The blind hand of the market

In his recent article for The Guardian, Simon Jenkins embarks upon a journey through the complexity of Rio de Janeiro´s favelas and the changes underway as the city contorts in preparation for the World Cup and Olympics. While there are some interesting elements of Jenkins´ piece, there is much that he gets wrong and even more that indicates a belief in the power of the free market to resolve historically situated problems of poverty and violence in Brazil.

 The title of the article “Vision of the future or criminal eyesore: what should Rio do with its favelas?” perpetuates a dichotomy that does not advance understanding or suggest solutions. The implication is that favelas are either warrens of criminality or creative solutions to a chronic housing crisis. The subtitle has a sinister tone: if redevelopment of Rio´s squatter settlements is not realized the price is poverty and anarchy. Therefore, redevelopment, renewal, requalification, and retrofitting are the only paths to salvation, order and progress.  

The message from the beginning of the article is the following: if the poor are not brought quickly and by force into the formal real-estate market through processes of gentrification, the “price to pay” is stagnation and ruin – basically the status quo as Jenkins sees it. The thematic of a  “price being paid” runs throughout the article and gives us an indication of how an expanding real-estate market should be allowed to solve the issue of criminal eyesores.  

In his opening, Jenkins relates the story of nearly being assaulted in a “city of muggers” but discovers that the hand he’d felt tugging at his belt was just that of a blind child is making his way up to the top of the Providência favela. Instead of using the story of this kid as an exploration into the difficulties of favela life Jenkins is horrified by a “wretched scene amid that firmament of wonder”. If the author arrived at the top of Providência, he surely must have passed through some very poor housing stock but yet when the city is revealed below it becomes a firmament of wonder. Why not examine the life of the blind kid, or the infrastructure of the favela and the idiotic tramline project? Perhaps the blind kid can be taken as a metaphor for the ability of outsiders to see what is happening in the city. Following a brief description in which favelas are compared as exceptions to the rule of valuable real-estate domains in “most cities” (read: Europe and N. America), Jenkins concludes by saying, “favelas are Blade Runner meets Italian hill town”.

Is comparing Rio to London, New York or Milan useful? How about Cape Town, Mumbai, or Jakarta? In these cities, unlike in the global north, rich and poor also live in close proximity. While it is true that the permanence of the favelas in high-rent districts is remarkable and exceptional, I have yet to see a neon mandarin sign hanging in a shop window in a Rio favela, yet the implication of Blade Runner is one of urban dystopia, cyborg threats and violent police action. The last element is certainly true. The Italian hill towns that I have visited tend to have bucolic, quiet environments with fresh tomatoes, excellent herbs, and good bread. That is rarely the case in favelas where shopping is difficult and the quality of food is low. In the search for an apt metaphor Jenkins goes both negative and rose-tinted, eluding the rich texture of place and the difficulties of daily life. In this he repeats the same dichotomies that he later criticizes.

Throughout the article, Jenkins does not explore the nuances of urban dynamics in Brazil and with favelas. He brings an idea of what cities should be to a context in which those ideas do not apply. For example, he hits the reader again with a generalization: “most cities would by now have contrived to clear such settlements” – as if this clearing were a desirable and natural outcome. He then lays out the smooth progression of improved living conditions and livelihoods: “Older areas are gentrified and this in turn draw tax revenue, private investment and political clout to deliver new urban infrastructure”. 

The linearity of gentrification is never explained as a process of competing interests and power dynamics, but one that has happened in “most cities” (and therefore desirable in Rio?). He points out that gentrification is happening in Rio and that Lapa and Santa Teresa are gaining restaurants, shops and entertainment. However, there is no evidence to suggest this is true, no research to be drawn on and no exploration of the potential negatives of gentrification in those places. Worse, Jenkins says that the “process has largely stalled” in Rio´s favelas. Are we to equate process with progress? Is gentrification the only way forward and are the favelados retarding their own path to redemption? If they could only understand how valorization brings benefits!

The constitution of 1988 provides some legal frameworks for an eventual regime of land tenure security but property titles are still highly contestable, take decades in the courts and do not guarantee the right to housing. Even so, where there is home ownership, the immediate effects of gentrification may be slower to take root. Jenkins “reckons” that between 33% and 66% of favela residents have title to their property. Where does this data come from? If law enforcement regarding land titles is so good, why as Jenkins rightly points out, are more than 170,000 being evicted across Brazil? Surely the gentrification of urban landscapes is not to blame? Surely the rapid valorization of land prices in Brazilian cities does not have a negative impact on the ability of favela residents to claim constitutionally guaranteed rights?

In this same regard, the phrasing of the sentence “Rio has failed to remove the Vila Autódromo favela” is problematic. What if Rio (again, a lack of specificity hinders understanding) had managed to remove the Vila Autódromo? Would that be a successful process? The resistances of the people who live there in conjunction with a well-articulated group of social actors (activists among them), have, until now, managed to stave off the removal. However, the city government is using every tactic possible to wipe it off the map so that the Olympic Park real-estate speculation project can move forward.  

I did enjoy Jenkins’ identification of favelas as fetishized objects of attention from foreign scholars and his admiration of favela architecture as a creative solution to problems of housing and urbanism. There is definitely a lack of research into the processes of “renovation” and “regeneration” in places like Lapa and Santa Teresa, the Zona Portuaria and in middle class neighborhoods like Botafogo. Jenkins follows his observation about fetishization by saying that “The challenge is somehow to upgrade [favelas] to meet even the minimal standards expected for modern urban living, without lurching into old-fashioned, state-sponsored clearance and renewal.” There are several problems here. The first is which minimal standards to apply. Are we talking about a “post-modern new-urbanism” standard? Are we talking about LEED certified, German designed houses with Swedish interiors? Who will do the upgrading and how? There is no “lurching” forthcoming in Rio. The state is employing the old-fashioned techniques and tactics to meet the gentrification and security goals of an emergent Olympic city.

Jenkins´ exploration of the recent history of favela infrastructure projects does well to point out the failure of Morar Carioca but ignores the fact that the Morar Carioca program was in place before the Olympics were sent to Rio. Once Rio 2016 was in hand, the mayor´s office put the Morar Carioca program into its “legacy framework”, showed the internationals how clever and good the program was (and really, it was quite idealistic and had some great projects) but then cut it off at the knees once the political capital had been gained. Morar Carioca died at the hands of political expediency and the short attention spans of the IOC and media. 

Instead of Morar Carioca, Jenkins explains, we have UPP. That is, instead of improving through state sponsored interventions in infrastructure, the state uses police occupation to open favelas to the market forces that will “upgrade” them. The quote of mine from Hunting White Elephants in the article is taken out of context and ignores the nuance that I have tried to bring to the issue of UPPs.  UPP is not only a changing of the guard. The program has brought material, legal and social benefits to tens of thousands of people. It is true that as military counter insurgency occupations of dense urban fabric, UPPs are inadequate solutions to security and the guarantee of human rights. The government admits this but has largely failed to follow up with equivalent investments in the invisible: schools, day care, health care, sewerage, mobility. It is also true that the murder rates are down in UPP favelas and that the dynamics in those communities have changed dramatically. Jenkins took a quote from Hunting White Elephants and used it to portray me as someone with an extreme vision of what is happening – while I do not deny that I wrote that on my blog, it is far from what I see as the starting point for a conversation about UPP.

Because of the multi-billion dollar investments in the World Cup and Olympics, there is a lack of money for social housing and programs. Jenkins skirts over the opportunity costs of preparing five star hotels and blinged-out stadiums and questionable infrastructure for the megas. He turns his focus to the Zona Portuaria, calling it “easy renewal of a virtually empty zone of the old city.” The Porto Maravilha project may seem easy from a parachute, but on the ground it is highly contested and massively problematic. There are around 25,000 people who live in the Zona Portuaria, so it is not virtually empty, but rather full of life and culture. Providência, where the trip through Rio started, is there, and the resistance to these market oriented renewal projects that are intended to be the salvation of the poor is what has created strong leaders (“hero”) like Mauricio Hora. Jenkins is correct to point out the absurdities of the tram cars in Providência and Alemão but misses the point of the “Museum of Tomorrow”. It is not a curious title but rather an intentional negation of the rich history of the port area where millions of African slaves were dragged ashore. Their descendants are made invisible by the renewal, renovation, revitalization, requalification and gentrification projects and even the re-discovery of places like the Cais do Valongo and the Cemeterio dos Pretos Novos are tokenized, begrudging recognitions of the region´s importance in Brazilian history.

In Manguinhos, Jenkins gets it right, letting the people talk for themselves to explain what has gone wrong with the city´s urbanization projects. However, when explaining the history of Cidade de Deus he retreats into the assumptions that he brought with him, “it was built with only the most rudimentary infrastructure and left to run itself, which soon brought it under the aegis of drug gangs.” This is not accurate. Cidade de Deus and the majority of Brazilian favelas did not experience an influx of the drug trade until the late 1970s and 1980s and then grew in tandem. Therefore it cannot be true that the City of God of the movie was a result of a lack of government planning for the community itself. The Cidade was planned (albeit not well), but the lack of planning in the city as a whole made favela expansion the only viable solution to a grave housing crisis that happened to coincide with the expanding drugs market.

It is important to remember that Cidade de Deus came about after the government burned down the Praia do Pinto favela on the shores of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas so the region could be gentrified. True, the pacification of Cidade de Deus has been accompanied by some very interesting social initiatives created by residents themselves. It helps to have the traffickers gone, but that is only one part of a much more complex puzzle. It is unclear if Jenkins went to the City of God or whom he talked to about the urban problems and solutions in the neighborhood.

For Jenkins, the “bugbear” of pacification is that in places with the best views and close proximity to centers of employment like Vidigal and Rocinha, there are “complaints of gentrification”. Complaints? Is this to suggest that people should not be complaining about or questioning gentrification in the poorest regions of one of the most expensive cities in the Americas?  Again, Jenkins presents us with the linearity of the gentrification argument: “immense imputed value from gentrification and tourism…draws new residents, employers and investors…in turn generate(s) resources for better services”. For new residents to enter, old residents must leave. The gentrifiers never want to know where.

As Fabricio Leal de Oliveira recently pointed out at the Second International Conference Mega-Events and the City, urban planning in Rio has always been used by the public authorities to consolidate power and to attend to a narrow band of economic interests. Jenkins holds the mistaken assumption that if the city government had more resources to spend that the mayor´s office would direct those resources to favela upgrading projects. Paes has shown that he is willing to do just the opposite. With money and projects available through Morar Carioca, he threw them away. Rio is not a poor city. Brazil is not a poor country. The distribution of wealth and resources is the problem and gentrification does nothing to solve that. To the contrary, it exacerbates economic distinctions, increases social tensions and puts the most vulnerable at risk of expulsion. This is particularly true with the leading edge of the gentrification regime is BOPE and UPP.

Following on this superficial examination of gentrification dynamics, Jenkins then blames favela residents for not understanding how they would benefit from it: “They see gentrification leading to evictions, even where the residents themselves would benefit from property sales. Their default is to see the state as responsible for retrofitting their communities.” Who are they? Did people express this to him in an interview? How do residents benefit from property sales in an overheated real-estate market? If you sell your house, the only way to benefit is to move into a less expensive place or to move laterally in the same neighborhood where the properties values will have risen in value at the same rate. Staying means increased rents or increased property taxes that are rarely accompanied by an equivalent increase in salary. In Rio, “picking up sticks” means moving away from centers of employment and leaving the community. That in turn implies a loss of social capital. The idea that valorization is universally beneficial ignores the realities of the real-estate market and the impacts on costs and livelihoods. 

Furthermore, by Jenkins´ own logic, the state would be the one to invest in the retrofitting through the increased taxes that have been accrued through land sales. Why then would it be wrong for favela residents to expect that the state invest in infrastructure retrofits? 

In the following paragraphs, Jenkins allies himself firmly with the mayor, a notorious free market housing proponent who has unleashed the hounds of speculation across Rio de Janeiro. For Jenkins, freedom is equivalent with “moving, taking value of one´s home with one”. Again, he gets the favelas wrong. These are places where investments are made with extreme caution and sacrifice on the part of residents. The value of homes cannot be counted, as the mayor’s office does, by counting bricks. To Jenkins, the reluctance of people to move “implies bondage” and therefore stasis. And if static “they will never see the investments they sorely need”.

There are legal frameworks in place to upgrade favelas without leading to gentrification, displacement and social tension (ie, statute of the city). While Jenkins is right when he says that favelas are “proud places” and that they are being fetishized and romanticized by academics and journalists, the non-application of rights to people who live in favelas is an equally proud tradition of the Brazilian state. This is especially true in the run up to mega-events where the end game is wealth accumulation through dispossession.  The most easily dispossessed are those who have less access to the state and a regime of rights. Within the neo-liberal framework that Jenkins is proposing, favela residents can seek their fortunes on the open market by carrying their value and labor with them. However, the very nature of favelas is that value is rooted in place and community, so that the labor market can be more easily accessed. A lack in economic capital is compensated by social networks and horizontal solidarities rooted in place.  

Jenkins concludes his article by telling us that favelas are a “remarkable surviving pattern of urban living”. While I am a little confused by the language, throughout the article it is suggested that whatever has allowed them to remain as physical, social, political and economic features of Rio´s complex geography needs to change. For Jenkins, the entwined processes of pacification and gentrification applied to select areas of this “city of muggers” are a “sensitive and workable” vision that “is in place for their renewal”. 

Very Important Blah Blah Blah

Sometime recently, IOC VVIP John Coates called the Rio 2016 preparations the worst ever. Much is being made of this statement but we need to put it in its proper context and to not take the commentary at face value. 

True, Rio 2016 is behind schedule on everything and as I suggested a few months ago should be called Rio Twentysomething. Building for the Olympic Games never happens the same way twice and never in the same place twice, so the demands and issues that Rio 2016 are dealing with are unique and there have apparently been very few inputs from the IOC to help them figure out how to “deliver”. So now, Gilberto Felli is coming to our collective rescue. The organized, demanding European, swooping in to save the skins of the organizing committee. 

Considered in this context Coates´ extremely unhelpful comments are similar to Valcke´s kick up the arse comments of a few years ago that caused such furor in Brazil. This time, the Lord Mayor of Rio has kowtowed saying that the criticisms need to be accepted but that everything will be done properly for the Lords of the Rings. How will this happen? The IOC and international federations are now sending in their technical experts to whip the undisciplined Brazilians into shape for their party. That this is happening only now is an indication of the lack of this “expertise” before. So, knowing full well how Brazil works, why is it only now that the IOC is sending in their special troops to help out only in 2014? In this sense we must take Coates´ blabbing barb as a self-criticism of the IOC´s lack of understanding about how things do or do not work in Brazil and for their incapacity to get things moving fast enough for their tastes. 

The other element of Coates´ commentary to consider is that high ranking  IOC members have made made no comment (sympathetic, antagonistic, or otherwise) about the recent wave of police violence in Rio. There is no secret that the security apparatus of Rio is being restructured for the Games but when this system fails tragically, there are few notes of concern sounded by the Games alarmists. What is at stake here in Coates´commets is not just the realization of Rio 2016 but the preservation of the IOC´s image and that of their sponsors. Does the IOC trumpet the fact that the Rio State Military Police have contracted the Austrian gun maker Glock to be their official 9mm supplier for Olympic security? Hardly. Death by handgun is not an Olympic pillar, though shooting is an Olympic sport. Coates is hedging the IOC´s reputation by focusing the blame on the Brazilians. 

In the frenetic run up to #WC14 and #Rio16 the existential angst of international sports federations is coming to a frothing boil. The narratives of lateness and unpreparedness are always the same, unless they have to do with places like Germany or London or Sydney. Will the unruly subalterns spoil the party with their ineptness and lack of organization? Will the IOC have their stage properly mounted and the places at the banquet table properly set? Frankly, I´m not concerned. 

Of course, Rio 2016 is late, the projects are poorly conceived and almost impossible to execute, but they have been so since the very beginning. The Rio 2016 Bid Book is a farce of a planning document projected by a public relations team to attend to the utopian fantasies of the IOC (and the sport mega-event industrial complex and their partners in Brazilian industry and government). If the IOC had done their due diligence, if they had people to critically evaluate the bid books, Rio wouldn´t be hosting the Olympics (after having finished fifth behind Doha in the technical evaluation). However, in the realpolitik of the IOC,  the overarching meta-narrative of urban transformation and opening new frontiers for sport blinded them to the realities of what it takes to put on an Olympics in a city as troubled, fragile and contested as Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps that would be an appropriate self-criticism for the VVIPs to take up. 

So, yes, Mr. Coates, we get the message loud and clear. Brazil is slow, maybe even lazy, much worse than those retrograde Greeks! If only Athens had been ready with everything on time their national economy would surely be thriving today and the crushing debt imposed by hosting the Games would have been forgiven. Excuse me if I don´t feel sorry for the IOC, but rather for the Cariocas who will be forced to bear the impacts, costs and burdens of the Olympics once Mr. Coates has gone to Tokyo to talk about how well everything has gone. 

How did you like the play Ms. Lincoln?

The last World Cup host without a functional first division was the United States in 1994. There were second and third divisions, but no first. In Brazil, none of the CBF´s four divisions started without legal disputes, the state tournaments have become a disgrace and the organizational frameworks of Brazilian sport have rarely been less transparent or more chaotic. Last week, the presidency of the CBF passed from the octogenarian Jumpin´ José Marin (@seeadarkness) to the septuagenarian Marco del Nero. Upon assuming the presidency in an uncontested election, del Nero said that there “would be no changes because things are going very well.” SQN (só que não, “not”, for those putting together a #WC14 Brazilian twitter vocabulary).

Fluminense, whose principal sponsor is UniMed, was saved from relegation because their lawyers convinced the CBF´s sports tribunal that a smaller team should be sent down because the CBF (having just received millions for a UniMed sponsorship) hadn´t informed that team about the status of a player that was sent on as substitute in the last fifteen minutes of the last game of the season. The Portuguesa directorship fought a bit, and then capitulated. Last week, a fan filed a law suit to continue the battle for permanence in the first division and as the first round of the second division was into its 15^th minute, someone walked legal papers onto the field and the Portuguesa coach took his team to the locker room. The fans were not pleased. This happened in the same stadium where Vasco and Atlético Paranaense organizadas tried to kill each other at the end of last season [ed: thanks to the anonymous comment at the end of this post, the plot is revealed as much more complicated than I describe here and also involves Flamengo and millions deposited in Portuguesa bank accounts. Follow this link to a timeline (in portuguese) of the events]. 

There were also legal battles to determine which teams would play in the 3^rd and 4^th divisions. The CBF manipulated and massaged the tournaments into the form and format that best serves OGlobo and the sponsors. The season will be cut into bits by the World Cup, players will be sold to Europe, Asia and the Middle East in August, attendances are miserable, the stadiums are privatized and sanitized, the football is terrible, the rich teams close ranks within the CBF, there is no transparency, kids are regularly and ritually abused in the youth systems and the October presidential elections may depend on Neymar´s 4^th metatarsal. The state of football in the country of football frustrates and depresses in equal measure.

Brazil continues to struggle with the legacy of the 1964-1985 dictatorship. All dictatorships are necessarily anti-intellectual and the evisceration of public education continues to resonate in the halls of power. It is almost fair to say that the leaders and elites of Brazil were educated not to be critical, progressive thinkers and did not develop the necessary skills to deal effectively with complex problems. They also carry with them a very anti-educational cultural perspective that is reflected in the media, in the public education system and in the knee-jerk violent reactions to public crises (aka, send in the shock troops). This is not to suggest that there are not Brazilian intellectuals but rather that the fetishization of a president with a fourth grade education because he is “of the people” is an indication of the level at which most public discourse occurs.

This week I returned to the Favela do Metrô, 500 meters distant from the Maracanã. When I last wrote about Metrô in 2011, the community was under attack from the city government, supposedly to clear the way for a FIFA parking lot. The city behind its internationally acclaimed (sqn) mayor dissimulated, sowed discontent, bulldozed and left the wreckage behind. The majority of residents were eventually able to move into decent public housing across the tracks, but only after years of delay, a lack of transparency and immensely tiring and emotionally draining fights. Now, returning to the place where I once gave an extension course from the nearby university, there are growing piles of trash and a fetid crackolândia. Most readers will never have visited a crackolândia and I do not recommend it. It is the end of the line dominated by young drug traffickers that have no education and less interest. The burned out shells of humans carry deadened eyes that would reveal the depths of despair if one could bear to look at them. The Brazilian reaction to what I am writing will be:  “You feel sorry for them? Take them home.” Thing is, many of these people had homes before the government destroyed them in the name of progress. Worse, there is no project to turn the area into something with even marginal utility for the World Cup. It is simply destroyed and left to fester.

As the saying goes, if you´re not outraged you´re not paying attention. The World Cup is one of the great collective cultural experiences that we as humans have managed to put together. However, the use of the tournament to consolidate wealth and power at the expense of the cities, countries and people that host it must come to an immediate end. The business model of the World Cup creates notions of distinctiveness and religious fervor at the same time that it thrives in vacuums of responsibility and regimes of exception.

For example, FIFA is parading its trophy around the world as if it is a religious object. Only heads of state and world cup winners are allowed to touch it. Seriously. People buy into this hokum but never ask who the poor sot was that put the trophy on display, or why. The entire World Cup can only come into being because Brazilian elites signed laws giving the shop away to FIFA through the Lei Geral da Copa. FIFA isn´t responsible for stadium construction, yet their demands drive the architectural projects which are heralded as “sustainable”. The cities and states aren´t responsible for the scope and scale of the projects because they have to meet FIFA demands. The federal government can´t intervene in the running of the national football leagues because they would be sanctioned by FIFA. And around we go. There is neither credibility nor accountability, just rentability.

The tensions are palpable in Brazil as the #WC14 rumbles towards us. Buses are burning in the suburbs and in Copacabana. Dozens were killed in Salvador when the police went on strike. The poor, expelled from their homes, see even the churches close their doors to them. The middle classes are being squeezed though rent and daily living price increases. Traffic jams and high taxes are the existential condition in Brazil. Public works that could have brought long-term benefits are fragmenting neighborhoods instead of creating wide-reaching mobility networks. The militarization of cities is happening in concert with the privatization of public spaces. It´s not all the fault of #WC14 but nature does abhor a vacuum.

Countdown to crazy

The World Cup is approaching like a meteorite that we cannot shoot out of the sky. Everyone is in panic mode and there are palpable tensions in all of the World Cup host cities. No one knows how this tournament is going to work, if the airports will be able to handle the increased volume, if foreigners will be able to buy flights with foreign credit cards, if there are enough seats in the stadiums (because not even FIFA knows which seats it has sold), if the police are going to go on strike.

A secure off-world in the midst of Salvador

This week in Salvador the Bahia state military police went on strike and chaos ensued. More than 40 people in the metropolitan region were killed over 48 hours and there was widespread sacking of shops and grocery stores. This speaks to the precariousness of civility in Brazil. The governor had to call in federal troops to restore order. If after a decade of economic growth and full employment the only thing standing between generalized homicide and mad dashes for food and consumer goods is the military police, then the social project of Brazil is on the brink of collapse. But have you seen Salvador´s shiny new World Cup stadium?

The more that I think and research the 2014 World Cup, the less important the stadiums become. I have come to think of them as bois de piranha. A boi de piranha is a weak cow that is sent across a piranha-infested river ahead of the heard. The piranhas are distracted from the main course by devouring the sacrifice and the heard passes easily. The World Cup stadia account for less than 30% of World Cup spending. The other projects, most of them incomplete, are what are called “legacy” projects.

The Boi de Piranha in Recife

The Recife stadium project is a good example of this. Built more than 20 kilometers outside of the city center in the suburban city of São Lourenço da Mata (forest), the so-called Itaipava Pernambuco Arena is the leading edge of a multi-billion dollar real-estate vector called Cidade da Copa. The government has invested more than R$2 billion in transportation lines to get between the city center and the Cidade da Copa and the stadium itself carries a price tag of R$529,5 million. The publicly financed stadium has been privatized. The Cidade da Copa reproduces the same kind of spatial and social fragmentation that defined the current wave of Brazilian urbanism, one in which upper-middle and upper class residents live in closed condominiums in car-dependent landscapes. The transportation lines are not for the people that will live in the Cidade da Copa but for the lower-class service sector employees that will work as cleaning ladies, janitors, gardeners and security guards.

Back in Rio governor Cabal Cabral resigned his post so that his second in command could take the reigns and increase his chances of election as an incumbent. The federal military´s occupation of Maré has captured the attention of the international media at the same time that the wheels appear to be coming off the UPP model in some key areas such as Rocinha and the Complexo do Alemão. In places without UPP, the same model of counter-insurgency incursion into favelas continues. In the far wild west of Rio a 7-year old was hit in the leg by a PM bullet and a resident killed. Revolted residents attacked a BRT station and burned a bus in protest. The more we are told that things have changed the more they stay the same.

While I agree with my colleague Brian Mier that there have been significant gains in the overall well being of Brazilian society over the last twelve years, the World Cup may be tearing asunder the last remaining shreds of the Brazilian social contract. The recent events in Salvador are an indication of this. The very idea of the Cidade da Copa is further evidence that Brazilian elites are using the World Cup as a mechanism to distance themselves financially, socially and physically from the people and places that make them rich. The ongoing repression, exclusion and expulsion of the poor in Rio de Janeiro, while historically consistent, is evidence that the World Cup is being used to re-configure urban space to ensure the smooth exercise and accumulation of power.

Everything is going great

The violence that permeates daily life in Brazil is becoming more visible as if the stresses of preparing for the World Cup are making people, infrastructure and institutions crack. In the past few weeks we have had a series of horrors that I refuse to ignore. A woman (Cláudia Ferreira) was shot in the chest while going to get bread for her four kids. The police that shot her, who between them were responsible for scores of deaths, threw her into the back of their SUV and as they drove away the door opened and she was dragged hundreds of meters down the street in front of her friends and neighbors. There may have been more scandal about O Bobo´s terrible coverage of the incident than the incident itself. 

In another act of daily horror a BRT Transoeste feeder bus came too fast around a corner, lost control, jumped the road divider and killed three children and woman that were waiting to cross. The lack of urban planning and the general insanity of the bus system are responsible for this daily violence that people have to face in Rio. These people died because there are no over or underpasses and there had been no intervention by public authorities to reduce the public risk on what locals called “the corner of death” . When the Brazilian media reports on these accidents they are mostly interested in how long it takes for the traffic to start flowing again. 

Today is the anniversary of the 1964 CIA-backed Military Coup. The violence is getting to the point where I have heard numerous people declare that the only way “to bring order back” to society is to have a dictatorship. It would seem that many are getting their wish as the expansion of military counter-insurgencies continues in Rio.  The saudade for the military dictatorship always comes from the very people who benefitted from it the last time around and who are also benefitting the most from Brazil´s spiraling ascension (or decline) into a well-behaved global economic player. There are, of course, millions and millions and millions of Brazilians that have fought long and hard to bring about democratic conditions and the rule of law, but they are fighting an uphill battle against a rising tide of neo-liberalism. This rising tide has all of the delightful aromas and flavors of Rio´s barely functioning sewage system where when we spoon through the fetid stew we find that there are pervasive notions about the rights of individuals that would be more appropriate under the Talban than the PT. 

Haven´t heard about this one? A study by IPEA showed that 65.1% of Brazilian respondents, men and women, agreed partially or in full that women who dressed provocatively “were asking to be raped.” An anti-rape campaign emerged with the hashtag “I don´t deserve to be raped.” This is a necessary, logical and correct response. However, in a machista, violent, and conservative society the reaction was not long in coming: death threats, rape threats and intimidation forced the organizers of the campaign off social media sites. This was the same week in which reports came out about the daily sexual violence that women experience on overcrowded buses and trains in Brazilian cities. To confirm the general acceptance of this in Brazil, advertisements on the metro are promoting a drink called SYN whose mascot is an alien (read: gringo) that “abducts” Rio´s provocatively dressed, tipsy, black and mulata women. The message: rape away boys, most people think it´s ok. 

The World Cup would be a welcome distraction from the daily violence except that yet another worker has died in São Paulo and work on the stadium has again stopped (gasp!). There will probably be a few more deaths as the time pressures grow. No one is to blame as the World Cup functions like an extensive shell game of interests that leaves vacuums of responsibility, exposing the least protected to the greatest risk. Of course, the “real risk” is to the World Cup which is why the government puts on massive security performances to show foreigners that they are getting tough on crime and that critical infrastructures will be protected. The occupation of Maré this week was nothing more than that. The media in Brazil crowed about how the military were able to occupy the whole complex in 15 minutes without firing a shot. Never mind the year´s long notice that the occupation was going to happen. This triumphalist discourse ignores the fact that hundreds of thousands of shots have been fired in and at Maré over the years and that last year during the Confederations Cup, this same “pacifying” force massacred eleven people (some with bayonets). So while the World Cup will have little or no impact on Brazil´s economy (according to Moody´s), in a country where black kids are three times as likely to be shot as all other groups, it is extremely disturbing that we are spending R$1.9 billion on security measures that will increase the likelihood of their deaths. 

Brazil has come a long way since the end of the dictatorship in 1985, but there are many generations of work to be done to make this a more just and democratic society. Facing the legacy of the dictatorship on its 50^th anniversary has to be more than just remembering how bad things were. The national leadership has only taken tentative steps towards truth commissions and is repeating some of the same tactics with their pursuit of draconian laws against social movements and protests during mega-events (including new “terrorist” laws). Part of the reason for the continuity of ideologies between the dictatorship and neo-liberal democracy is that the economic and political agents that dictate public policy in Brazil accumulated their wealth and power under the military regime. Granted, the PT has to work within the given structure but they don´t seem keen to change things as long as they can keep their hands on the tiller and in the till. With the World Cup hurtling at us like an unavoidable meteor it is important to remember that “the political use of football by dictatorships, military regimes and authoritarian governments dos not neutralize the spaces and practice of football for acts of resistance.”