Jackson shot scenes in Salvador, alongside throngs of people, accompanied by the Afro-Brazilian cultural group Olodum. “And he was-it sounds strange to say this-a normal guy.” “People were very surprised in the end, because they were expecting an extraterrestrial guy,” Silva says.

Jackson arrived by helicopter but walked the streets of Dona Marta shaking hands and distributing candy. People got up early to clean the area, they prepared for him, they took out the trash.” But Silva found a family that let her spend the night at their home and saw the favela residents washing the streets to prepare for Jackson’s arrival. When Jackson shot the video in Rio, Silva was a journalist for the daily newspaper O Globo, but Lee and his staff had banned journalists from the shoot because Dona Marta drug dealers didn’t want the attention. “The video is about the people no one cares about,” says Claudia Silva, press liaison for Rio’s office of tourism. In that context, Jackson’s choice of locale for his video made sense. “He displayed great concern for everything in the country, with poverty, with street children,” Sirena says. He’d been to the country twice before, once with the Jackson 5 in the ’70s and again in 1993, when he played two concerts in São Paulo to 100,000 people each night.Īt the time, the concert promoter Dodi Sirena recalls a “sensitive” artist who asked for an amusement park to be reserved for his use, then invited children from the poorest public schools. At the time, Brazilians, like people the world over, saw Jackson as an idol. When Jackson came to Brazil to shoot the video, directed by Spike Lee, Rio’s local government became concerned that the singer would show the world an unflattering picture of poverty. Jackson shot two videos for “They Don’t Care About Us,” the fourth single from “HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I”: one in a prison and another in Dona Marta and Salvador da Bahia, a colonial Brazilian city known for its Afro-Brazilian culture and music.

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