Life and death at Brazil's Olympic Games.

• Author: Reichard, Lawrence

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The Olympics may be killing Isabel Ribeiro. Literally.

Ribeiro has an enlarged heart and needs surgery. But she cant get the surgery she needs, she says, because her credit was destroyed by her failure to make a lump sum payment of $20,000 for her new apartment in the Colonia Carioca housing project. The project was built on the edge of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to house 1,000 of the estimated 22,059 families displaced to make way for this summers Olympic games.

Like many who have been displaced by the Olympics' construction projects, Ribeiro never wanted to leave her home in the first place. She was forcibly evicted and relocated to new housing, which, she says, government officials told her would be free. Now the Brazilian national health-care system wont do the operation because she doesn't pay her bills, and she can't borrow money to have the operation done privately because of her ruined credit.

The government describes the program as a "key swap"--your old house key for your new house key. But it hasn't worked out that way. First Ribeiro received demand letters from the Banco do Brasil, Latin America's biggest bank. Then came the texts, which are still coming. Ten to twelve on an average day, at all hours. Standing in front of her Block Four home, Ribeiro shows me the texts on her cell phone. They go on and on, screen after screen, demanding that she pay.

It gets worse. Ribeiro had a sewing business. But with her poor credit, she was unable to buy inventory and had to close up shop. When I met her in May, she was getting by without the income from her business by relying on the kindness of others. In early June, she wrote to me saying that her power and gas were shut off.

Colonia Carioca is full of former residents of Rios famous favelas who were forced from their now destroyed homes to make way for Olympics-related construction projects and who are also receiving similar demands for payment on what they believed would be free housing. Julia Oliveira, the housing project's block manager, tells me that none of the 1,000 families in Carioca have made payments. "They simply don't have the means," Oliveira says from behind the desk in her office.

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According to Oliveira, who hails from Ipadu, the same favela as Ribeiro, most Colonia Carioca residents never wanted to live there in the first place. "There was a sense of community in Ipadu," Oliveira says. "We were free. There was music and barbecues in the street." In a country whose streets are alive with social interaction, Colonia Carioca residents now live behind chain-link fences where visitors have to call inside to get access.

Others in Rio have managed to stay where they are, for better or worse.

Daniel Ferreira lives in the Vila Uniao favela, about a twenty-five minute walk from Colonia Carioca. His house, like...