Manoel Ribeiro has never known a world without Rio de Janeiro’s best-known flea market, the Feira de Acari.
The swarming suburban bazaar was founded outside his home in 1970, the year of his birth. It existed in 1993 when the market trader was shot nearby during an armed robbery and lost the use of his legs.
And, until last month, it continued to thrive – a Sunday institution famed for its suspiciously low prices and immortalised in songs by celebrated Brazilian musicians. “The Feira de Acari is a success. It has everything. It’s a mystery,” the singer-songwriter Jorge Ben Jor sang in one hit.
If Derek “Del Boy” Trotter – the fictional wheeler-dealer from the British comedy Only Fools and Horses – had been born in Rio, it would have been here that he plied his trade.
But as dawn broke two weeks ago, the Acari street market was nowhere to be seen after Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, ordered a sudden end to its half-century existence.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Ribeiro, 53, as he drove his motorised wheelchair to the market where he has worked for over 40 years.
Instead of wooden stalls stacked with merchandise and secondhand clothes, Ribeiro found dozens of police officers and guards carrying riot guns and rifles. The canine unit had deployed two Belgian shepherd dogs to keep angry traders at bay.
City hall justifies the clampdown by claiming gangsters had commandeered the market, using it to peddle stolen goods. “The market was known as ‘robauto’ [auto-theft],” said Rio’s public order secretary, Brenno Carnevale, a former police chief tasked with shutting it down.
Acari’s market earned that nickname decades ago thanks to a booming trade in stolen car parts. But Carnevale claimed car tyres and tailgates were not the only things on offer. Gangs of cargo thieves had long operated in the area, hijacking lorries transporting household appliances, clothes and medicine and reselling the goods at the market or distributing them to nearby favelas.
“Unfortunately, 30% of all cargo thefts in Brazil are concentrated here in Rio right now,” said Carnevale, who added that he had seen the deadly consequences of such robberies while serving in the homicide squad. Animal traffickers also allegedly used the market: one man was caught selling an orange-beaked toucan for 6,000 reals (£955).
Carnevale acknowledged that not all traders were involved in crime and that many depended on the market to survive. The region is home to three of Rio’s largest favelas – Chapadão, Acari and the Morro da Pedreira – and suffers some of the city’s lowest life expectancy levels.
Acari’s traders are seething at the closure and, as they see it, their branding as crooks.
“So many decent people work here. It’s not like they say that this is just drug traffickers and thieves,” said Ribeiro, who sells cut-price air fryers, popcorn makers and fans “with a few minor defects”.
“If there are people up to no good here, nicking things, I can tell you with absolute certainty it’s 5%.”
Luciana Rodrigues, a 49-year-old underwear saleswoman, was also incensed. “They should separate the wheat from the chaff but that’s not what they’re doing. They’re treating us all as thieves,” said Rodrigues, who lives in Pedreira, a hilltop favela overlooking the mile-long market.
Sérgio Luís Lopes da Silva, a 55-year-old lightbulb vendor, said Acari’s market – where he works with his son – was precisely the thing preventing the teenager falling into crime. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop – I learned that from my parents up north,” said Silva, also crediting the market with helping him escape poverty after he migrated to Rio in 1986 from Brazil’s less-developed north-east. “I came on the back of a livestock truck. Today, I have a home to live in and a car to drive,” Silva said.
Other traders hailed the marketplace – which was also memorialised by Brazil’s most famous living sambista, Zeca Pagodinho – as a cultural treasure. “Culturally speaking, this is such a rich place,” said Aline Santos, a 39-year-old chocolate vendor.
“You can find antiques, books, CDs. There’s something here for everyone,” Santos added as protesting traders gathered at the shuttered market with posters denouncing the government’s move. “SOS Acari,” read one.
As proof that her products had not fallen off the back of a lorry, Santos had taped 18 receipts to her poster showing they were legally purchased from a wholesaler. “We aren’t delinquents and we’re here to prove it,” she declared as the group proceeded through the defunct market to the sound of a funk track celebrating its bargain-basement prices.
The Feira de Acari has faced eradication before. In 1994, hundreds of troops besieged the area after a similar mayoral decree. Ribeiro remembers helicopters swooping over Acari’s rooftops as the cinematic crackdown unfolded.
Authorities detained more than 100 people and proclaimed their mission accomplished. “The Acari market is extinct,” one government mandarin told the Jornal do Brasil. He was wrong. After a few months lying low, traders returned and Acari’s market was reborn, attracting thousands of bargain hunters each week.
Carnevale insisted that this time would be different but admitted that enforcing the prohibition was a major challenge. “It’s the challenge every winner faces – not how to win but how to ensure you keep winning.”
Acari’s jobless traders hope he will fail. The market’s closure came as the region was still reeling from deadly floods that were partly blamed on climate change. Ribeiro lost 5,000 reals’ worth of merchandise when rain caused the Acari river to overflow, engulfing his delivery vehicle and home. “This whole area turned into the sea,” he said “I lost everything.”
As he surveyed his deserted market, he lamented its downfall but wagered that it would eventually return. “My whole life I’ve made a living off this market. To see it snatched away just like that, it’s as if you’d worked for a company and one day were just sacked on the spot.”
Further up the road towards the favela, protesters had hung a banner by the roadside where customers once haggled. “Acari weeps,” it said.
