For original post in Portuguese on Comitê Popular do Rio click here.
After Rio’s City government asked Google to reduce the presence of favelas on the map of Rio de Janeiro, the word “favela” was practically eliminated from the map, replaced by “morro,” or hill. Some communities simply vanished. The image above compares an area of Rio Comprido in 2011 and 2013.
The virtual removals are part of the city’s plans to make poverty and the poor invisible, in the virtual realm as well as in the real world, with forced evictions.