of jacarés—the region that included Barra da Tijuca, Recreio dos Bandeirantes, Jacarepaguá, and others—was also the fastest-growing part of the city. Nowhere was Rio’s physical transformation more visible than in its western suburbs.
As fast as change had come over the past few years, this process would only continue to accelerate until 2016. This ecologically fragile part of Rio would host the greatest number of Olympic venues. According to Rio’s bid, the sporting event would highlight the city’s natural assets and provide leverage to remedy existing damage. These promises had been an essential aspect of selling Rio as a candidate city. A discourse analysis of the Olympic bid showed that “environment” or its variation, “environmental,” was the second most used word after “security.”
How did the fast-paced development of the west side, and the impending Olympic project, fit into this picture?
The answer started with the crocs. They’d been there first. They were also tougher than other species, built to adapt and withstand conditions that could wipe out other critters. They would be my gauge.
To Cariocas living in a city squeezed by natural features, where buildings rise shoulder to shoulder, blocking views and airflow, the western suburbs offered space. Relatively undeveloped until the 1980s, the region had absorbed most of Rio’s residential expansion since then. I knew the area well. My parents had moved into one of its first gated communities when they relocated to Rio from abroad; decades later, my brother followed after his second child was born.
Going to see my family meant an hour’s drive from Flamengo. The route itself reveals Barra’s appeal. It starts within the perennially jammed streets of Botafogo, once an elite bedroom community, now a throughway in which streets are lined with a jumble of residential buildings, shops, schools, and government buildings and the roads are thick with buses, motorcycles, cars. Pedestrians spill off its narrow sidewalks and cyclists weave through traffic, each adding to the confusion. The drive continues through the clogged streets of other packed neighborhoods—Humaitá, Jardim Botânico—before diving into the tunnels that lead out west.
To enter Barra da Tijuca, the first of the western neighborhoods, after all that chaos and congestion is like coming up for air. Drivers emerging from the last tunnel have the ocean on the left and a lagoon backed by luxuriantly green mountains to the right. A sign says “Welcome to Barra.”
Gone are the pedestrians, the diesel belches, the visual clutter. The west is sleek, with sixteen-lane highways, luxury malls, and gated communities. This is a landscape designed for cars, not pedestrians. Residential life is contained within condomínios, guarded and enclosed collections of buildings and houses that promise to deliver everything that was lost as Rio grew: tranquility, fresh air, safety. Some of these condomínios hark back to that paradise lost with names such as Nova Ipanema, or New Ipanema, where my parents lived, or Novo Leblon. Others have even more nakedly aspirational names that suggest, in English or a suitable European language, a privileged life: Les Résidences de Monaco, Riveira dei Fiori, Barra Golden Green. The rarefied airs are partly justified: if considered separately from the rest of Rio, the region has a Human Development Index score on par with Norway and New Zealand.
Maintaining this segregated lifestyle in an unequal society has a cost that goes beyond condo fees and gasoline bills; it is essentially a life behind gilded bars. Going to see my parents means driving up to gates flanked by armed guards, then waiting as one security officer, protected by a cabin, calls their apartment. Permission to enter granted, the gate opens and I pull into an idyllic once-upon-a-time land where children still play in the streets and where there are extensive landscaped gardens for running and hiding as well as playgrounds, sports fields, swimming pools, a restaurant, and a bar. One’s entire life, or at least a certain kind of life, could be completely contained within the community’s tree-lined streets: there is a hair salon, a massage studio, waxing and manicure facilities, a bakery, a convenience store, and a private school.
The Barra way of life has a lot of takers—including the Olympic Games. There will be competitions in the south, along Ipanema, Copacabana, and Flamengo; in the center-north, home of the Maracanã and Engenhão stadiums; and in Deodoro, in the northwest. But the west side will host the main Olympic sports cluster, with fifteen venues housing competitions from boxing and table tennis to swimming and gymnastics.
As the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee put it, the region provides a “truly beautiful setting . . . surrounded by lagoons, mountains and parks.” They forgot to mention the beaches—more than sixteen miles of dazzling white sand facing the Atlantic. The potential was evident, and most everyone wanted a piece.
This meant the place was a construction zone. On each visit, I watched construction crews birth high-rises of 10, 15, 20 stories out of earthen craters. While the population of Rio had grown about 8 percent between 2000 and 2010, Barra’s population grew by 47 percent, according to the census. But that’s practically sluggish compared to stretches even farther west—Jacarepaguá, Recreio dos Bandeirantes, and other neighborhoods—where the buildings popped up like mushrooms after the rain to house a population that had expanded by up to 150 percent. Altogether, Barra and the eight surrounding neighborhoods had added an astounding 278,000 new residents during those ten years. Traffic thickened and slowed to a crawl even on the sleek new highways.
This mad race showed no signs of stopping. Hotel chains were busy adding nearly 4,000 rooms in the area in anticipation of the Olympics. Between 2010 and the Games, Barra was expected to gain another 65,000 residents or so, and Jacarepaguá, another 53,000, according to the Instituto Pereira Passos, an urban planning organization connected to the city government.
Even the transportation projects that were promised as one of the most useful Olympic legacies in this gridlocked city—an extension of the subway and nearly one hundred miles of exclusive bus lanes, part of a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system—all fed the west side. The Transcarioca BRT linked it to the international airport; the Transolímpica BRT, to working-class neighborhoods to the north. The Transoeste BRT, the first one completed, plowed over virgin marshland as it reached from the center of Barra to the city’s far western border. New gated communities sprouted in its wake.
All this, remember, in the “place of jacarés.”
No one knew Rio’s caimans like Ricardo, the biologist who’d founded the Instituto Jacaré. Since 2000, when he established the research center, he’d caught, tagged and cataloged nearly five hundred of them. But on the wet, early spring day when I joined him on the banks of that muddy creek, a southwest wind streaked with rain lowered temperatures. Leaden clouds smudged out the sun. It wasn’t good caiman-catching weather. The cold-blooded animals found it warmer in the water.
After a few hours of tramping around, we’d seen dozens of eyeballs and nostrils prick the creek’s surface, but few caimans loitering on the banks. Those we did see slid with surprising speed through the brush and swam away as we approached, shying away from the bits of fish tied to a rope that we dragged through the water as bait. Although Ricardo said the caimans generally posed no threat to people—or poodles, for that matter—we were not ready to wrestle a healthy, unwilling croc out of the water. We decided to break for lunch and try later. If the caimans weren’t out in the cold, there was no reason why we should be.
I went with Ricardo, his intern Camila, and a handful of graduate students to a beachfront barbecue joint. Almost on cue, the clouds broke and let through a watery sunshine. We huddled around an outdoor table and ordered a bucket of beers. Even in informal Rio, we drew stares: after a morning of sloshing around canals, we were covered in mud. With the dirt, our bush-beating outfits, and green-eyed Ricardo’s five-day beard and beaten-up hat, we could have been extras in an Indiana Jones movie.
The conversation turned to the flurry of development that was burying these wetlands in concrete slabs. Much of this new construction, from the Olympic sites to the mega-highways to the private housing, was being done by draining or filling the marshy land. This was anathema to the croc lovers gathered there.
Ricardo reached into the ice bucket for a beer. The Pan-American Games should have been a lesson, he said.
“We’re still cleaning up and paying for that mess,” he said.
The 2007 competition was seen as a trial run for the 2016 Olympics. But as Ricardo pointed out, it could also serve as a warning. Operationally, the games were a success, but their price tag was a shocker. The competition that had been billed at $250 million cost public coffers at least $1.15 billion, according to the Tribunal de Contas da União, or TCU, a federal auditing body. It may be more; at the time of the report’s writing the government had not fully accounted for all expenses. Even without knowing the total cost, the 2007 Pan-American Games was the most expensive in the history of the event, and fifteen times more expensive than the previous edition in Santo Domingo in 2003.
Beyond being grossly over budget, the Pan-American Games also left behind structures that were underused and expensive to maintain. Some were passed on to private initiatives and closed to public use. Others were just plain shoddy, including the Pan’s most visible and most expensive venue, the Estádio Olímpico João Havelange, also known as the Engenhão. At $192 million, it was six times over budget. It was also passed on to the private sector—in this case, a soccer team—for a modest rent of $15,000 a month plus maintenance expenses.
The stadium turned out to have such serious structural defects that it was forced shut in March 2013, less than six years after its inauguration. The absurdity of it was on everyone’s mind: Rio’s mayor had admitted in a press conference that “depending on wind velocity and temperature,” the roof could collapse or blow off.
The Engenhão had never been a popular arena, but with the Maracanã closed for Olympic reforms, it was the only one Rio’s teams had at the moment. Shutting it down left soccer-mad Cariocas without a stadium—for how long, no one knew. Officials estimated it would be back up in 2015, after yet more money was spent expanding its seating capacity from 45,000 to 60,000 for the Olympics, when it is slated to host the track and field events.
Most of the Pan’s venues had been built out in the west, establishing the model that would be followed with the Olympics. One in particular became a symbol of the poor planning, the expense, and the questionable motives that marred many of these works: the Vila Pan-Americana, or Vila do Pan. This condomínio of seventeen buildings was raised on a forested strip of land between a creek and the Camorin lagoon through a public-private partnership, a collaboration between local government and a construction firm. It was meant to house the athletes and later be sold as residential units.
The project raised questions from the start. Yes, the state had a desperate need for housing—in 2007 it was 338,068 units short. But most of the demand was among families earning less than eight thousand dollars a year, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Why were Rio authorities creating incentives for private enterprise to build yet another upper-middle-class development?I
The Vila do Pan was also a very expensive option for housing the athletes. Each day they spent there cost taxpayers $568.50—nearly double the $300 daily rate charged by premium hotels in the area.
But the Vila’s biggest flaw was only revealed once the athletes were gone. Its pastel-colored towers had been laid over unstable clay. In the years that followed, the ground shifted and subsided, sending long, jagged cracks down the condomínio’s streets, exposing water and gas pipes, tilting electrical posts, and bending the metal gates.
Even as the city started building its Olympic sites, it was still throwing fistfuls of cash at the Vila do Pan to fix the disaster. Initially estimated to cost about $2 million to correct, the sinking grounds had swallowed more than $15 million by 2012. All this for apartments no one could love: in spite of the land grab out west, the Vila do Pan has never been more than two-thirds occupied. At night, when Barra’s towers light up, its buildings are pocked with darkened windows.
The TCU concluded its report on the Pan-American Games by mentioning that they had provided a chance for this naturally exuberant city to set right its serious environmental problems. This opportunity had been wasted, the report said; efforts made were “timid, insufficient.”
Now the Olympic preparations presented the city with a new chance. But from the perspective of the ecologists, biologists, and zoologists at the table, the Olympics were doing more harm than good. The new bus thoroughfares, the rush to build bigger, better, faster, funneling ever more residents into an area unprepared for the onslaught . . . Ricardo exhaled in frustration, took another swig, shook his head, and unleashed a stream of invective.
“The reality is fuck the animals, fuck biodiversity, fuck the laws, and long live construction,” he said. “All of this is being done because some people will make a lot of money, and it’s being done with no monitoring, no support, no rescue of species.”
This was often how construction was done in Rio, he said. Out west there was simply more of it, happening faster than anywhere else in the city, with very little being done to mitigate the deforestation, loss of wetlands, and habitat disruption that it caused. Regulations governing construction on beachfronts and wetlands were being plowed under, he said, along with the flora and fauna. The laws that required a study of environmental impact before building were just not taken seriously.
“It’s all just eyeball. You take a look around, see if you can spot animals. That’s your environmental impact report,” he said.
At that point, waiters interrupted us with great, bloody platters piled high with steak, grilled chicken, and sausage. Ricardo served himself a heaping plateful of beef and before tucking in, threw out a rhetorical question. “Really, what is the law when it stands in the way of what the government wants to do?”
That was the crux. Instead of providing oversight, Rio officials were actively shoving aside regulations to speed up the construction process. The most egregious example of this circumvention was the golf course being built for the Summer Games. I’d been following the story, as golf would be included in the Olympics for the first time in over a century.
From the start, negotiations surrounding its location were fraught. According to Rio’s Olympic bid, the golf competition would be held at the private Itanhangá club. But in June 2011, Mayor Eduardo Paes announced to visiting members of the International Olympic Committee that there had been a change in plans.II Instead of refurbishing the private club, the city would build a brand-new course on a gorgeous stretch of white sand and coastal marsh bordering the Marapendi lagoon and facing the ocean. Best of all, he pointed out, this would come at no cost to the public; the developer would be paid with the right to build around the course.
The first hurdles were environmental. The plot, although degraded in parts by illicit removal of its white sand, was a legally protected area and home to a number of jacarés and other critters, among them two threatened species found only in Brazil—Lutz’s tree iguana and the Fluminense swallowtail butterfly. But those were just the first concerns. Others would emerge as the project was pushed forward in 2012.
In March, the name of the course designer was announced by the local organizing committee with due pomp—after all, it would be a state-of-the-art three-hundred-acre course. A developer was chosen to lead the $30 million job. The cost would be borne by the construction company, as the mayor had said. As compensation, the firm earned the right to build twenty-two new high-rises right behind the course, facing the landscaped grounds, the lagoon, and the cool blue Atlantic beyond.
Official go-ahead came during an extraordinary session of the Rio de Janeiro City Council called for the afternoon of December 20. Most Cariocas were well into their summer vacations by then. In the meeting, council members approved one measure with several astonishing provisions. First, it green-lighted construction on the protected area. It also sliced an additional fourteen acres of forested grounds from a neighboring natural park—also habitat for the threatened butterfly and iguana—and added it to the course. Finally, it increased the height limit of the buildings that would be raised by the course developer from six to twenty-two stories.
The price tag on one penthouse apartment in the super-deluxe condomínio next door was $6 million. That’s just the value of one penthouse.
The whole thing was authorized by the mayor in January 2013, still during the summer holidays, and rubber-stamped by the city’s environmental department in April. There was no environmental impact report; the project was never put to public debate. Work began immediately.III
I raised the issue with Ricardo. As a biologist working in the area, he had been watching this unfold and, I hoped, could offer some insight on what a three-hundred-acre pesticide- and herbicide-fed lawn would mean for the region’s ecology. This was marshy land, and the water table was high. Chemicals that leached into the groundwater would necessarily spread to the lagoon nearby.
But this was a charged topic for the croc expert. When the area was first mentioned as the site of the Olympic golf tournament, he’d sent an email to the local organizing committee warning that if they built a golf course out west, they’d have unexpected guests. He got no answer. But once work began and the jacarés started to show up, the company managing the site for Rio 2016 hired Ricardo to manage the animals.
“It’s not that all of a sudden they’re genuinely concerned with what happens to the jacarés,” he said. “It’s just that, because of the Olympic Games, they’re a problem, and they need to be dealt with.”
We wrapped up the lunch. The sun was burning off the puddles. Ricardo took deep drags on his cigarette as we talked and made our way back to the creek.
Ricardo fundamentally disagreed with the construction of the golf course, but figured the crocs would be better with him than without him. Part of what motivated these weekend courses was seeing the damage done when the crocs got in the way of construction or showed up in someone’s swimming pool. They could end up shot or injured—often with broken necks after being lassoed and yanked around.
Then there was the money. He earned twenty dollars an hour teaching ten hours of classes a week at a private university. The rest of his time went to the institute. He had to take consulting jobs to supplement his salary—things like pulling caimans out of condomínio fountains. Protecting jacarés on the site of the 2016 golf course was a good gig.
“I love my job, I love the animals, but there is no return in it, no money, no time to publish,” he said, stubbing out his cigarette on the side of his pants and putting an end to the conversation. “So. Let’s catch come crocs.”
The afternoon was warm now, the air thick and moist; good weather for jacarés. Their eyes and nostrils cut through the creek’s nearly stagnant surface. Several were sunning themselves by the water. We spread out along the banks. I stayed with the intern, Camila, who was standing on a narrow footbridge spanning the creek and tying squishy fish parts to the end of a rope. Once she had her line baited, she threw it into the water and gave it a couple of tugs so that it slapped the water like a flailing fish. This awakened immediate interest: a couple of crocs turned in our direction. A few more slaps of the rope and two pairs of protruding eyes began gliding our way. Their wakes spread, overlapped, and seemed to stir up interest in the other caimans. We had an audience.
One middle-aged woman in sarong and bikini top stopped on her way to the beach to berate Camila for fouling the wooden bridge with the fishy stench. It was true the bag reeked. So did Camila, who was elbow-deep in blood and guts. Face smeared with fishy goo from pushing up her glasses with dirty hands, Camila glared at the beachgoer’s fleshy, receding back.
“And they complain the jacarés are aggressive,” she said under her breath. “She sniffs her own shit all day and she’s complaining about fish?”
That was also true. Although the creek linked two lagoons in protected park areas, the smell was unmistakable: human feces. This creek was foul with sewage. It had the stink of the Carioca River and the same whitish scum frothing the banks. The wastewater poured out under the bridge from one of several cement tubes that opened over the stream. As I watched, a condom slid out and plopped into the water, its latex body undulating gently like some unknown invertebrate.
These western suburbs were sold with the promise that they offered Rio as it used to be—safe, calm, clean—but they were quickly catching up with the worst aspects of the old city. The mad dash to develop meant construction had far outpaced infrastructure; most buildings in Barra, Recreio, and Jacarepaguá had been thrown up before the region had a supporting sewerage system. This meant they either built their own treatment plants, as the law required, or they dumped their sewage fresh out of the toilet into the streams and lagoons via the rainwater mains. With little monitoring, entire gated communities, malls, and office parks did the latter.
According to the state secretary for the environment, Carlos Minc, nearly $35 million were being invested in new pipes and pumping stations in the region to improve the situation. The new infrastructure would run through what was being called the “Olympic Axis,” and included the future Olympic Park, several centers, hotels, office parks, and condomínios. During a visit to the construction site in September 2013, he’d said projects costing $350 million had already brought significant improvements over the previous six years. During that time, sanitation in the region had gone from zero to 60 percent. This was indeed real progress. With the new lines in the ground, any new construction would have a formal system available to which it could connect.
The problem, as Camila pointed out in a huff, was what we could see and smell in the canal. The vast majority of houses, high-rises, and stores erected before the infrastructure was in place had been blithely pouring their untreated waste into nature for decades. Once sewage pipes were installed in the area, they were expected to follow the law and connect to the formal system within sixty days—at their own expense. Whether this happened or not, the water and sewerage company began charging them for the service, the street was checked off the dirty list, and the percentage of the region considered to have basic sanitation treatment grew.
This was why the canal that opened onto the beginning of Barra beach rendered that stretch of ocean unfit for bathing, although official statistics showed 85 percent of the neighborhood was reputedly connected to sanitation treatment. That canal was the end point of the western lagoon complex and its direct connection to the ocean. It was so foul with sewage that one biologist referred to it as Barra’s rectum. From that opening, a brown stain fanned out over the ocean.
The state environmental department did spot compliance checks, fining some of the larger violators. This included several large condomínios that were found pouring their wastewater into lagoons and creeks that, as Camila had noted, were within reach of their residents’ noses as they enjoyed their spacious porches.
Minc, the state environmental official, had taken to physically stoppering pipes carrying sewage from the most egregious repeat offenders. He called this simple but effective strategy an “ecological cork.” But there was not enough manpower to check each building, each mall and office park; there was also no treatment available to the favelas that had sprung up to house the army of service workers who staffed the west’s housing complexes. And so the creeks filled with sewage, turning neon green when the summer sun fed the photosynthesizing cyanobacteria that thrived in them.
Untrammeled development without adequate planning, together with Rio’s habitual environmental neglect, resulted in what we could see in the canal that day: shit flowing, unchecked, even along Rio’s urban frontier.
“The biggest danger to us in this work isn’t really the jacaré, it’s the water,” Ricardo said, explaining the risks start with exposure to hepatitis A and go from there. “That’s the reality we work with as urban biologists.”
As we continued the conversation, four crocs had surrounded Camila’s slapping fish. They hung back, cautious. Then in one furious whip of the tail, one of them lunged for the fish and snapped its jaws around it. The rope with the bait was tied so that it looped around his upper jaw. As the animal thrashed, this closed around its bony upper mandible although the tether stayed loose.
“Hold steady!” Ricardo yelled as he ran off the bridge and down to the banks of the creek. He waded in, stirring up bubbles of sulfurous gases and cursing the filth he was sinking into. “Shit, shit, shit, fuck this fucking shit!”
As the caiman calmed down, Camila slowly walked toward the bank, gently pulling the ensnared croc through the water. The animal shook its massive head every once in a while in annoyance, but otherwise allowed its body to glide toward Ricardo.
Once near the muddy shore, Ricardo took the rope and tugged it toward land, where we waited. As he pulled, the professor explained that this process of capture and measurement doesn’t hurt the animals. Inexperienced handlers often use a tool that looks like a stick with a metal loop at the end to lasso the animal. The length of the stick keeps the crocs away and makes the handler feel safer, but it isn’t flexible and can dislocate or break the animal’s vertebrae, he said. The method he was showing us required some training but was safe for the caimans.
It took some tugging to land the croc, but once there, it stood absolutely still, as if wondering what to make of all this. Its mouth, which turns up at the corners, giving it a wicked grin, was agape and showed jagged, yellowed teeth; its golden eyes, divided by a narrow black slit, were on us. Ours never left it. We had all seen how fast these creatures could move.
Ricardo approached, tapping the animal on the nose a few times. Its mouth opened wide. Ricardo held his canvas hat in his hand, then thrust its brim toward the croc. The great maw snapped shut; the ecologist immediately reached underneath its chin with one finger and tilted its head all the way up. He then pinched the jaws shut between his forefinger and thumb.
So that was why Ricardo’s hat looked so chewed up. This time the caiman missed it, but sometimes it was faster.
“You’ve got to work with its anatomical limitations,” he said, still holding the jaw shut with one hand.
Although the jacaré’s jaw is powerfully muscled, nearly all that strength is used to cinch its viselike bite, he said. Once the mouth is closed, the musculature to open it is weak—so weak the jaws can be held together with two fingers. Ricardo swung his leg around the croc, crouched over it, and taped the mandible shut. Once the feet were also bound, the animal could be measured and studied. This one was six feet long and sixty-four pounds. Figuring out the gender required Ricardo to stick a finger in the animal’s cloaca, an all-purpose excretory and reproductive opening, to search for a curved, retractable penis. The croc submitted with resignation. No penis was found—it was a rare female.
The less experienced members of the institute got a chance to handle the next bit of work: give the croc a microchip tag between its clawed fingers and slice off a designated sequence of scales on its tail. This combination gave the animal a unique marking and gave the researchers blood and bits of osteoderm—thick, hard jacaré skin—to test for heavy metal exposure. As they worked, Ricardo took a moment to answer some of my questions about what all the west-side development meant from a croc’s perspective.
Ricardo was thrilled that this animal was female. That’s because 85 percent of the nearly 500 jacarés captured so far in their survey are male. They’re not sure exactly why this is yet; more study is needed. But they have a theory. The abundance of organic matter—the fermenting shit that burped up gases when Ricardo walked into the creek—makes the muck along the banks where the animals build their nests warmer. Since gender is determined by temperature, an imbalance there could lead to a preponderance of males. The long-term effect of this skewed ratio was obvious.
There were myriad other problems. Their food options were growing more limited: a look at the content of dead animals’ stomachs found they were living largely off insects and food people threw at them—things like crackers, sometimes still in their packaging. The crustaceans, fish, frogs, birds, and small mammals the jacaré usually relies on were rare treats. As creek banks were cemented and condomínios loomed alongside lagoons, the crocs had difficulty finding room for their leafy, muddy nests. Ricardo had even found them nesting inside the big cement tubes that carried sewage. The scarcity of food, the close quarters, and their territorial nature made for an unhealthy combination that led to fights. Even their genetic diversity was threatened. The built urban environment made it increasingly hard for animals to travel to other ponds to crossbreed.
The sun was starting to set. Our croc had long stopped struggling and had given herself up to being probed, handled, and photographed. There would be a lot of caiman-themed Facebook uploads that day. Our work done, we untied the creature and watched as she slid back into the water and became another pair of golden-yellow eyes pricking the murky green surface.
The crew was packing up and preparing for the nighttime part of the course. This involved capturing jacarés in the water while balancing in a little rowboat, then hoisting the thrashing animals on board for measuring and tagging. I’d seen the boat. It was strapped to the roof of a car, and was about as long as some of the crocs out there. I’d had enough. I left them to it and headed to my parents’ house for dinner. Within fifteen minutes the guards of Nova Ipanema were raising the security gate for me.
Six months later, I thought of Ricardo and his crew again. The Sunday paper carried a full-page advertisement for Riserva Golf, the condomínio that would rise by the Rio 2016 golf course. The super-deluxe marble-and-glass-skinned high-rises had apartments that were “suspended mansions,” the ad said, costing between $2.3 million and $23 million each; even before the towers were erected, 60 percent of the units were reserved for prospective buyers. I’d clearly underestimated how much was to be made from this transaction.
The copy sang the new venture’s pedigree, calling attention to such details as the filigreed glass entrance inspired by the Louis Vuitton store in Singapore. But the real attraction was the astounding natural surroundings: “the Marapendi lagoon, the vegetation of the Marapendi reserve, the blue ocean, and the future Olympic golf course.” There was no mention of the crocs.
I. In addition to not helping remedy Rio’s low-income housing deficit, building the Vila do Pan required the removal of about one hundred favela houses. The reason given was that these houses were an environmental threat.
II. Later in 2012, an investigation by city council members found that Itanhangá, the golf club named in the bid, was never approached about hosting the golf tournament. A letter released to the press by the club’s president confirmed this; it also said he believed the club could have met Olympic requirements.
III. Later, the head of the city’s environmental department explained that the purpose of the environmental impact report is to investigate alternatives. As the city council and the mayor had already determined the golf course location, there was no need for a study.