Here is a short version of why we were tear-gassed yesterday outside of the Maraca.
The Maracanã, a
public space of tremendous historical, cultural and architectural value, has
been successively deformed since 2000. The first deform cost around R$100
million. This was ostensibly for the FIFA World Club Championship. They put in
sky boxes which closed off the access to the stadium from the big ramps and
eliminated much of the air circulation. Plastic seats also went in. A stupid move that reduced the capacity to
129,000, but much of the stadium’s character remained.
In preparation
for the 2007 Pan American Games the state laid out another R$330 million on the
Maraca, this time grossly disfiguring it. The geral disappeared, the field was lowered, huge televisions put in
and the VIP section expanded, the capacity reduced to 89,000. At this time Brazil
knew it would be hosting the World Cup and these reforms were intended to serve
as a “legacy”. Beneficially, there was investment in the Julio Delamare aquatic
center and in the Celio de Barros athletics facility. The stadium was closed
for 20 months.
Despite being
disfigured, the Maraca still held some of its old charm. That was until 2010
when the Gigante do Derby was closed again for unspecified reforms. The initial
budget was between R$400 and R$500 million. That has since ballooned to R$1.2
billion. The aquatics center has been shuttered, the athletic track replaced by
a parking lot, the public school on the grounds is in threat of imminent
removal and the former national Indigenous Museum has been violently emptied of
its people and history. Brazil’s formerly richest man has won the rights to a 30
year concession – a competition he won after being contracted to do the
economic viability study. During the destruction process, Delta, one of Brazil’s
biggest construction firms was caught in bed with the governor and was kicked
off the project. There has never been any dialogue with anyone who wasn’t
already at the table (which is in a smoky back room inside a huge black box).
Now, instead of
a place of popular manifestation and convivial emotion, the area around the
stadium is a sterile environment, a brutally empty zone of transition between
the organic and inorganic. Inside the Zone of Exclusion, there can be no informal
commerce, no music, nothing except overwhelming police force that are there to
guarantee the safe passage of the wealthiest segments of Brazilian society into
the shopping mall environment of the stadium. Protected on the outside by the
national army, shock troops, and military police, the well-manicured are guarded
on the inside by a sense of entitlement and aloof condescension. No drinks are
available on the outside, but once in the stadium they can drink
campaign and eat caviar. Inside the stadium, there are no smells. Outside
the air is like Venus: hot, acrid and impossible to breathe. The off-world of FIFAlandia
is mirrored by a nether-world of repression.
On the outside, everyone
is a potential criminal, vandal or threat to public order. On the inside,
everyone is a walking cash machine. Outside, the right to manifest in public is
repressed and rejected. Inside, the right to public culture is manifest through
one’s capacity to pay for it. The performative spectacle of police violence on
the outside has been countered with pacific displays of social solidarity (with
some radical, fringe opportunists that trigger the police and vice versa). On
the inside, the performative spectacle of capital reproduction is manufactured,
understood and internalized by prodigious flag-wrapping, fetishization and
baleful ignorance. Both are publically financed spectacles and speak to the
rifts and ruptures that define Brazilian society.
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