Rio Twenty Something

Brazil is desperate for some good news that doesn´t come from its entertainment pages. The economy has been sacked by Dilma and the PT, the “pacification” program in Rio is proving that it does not, in fact, make sense to replace one arbitrary, militarized system of justice with another, the World Cup organizers are entering into full-scale damage control and the Olympic projects are so far behind schedule before they even get started that Rio 2016 might change its name to Rio Twenty Something.

The depressing state of affairs in the run in to the World Cup is making everyone quite anxious for the Cup to actually get going. It will be a huge relief to be able to talk about football for a month, though of course there will be protests and violence and human rights violations, arbitrary arrests, massive confusion at the airports, teams getting lost on the way to their hotels and the trumpeting cacophony of the world´s largest herd of white elephants.

We discovered this week that airplanes will not be adding to this noise. As a “security measure” all airports within a 7 km radius of WC elephants will be closed for up to seven hours before and during matches. Why 7 km? Surely it is not for security reasons as a plane could zip into a stadium as easily from 10 km as it could from 7 and there are not yet plans to have anti-aircraft missiles on rooftops. No, the reason for the cancellation of more than 800 flights is to prevent airplane noise from interfering with game transmission. At least there won´t be long waits to get baggage.

The Lord Mayor Eduardo II of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro decreed public holidays on all WC game days, cancelled all permits for cultural events between May 22 and July 18, and suspended all public works projects for the same period. That means that there will be no work done on any Olympic related projects, no improvements to city infrastructure, no hammering of any kind for two months. While it will be quieter, what will all of the workers do? Will they be receiving their salaries for staying at home with their kids? The banishment of residents from their own city is what is going to make the World Cup possible – just another form of accumulation by dispossession.

Has everyone fully swallowed the bitter pill of the Sochi Games? Watching the closing ceremonies of the Paralympic Games last night, I could envision the map of Russia that served as the podium growing to

Putin´s message to the West

incorporate Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Sochi 2014 has served as a delightful soft power cover for Putin to pursue his hard power geo-politics. All the while the IOC sits on its pudgy golden ringed fingers, extolling the hackneyed virtuosity of the European aristocracy as a viable model for conflict resolution within the context of a brazenly cynical political economy of global sport.

The latest to add his name to the increasingly long roll of kleptomaniac shysters in Brazilian sport is Ary Graça, ex-president of the Brazilian Volleyball Conferderation and ex-president of the International Volleyball Association. Graça was caught out by ESPN Brasil reporter Lucio de Castro to the tune of R$10,000,000. Graça then renounced his two presidencies but will not likely face any kind of legal action (of course). The person Graça had received his position from, 2016 President Carlos Nuzman, said he was “surprised” just before he took a position on the ethics board of the International Association of Athletics Federations. Asked what more he was surprised about that day, Nuzman revealed his pleasure at seeing the sun rise in the East. 

Sitting and spinning

The spin masters are out again, trying to say that everything is fine, or that even if things could have gone better, er, if everything had gone better then everything will still be fine. In short, the business model of the World Cup is to assure that the World Cup continues to be a viable business model. To that end, everything half-true and maybe true is taken as absolute truth and the oddities that hang off the press releases like toilet paper on a dignitary´s shoe are simply ignored until the money is counted in Switzerland.
Here are some recent gems from the World Cup organizers and their business insider fakirs:


Valcke: “What FIFA injects in the country is $800m and the cost of the World Cup to FIFA itself is $1.3bn because on top of that sum we have prize money for the teams and additional costs. But FIFA is not asking for any financial support from the Brazilian authorities and whatever is spent by the cities and by the government will remain within the country.”



Aldo Rebelo: “What exists is a campaign against the World Cup by desperate sectors in the media but it won’t be enough. We participated in 19 cups, won five, we’ve given and continue to give great soccer stars to the world. What more do you want from Brazil?” 

Anonymous : And What about Brasil? True: some stadia are still not ready. True: the monorail in Sao Paolo looks more like a piece of abstract art in some places where two tracks fail to meet in mid-air. True: some of the airports promise to offer a serious challenge to the masses of arriving and departing passengers. Also true: there is social unrest in many parts of the country. It is altogether likely that some things will not work the way they should but it is equally likely that most things will. Despite a President who doesn't care about football, and despite the fact that some critics continue to speak of endemic corruption…But will any and all of this really have a devastating impact on the world's favourite game?

Valcke neglects to acknowledge that the tournament and profits are wholly dependent upon Brazilians investing public resources into infrastructures that will make the Cup possible. FIFA and all of its corporate milkmaids have total immunity from taxation in Brazil. That is, we are sinking our limited capital into fixed infrastructures so that money, people, goods and images can flow through them and out into larger circuits of accumulation. What will be left behind are big, fat, greedy elephants that demand ever more resources to maintain. Where will these resources come from once FIFA has changed cachaça for vodka? The very people that were duped into paying for them in the first place by their own aloof elite. If FIFA asks for no financial support from Brazil, why did we need the General Law of the World Cup to exempt them from any financial onus?

Aldo Rebelo once sponsored an investigation into the nefarious relationship between the CBF and Nike. Now, he is parading around in Nike and CBF gear. What the minister fails to recognize is that the media itself  is desperate to promote the World Cup. The investigations into corruption, incompetence, lack of planning, conflicts of interests among members of the LOC like Ronaldo, militarization of public space, violence against protesters and the emergence of a permanent regime of exception are not the work of some radical fringe within the media, but rather a minority of dedicated journalists trying to get to the bottom of the pit. Fortunately for the Minister and unfortunately for Brazilian society, there is no bottom.

The last quote comes from a publication dedicated to the vapid promotion of football business around the world to stuff the pockets of the European football lords. Tellingly, it has no attribution but reflects the perspective of those who never have to live with the consequences of their business practices. Global football is in a pathetic state. Brazilian football is even worse. All four divisions of the national competition are tied up in judicial processes and there is a zombie driving a five star bulldozer through a field of chaffed credibility. The article is basically saying that despite all of the bad news, we should just pay attention to the action on the field and forget about larger issues such as transparency in governance, the horrible things that a World Cup does to places with massive inequalities and insufficient urban infrastructures. People said horrible things about South Africa 2010 and everything as great! Surely the same will be the case in Brazil. This is a delusional perspective that has no role in honest debate, I´m sorry I even brought it up.

If swooshes were arrows, I´d be a genius

The justifications for the World Cup spending and the heavy-handed, authoritarian, violent and non-transparent mechanisms for carrying it off are that the World Cup itself is popular. “Look how many tickets have been sold!!!” “Brazilians love football!!” “We are bringing new hope to a young generation of fans!”  Of course the World Cup is popular in Brazil (though not as much as before) and people really, really want to go to games. I do too. For most in Brazil, this would have been a once in a lifetime opportunity (for those with credit cards, computers at home, and enough money to flop down). Had the Maracanã not been deformed, FIFA could have easily sold 130,000 tickets at $1000 each. If the Maracanã had a capacity of 500,000 they could have sold it out.  However, the limited tickets for Brazilians have excluded even that possibility. So of course Brazilians are not happy to have been forced to build unnecessarily expensive stadiums that they won´t be able to get into unless they are both lucky and wealthy. The so-called legacy projects are not being completed and there is no guarantee that after the World Cup there will be money or political interest to finish them. The vacuums of responsibility ensure that everyone can point the finger somewhere else.

The defensive and offensive reactions to the criticisms are as disingenuous as they are hollow. Valcke tells a half-truth as if we were to believe that FIFA is not benefitting directly from a Brazilian subsidy on their operations. Rebelo wants us to believe that because Brazilians are good at football that should be enough to cover up the fact that they´re terrible at completing large scale infrastructure projects on time and on budget. The international business community wants us to ignore the realities of Brazil so that the world´s favorite game can go on its merry way. 

Shocking Normalcy

I wish that I were so creative as to make up the stories unfolding in Rio and Brazil for the World Cup. I was criticized a couple of weeks ago for failing to see the humor in the Visa advertisements that featured Imperial Stormtroopers on the beach with the slogan “Everyone is welcome at the World Cup”. Two days ago, OBobo, South America´s biggest waste of cellulose and the paper of record for Rio´s Zona Sul, pinched off this gem above the fold. This is the new uniform of Rio´s Mega-event Shock brigade. There were, as often happens in USAmerican papers when invading Oil/Banana Republics, fawning descriptions of the weaponry, training and mandate of the stormtroopers. It would be comical if it weren´t so terrifying. Please, if you are going to the World Cup, do not wear black, don´t bring anything to cover your head and bring your running shoes. As long as you consume in the right way, in the right places, and with Visa, everything will be just fine.

Speaking of consumption, there was a national furor this week about the “poor taste” that Adidas demonstrated in producing t-shirts for the USAmericans that highlighted the desire of foreigners to ravage Brazilian women. Tudo bem, agreed, the t-shirts were horrendous and heads should be rolling at Adidas (which it should be remembered has been FIFA´s principal partner since the 1980s). But if we look at the way that Brazilians represent Brazilian women to themselves and to others, it would appear that Adidas was only following the disgusting lead of classic machistas like OBobo´s Ancelmo Gois. In his daily column, Gois always publishes, every day, hundreds of days per year, photos of women that he finds attractive. His comments might as well be accompanied by an icon of a drooling mouth. One slobber for pretty, three slobbers for gostosa.  Every year this middle aged white man has a competition to see who will be the “Mulata do Gois” . Beyond the idea of a black woman as a sexualized possession of those with more power and privilege, the general sterotypes propagated by Gois, OBobo, and Carioca society in general towards women make it completely normal for a multi-national corporation to market the place of Rio and the people of Brazil as objects of consumption. If Brazilians are shocked by the marketing of the “natural beauty” of Brazil to foreigners, they should take a step back and consider how they represent themselves to themselves (with a tip of the hat to Andrew Downie).

The Utopia of Rio in 2014

As if to confirm my infinite posts about how Rio is a city that needs a smart system to watch it fall apart, the heavy hand of the mayor has again fallen on the resident population. The genie of urban planning has been let out of the bottle yet again, reorganizing all of the vehicular traffic in downtown while eliminating second and third options at the time of greatest road closures because of Carnaval. The mayor is trying to make things so bad in Rio that if and when any of his hare-brained transportation projects get done, they will seem like improvements on  the hideous conditions the projects themselves have imposed.

Put this on repeat: Rio does not have the conditions to host its own population, much less mega-events. When urban systems are stressed out, they break. When one breaks, others are compromised. The metro broke yesterday. There was a two hour traffic jam on the bridge. The BRT Transoeste is a disaster. A broken sewage line in Copacabana closed traffic. Murders, thefts and petty crime are on the rise. Is it any wonder that the federal government is investing R$2 billion in the World Cup security apparatus? The closer we get to the Cup the more local populations will be treated as insurgents / rebels. Rio de Janeiro might be turning into a Death Star that holds its own people in tortured poses while it reconfigures urban space to maximize the flow of capital into private hands. 

Curmudgeonly feats of observation

For the first time in a long time, I sat down to watch some football on a Sunday afternoon, Vasco x Flamengo. I have gradually distanced myself from both Vasco and football after the death of a youth footballer at a Vasco training ground in 2012 and from Brazilian football in particular because it is so irresolutely corrupt that it´s hard to enjoy. There is also the really low quality of the games, meaningless competitions and insanely high ticket prices to go to stadiums where the threat of police violence is on a par with the lack of institutional concern for the paying fan. Watching games on tv forces one to listen to the kind of lowest common denominator commentary that actively kills brain cells and corrodes whatever capacity for tactical analysis that I once had. In short, the more I have come to know about and experience Brazilian football the less I care. This is a profoundly difficult existential condition and one that I thought I could rectify on a Sunday afternoon on the couch, watching one of the world´s famous clássicos.

The game was at the Xaracanã and was played at a breakneck pace. The Brazilian championship used to be much slower, but now the ball pings around the midfield randomly until someone gets control for long enough to get hacked down. There is no space left on Brazilian football pitches. In this latest deform the Maracanã playing area was reduced by 16%. Once of monumental proportions, the Maracanã´s pitch would only be the 8^th biggest pitch in England. Not incidentally, the field size reduction was mirrored by a 16% capacity reduction (89,000 to 76,525). Not that it matters: there were only 13,000 paying customers in a metropolitan area of 13 million on a Sunday afternoon. Those present were treated to a very emotional game that had a very little technical or tactical quality, but generated some hugely troubling moments during and after.

In the first half, Vasco´s octogenarian signing Douglas curled a lovely free kick that bounced off the underside of the bar and into the goal and then out again. The linesman, trained and paid to stand on the line to see that ball enter, didn´t see it and the goal wasn´t given. Fine, people make mistakes, the game continues. A bit later, Vasco scores, one nil. A few minutes after, Flamengo´s Elano curls a lovely free kick that could have entered the goal or not, but this time the goal was given by the linesman. One one at half time. This was not the correct score, but whatever, these things happen in football. The major problem was the violence with which the Vasco players took up the issue with the six man referee crew. There was so much pushing and shoving and yelling and real, vibrant anger that the Military Police rushed in to protect the refs. This was no surprise to anyone. Yelling and screaming and threatening are normal ways of dealing with things one does not like. Of course it is not just Vasco that does this, but it should be hugely embarrassing behavior for professional athletes to engage in. But in a country where UFC / MMA is the fastest growing sport, what does one expect?

The day after the non-event, in a tournament that means almost nothing, the referee (who teaches physical education in the public school system) is receiving death threats, has had his children´s names and photos published on fayce, his address revealed and is having his second job limited. The violence of Brazilian society appears to be growing every day and is taking its worst toll on the most vulnerable people. This referee can be made fun of, can be put into a lesser division, can have his eyesight examined, but death threats? He´s a working class public school teacher, not a mensalero!  If Vasco hadn´t lost the game through their own lack of tactical nous would there have been as much recrimination from the supposed Vasco fans? Is a person´s life and well-being really worth points in the Campeonato Carioca? The CBF hasn´t offered to keep the goal line technology installed for the Confederations Cup and FIFA doesn´t have much interest in putting chips in footballs, so the threats to human life for not seeing what should have been seen will continue.

Today, February 18, may be a turning point in Brazilian history. We will find out if the Curitiba World Cup stadium has the chance of being ready (my guess is that the hassle of reorganization will overcome construction delays). We will also likely find out the extent of the damage of the fire at the Cuiabá stadium. The former we can attribute to a lack of managerial capacity on the part of Atlético Paranaense. The latter story is more sinister as it may be the case that the construction firm, the World Cup secretariat of Matto Grosso state and a few other officials, knew of but did not publish a report that a fire set by a disgruntled employee in October had caused structural damage to one of the stands. The official report, obtained by Brian Winter of Reuters last week, claims that there was extensive structural damage to the supporting pillars.  The contractor and government officials deny this. One can imagine the scenario: big fire, massive damage, tight deadline. The organizers don´t want to admit that the damage is more than they could repair and even though the lives of 10,000 people in the stands might be at risk, the risk of not having the Cup would be even greater, so let´s just pretend that report doesn´t exist. This is the kind of violence that eats at the core of Brazilian society. If it is indeed true that this report was buried so that capitalist expediency could again take precedence over human life, it is then fair to assume that this is not an isolated incident in Brazil´s World Cup preparations.

The Cup of Cups

The Brazilian executive branch has launched an ad campaign to convince Brazilians that this will be the Best World Cup ever. Using the hashtag #copadascopas, the attempt to put a positive spin on negative news, exorbitant spending and unfinished projects is the latest sign of the creaking Brazilian governmental apparatus. The new marketing campaign replaced “Patria das Chuteiras” (poorly translated as Country of Football Boots), which carried with it a cultural memory of the use of football to prop up the military dictatorship during the 1970 World Cup. Most of the marketing campaigns for the 2014 World Cup are in poor taste. The Visa commercials that are spreading across the country like foot fungus are particularly terrible. These are taking up ad space at bus stops, public transportation and other public spaces.

Mr. Burns= Blatter or Marin?

The ad says “todos são bem-vindos na Copa” – everyone is welcome a the World Cup. The Simpsons ad is disturbing for a number of reasons. There are no women in the lineup. The “workers” are all in radioactive suits with the nuclear plant steaming away in the background, while Mr. Burns is in his suit and tie. Here, we could surmise that Mr. Burns is CBF president Marin and that the workers are the LOC employees protected from the poisonous effects of the work they are carrying off? Or we could assume that Brazilian cities are so toxic, that only tough working class men in protective suits ( or those who have the wealth for quick escapes) can survive? Or it could mean that to come to the World Cup, middle class visitors should have their gas masks ready to confront the other group presented on the Visa commercials.

This second ad is as horrifying as it is ill considered. It is doubtful that anyone using this kind of propaganda could not know what the word “stormtrooper” means in the context of sports mega-events and the control of urban space. This is especially true given the events of the Copa das Manifestações. Stormtroopers are everywhere in Brazilian cities these days. Of course, public security is a

Drones and Shock troops!

necessary component of these events but putting an ad like this all over Brazilian World Cup host cities is basically saying to the Brazilian public that they should prepare themselves for the arrival of Imperial Forces who will act with extreme prejudice against "rebels". 

This is all happening in a context where the federal senate is debating a bill that would create terrorism as a crime in Brazil, criminalize protesters and create jail terms of up to thirty years, and in which the media cannot figure out the connections between vigilante justice, military police brutality and persecution of poor and black kids as a systemic element of Brazilian society. When the Corinthians fans lit a flare that killed a young fan in Bolivia two years back, the media was clamoring that the Bolivians had no right to hold these guys in jail because it had been an accident. When a cameraman was killed in Rio this week with a similar flare (supposedly not a bomb launched by the police), there was no investigation into the conditions of his labor (where he was sent out alone and unprotected into a violent protest) but rather a national man hunt to find the person who supposedly lit the flare. The flares, of course, are readily available to anyone who wants to buy them. In short, the stormtroopers are welcome, those who are prepared to survive in a toxic environment are welcome, their bosses can circulate unimpeded in the city and if you don’t agree to the terms set by Visa, stay at home or suffer the consequences. 

Tired Resignation

It should be clear by now that Rio de Janeiro does not have the capacity to host its own population, much less a never ending series of mega-events. During a week of record heat there have been widespread power outages, water cuts, transportation breakdowns and absurd scenes of violence. All this while Lord Mayor Paes is off in South Africa taking over the the C40 mayors´ conference from Billionaire Bloomberg. The list of insanities in Rio these past weeks has combined with the incredible heat to make me even more irritable than usual when talking about the city. But let´s go by parts.

First, the city has been made hotter and hotter by its horrible architecture, dedication to the car and lack of connectivity with the water. The most recent horror in the infinite list of heat creating buildings is by the recently deceased Oscar Niemeyer. The picture says almost all you need to know about this new monstrosity at the Fundação Getulio Vargas on the Praia de Botafogo. A big black glass box reflects

Hotter than Hades, uglier than sin. 

afternoon sun onto a treeless esplanade of white concrete. The red sculpture out in front is a reminder that Niemeyer was an expert at creating heat islands unfit for human circulation. Even if it were humanly possible to deal with the space, the kind folk at FGV have made sure that no one can enter it by erecting fencing on the access routes and posting private security 24/7. This kind of building and urban design is so common in Rio as to go unnoticed most of the time – but then no one asks why we have power outages after we cut down all the trees and cram ourselves into air-conditioned boxes that cut off external air circulation. I know ol´ Oscar was a decent enough fellow, but he has really made life a living hell for generations of Brazilians. With one of the most iconic views in the world, he opted for a building with no windows! The heat index in some parts of Rio was 57 celsius yesterday.

Second, violence, violence, violence. Brazilians love them some violence. MMA is one of the most popular sports and much like American Football can be considered a cultural representation of how the country functions. Remember when Eduardo Paes had his bodyguards hold back a disgruntled citizen so he could punch him in the face? This is an interpersonal reflection of the obsession with MMA and the normal way that people in Rio try to resolve their anger. Get on a city bus and see what I mean.

Another example? On one of the wealthiest streets in Flamengo there has been increasing insecurity due to a number of robberies committed by young kids. Part of this insecurity comes from the abandonment of the Edificio Hilton Santos which was previously occupied by live people but has been turned into yet another festering element of Eike Batista´s crumbling empire. The area in front of the building is deserted, and poorly lit and overgrown, making it an ideal place to steal cell phones and wallets. Of course, the police are never anywhere to be seen, busy as they are sitting in their cars with the engines running to escape the heat. So a group of middle class vigilantes decided to take matters into their own hands. They chased down a young black kid, stripped him naked, cut his ear with a knife and locked him to a light post with a bicycle lock – around his neck.  The case has been alternatively celebrated or decried in government and media. Just what Rio needs are gangs of upper-middle class men acting as judge and jury over the lives of poor black kids. Oh wait, that basically describes the justice system anyway.

More violence? How about the invasion of a hospital by armed gunmen who robbed patients in their beds! How about the invasion of the Morro do Juramento by the Rio Military Police that left 6 “suspects” dead. The motive was payback for shots fired against the UPP units in the Complexo de Alemão. The Guarda Municipal of Rio continue to beat up street vendors in the city center in preparation for the World Cup.Want more? How about the video showing police beating up a fan in the bathroom of a stadium. Or the 100 Corinthians fans that cut through the fencing around the team´s training site and invaded practice, throttling several of the players. There are widespread reports of inhumane conditions for Haitian workers at the Manaus World Cup stadium. Yesterday there was yet another death on Rio´s BRT Transoeste line.

Add to this the power outages and water shortages all over Rio de Janeiro and one wonders what the city´s top executive is being lauded for in South Africa this week.

The Slow March of the White Hippopotami

There has been a long debate about which of the twelve World Cup stadiums are going to be White Elephants. The leading pachyderms have been Manaus, Cuiabá, Natal and Brasília. While it is true that these wayward children of post-Keynsian corporate welfare will have no practical use as sporting venues after the World Cup, the global band of elephant hunters has yet to turn their sights on the other eight elephants. In reality, ALL of the World Cup stadiums are White Elephants. Let me explain.

The public financing of stadiums that remain in the public domain theoretically bring public benefit. This is what taxes are for. Ignoring for a moment the privatization of social services, we pay taxes for health care, security, sewage, trash collection, education, public transportation and the maintenance of public spaces because they bring public benefit. It doesn´t matter if these make money because as taxpayers we are willing to pay for them.

Ignoring for a longer moment the obscene tax burden in Brazil and the recondite machinations of massively irresponsible people like Rio´s State Secretary of Transportation (who was last seen laughing at the site of yet another train derailment in Rio), the public financing of stadiums for the 2014 World Cup, should theoretically bring public benefit. Yet other than being a condition of hosting the World Cup, during which time the stadiums will legally belong to FIFA (except if anything goes wrong), what public benefits are privatized stadiums going to bring?

All of the stadiums have been financed with public money to some degree or other. Three have had private sector investment because they are the property of teams: Porto Alegre (Internacional), Curitiba (Atlético Paranaense) and São Paulo (Corinthians). ALL of the others have had 100% public financing and ALL of them are going to be run as for-profit venues by private companies or consortiums. This jack-in-the-box hocus pocus has a name: Public Private Partnership, or PPP. What´s the problem with this?

PPP takes the stadium out of the public domain, shifting the logics of the building from one of public benefit to private profit. The only logic driving the operation of the stadiums for the World Cup is profit. When that is all you have as a guiding principal, ticket prices rise, costs get cut, perhaps safety is compromised, and the taxpayer, if he or she wants to enter into this formerly public space, now has to pay, and dearly, for this “right”.

Take the case of the Maracanã, an elephant so white it could run for political office in Utah. The stadium was built, maintained, used, modified, enjoyed, adapted, hacked and deformed with public money. Now it has been violently ripped from public hands and handed over to some fat cat construction bosses, marketing fakirs and the benighted princes of Rio´s football teams who are keen to extort the public at every turn. The public paid in money, blood, and gas induced tears for the Maracanã, now they pay again and again and again to have access to it. This is the new White Elephant scenario in Brazil where eight cities destroyed pre-existing stadiums to build new ones on the same spot.

The economic logics used to justify PPPs are never adequate. For instance, we will never know how much the Maracanã cost to maintain during its 63 years in the public domain because Rio´s State Secretary of Sport and Leisure and SUDERJ are as transparent and accessible as a lunar eclipse. There is no information available, not even through Freedom of Information Requests. We may know how much the new stadium costs to maintain and operate, but only because those numbers will justify increased entry fees.

The use logics are equally wrong. The notion that these Elephants are now multi-use arenas ignores the history and functioning of the stadiums before. These “obsolete” stadiums were used for exam taking, cadet training, religious gatherings, or had public restaurants, meeting spaces or served as public athletic facilities. They were also relatively affordable places to see football matches. Under PPP, multi-use means “shopping mall”, where the only chance that the public has to use the facilities that they paid for is by opening a wallet wider than a hippopotamus.

Incompetência Gera Violência

The 2013 Brazilian championship is still not resolved, lingering in the court system. Ricardo Texeira is lounging in a bath of saline and botox in Florida, his pilfered millions safe under Obamacare. The CBF continues to bumble along under the liver-spotted hands of José Marin, who is to institutional reform what a sewage system is to a band of Australopithecus. In the country that is about to host the most expensive World Cup of all time, there has been no attempt whatsoever to make the national sport more transparent, more accountable to fans, less abusive of tens of thousands of young men, more supportive of the women´s game (there is no national league of any kind), etc. The national championship isn´t resolved on the field. It´s not resolved off it either. Clubs are hundreds of millions in debt but money keeps pouring in from sponsors and as we get ready to kick off the state championships the prospective of Brazilian football appears as solid as Neymar´s ankle ligaments.

This excellent website has put together a collection of photos from the Confederations´ Cup, showing just how lively Coca-Cola can make an urban environment. In preparation for more of the same in 2014, the federal government, headed by the Worker´s Party since 2003, hs put together a 10,000 strong shock force to deal with protesters. These troops are being trained by the French police that use such a light hand in dealing with suburban youths. On the heels of this, the massacre in Campinas this week has once again demonstrated just how prepared and professional Brazil´s police are. When it comes to settling accounts, none better. When it comes to protecting the lives of citizens, guaranteeing their civil liberties and actually policing, none worse. Hooligans beware, this is a war zone.

The Rio city government continues to remove people with shock troops and military police. The favela do metrô has been suffering the effects of state-sponsored terrorism for several years now. Last week, the city moved to clear the rest of the people and buildings so that a parking lot for the Maracanã can be installed. Somehow, Eduardo Paes has convinced mayors around the world that he is a thoughtful, reasoned, capable administrator. All of the evidence in Rio de Janeiro is to the contrary. The recent news that the proposed TransBrasil BRT line will no longer reach the Santos Dumont Airport is yet another example of how the city is being reshaped on an ad-hoc, authoritarian basis.

As predicted, 2014 is going to be short. We have already had mass murders, massive flooding and a mass movement of poor suburban youth occupying shopping centers, exposing the latent violence, classism and racism that undergird Brazilian social relations. In March, after Carnaval, we will “celebrate” the 50^th anniversary of the 1964 military coup in various ways – the old guard that is still hanging about in the corridors of power and at João Havelange´s bedside will pine for the good old days while the rest will get tear gassed in front of the Clube Militar. This will be a nice warm up for the waves of protests that will target the rise in bus fares (again), the summary executions of the poor (again), the privatization and militarization of public space (again), and the violations of human rights to ensure private accumulation (again and again). As a curmudgeonly profeta gentileza would have said: Incompetência gera Violência.

Trigger Finger

For those not following Brazilian football, you might want to keep it that way. Here is the inglorious tale from the end of the 2013 Brazilian championship. Portuguesa, a small team from São Paulo, used the substitute Heverton with thirteen minutes remaining in the last game of the year. Heverton had not completed a two game suspension but the CBF (Brazilian football confederation) had not made this explicit to Portuguesa. Earlier in the year, the CBF had signed a huge sponsorship deal with Unimed, one of Brazil´s biggest private health insurance providers.

The rules of the CBF state that the use of an ineligible player in a game will result in the loss of points won in that game in addition to another three point deduction. Portuguesa´s case (as well as that of Flamengo which had shown their usual alacrity in management and fielded an ineligible player), went before a special sports tribunal which operates outside of any other Brazilian legal framework. In the first vote, Portuguesa lost their bid to keep their four points, arguing that according to FIFA rules the point deduction could be taken next year, that the player in question wasn´t good enough to alter the outcome of the game, and that it was the last thirteen minutes of the last game of the year so the letter of the law shouldn´t apply. The rub here is that the loss of four points relegates Portuguesa to the second division and implies the loss of millions in television revenues. This is no joke for a small club. The second rub is that with the loss of four points, Fluminense will not be relegated and will stay in the first division. It was sad to see the Fluminense fans celebrating in their legal victory what they couldn´t get on the somewhat more level field of play.

The Portuguesa case was then taken to a second round of voting in an appeals tribunal that few had ever heard of. The CBF, as the organizing institution of the charade, was able to nominate multiple members of the tribunal.  In this second round, Portuguesa lost 15-0 (as did Flamengo). The unanimous ruling by a body internal to the organizers of the competition have determined that Fluminense, 2012 champions, will be saved from relegation by a parallel sporting justice system that has nothing to do with justice and everything about keeping the big fish in small ponds. The CBF pays the salaries of those on the tribunal. Fluminense is paid by Unimed as are their lawyers. Unimed pays the CBF. See any conflicts of interest?

In the country that is about to host the World Cup, football continues to be the operated by the Wizards of Leblon. The violence of the 1% of torcidas organizadas dominates public policy for everyone. The violence of the small minority of torcidas is matched by the violence (or absence, or incompetence) of the police, the indifference of the teams and the aloof, uncompromising arrogance of the CBF. As a whole, the best talents continue to be exported like so many pieces of hardwood to European, Middle Eastern and Asian collectors who send them back to Brazil at thrice the price and half the utility. Thus, the quality of football in Brazil is abominably low, the rules confusing, the fans treated like cattle with ATM cards, and the national team is run by a Qatari marketing firm. Yes, that´s right. The CBF doesn´t decide where its own national team will play but under Ricardo Texeira sold the rights to International Sports Events of Qatar until 2022 for the price of US$1 million per game. You might want to think twice about wearing a shirt with CBF on the breast.

The good news coming out of Brazilian football is that a few of the old pieces of wood that have washed up on Brazilian shores have formed a political movement to contest the Wizards at the CBF. Good Sense F.C. (Bom Senso F.C.) staged a number of protests during matches in which players have not moved after the initial whistle, or knocked the ball back and forth to each other in protest of the insane calendar that the CBF has put together for 2014. Brazil is the only country in the world that plays in every month of the year. Top flight teams in Brazil will frequently play more than 80 games a year, with no more than two to three weeks break between seasons. Not that you would know this from looking at the CBF website. The most recent information in English is from 2012.

Unfortunately there is not much to look forward to in the local scene this year. Vasco, relegated. Fluminense, relegated but somehow stayed up. Flamengo, one point off relegation but will be in the Libertadores because they won the Copa do Brasil. Botafogo, squeaked into the Libertadores and have the amazing Seedorf to keep us entertained at R$40 per hour.  The best games, by far, will be those of the Rio State Championship where we can look forward to seeing Bangu x Friburgense. If only the Rio State Football Federation had any practical information about the tournament they run, we could find out when and where the game is going to be played. Sigh. 

Reloading for 2014

2013 will hopefully be remembered as a year of positive change in Brazilian history. As we have gone through a series of urban and social transformations for huge sporting events, the real fragilities of Brazil came into sharp focus. To host the World Cup and Olympics, special legislation weakened already tenuous institutions. Tens of billions of public funds have been directed to projects that were never discussed with the

public. These privatized projects are justified with the word legacy, but there is no guarantee. The spoken word means almost nothing in Brazil and the very structure of the World Cup and Olympic Games allows for the circus to move on while the locals are left to clean up the elephant droppings. Forever.

The protests of 2013 were partly a reaction to the opaque, exorbitant and authoritarian megas. They also responded to the deteriorating conditions of urban life in Brazilian cities. I see this every day when I walk out of my apartment: bubbling sewage, abandoned buildings, precarious infrastructure, military police sitting on the corner. The protests were not spontaneous expressions of rage, but a big blip of concentrated indignation that is always kept alive by Brazilian social movements such as the Comitês Popluares da Copa.

The violent police responses to peaceful protest exposed the contradictions and brutalities that underlie most facets of Brazilian life. The police do not do policing, they treat the population as a threat to order and have no capacity to work for the public good. They serve at the behest of a very thin slice of Brazilian society – those benefitting from the very projects and conditions that the protesters were on about. There may have been real material gains in Brazil over the past generation, but this does not indicate meaningful social, political, infrastructural or economic reform has been accomplished. Rio is a perfect example of this – a place where issues of inequality and violence are solved through a counter-insurgency pacification program. The knock-on effects of pacification were never thought through or adequately prepared for, exposing Rio´s most vulnerable citizens ever more to conditions of bare life.

2014, without question, will be the shortest year in modern Brazilian history. A late Carnaval, World Cup and Elections will ensure that none of the necessary, difficult work of building a more just society will occur. The events will limit social agency at the same time that the politicians will be handing out crumbs to gather votes. If Brazil wins the World Cup, we will lose even more of our lives to the false delirium of a hollow promise.  

Despite the constant difficulties of living in a city governed by decree and in a state that acts on the behest of the invisible hand, 2013 was a year that demonstrated that there is real potential for collective social action to have an effect. The work of building consensus to create a collective future based on an atomized and self-referential past is tiring, frustrating and slow. The events of 2013 demonstrated that this work, undertaken by millions on a daily basis, can spring to life to challenge those in power with legitimate, articulate and diverse messages. These messages were heard and seen around the world linking Brazilians with Turks, Egyptians, and Circassians in their struggle against authoritarianism. Hopefully 2014 will bring even more people to the streets to raise their fists and voices.

That´s it for another year of Hunting White Elephants. Thanks to the tens of thousands who have visited the site this year and be sure to follow my twitter @geostadia. I´ll be putting up links to journalistic and academic pieces in January and updating the media page. Feliz ano!

After the rains, the shock

It didn´t take long for the new transportation projects in Rio´s port area to assume the habits of their elder siblings. With the intense rains of last week, the Via Binário filled with rainwater and sewage, completely blocking access to downtown. The city government admitted that their due diligence wasn´t happening but all

The Via Binário gests into the flow of Rio. OGlobo photo

the same slapped the private consortium that is handling the R$9 billion, 5 million square meter privatization of public space  with a R$100,000 fine. One wonders what will happen when all of the traffic that used to flow above ground through the port goes below sea level and people are trapped inside their cars in a tunnel. 

The Via Binário shouldn´t feel badly for failing its first test. The Metrô flooded. The SuperVia train tracks flooded. The region around the Maracanã flooded completely. The Avenida Brasil flooded. There was no way in or out of the city center where 60% of the city´s jobs are concentrated. The advice of the mayor: “stay home”. Of course, he could have said this earlier in the day before millions made their way across waterworld to never get to their places of employment. Again, how much good does an IMB smart system do when it can only sit by idly and watch a dumb city fall to pieces? In their propaganda video, there is a line that suggests that the smart city center can now predict heavy rains and

Imenjá makes an appearance in Rio´s Zona Norte

move to prevent disasters. It is amazing that only five people died. Hundred were robbed on Rio´s highways as bandidos made the most of stopped traffic. IBM: “The result is a visionary city, equipped to react, predict and plan for current and future events”.

During these wildly unpredictable rains, the Observatório das Metrópeles held a national seminar that dealt with the effects of the World Cup on all twelve host cities. The results were depressing. In every case, the World Cup is stimulating interventions that use public funding and military agents to commodify urban space, increase prices, and reduce access to sport while guaranteeing a suite of “executive privileges” for the cloistered and aloof global elite. Those who were present at the World Cup draw on the Bahian coast witnessed the FIFA president shutting around with a 50 car motorcade. Brazilian officials use the phrase “differentiated treatment” without a hint of irony, as if it were a defining characteristic of a democratic society. For this and for other reasons, the National Articulation of the Popular Committees of the World Cup nominated FIFA as the worst corporation in the world. While there is stiff competition from Gasprom, the campaign is picking up steam.

Three workers have died building the World Cup stadium in Manaus, one fewer than the number of games that will be played there. I wonder how many minutes of silence Herr Blatter will have for them before each of the games? If the ten seconds he allowed for Nelson Mandela is any indication, we may have already been silent for long enough.

Assuming that the stadium is built without more human sacrifice, the four games in Manaus mean that eight teams will play there, 25% of the total field of 32. However, there was a 100% chance that the USA would end up in the Amazon. Given that the USA sends more fans than any other country to the WC, that there are direct flights to Manaus from Atlanta and Miami, and a penchant for eco-tourism...bring the sun-screen, forged notions of Fair Play and bug spray!

Staying with football, we have no idea what the Brazilian first and second divisions will look like for 2014, more than a week after the final games of the tournament. Three teams are relegated from Serie A: Vasco, Ponte Preta and Náutico. However, Portuguesa from São Paulo used a substitute who was in some kind of legal limbo with 16 minutes remaining in the second half of the last game of the year. They tied the game and kept their heads above the relegation line. The punishment for an illegal player is the points that were won in the game + 3. If Portuguesa were to be punished with a four point deduction, Fluminense would be saved from relegation. My money is on Fluminense to be saved from a terrible year in which they went from Brazilian champions to relegation. Flamengo is also facing the same situation as Portuguesa and could face relegation if the sporting tribunal in Rio rules against them. My bet is that the size of the angry crowds outside of the building will encourage jurisprudence to go with the masses. However, if the vote goes for Flamengo, it must surely go against Fluminense. I am changing my bet. I bet that nothing will ever be resolved in Brazilian football as long as the CBF continues along without a massive institutional overhaul. The rest is just a bunch of guys in shorts.

And to get the week off to a flying start, over the weekend the road in front of the Maracanã was closed so that work could get started on a pedestrian overpass that will connect the stadium to the Quinta da Boa Vista. Last night (Sunday), perhaps making use of the fact that no media could get near because of the closed roads, the Rio Military Police shock brigade moved against an occupation of buildings undertaken by members of the Aldeia Maracanã. The terrorism that the state has manifested against a peaceful occupation of indigenous space is a perfect encapsulation of the creative dialogue that has defined the hosting of the 2014 World Cup. 

Fim do ano, fim do mundo

The end of another year of football in Brazil exposed the putrid state of every element of the game. This video explains some of it:

The Vasco x Atletico Paranaense match was held in the city of Joinville in Santa Catarina State because Altético´s stadium is under construction, and massively delayed, for the World Cup. Vasco needed to win in order to avoid relegation, but their team is so devoid of talent that staying in the first division another year would have been a sporting injustice. Why are Vasco so bad? Anyone out there remember Phillipe Coutinho, now starring in midfield for Liverpool? Ex-Vasco, he was sold to A.C. Milan on the day he turned 18. Vasco´s youth system has been condemned in the courts and the few times they do manage to produce talent, the boys are sold off to the highest bidder. This is same reason for which Fluminense was relegated. They decided to sell their two best players, Wellinton Nem and Thiago Neves, in mid season and brought no one in to replace them. The political-economy of Brazilian football continues to benefit agents and directors at the expense of clubs and fans.

However, the causes for the scenes above have much deeper roots than just the emptying of talent pools and managerial incompetence (read: Vanderlei Luxemburgo). The torcidas organizadas have long standing relationships with club directors. This is not new or surprising in Latin America. However, the fact that there had been violence between the torcidas of Vasco and Atletico PR and that the Military Police decided not to patrol inside the stadium, leaving it up to a private security force, on a day when the Torcida Jovem of Vasco was likely to be at its most aggressive because of the impending relegation…that is another kind of violence in and of itself. The inability of the state to anticipate pre-announced conflicts or of the responsible football authorities to ensure the safe realization of a game is exactly the kind of violence through absence that has as its inevitable counterpoint a boot in the face and a nail-tipped club in the head. Violence permeates Brazilian football at all levels so why are we so surprised when it breaks out in the stands?

Naturally, in Brazil, no one is going to assume responsibility for any of this. The clubs cannot be held responsible for their permissive relationships with the torcidas, the PM´s hands off attitude may be criticized but not investigated, the CBF is tone deaf, blind and unmoving. The only thing that will happen is that both Vasco and Atletico will receive punishments of short duration that will not significantly alter the status quo.

A number of important Brazilian footballers have started a movement to reform Brazilian football from the inside. Good Sense F.C. is calling for a reorganization of the football calendar and for a declaration of labor rights for football players. They issued a note regarding yesterday´s violence saying all culpable parties should be found out. This includes the CBF, the Military Police, the private security firm in charge of the internal policing, the emergency personnel, the board of directors of both clubs and the torcidas organizadas. 

Smart is the new Stupid

Rio de Janeiro. If cars were bread, the city would be the world´s largest, moldiest, most immobile basket. But cars aren´t edible, and therefore we have the blingest, bestest, most smartest city in the world, full of a thousand hidden treasures and a million kilometers of traffic jams. We can all thank the brilliant privatization initiatives and urban operations and mega-events for the wholesale prostitution of urban space and commodification of our increasingly bare lives. We are being led into an impossible smart future by the rising star of hyperbolic, back room, smart guy glad-handing. In the past weeks, Rio de Janeiro has been selected as “the world´s smartest city” at the Smart City Expo World Congress and his royal munificence Eduardo Paes was elected president of the C40 group of the world´s largest cities. 

Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. It´s just that the city is more dysfunctional than ever, the urban future is being built upon car and bus transportation, the bay and the ocean are too polluted for human use, half of the city is controlled by militias, the other half by drug gangs and a brutal military apparatus,  the mayor wants to build a ski slope in the Madureira park and is more concerned with Woody Allen than with reforestation.

Truly, the marketing machine of the city and state governments are the smartest elements of RJ. I have not done a formal analysis, but Rio de Janeiro must be the only city in the C40 that does not have a map of its bus routes. It must be the only port city that does not use the water for mass transportation. It is the largest city in the Americas with one metro line, which does not a metro make. It may be the world´s largest city that has privatized all of its public transportation and continues to blast highways through dense neighborhood fabric without ever having demonstrated that those lines aattend present or future demand. The Olympic bid books have become the de-facto urban planning documents. Rule by decree, violations of human rights, rampant deficit spending, mega event after mega-event, bubbling sewage, increased congestion, violent police, voracious real-estate speculation undertaken by the state, attempts to close high performing public schools, the elimination of Olympic training facilities and tens of thousands of forced removals. This is the toned and bronzed face of the new smart city.

Now, as we welcome another gang of “global experts”  in the form of the Clinton Initiative (with Chelsea! and the president of Nike, Otavio Marques de Azevedo, presidente da Andrade Gutierrez; Candido Botelho Bracher, presidente e CEO do Itaú BBA; Alessandro Carlucci, CEO da Natura; Sylvia Coutinho, CEO do UBS Brasil; Andre Esteves, CEO do BTG Pactual; Angélica Fuentes, CEO do Grupo Omnilife/Angelíssima; Eduardo Hochschild, presidente-executivo da Hochschild Mining; Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, presidente do conselho de administração da Gerdau; Kurt Koeningfest, CEO do BancoSol)  - as we receive this cavalcade of the lords of the planet, we will again hear how great Paes and Cabral are performing for this brutally limited audience.

On the positive side, the only really intelligent plan to come out of RJ in recent years has won an important international prize. The Plano Popular da Vila Autódromo (link to download), developed in conjunction with the residents of the Vila Autódromo (whose residents possess title to land and whose existence has been personally threatened by Mayor Paes for 20 years), has won the London School of Economics / Deutche Bank Urban Age Award. The recognition of a plan that emerged through the collaborative efforts of residents, universities and urban professionals is an important political statement on the part of the Urban Age. This will give political muscle to the Plan,  forcing the city and state to work with the V.A. to urbanize. It will also make it even more difficult for Rio 2016 to “clean” the Olympic site for its London-inspired urbanization project. More, the recognition that collaborative, grassroots, bottom up planning can have significant and positive effects on urban environments and social relations should be taken as proof positive that despite being smart, there is still hope for Rio de Janeiro.

Dengue, Dudu, Dirceu

Now a UNESCO heritage site but always projected as a  landscape
 frontier for capital accumulation

Still believing the Brazil hype? I´ll just touch on three issues in this post, and do not want to be a haranguing voice of despair but until there is good evidence that urban conditions are being materially improved by mega-events or that a meaningful social change towards a more just society is evident, I´ll continue to point out the gaping holes in the gold-framed 17^th century landscape painting hung on Brazil´s front door.

 Dengue is still a major problem in Brazil, particularly in 6 of the World Cup host cities (doubling of deaths since 2010 and 217,885 declared cases in Brazil in 2013). Dengue is not really that hard to eliminate if there is sufficient investment in sanitation and a focuses public education program to eliminate stagnant pools of fetid water. The chances of getting dengue are still pretty slim, unless you are living in a poor area of town or in low lying areas, or at a job site…

For the World Cup there is a thing called the Matrix of Responsibilities that each city agrees to as part of its host city contract. In Rio, for instance, the Matrix includes  the Maracanã and the Transcarioca. Of course, the opportunity to include pet projects in all of this in order to “maximize” (read: make as much money as possible) the benefit of the mega-event is irresistible. In some cases, such as Brasilia, none of the urban mobility projects made it off paper and have since been eliminated from the matrix. In Cuiabá, all of the urban mobility projects began on the same day, immobilizing the city for years. Not even Neo could get to work on time in Cuiabá.  In Rio, the re-organization of transport lines in order to make more room for cars has made an impossibly bad system even worse. The mayor first asked for residents to be patient and now has told them to leave work early. Some have suggested that he take his own advice. I wonder how this kind of brutal, arrogant indifference is measured by IBM´s smart city machines. Want to find out the best place to get into gridlock? The new Iphone 5s will cost R$3,600 in Brazil and the promised G4 network likely won´t work.

At least there has been some movement towards completing prison sentences for the corrupt operators of the PT´s monthly kickback scheme. Of course, nothing will stick to the former president even though his former chief of staff and the majority of the PT´s inner circle have now been dragged off to prison. Of course it is good that these convicted criminals have to submit to the law of the land (even though prisons in and of themselves are good for no one). This may indicate that something has indeed shifted positively in the Brazilian justice system.

We know that Brazil already has the most expensive football tickets in the world (relative to minimum wage), but what C.R. Flamengo has done to their fans is beyond the pale. After reaching the final of the Copa do Brasil, the cheapest tickets for the final at the Xaracanã were set at R$250. Minimum wage in Brazil, R$690 a month. A judge intervened and set the cheapest tickets at R$120. The Brazilian clubs are run by amateurs who are articulated politically with a closed and cloistered national football federation that is mirrored by a 2014 Organizing Committee that has no information about its organizing structure and that is trying desperately to convince Brazilians that the World Cup is going to be the best ever. Can we stop with the charade that football tournaments are adequate tools for urban and social development? Mesmo sendo um sapo tamanho cristo redentor, stopping the bombast would make the transfer of wealth program that is the World Cup a little easier to swallow.