In the hills of Rio de Janeiro's Complexo do Alemão stands a cable car that once ferried passengers from the favela to the city. It cut a trip that originally took hours down to just 16 minutes.
Now, it sits disused and decaying, useful only as a symbol of the massive social inequality that besets Brazil's second largest city.
Opened to much fanfare in 2011, the Teleférico was part of a massive city-wide urban renewal program launched in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics.
The 3.4-kilometre, six-station service provided much-needed public transport to the residents of some of the Brazilian city's poorest favelas.
Today, however, Rio's Teleférico is defunct, out of operation since the Olympics ended and the government withdrew its funding in 2016.
The aerial lift is a "typical Olympic ruin", according to Mariana Cavalcanti, an associate professor with the Institute of Social and Political Studies at the State University of Rio de Janeiro.
"It's not the only one," she tells ABC RN's Return Ticket.
"But it's a story that will help us understand a lot of what happened in the run-up to the Olympics here."
A divided city
Rio is famous for its postcard views, glorious beaches, beautiful people — known as Cariocas — and, of course, the party to end all parties: the annual Carnival.
"It's magnificent," says Flávia Bellieni Zimmermann, an international relations analyst at the University of Western Australia. "It's beauty and chaos."
However, Dr Cavalcanti says that's a view that only represents a "tiny portion of the city".
In reality, Rio is a city riven by inequality, a longstanding problem across Brazil.
In 2021, the richest 10 per cent of Brazilians earned 41.5 per cent of the nation's income. The poorest 20 per cent of the population earned just 3.3 per cent.
Six per cent of the Brazilian population live in favelas, informal settlements often located on the outskirts of large metropolitan areas. In Rio, one-fifth of locals reside in these neighbourhoods.
Many of Rio's favelas were connected to the electricity grid and received municipal services such as garbage collection as part of big infrastructure improvement programs in the 80s and 90s. However, many still lack essential services such as transport and sanitation.
In these poor communities, drug trafficking is rife, and hundreds of favelas are under the control of criminal gangs.
Rio's residential apartment towers, home to wealthier middle- and upper-class Cariocas, gaze across to the hillside favelas.
The effect is a juxtaposition of privilege and poverty that can be jarring, Dr Bellieni Zimmermann says.
"You are in your amazing luxurious apartment, and you have the level of sophistication and luxury you would find in Europe," he says.
"And then you look across the street, and there is this shanty town where people are living below the poverty line."
The people who live in Rio's favelas — known as favelados — tend to be non-white and working class.
"The more European looking you are, the richer you are in Brazil," Dr Bellieni Zimmermann says.
This disparity is rooted in Rio's colonial past.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries, nearly four million Africans were brought to Brazil as part of the slave trade. Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, the last nation in the Americas to do so.
"There is still this mentality of master and slave culture in Brazil," Dr Bellieni Zimmermann says.
"In the favela, you have the descendants of African slaves … [for many privileged Cariocas, the favelados] are just there to do the menial jobs that the white middle class doesn't want to do."
An urban renewal success story
Nearly 8,000 kilometres away is Medellín, Colombia, a city that shares Rio's hilly topography.
A cable car is credited with transforming Medellín's hillside barrios that were once known as no-go zones of poverty and violent crime.
The barrios — or neighbourhoods — were former strongholds of the Medellín cartel, led by notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, who drove a wave of violence throughout the 80s and 90s. In 1991, the city's murder rate peaked at 380 deaths per 100,000 people.
In response to the lawlessness in the underprivileged barrios, city authorities developed an urban renewal plan in the 90s, which featured the Metrocable as a key piece of infrastructure.
Built in the early 2000s, the cable car connected Medellín's poorest neighbourhoods to the city's metro system.
The local government took steps to ensure the project's success, conducting extensive community outreach and committing to a public investment program, promising to build schools, libraries and parks in the barrios.
The approach paid off. While the cable car did not solve all Medellín's problems, the city's barrios have seen a raft of benefits since it opened in 2004: cuts to travel time and cost, increases in land values and business activity, and a fall in crime.
Today, Medellín's murder rate has fallen to 16 deaths per 100,000 people, representing a dramatic turnaround for a city once known as the murder capital of the world.
Rio's white elephant
In 2009, the announcement that Rio had won its bid for the 2016 Olympics put favela renewal back on the national agenda in Brazil.
The Brazilian government launched a massive infrastructure program, hoping "to convey to the public that Rio was a city that would be able to host an event of the dimension of the Summer Olympics," Dr Cavalcanti says.
These large-scale infrastructure projects served a symbolic purpose, signalling to the public that "the state had taken over the favelas".
Keen to replicate the success of the Medellín Metrocable, the government announced plans to construct a cable car to service the Complexo do Alemão, a group of favelas located in Rio's North Zone.
However, while the Medellín Metrocable was developed in close consultation with the community, Rio's Teleférico was not.
Many argued the R$210 million (around A$121 million in 2011) cost to build the cable car could be better spent on other much-needed infrastructure.
"If they had gone into the favelas and asked the [people] … what they wanted, their response would have been, 'we want a sewage network'," Dr Cavalcanti says.
"But the sewage network is the complete opposite of the gondola cable car system, which is extremely visible … You can see it from the airport, you can see it from all the major expressways in the city.
"What the people wanted was something completely invisible. They wanted sewage networks. They'd already built the water distribution network. What they needed was something that would help these favelas deal with rains and floods and the drainage they needed."
While it wasn't top of the favelados' infrastructure wishlist, the Teleférico cut commuting times to the city and offered new employment opportunities to residents.
However, any benefits were short-lived. In September 2016, just one month after the Olympics ended, the consortium behind Teleférico shut it down after the government withdrew funding.
"It was all about the pictures," Dr Cavalcanti says. "Within a year, things had gone back to normal in the favela Alemão."
Today, the cable car stations lie abandoned.
"This is another failure … [that] makes people's relationship with the state in this area even more difficult," Dr Cavalcanti says.
An Olympic hangover
The Teleférico isn't Rio's only Olympics-era white elephant.
Seven years after the Olympics, which cost Brazil at least US$13.1 billion, the residents of Rio de Janeiro are yet to see the economic benefits promised to them when their city won the bid for the Games.
Many Olympics infrastructure projects remained unfinished, and others have fallen into disrepair.
Several corruption scandals have seen key figures from the Brazilian Olympic Committee jailed for bribery, vote-buying and misappropriation of funds.
However, there is some good news. In 2022, work finally started on a key pillar of the Olympic Legacy Plan: the construction of four state schools in Rio's West Zone using materials repurposed from the dismantled Handball Arena.
Dr Bellieni Zimmermann has "mixed feelings" about Rio's Olympic legacy.
"It had a lot of potential … but the living conditions of people in the favelas didn't improve. Law and order is still a major issue," she says.
The question remains, she says: "Where did the money go?"
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