Chile 2015? Yes, Chile 2015.

Are they insane?

Yesterday, or quarta feira or tomrorrow, it doesn't matter, the 2015 Copa America, Brazil, changed its name to 2015 Copa America, Chile. It won't be until 2019 when what was to have happened in 2015 actually occurs, but by then it may be too late for Brazil 2015 to have happened in the first place. Like that sentence, it doesn't make any damn sense at all.

Are we so dead that this goes unnoticed?

Here's a nutshell of events that led up to Chile 2015. That nutshell is stuck in your throat, so read quickly.

FIFA elections in 2010 pit the Havelange-Texeira clan against Blatter. Blatter, Havlelange's criado, had learned the master's game too well, using his own involvement in the ISL/FIFA scandals to twist the arms of the Brazilians, who had  thrown their lot in with Quatar's bin Hamman. Bin Hamman gets a life ban for corruption, Texeira is damaged but not out. Meanshile, his cozy assocation with Lula meant nothing to Dilma and R.T. was suddenly like a dog begging for attention after being shut out of the master's house. Without political coverage at home or in Switzerland, Texeira gets peptic as Brazil 2014 unfulrs into a three sheet shite storm. Say that five times while you're thinking: Russia 2018, Quatar 2022. Huffing and puffing, Texeira organized his pill box more than the Local Organizing Committee.  Sick, tired and longing for an endless series of injections in Miami, Texeira gets a unanimous vote of confidence form the 27 federations, supposedly with the promise that he would not resign. The next week, Ricky claims sicky, resigns from the CBF and the LOC, replacing himself with a 78 year old patsy where he could very have well done with a clown, with apologies to Ronaldo. The following week, he resigned from the FIFA Executive Committee, redeeming himself by putting a clown where he could have put a patsy. The week after, the "new" CBF president, after meeting with Texeiras friends at CONMEBOL, calmly announces that the 2015 quadrennial, already scheduled to take place in the non-World Cup cities of Goais and Belem, will not bring unending streams of tourist money, solve poverty, eradicate pollution, resolve transportation ills or cure any dangerous tendiencies to clarity of thought and action until the last year of Brazil's twinkling teens.

The official reasoning for the shift was that the interminable sequence of mega-events would interrupt the Brazilian football calendar four consecutive years. Instead of opening the possibility of a calendar reform which most commentators see  as the primary mechanism to give clubs more autonomy and reduce the deprecations of the European transfer market on Brazilian players. When there is no posibility of re-thinking, other things need to happen. When there is no accountability, no mechanism of interaction what can we reasonably hope for? Change the Brazilian football schedule and the argument for changing the Copa America disapepars, leaving this as yet another arbitrary decision that perpetuates the status quo.

No one is willing to recognize the right of the fan to have a voice in the running of fooball, or sport in general. Even Carta Capital, which published an expose on the recent change of powers at the CBF, giving some god insight into the new power players, only ever keeps the discussion at the level of institutional big-wigs. Yet, even if those possibilities were there, would people use them? In Rio, not if it's raining.

It is difficult to tell how large these shake-ups in Brazilian sport are. It may be like the 2008 financial crisis when Obama decided to restore to full health and replicate with even more nitidez the nearly collapsed banking system instead of using the moment to make meaningful reforms. It may be that some of the older thoroughly rotten fruit is falling of a tree whose roots are ever more intertwined. This tree is certainly a jaca, which may be why all of these guys look so good.

100,000 formigas to the stadium!

The Good News

I would like to write about all of the good news related to the top-down installation of mega-events but am having trouble finding any. It’s pretty clear that one has to look at the micro-level to see anything positive as the recent FIFA embarrassments were given a healthy scrubbing by the IOC. It is a sad day indeed at FIFA house when Jacque Rogge has to come across the country to give the IOC’s five fingered seal of approval. The despicable shenanigans at FIFA are nothing new. On the bright side the swirling corruption claims may have opened up a corner of the black box, potentially ushering in a call for change. On the other hand, 186 of the 208 member associations voted for Herr Blatter in the uncontested election. FIFA runs on a fear-based economy and the national associations act like sniveling sycophants.

In Rio, the installation of mega-event infrastructures is happening at various paces. The Maracanã is dead, and the process of creating the Novo Maracanã has to wait until the roof is taken off the old stadium. There’s no real hurry, as long as the stadium is ready six months before the World Cup, no one will much care. The budget for the stadium has already tripled from the initial projections in 2009. My estimate is that the Novo Maracanã project will cost 2 BILLION REAIS (US$1.25 b).

View of the deceased Maracanã from Parque Nacional da Tijuca, June 5, 2011

The average monthly salary for a fireman (bombeiro) in Rio de Janeiro state is R$950. No surprise then that the Rio Bombeiros took collective action to demand improvements in salary and working conditions. They invaded their own headquarters last week, occupying their place of work in order to negotiate with the government. The governor’s reaction: send in BOPE (the black hooded killing squad that usually invades favelas). The scenes were as lamentable as they were preventable; children getting tear gassed, police forcing public servants to the ground with machine guns, massive arrests, general jack-booted thuggery. The governor has no problem spending billions on a stadium that was already functioning but when essential public services like firemen as for a raise he sends in a death-squad.

The stories coming out of the Zona Portuaria, Jacarepaguá and the Zona Oeste are equally discouraging. The SMH, municipal housing secretary, continues to use the most incredible tactics to remove people from their houses. The stories defy belief. The jist is that the SMH, at the behest of the mayor, is denying communities the right to collectively bargain, arriving in some cases with unmarked bags of cash and handing thousands of R$ to people who may have never seen that much money before. In other cases they force children to sign documents in the name of their parents. In other cases they simply intimidate, in others they deliberately deceive and mis-represent. The asymmetry of information is complete. The very threat of forced removal is a form of terror that violates basic human rights. Even with a very powerful telescope, Jacque Rogge and the IOC couldn’t see these things happening from Mount Olympus.

The Brazilian national team is back in country for the first time in a long time, playing a series of friendlies leading up to the Copa América. There was a poor performance against Holland in Goiânia the other day. However, the Goiânians were so well behaved that the CBF promised them that they would be able to host games for the 2015 Copa America. Hold on. We are constructing 12 new stadiums for the World Cup, none of which are in Goiânia. In fact, the only reason that the seleção played there was because all of the major stadiums in Brazil are under construction. Of course the Copa América won’t be played in Manaus, Curitiba, Natal, or Cuiabá, because no one would go. Why are those cities building World Cup Stadia?

ANT-SP is organizing a protest against the CBF and their absurd and corrupt regime for the seleção’s game against Romania at the Pacaembú in São Paulo. The cheapest ticket is R$140 and for a seat it’s R$800. The game will, naturally, start after the novellas on Tuesday night at 9:50pm. So by the time the game is over the metro will have stopped and the bus service diminished. In Rio, Super Via managed to provide special trains to bring people from the Zona Sul to the Enenhão for the Paul McCartney concert last week, but insist that they can do nothing about the over-crowded, un-air-conditioned cars that sometimes make it to their final destination, much less provide special cars to get people to the Engenhão for a football match.  

As I have mentioned in innumerable posts and interviews, the installation of mega-events in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro allows for the acceleration of the deployment of neo-liberal tactics of governance. States and cities of exception produce highly territorialized and militarized spaces of exclusion where democratic and human rights are available to those who can afford them. As Mirelles (head of the Public Olympic Authority and former Central Bank head) said the other day, “the Olympics are a symbol of the growth of the country”. This is undoubtedly true. But this growth is coming at a tremendous cost and mega-events, with all of their symbolic, cultural, and poltical powers, allow us to crystallize our thinking about the kind of society we want to develop. The good thing is that the Gestapo tactics of the government are showing what Brazilian “development” is really all about. This is helping social movements across the country to articulate in ways that might not have been possible without the events. Thus, the very things that are accelerating the implementation of rapacious regimes of capital accumulation through the deployment of jack-boots and surveillance cameras is also allowing for the contestation of those systems. The bad news is that tens of thousands of people are going to lose their homes, have their communities divided and dispersed, and have their children tear-gassed in the struggle for a living wage.