For all the failures of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, the decade leading up to the Games has unintentionally left at least one positive legacy in the host city, particularly in its favelas, where residents like Raull Santiago have a voice in a way they never did before.
A recently released study by Rio-based NGO by Catalytic Communities found that coverage of the city's favelas in eight major global news sources increased drastically during Rio's Olympic cycle, from 45 total articles mentioning favelas in 2009, when Rio was named the host city, to 315 in the year leading up to the Olympics. Favelas were increasingly the main subject of those articles. Furthermore, by 2016 favela residents were directly quoted in 16 times as many articles as they had been in 2009. The coverage also became more nuanced, with less emphasis on violence and drugs and more on favelas having a strong sense of community and its residents being active agents of change.
In 2014, inspired by the changing conditions in their hometown, Santiago and several other residents of Complexo de Alemão, a favela in Rio's north zone, formed a local media collective called Coletivo Papo Reto. Although it's a young group, Santiago told me its founding members were all activists prior to that. Upon formation, they hit the ground running. Papo Reto documented everything, putting it on social media for the world to see. And there was much to report.
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