Tchau Vasco

I became Vasco when researching Temples of the Earthbound Gods. In the 1910s and 1920s, Vasco fought the elite clubs of Rio so that the working class, illiterate and sub-altern could play football and receive something for their labors. The all-white clubs of Botafogo, Flamengo, America and Fluminense did not have to pay their players because they were daddy’s boys exercising their right to exercise vigorously. They had sponsors but instead of wearing the names of companies on their shirts, they carried their wealth in their names and residential addresses. The smaller teams from the suburbs paid their players a bicho, an animal, sometimes a leg of a cow, or a chicken, or some eggs – something to pay them back for the energy and time expended on the field of play. This was unacceptable to the nascent Rio football federation which disguised its racism and classism behind statutes of amateurism.

When Vasco won the second division in 1922, the big four of the time decided that they wouldn’t play against the blacks, mulattos, Portuguese and poor whites from São Cristóvão, forming a separate league that lasted for TEN YEARS. This apartheid system was only resolved with full professionalization in 1933, six years after Vasco had built a monument to its project of social inclusion, the São Januário. Vasco’s role in opening football to all social classes, the beauty and symbolic power of the stadium and a wealth of other non-rational reasons made me Vasco. That’s over.

I have long argued that if there is going to be any meaningful change to and in the world of football, we have to start understanding the acts of fandom as political. Putting on a team jersey is never neutral but rather an incorporation of one’s self into a larger community, a larger historical trajectory, a complex of actors and agents that are invariably connected to political economies and urban spaces that make one sleepy imagining their extent and intricacy. Nonetheless, they exist.  I would never, ever pull on a shirt that had the letters CBF (the Brazilian football confederation) on it because of all of the reasons I have explained ad nauseam in these pages. If there are to be political consequences that result from our individual actions, football is a fine place to start thinking more deeply.

São Januário loses his head. It appears not much has changed.

The report that Vasco has maintained a secret training ground where its young, poor, semi-literate players are kept in conditions of slavery, with the full knowledge and consent of the board of directors, after a year of negotiation with public prosecutors after a 14-year old boy from Minas Gerais died because there was no medical staff on site…it makes me sick. 

Vasco has turned away from everything that it stood for while at the same time using the words “inclusion” and “democracy” to promote their brand on a uniform. In short, Vasco is selling its history as a hollow commodity while at the same time exploiting the very people this history pretends to connect with. I repeat: Vasco was trying to hide their “slave-like” training camp for more than a year after one of their youth players died from the conditions at a different site. The board of directors smiles and struts around repeating the old mantras while marching to the drum of maximum exploitation.

We know that Vasco is not the only Brazilian team that engages in these kinds of practices. Brazilian teams make 28% of their profits from the sale of players, most of them never play a full professional season in their native land. The global political economy of football begins with the pipe-dream of becoming Dani Alves or Ronaldinho Gaucho, passes hopefully through concentration camps where swarms of piranha-like agents and coaches break and bend Brazilian adolescents to be fit for export while neglecting human rights and individual dignity. When those unpaid, ill-treated adolescents do actually break, or don’t bend enough, they are discarded on the scrapheap where tens of thousands just like them squirm and cry, their young lives already wrecked by the impossibility of their own dream that may not have even been theirs to begin with. 

We prop up these dreams every time we pull on that shirt.

I am saddened, horrified and angered.

I am not this Vasco.

I reject this club.

.

Shame on Vasco

From the Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO - Vasco da Gama has been ordered by a juvenile justice judge to immediately suspend activities at its youth training facilities because an investigation found teenage footballers were living in "slave-like" conditions.

Judge Ivone Ferreira Caetana issued the ruling on Wednesday in response to charges by state prosecutors who have been looking into conditions at the club's main youth facilities in Sao Januario since 2009.

It was only in February, after a 14-year-old boy died while trying out in Itaguai, a more remote training centre, that investigators even learned of the existence of that facility, which housed dozens of boys aged from 13 to 17.

Since then, they've learned there were no doctors available on site when the boy, Wendel Venancio da Silva, died.

In an investigation since then, prosecutors found the boys were lodged in deplorable conditions and not fed enough as they were pushed through a grueling routine that left them with little time for school, said main prosecutor Clisanger Ferreira Goncalves in a statement.

In addition to denouncing the teenagers' poor housing and nutrition and their strenuous schedule, prosecutors also charged the club with transporting the teenagers in an unsafe vehicle, failing to provide them with medical care, and exposing them to unsanitary facilities.

"The decision was made to safeguard the most fundamental rights of dozens of the teenagers, aged 13 through 17, who are being violently disrespected by the club," the judge said. "The conditions these children are exposed to are slave-like."

Calls and an email requesting comment from Vasco got no response.

As of Thursday, Vasco had five days to start improving the situation. If the judge's orders are not followed within 30 days, the club faces a fine of $16,000 a day.

In the meantime, the club is prohibited from using the facilities at Itaguai for training or housing young players.

The judge ruled that youths should eat with the professional players, and be trained at Sao Januario, where the facilities were better but needed to be fixed in five days. The problems at Sao Januario include dorm rooms without ventilation, old and torn mattresses, and water rationing.

About 20 teenagers are from other states and have difficulty seeing their families because the club won't pay for their transportation. This also must be changed, the court said.

Prosecutor Goncalves has been involved with the investigation of Sao Januario for three years. She spent the last year negotiating terms of improvement with the club in meetings often attended by the president, Roberto Dinamite.

She thought the club had agreed to improve conditions when 14-year-old Silva died at the Itaguai site, which had never been disclosed to prosecutors.

"The conditions at the Sao Januario training centre were not ideal, but we made suggestions and thought they were being followed," she said in a statement. "But they were lying, and using the Itaguai site. What we found there is an affront to the basic rights of children and teenagers."

Exploitation of young players with dreams of making it big was a common phenomenon in Brazil, but one that's never been addressed by FIFA or by the clubs that benefit from the sales of these young players, said Christopher Gaffney, a Brazil-based academic who has written about local football.

"The economy of football depends on unpaid adolescent labour," Gaffney said. "This is a global phenomenon that the Brazilian clubs exploit to their advantage."

Other big clubs in Rio are also under scrutiny, prosecutors said.

Flamengo was facing an investigation after a 14-year-old hurt himself within their facilities. Botafogo and Fluminense are faced administrative inquiries into the conditions of their youth training centres.

In five days, a team of social workers, psychologists and law enforcement officials will visit Vasco's training grounds to check on progress.

Sei la, mil coisas

As usual, a million things happening and no time to cover them all.

First, as predicted the non-transparent fat cats at the CBF and CONMEBOL danced around some chairs and put Ricardo Texeira’s allies in positions of power. The following week, FIFA welcomed the president of the São Paulo football federation as the new CONMEBOL representative and the Brazilian football clubs gave a vote of confidence to the 78 year old Jose Marin as head of the CBF. Football directors in Brazil are born without spinal cords. 

The same week there was a predictable and avoidable conflict between Corinthians and Palmeiras fans in São Paulo. Before the season began all the torcidas organizadas of São Paulo sat down with the Military Police to indicate parts of the city that were most likely to see fighting or conflict. The idea was that policing would be re-enforced in those areas. However, because it behooves the police to have violence in order to guarantee overtime, the fans were pushed into those very same areas and conflict ensued, duh. So not only are the police frequently the most violent actors, they also stimulate and encourage violence. Then the media jumps all over the fans for being violent. Watching the videos from the stadium it's clear that the police are the agitators. 

Brazil suffers from an irony deficiency.

At the same time in Rio, a bunch of septuagenarian, crusty old bastards who apparently liked the firm hand of the military crushing dissent, homosexuality, and freedom of expression  gathered at the Club Militar in the center of Rio de Janeiro to, get this, celebrate the anniversary of the 1964 military coup!!!!! The Military Police were, of course and as is their wont, spraying pepper at protester and passer-by while heavily-pensioned, slack-jawed torturers were able to celebrate their former actions with total impunity! This in a country whose president was arrested and tortured by military dictatorship! Imagine Obama saying nothing about a major rally to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the Confederacy and all that socio-political-economic system implied. I wonder what João Havelange thought about all of this. Probably oatmeal.

The spate of recent articles trickling down from the north about how wonderful all of this investment is going to be for Rio are based on visions of the world that have nothing to do with the realities on the ground or an understanding of the paucity of planning and respect for human rights in Rio de Janeiro. This continues to be a very violent culture that is at the same time hyper-passive politically. The more one looks into the World Cup and the Olympics from the perspective of urban functionality, opportunity costs, and efficient use of scarce resources the more one cannot believe that people who should know better, don’t.

But wait, perhaps it is not in the interests of politicians and their friends in the civil construction and real-estate businesses to know better. Corruption is rampant, politicians are tied to multi-billion dollar interests and democratic institutions are weak. Half of Rio de Janerio isn’t even under the control of the state! Where the state has gone in to try to establish a new order, such as in Rocinha, they can’t control the explosion of violence that results. In two months there have been nine recorded murders in Rocinha, including the head of one of the resident’s associations an yesterday a member of the Military Police. This is in addition to the uncounted knifing deaths whose vicitms have been thrown in the forest. To make matters even more whatever the PM commanders have decided that all, all new PM recruits will do their training in Rocinha! Come on, using a neighborhood of 100,000 people as a training ground for new recruits while that neighborhood is in the middle of a massive socio-political-economic restructuring and is clearly going through a wave of gang-style murders? Fala sério.

The discussion about Rio’s Olympic Era in the New York Times was excellent as a way of highlighting the differences in perspective. Theresa Williamson set up her ducks and knocked them nicely down while the risk management specialist blew holes in his own argument (see my comments on the site and please contribute). There is no justification for these events, it’s all gone wrong by design, the most we can hope for is damage mitigation while the rich get fantastically richer, the middle class gets pushed out of the city  and those who rent anywhere are squeezed by micro and macro-economic forces that roam the land like angry Greek gods. Maybe as the days get shorter I start to lose my optimism, but barring any evidence to the contrary...

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!

Going, going, nearly gone

There have been some big shakeups in the world of Brazilian football and more are about to happen. Today, or yesterday, it doesn’t matter, Ricardo Texeira, Mr. Jowls, Sickly Ricky, resigned from his post on the FIFA executive council. FIFA says they want an “immediate replacement”, ostensibly before anyone can notice that R.T. will be replaced with someone just like him, only healthier.

Grondona, a virile physical specimen

Nice medal, but who ate all the pies?

CONMEBOL, the South American football confederation, has three members on the FIFA executive committee. The remaining two are old school gangsters – Nicolás Leoz, a Paraguayan strongman, and Julio Grondona an Argentine snake in the grass. Both have been in power since the 19^th century and are long overdue for one way tickets to Miami via Devil's Island. That nothing ever changes in South American football while the quality of play is detonated by the export of the best talent to Europe should concern the continent’s sporting press. The only voices in the shiny, happy wilderness of increased consumer consumption continue to come from the good lads at ESPN Brasil. I keep wondering how much longer it will take for ESPN’s parent company, Disney/ABC, to figure out that their mouse ears are being continually tweaked by Júlio Cruz and Juca Kufuri.

On a lighter note, João Havelange has been hospitalized with what appears to be a serious infection. Incredibly, unbelievably, yet predictably, I received an email yesterday citing this criminal mastermind for the Nobel Peace Prize!!! Havelange’s family fortune came from made millions dealing arms between Belgium and Brazil and then from building bus companies. Havelange coddled dictators and murderers throughout his career always asserting, “I don’t do politics I do sport.” He was cozy with the military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay and was constantly re-elected to the top spot of FIFA by greasing the palms of Asian and African dictators. Since 1974 he has been pulling the strings at FIFA. Blatter is his creation. Sickly Ricky was his son-in-law.

When the 96 yr old Havelange shuffles off this mortal coil in the next days or weeks, it’s only a matter of time, get ready for a white-washed version of his “grand contribution” to global sport. Nobel Peace Prize, indeed! The man should be tried at the Hague! Nuzman, head of the Brazilian Olympic Committee and Rio 2016, went to kneel at his bedside yesterday, like a loyal godson gathering a few more pearls of raspy-throated wisdom. I am going to make myself preemptively sick so that I can pick up the obituaries with something approximating calm.

Was it something they ate? Go get 'em Andrew!!!!!

This may be the physical end of the Havlange-Texeira era but their legacies have created a scoliosis-ridden sporting body that will take the rest of us decades to correct. All it will take to rub the shine off these Teflon-coated gangsters is the release of those Swiss court documents that chronicle the extent and depth of the corruption scandals that these two were involved in.

For those of you that missed it, Romário, the former world player of the year and now state deputy for Rio said that Texeria’s removal from positions of authority at the CBF was akin to “removing a cancer from Brazilian football.” Touché, my good deputy.

Texeria Fora! E Daí?

Yesterday, an axe fell on the head of the serpent. Ricardo Texeira, the president of the Brazilian Footbal Confederation (CBF) for 26 years resigned less than a week after he was given a unanimous vote of confidence by Brazil’s 27 state football federations. Texeira came to power by virtue of his marriage to the daughter of João Havelange, president of FIFA from 1974-1998. The old man was probably controlling most of the big decisions of little Ricky but then he too came up against corruption charges and was forced to resign his position at the IOC a few months ago. Two of the biggest names in Brazilian sport have fallen in the past three months. What this means is unclear as João H. is still held in absurdly high esteem and R.T. is bound for the land of fugitive Latin American criminals, Florida.

We have Andrew Jennings to thank for much of these developments. Andrew has been tireless in his investigations into FIFA corruption. Once he started pulling on some threads it wasn’t long before he found the Havelange-Texeira clan knee-deep in merda. We can also point to petitions circulated by the Associação Nacional dos Torcedores e Torcedoras (ANT, www.torcedores.org.br), which called for the head of Texeira throughout 2010, collecting thousands of signatures. The combination of rigorous investigative journalism and civil society activism is powerful – let’s hope that the documents being released by the Comitês Populares in Brazil will have similar effects on the abusive and opaque reign of Carlos Nuzman at Rio 2016 and the Brazilian Olympic Committee.

The loss of Texeira will not, unfortunately, change much about the fundamental structure of the World Cup. His daughter, Joanna Havelange, is the Secretary General of Brazil 2014. Her qualifications for this job were the same as her dad's, none. The rest of the executives for the World Cup are the same people that helped stuff the workings of the CBF inside a black box for so many years. It is important to remember that just last week Sickly Ricky received a unanimous vote of confidence. This allowed him the chance to maintain the power structure through the next CBF election. The acting president of the CBF is 78 years old and recently stole a winner’s medal at a juniors' tournament. The Brazil 2014 Local Organizing Committee has no president yet, but Ronaldo Fenômeno will likely step into that role as a figurehead.

This is a chance to start pulling on even more threads, unraveling the Indonesian-stitched fabric of Brazil’s canary-yellow shirt. I do not have much confidence that the Brazilian media will do this as they are focused on the serpent’s head lying on the ground as the rest of the snake slithers back into its hole to shake off the hangover. This saga has long felt like something out of The Open Veins of Latin America: occasionally a coronel gets shot in his office, but the power structure remains the same. As the Minister of Sport showed the other day, even when the Communists get into positions of power, nothing much changes. 

Fala sério Ministro!!!!

Politicians are slippery creatures, difficult to pin down. They never respond directly to questions and wrap their flowery vision of an unerring government in a tortured phraseology that makes a Gordian knot out of a shoelace. That they do this intentionally is no surprise, it’s part of their job. But when Aldo Rebelo, the Minster of Sport, one of the elder statesmen of the Brazilian Communist Party (CPdoB), and a former radical leader of the 1970s student movement said, without laughing, “There are no forced removals in Brazil”, he urinated on the smoldering embers of my optimismo.

The quote came during a press conference for foreign journalists in Rio in response to a question regarding the thousands of forced removals underway. In Rio alone, according to a document about to be released by the Comitê Popular da Copa e as Olimpíadas, 6,715 families have already been removed or are soon to be. This was also highlighted in Simon Romero's New York Times article last week. The number in Brazil is many times more. As many as 30,000 people in Rio will be directly removed as a result of the public works underway. Let us be clear: it is normal to remove homes and businesses for large urban projects. It is not normal to spraypaint houses marked for demolition, deliberately mis-inform, grossly underpay for the value of homes, act without legal recourse, and destroy homes before having reasonable and dignified alternatives. The idiocy of the infrastructure projects I will have to leave for another post. If there are no forced removals in Brazil, Rebelo’s definition  is the equivalent to Kristallnacht, an unacceptably low standard.

We should also not accept that our public officials utter the boldest of apologies for policies that are clearly intended to stuff private coffers at public expense. When asked to give an estimate of the cost of the World Cup, Rebelo replied: “We are not spending money on the World Cup, but rather investing in our cities.” Right, pull the other one. He obliged: “There are no social costs associated with the World Cup”. Please, Excelentíssimo, don’t pull any harder, it hurts.

When asked whether or not the Brazilian government had any programs in place to guarantee access to the new stadia following the World Cup, Rebelo started talking about the “colonialist attitude” of European teams that set up base camps in Brazil and drain off talented young boys to Europe. I don’t know of any European clubs that have done this in Brazil (there are innumerable cases in West Africa) and the fact is that they do not need to because the clubs and the CBF are all too happy to continue their obscure, amateurish and export orientated practices. Brazilian teams gain 28% of their operating budgets from player sales and only 11% from ticket sales. Ticket prices have increased more than 70% in the last five years while average attendance has declined by 16% and profits increased by 47%. The clubs are making more money out of fewer people, eliminating the lower classes from active participation in football (except as the paid clowns) and the government is turning the stadiums into theaters. Soon, watching a football game in Brazil will be like watching the NBA: rich whites in the seats, poor black and brown on the pitch. The CBF used to post a list of transfers and returns on its site but likely recognized the dangers of releasing this kind of information.

OGlobo is Rio’s local paper. It’s an embarrassment to journalism but is considered the pinnacle of everything in this provincial town. With a lower circulation than Toronto’s daily papers and a long history of sucking up to power, OGlobo can’t and won't criticize the World Cup. This is especially true given that they have just purchased the broadcast rights for 2018 and 2022. Contrary to the practices of the IOC, FIFA wrote me saying that they “do not divulge the value of their television contracts”. If you’ll forgive the scatology, this is a steamy, non-transparent pile of cocô. 

Is there no sense of irony whatsoever within the Brazilian media? I have never been around so many sniveling sycophants. They appear to only be interested in the tele-novela that is the spitting match between FIFA and the Brazilian government. At the second presser of the day six government apologists lined up to not answer questions about nothing. They sat in front of two photos: one of the Vasco torcida in the Maracanã and one of the Framengo torcida. These huge photos were taken in the old Maracanã: thousands of people standing close together, waving huge flags, homemade signs, hands in the air, fireworks, songs, chants, emoção.

As Ícaro Moreno and Márcia Lins were talking about the “progress” being made in killing the Maracanã and state vice-president Pesão talked about the new lines of finance obtained from BNDES and the International Development Bank, was no one in the Brazilian press able to recognize that the pictures that framed the scene would likely never again occur? Brazilian football culture is being killed by the very institutions meant to protect it. The only thing that (apparently) matters to the Brazilian media is fofoca (gossip), which makes for some righteous indignation about the arrogance of FIFA and some pathetic he-said she-said stories but doesn’t scratch the surface of the cruel reality that is Brazil 2014.

Finally, regarding my suggestion that the Brazilian government nationalize the CBF, Rebelo said that it was legally impossible and that he “complies with the law”. This was said as if the law came before legislators and as if the Law of the Cup weren’t explicitly designed to get around all of the laws that would make more difficult FIFA’s task of sticking their rapacious proboscis into Brazil. The power structure of the CBF needs to be dismantled. The government can do this. Sickly Ricky has gone on a leave of absence from the CBF, leaving in charge the man who stole a winner’s medal from a junior’s tournament. Mr. Jowls is still at the head of the Local Organizing Committee, which may be an indication of the demands of the job.

The Law of the Cup will go to a vote this week, analysis to follow.

Kicks in the Arse

Last week, Jerome Valcke finally said what we know to be true regarding Brazil’s World Cup preparations – “they need a kick in the ass”. Nonplussed, the Minister of Sport replied that the Brazilian government would no longer deal with Mr. Valcke as an interlocutor. Irritated, Valcke called the Brazilian reaction “puerile” adding that Brazil appeared to be more interested in winning the world cup than hosting it. Sadly for the Brazilians, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of that either.

At the same time, the CBF gathered together the whimpering dogs of the 26 state football federations at the feet of Ricardo Teixeira. Tricky Ricky left the meeting with his power intact. Faced with allegations of international money laundering, receiving bribes, and other malfeasances, Mr. Jowls has an amazing ability to hold on to the reigns of Brazilian football. Let’s not forget that this is the first time that the president of a national football federation is also the president of the World Cup organizing committee. How Teixeira has kept afloat is beyond me.

During Lula’s good-ol-boy government, Teixeira had some solid political coverage. Dilma has changed things somewhat, refusing to meet with him. The president of FIFA has worked to distance himself from this dough-faced dandy leaving a politically isolated figure that somehow convinced the presidents of Brazil’s federations to prop him up through 2014. As I mentioned a post or two ago, I think that FIFA was waiting to see what happened in this meeting to determine what they were going to do with the documents from the ISL money-laundering case. Does FIFA delay releasing the ISL documents in order to preserve the World Cup in Brazil as they look for plan B?

No one has ultimate responsibility for anything related to the 2014 World Cup but that does not mean there aren’t things that need to be done. FIFA cannot be wholly blamed for the stadium cost overruns or transportation projects or the choice of 12 cities across a continent with shoddy airports and no ground transportation. They have a series of demands that they “need” met in order to extract the maximum amount of money in the shortest time frame. FIFA is a pimp for global capital interests, using the World Cup as the emotionally charged smack that blinds us to the accumulation of power and profit. The Brazilian government (at all levels) has used the World Cup preparations as a nominal way to “improve” cities but has repeatedly stepped on the ball in all the ways that I have documented over the last few years. Rio de Janeiro could not, today, handle the World Cup. Other than the completion of the destructive destruction of the Maracanã will that much really change?

With all of this infantile bickering, instead of focusing on the 12 White Elephants, forced removals, idiotic transportation projects, unnecessary hotels, the lack of inter-city transport, the privatization of airports, security, public space, and the massive transfer of public wealth, the media can pay attention to whether or not beer should be allowed in the stadiums or split hairs about whether or not 20,000 indigenous people will be able to watch South Korea x. Slovakia in Manaus. The issues really have nothing to do with Brazil’s ability to build stadia or media centers or airports, but what kind of society is being constructed, how, and for whom.

From a logistical perspective, FIFA is rightly chafed about the delays in everything. This process began four and a half years ago and the legal foundation is still being poured. The Brazilian government is overreacting to FIFA, launching bombast when a more sober consideration of real issues would help. There are major and massive issues to be resolved. Without the legal framework in place, there is nothing that FIFA can do. Without a working relationship between FIFA, the Local Organizing Committee, and the three levels of Brazilian government, this month long party won’t happen. The government isn’t talking to their partners and the communication between FIFA and the CBF/LOC is fractious. I am sure that Valcke and Blatter have thought on more than one occasion: USA 2014. 

Balanço do Carnaval

Balanço do Carnaval

This was my second Carnaval experience in Rio. Much like the first, it changed the way I think about the city and about the possibilities of Carnaval to change space and the social order. The spatial element is easier, so let’s begin there.

I went to the Volta Alice bloco in Laranjeiras at 9am on Sunday meeting two friends. Volta Alice has a double meaning as the bloco does a Volta up the Rua Alice, a narrow passage up towards Santa Teresa and it also means come back, which it does every year. Thousands of people crammed into the narrow street, shuffling forward behind a massive samba-blasting beer can. Not a bloco to bring parents to, Volta Alice is a forward-moving mosh pit. Moving from side to side was only slightly less difficult than back to front. Retreating to the back would have taken about 10 minutes though tightly crammed and increasingly drunk, though always friendly revelers. It was hot and sweaty. When the beer can stopped rolling, the crowd’s density increased. By 10am beer had become a possibility, by 10:30 inevitable.

It was within this context that an ambulance doggedly tried to push through the bloco. Driving this rather impoverished looking conveyance was an elderly gentleman who insisted that he get up the hill to get to work. In the passenger seat, a woman on the phone chatted lightly. There was clearly no medical emergency underway though it seemed as if there would be soon. The bellowing fumes of exhaust poisoned revelers even faster than they could do it to themselves. The license plate was from São Paulo, the way clearly lost. Was there no police control at the entrance to Rua Alice? Why was this siren blasting in the middle of this sweaty, slowly moving wave? C’mon…

These otherwise excellent hats from Belo Horizonte were a poor option for a dense crowd.

People do love to cram together in sweaty lumps of flesh in Rio de Janeiro. I felt badly when my sweaty arm or back slathered those near me. I stepped on dozens of feet, knocked over a beer or two, and bumped roughly into well-muscled, chest-hairless Cariocas. I was one more beer-fueled, sun-soaked biped in a pulsing mass that I could not see the beginning or end of.  This is fun until the herd tries to take the same public transportation system or there is any kind of emergency.

Sargento Pimento is the Portuguese translation of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper. Last year this bloco was a disaster because so many people tried to cram in the small side streets of Botafogo and no one could even get close to the music. This year the good Sergeant was moved to the Aterro do Flamengo and it was still a disaster.

The sound car was terrible, you had to be within 100 meters to hear anything. I talked with a professional stage hand who said he was “embarrassed for them”.

The cell system crashed. With that many people trying to find each other there were probably 100,000 SMS messages a minute bouncing around. None of them made it to their intended destination. Thousands never met up with their friends.

Though I didn’t see it myself, the anecdotal reports from the end of Sargento Pimento were that the Gloria and Catete metro stations were utter chaos. If something went wrong, a fight, heart attack, birth, not as many people would be singing Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds next year.  How many people gave each other nerbvous looks, thinking, “Imagina a Copa…” Imagine what this will be like in 2014. Let’s hope the emergency systems aren’t tied to the cell towers?

We clearly need to figure out a better method for measuring crowds, but there were certainly as many as 40,000 and perhaps as many as 90,000 (my guesses) at the bloco (any suggestions on crowd counting techniques welcome). Imagine a stadium full of people emptying all at once into two metro stations that run along one line and most of those people heading south. That’s the situation that unfolded after Sargento Pimenta.

I heard at a debate earlier this year, “Praia não tem catraca.” The beach doesn’t have a turnstile. This means that it’s impossible to control access to Rio’s major public spaces. When you invite millions and they come, you need to be ready to handle it. We’re a long way from that in Rio.

It’s clear that Rio Metrô is not a mega-system. On Monday night as we went to the Sambodrômo via Metrô, there was only one attendant at the Flamengo station and both of the automatic tellers for recharging the metro card were broken. The Metrô is a scandal disguised as a model of successful, privatized urban governance.

There was a sophomoric element to this year’s Carnaval. The tv and radio campaigns to stop people peeing in the street were backed up with more toilets. The arrests for peeing in the street seem stupid, but they did allow for guys to shout “Polícia!” at their friends. Funny the first time.

Despite the lack of traffic control at Volta Alice, there was a greater police presence this year than last. I didn’t really notice them too much when I wasn’t looking for them. Relative to the policing tactics that I have seen in Austin, Texas this is a pretty hands-off approach. When the hands get you though, it’s not good. Why arrest people for peeing? Can’t you write them tickets? Perhaps because there’s no ticket to give, the cops aren’t there to bust people, they’re there to make sure there’s a limit to the possibilities of Carnaval. OGlobo seemed to take a perverse delight in showing the effectinve policing tactics of the police by reporting on how many people were arrested per day for peeing in the street. While peeing strategies are essential for making it through the party, reporting pee-arrests as front page news should also come with a criminal penalty.

Carnaval confuses, confounds and delights in many of the same ways that the city does. The party is stretched out over two weeks, marking the end of summer and the official beginning of the year. It’s seemingly endless, overwhelmingly large, too much to take in. It seems both too near and too far any to get any focus on. Millions are in their neighborhoods dancing and singing where they usually work, go shopping, sit in traffic. There is an apparent liberty of expression that is both constrained and amplified. Rio’s aggressive sexuality is validated, making public life even more uncomfortable for women. The social production of fantasy takes physical form on women's bodies who do incredible things to (butt and bust implants, bigger thighs than footballers) and with their bodies; girls imitate their elders. 

There is a common sentiment that nothing gets done between xmas and Carnaval, but this isn’t really true. People work their asses off to make the party happen. There are tens of thousands of beer vendors, making their investment back R$1 at a time, lugging ice through crowds, pushing heavy carts, and negotiating with drunks.  I don’t know how to estimate the number of aluminum cans consumed, but it is surely in the tens of millions. Plastic bottles? Sustainable tourism? Overload of sewage systems? Who cleans all this mess up? Can it really get bigger and bigger and bigger until 2016?

Once there, the pageantry and beauty of the samba schools was amazing. The creativity, detail, beauty, and coordination filled me with wonder. The Unidos da Tijuca floats were some of the most incredible things I have seen, mindboggling testaments to the creative possibilities of Carioca society. I’m under no allusions of pureza but as a spectacle in-and-of-itself, wow.

As if to remind us that the year is about to really begin, Sunday marks the end of summer hours in Brazil. The long slide into a short winter has begun.

Fora Teixeira!!!!

Fora Ricardo Teixeira! E daí?

It is long past the time when Ricardo Texeira should have been sent to Rio’s Bangu One prison where he could share a cell with the dozens of Military Police who were imprisoned for having the temerity to strike (albeit briefly) for higher wages. Incredible what happens in Rio when you take on the government:  só porrada.  It appears as if Mr. Jowls, as I like to call him, has finally run out of escape hatches and is going to resign from the CBF, some say today, maybe tomorrow, certainly before March.

Reports have R.T. literally hiding in his hotel room to avoid Herr Blatter at a recent CONMEBOL meeting in Buenos Aires. The man is not well, physically or mentally, nor has he been for some time. Romário is ramping up his criticisms of the feudal system that counts as professional football in Brasil, making it clear that Tricky Ricky (as our good friend Andrew Jennings calls him) is only a major figurehead in a very sick footballing world.

As Mr. Jowls flees to the dangling dongle of Florida (where he will no doubt be immune from prosecution and extradition – USAmericans please write your government asking that this misanthrope’s visa be revoked) what will be the implications for the World Cup? R.T. is the president of the Local Organizing Committee, his daughter is the Secretary General of the 2014 World Cup, his personal secretary director of communications. Will there be a house cleaning as FIFA tries to distance itself from the sordid legacy of João Havelange and his criado?

There are rumors floating about that FIFA is ready to cut one or two cities form the cup, or that they were waiting to see how they could appear to tidy house while maintaining the status quo before they suggested any major changes to Brazil 2014. Some rumors have suggested a re-working of the match schedule in order to regionalize travel. I won’t repeat the absurdities of the current scheme, check this old post if you don’t remember what the current plan is. There are some chairs being shuffled, but will they clean the stains?

Dilma should use the imminent fall of Dr. Jowls to nationalize the CBF. This would have various effects:

1. End the obscene and absurd position of FIFA that politics and sport are separate categories of human endeavor. FIFA cannot ban Brazil from international competition, in this regard, the government could immediately take the upper hand in negotiations over the World Cup Law. (Not that it really matters as the Worker’s Party is quickly privatizing everything in sight. For those gringos out there that have still have some romanticized vision of Lula’s lefty politics, the PT is about as progressive as the Obama administration on immigration). 
2. Reduce the influence of cartolas in the running of the game. The person who is taking control of the CBF in R.T.’s absence is an 80 year old who recently stole a medal from the winner’s stand at a junior tournament in São Paulo. The second-string keeper was the last one on the podium and got a handshake, nothing more. FDP.
3. Have concursos públicos to administer the positions in the CBF, hopefully professionalizing and making more transparent the running of football in Brazil.   
4. Pull the plug on OGlobo.

It won’t likely happen, but one year ago it didn’t seem likely that Teixeira would be facing criminal charges in Brazil and Europe and fleeing with his family to South Florida. Let’s keep up the pressure!!!! Fora a familia Teixeria-Havelange ! Nacionalize já a CBF!!!!

Homenagem à Yemanjá

The other night, when I came home from a party, all of the lights on the Aterro do Flamengo were out. From the front window I could clearly see fires along the beach, flickering offerings to the orixá Yemanjá, goddess of the sea.

Aterro do Flamengo, 2am 3 Feb, 2012. Immediately above the 2am
are the fires set on the beach in honor of Ymenjá.

The lights were out, the radio later informed, because a power outage had hit a few parts of Flamengo and Botafogo. The cause of the pane (breakdown) was unknown and there wasn’t a larger systemic failure as happened in 2009 when a massive apagão hit Brasil shutting off power to nine states. 

It might appear that Rio is falling down faster than it can be built or remodeled, but that’s not an accurate assessment. Antes de mais nada, we should remind ourselves that Rio is not the only city in the world with some old and decaying infrastructure problems. The United States, for example, will (soon) find itself in a massive infrastructure crisis. Has everyone forgotten about the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007? How’s that I-95 corridor treatin’ ya? Waited for a summer-time bus in Austin? How's that passenger train service between x and y USAmerican cities beyond the Portland - D.C. megalopolis?  After the Minnesota collapse, I'm pretty sure there weren’t Brazilian journalists calling up professors in the USA to ask whether or not the country was falling to pieces. There should have been, but we know that the only thing flat about globalization is Thomas Friedman’s head.

So it's not just Brazil or Rio that has infrastructure problems but they are particularly acute here for a number of reasons. The country has only recently emerged into the global economic spotlight. Even though it's a terrible term, it's not a CRIB country for nothing. For many decades, it did not have the financial capacity, international trade or internal consumer markets that produce the need to develop large scale widely placed infrastructure (remember that this only happened in the USA beginning in 1956 with the Eisenhauer National System of Interstate and Defense Highways program). 

True, there are many bureaucratic and institutional structures that limited Brazilian infrastructure development and investment (and continue to do so), but the reality is that Brazilian cities, and especially Rio (and especially after the capital moved to Brasília in 1960), did not invest in basic infrastructure. Not having smooth functioning transportation, communications, sewage, tourist, security, or other systems that are equipped to handle the volumes of traffic that come with rapid economic growth is a historically contingent reality. The successful pursuit of so many bloody events is stressing these already fragile systems. These things really need to be planned for in the long term so that the short and medium term effects aren’t so disastrous.

The costs for the mega-events are manifold and magnified by pushing the creaky old legs of the city onto center stage. Perhaps the building wouldn’t have undergone a hurried renovation if it weren’t in the most expensive real-estate market in the Ámericas. Perhaps more rigorous oversight by the city government would have saved some lives. Maybe, just maybe, they should have accounted for all of the bodies before scooping up the rubble. They found a few later in the city dump. Some parts of the story are unimaginable, some structural, and some things just can’t be explained. 

An easy solution? The World Cup, Olympics and their minor offspring cannot occur in any city that does not include them as part of an existing, long-term, integrated metropolitan urban plan that folds the events more seamlessly into its varied fabrics. It’s nice to dream, não?

Ymenjá might have appreciated the blackout the other night, but she would probably be happier if the bay were clean.