End of Year Report

2011 comes to an end without the promised bang of divulged documents, lawsuits, popular uprisings (though there was an excellent dossier detailing abuses), gnashing of teeth and death by papercut. Maybe at this time next year we can all get our millennial dander up as high as the notes on the Legadômetro, but for this year everything in Brazil is sliding relatively quietly into the delicious do-nothing months between xmas and Carnaval. There is no shortage of material to comment on, however, and I’ll use this last post of the year to properly shut things down.

Transportation. It’s a mess and getting messier. The city is in a permanent state of near-paralysis and has one of the most fragile transportation systems in the world. In early December, a bus caught fire in the Linha Amarela tunnel which links Barra to the Zona Norte and shut down traffic in both directions for more than three hours. There continues to be no map of the city’s bus system and one never knows when a bus is going to arrive or if it will stop to let you on.  It frequently takes me an hour and a half to travel from Rio to Niterói, 3 km as the papagaio flies.

The smallest accident on the Rio-Niteroi bridge or on the perimetral clogs the city like a vegan after eating a cheesesteak. The projects underway in the Zona Portuaria have made the main transit avenues so unreliable that the ferrys have received a 50% increase in traffic. This is unfortunate because they are not equipped to handle the volume. The concessionaire, Barcas S.A., can’t manage to train pilots or maintain the boats with the inevitable result: two weeks ago a fully loaded ferry crashed full-steam ahead into the docks injuring more than a hundred people. As if to reward the company, the state government approved a massive increase in the fares. The state secretary of transportation really should be made to water-ski behind the ferry for a day and then to eat a kettle of raw Guanabara Bay mussels.

Air travel is quickly becoming the only viable means of transport in Brazil, even within the cities themselves. Rio’s proposed BRT lines will not attend current or future demands, nor reduce the need or desire for cars which are the principal problem. The innumerable construction projects are detonating what mobility there was.  If one has the luxury to be strategic about where, when, and how one moves about the city, then bicycle is by far the best option except that one inevitably takes fantastic risks in doing so. The city just put in, for the third time, one of those bike share programs and people seem to be using them, but without a larger bike-orientated transportation plan what’s the point? Ah yes, it looks good and Barcelona does it.

The Metrô linha 4 project is taking more form and looking more and more idiotic as time goes on. There are reports that the recently opened General Osorio station will have to be closed for 8 months for reforms. Most ridiculously, in order to convince the wealthy residents of Leblon to go along with the project, those who have their garage parking eliminated during construction will have personal, public servants to park their cars, carry their groceries, and generally help out with their lives. In addition to closing multiple public spaces indefinitely, the project is going to make traveling by metro even more difficult for those who live in the Zona Sul. Why? The Trans-Oeste BRT is going to pack the new metro line full in Jardim Oceânico in Barra in the direction of the center, so that by the time the trains get to Leblon-Ipanema-Copacabana-Botafogo, they will look like sleek sardine cans.

Sport. João Havelange was forced to resign from the IOC before he was kicked out. Despite his shame, he received standing ovations at soccerex and is still viewed as some kind of cantankerous, a-political saint. He’s an embarrassment to sport and society and should be prosecuted to the full extent of national and international law. His favorite phrase had long been, “I don’t do politics, I do sport.” This rang particularly hollow when he was running around the world courting votes or when he was glad-handing with dictators. Now his favorite phrase is, “just leave me in peace.” Sorry João, let’s hope those ISL documents come out before you exit through the trapdoor. I think Nem is looking for a roommate.

Tricky Ricky Teixeira has caught some of the same bug that his ex-father in law has, and has relieved himself from various CBF and World Cup duties until the end of January. While one has to admit that he doesn’t and has never looked particularly well, the “health reasons” excuse just before incriminating documents were meant to be released is pathetic at best. The vice-president of the Piauí Football Federation has called for his imprisonment. Let’s hope that gets some legs.

The Brazilian Olympic committee decided to make the fort at the end of Urca the base for the Brazilian Olympic Team for 2016. I wonder if anyone asked the residents’ association of Urca what they thought about having their principal access to their neighborhood clogged with news trucks, security forces, athletes’ buses, VIP limos, etc. for the months leading up to and during the Olympics. Don’t want the Brazilians to arrive at their events? It would be almost as easy as shutting down the Linha Vermelha.

The gap between the best football in the world and what we see in Brazil was exposed in stark detail in Barcelona’s 4-0 thrashing of Santos in the final of the World Club Championship. Brazilian football is decades behind in management practices and mired in the export-minded political economy of a banana republic. Barcelona’s total football is not just about football, but about the creation of a life-world for its players. While the players are perhaps savagely competitive, there is an educational and social structure at Barcelona that does not throw their injured or less-talented prospects back into the murky waters of the labor-market like so many ill-caught fish. Of course F.C. Barcelona has its problems, but one cannot argue with the beauty and dynamism of what they produce on the field. The most disappointing part of the game was seeing the line of FIFA safados handing out the trophies. A gaggle of corpulent, self-important stuffed shirts, smirking all the way to the bank. You too, Platini, shame on you.

Model of Brasilia's LEED certified stadium

The Cup. This is the official line of thinking regarding the stadium projects. 1) Stadiums are not viable economic projects because ticket prices in Brazil are too low, therefore, 2) The “only way” to sustain stadiums is through international shows and increased points of sale, turning fans into clients and stadia into shopping malls 3) though being over built for the World Cup, don’t worry, the stadiums are now being planned for use after the events to guarantee their economic viability 4) the stadium projects should be constructed to attain the highest possible LEED certification to highlight Brazil’s commitment to “sustainable development” (even though Brazil doesn’t have a company that manufactures the technology required to attain the certification and all of the contracts will have to go to foreign companies) 5) the most important thing that the stadiums will do will be to project the city to international audiences therefore the cost isn’t entirely relevant. Booooooo, hisssss. How are those stadia in South Africa doing? Useless. White. Elephants. Unless, of course, you believe the NYTimes which had the gall to show the Green Point stadium in Cape Town as a symbol of that city’s creative economy. Bullocks, bullocks, bullocks.

Brasilia's Mane Garrincha taking form

The naming of Ronaldo Fenômeno as the mouth piece of the World Cup is meant to attract investments and divert attention. As was to be expected, Ronaldo knows how to use his foot, putting it squarely in his mouth by saying “You host a World Cup with stadiums, not hospitals”. Nice one. Actually, Ronaldo, hospitals are a major component of a World Cup, but let’s leave that for next year.

The Law of the Cup that has been such a bone of contention between FIFA, the federal government, and civil society was not voted on, again. The details of the law are of interest to those of us working on the structure of the event, and once it is passed we’ll give it a good look and analyze the conflicts, delays, and players that brought it into being. For now, FIFA is going to have a big, empty stocking that may not be filled with as much money as it would like in 2014. Does anyone actually think that FIFA needs more money or that it is an effective steward of football? Que se vayan todos.

Brasilia's aborted VLT project

After a visit to Brasilia, I was both relieved and saddened to learn that Rio de Janeiro is not the only city that is going through some major problems with transportation, stadium construction, corruption, and incompetence. The World Cup organizing committee in Brasilia is going to put a few leisure-oriented bike paths along the axis monumental but will put the bike racks about a kilometer away from the stadium, in the middle of a grass-covered open space. The proposed light rail system linking the airport to the stadium (more or less) went ahead without approval, destroying an existing traffic interchange. There are no plans to either fix the interchange or to complete the rail project, which was very, very poorly designed in the first place. As I wrote earlier this year, the World Cup was born in obscurity, is being run out of a black box, and is going to end up in the courts. It will be a hell of a party.

UPPs, Milicias, Traficantes, oh my. Rocinha and Vidigal were occupied / pacified without so much as a “by your leave”. As ever, real-estate has boomed and people are trying to make sense of the new dynamics. The circumstances under which these two critical neighborhoods were occupied were strange in the extreme. It appeared as if the either the entire architecture of the drug trade in the Zona Sul was dominated by one person (Nem) and that he had a critical, unimaginable security and information meltdown or that the new boss is just like the old boss but with weapons and training paid for with public money. The security situation in Rio continues to boggle my mind. It’s big business, unevenly distributed, unequally applied, and a determining factor in just about everything that happens in the city. The milicias in the Zona Oeste continue to have a fantastic and phantasmagoric influence on the city and state governments, whose levels of depravity, arrogance, and misanthropy are reaching ever greater heights. It’s not safe to sit around in public space where the UPPs are active. There are always fingers on high-caliber triggers. This link is to a story of a man shot while in playing samba in Mangueira, just across from the Maracanã.

Meanwhile and perhaps encouraged by the marketing of the illusion of security, record numbers of foreign tourists are coming to Brazil. How many? 7 million in 2011. That is around 600,000 a month, exactly the number that is expected for the 2014 World Cup. How is it again that the World Cup is going to increase Brazil’s tourist numbers and establish tourism as the ever expanding base for urban economies? It’s not and it won’t. As I have repeated time and time again, international tourism in Brazil is not a major source of revenue or employment. 7 million tourists is only slightly more than the Dominican Republic receives. This is an insanely expensive country, there is little or no tourist information (for instance, the last time I came through Galeão in Rio the only English language tourist information was produced by “Rio for Partiers”), and mono-lingual gringos are going to have a tough go of it. Not to say that Brazil isn’t wonderful or that tourists shouldn’t come, just that it is neither easy nor cheap nor close to the major centers from which international tourists depart.

Brazil, the myth of emergence. Brazil’s actual economic growth has not been that dynamic in the last few years. While it is true that the economy has expanded the state controls on the economy are so great and the protectionist measures so strong that the opening of Brazilian markets that would really cause the economy to take off simply hasn’t happened. There is little to no competition in the Brazilian marketplace for essential goods and services, which makes quality low, prices high, and service terrible. The re-distribution of income that supposedly took place under Lula via the Bolsa Familia program appears to have been a token gesture that has had the very positive effect of removing millions from absolute poverty and pushing them into the lower classes or into plain ol’ poverty. Indeed, there has been a general improvement on the national scale towards a more equitable distribution of income, but Brazil remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. This was highleghted by the release of the IBGE report detailing the increase in the percentage of Brazilians living in favelas and informal settlements. Rio de Janeiro, sadly, has been the one state in Brazil that has seen income disparity increase over the last ten years and is the city with the highest percentage and overall numbers of people in favleas. One well-known effect of these dang mega-events (that don’t exist, remember) is that they increase inequality while brining in a large, sophisticated, and permanent military apparatus that acts to preserve and re-enforce the accumulation of capital in its various guises. The more we can pull back the curtain, open the black boxes, say nay to the Trojan horse,  and demand information, the more likely it will be that these events can be used as opportunities to propose and impose alternatives to the current paradigm.

Felizes festas e nos veremos em 2012!

Finados

Orlando Silva is out of the Ministry of Sport and is under federal investigataion for shuffling cards under the table. Nothing surprising, but the top communist post in Dilma’s government appears to have been less than equitable in his redistribution of state funds. Silva has been replaced by Aldo Rebelo who was involved in some small scandals in the Lula government. Far from squeaky clean, Rebelo’s brother was named in the scandal that brought down Silva. It is unclear if Rebelo has ever kicked or thrown a ball in anger or what his qualifications are to head the government’s primary ministry that will deal with the World Cup and Olympics. More of the same, de novo.

After saying he was going to radically reduce the taxi fleet by some thousands of taxis (and had this put into the Master Plan) the Glorious Crown Prince of Rio has decided to increase it by six thousand. How does he do this? Executive decree. What is an executive decree? A handy tool taken from the box of authoritarianism. What is authoritarianism? The dominant regime in Rio.

Has there ever been a city preparing for mega-events, trying to sell itself to the world as a place of business and leisure that has an much violence and open gunfire in the streets as Rio? Yesterday, in Santa Teresa, there was a gun battle between traficantes and the Military Police after the latter arrested some of the former. The attack on Santa’s UPP is the latest in a series of battles between insurgents and the coalition forces and was probably related to the monthly payment scheme that the two sides had worked out (where the UPP bosses received R$50,000 a month from the traficantes). Last week in Maré, one of Rio’s biggest drug bosses was gunned down in an intense firefight. BOPE has been occupying a part of Maré for a couple of weeks as they prepare to install their headquarters in the region.

The state government appears to be massaging their homicide statistics to show that their public policies are working, but there has been a commensurate increase in “deaths by other causes” as well as disappearances. Between 2007 and April of 2011, 22.533 people disappeared in Rio de Janeiro.

One of the people who should not have disappeared from Rio is State Deputy Marcelo Freixo. Freixo has been under death threat by milicias for years, but recently those threats have escalated and he gone to London at the invitation of Amnesty International to give a series of lectures. Ever sympathetic to the allies of the Crown Prince, who had a sit-down meeting with the milicias about van transport last week, OGlobo mocked Freixo in today’s paper saying that Freixo really isn’t under threat but that his departure was “already scheduled”. From Freixo’s twitter page:

Não recebi qualquer contato de autoridade do gov do Rio para falar sobre as ameaças que recebi. Tratavam como se o problema fosse meu.

I have not received any contact from the Rio government to talk about the threats I have received. They are treating the problem as if it were mine alone.

Naked and repeated death threats to state representatives, open gun battles in some streets, a mayor that governs through executive order, insane traffic problems, rampant real-estate speculation… all made better by the announcement that FIFA is going to offer tickets for the first round of World Cup games between US$20 and US$30. The above link is an interview with FIFA VP Valcke, who is honest in his answers but after reading the interview I’m pretty sure that this is going to be a disaster of a World Cup in terms of mobility. His response to the reporter’s question about a Brazilian fan having to travel more than 10,000km to see the team play was “At least he will be able to say that he traveled.” As I described in an earlier post, the sheer number of air miles is going to overload the Brazilian system completely. My recommendation: stay in the north-east (Recife, Natal, Fortaleza) and paddleboard between the cities.

The Campeonato Brasileiro is headed to a dramatic conclusion. This is the most disputed title in some time with as many as 6 teams with a chance to win it. Happliy, Vasco da Gama is level on points at the top of the table (with Corinthians) four games to play. For the first time in recent memory all four of Rio’s big teams have a chance to win. Vasco’s path is the most difficult with games against Santos, Botafogo, Fluminense, and Flamengo.

Oh the Maracanã.  The contract process for the area surrounding the stadium was just suspended. There are plans to privatize it before 2013 and Eike Batista wants to use his toupee to cover the stands. The final supporting beam of the old roof has been removed and with the implementation of the UPP in Mangueira, the stadium is completely surrounded, as if it had just robbed a  case of beer and was running down the street into a BOPE nest. Hopefully the Policía Federal will have the courage to surround the band of crooks at the CBFdp, but they apparently weren’t able to get much out of Dr. Jowls when he talked to them the other day.

This is the last post for awhile as I will be attending Think Tank 2: Sport Mega-event Impact, Leveraging, and Legacies in Vancouver. The title of my paper for the think tank is The Mega-event city as neo-liberal laboratory. Here’s the abstract:

The production of sports mega-events in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is occurring within the context of profound political, economic, and social change. As Brazil’s economy and political structures have stabilized over the past quarter century, the country has assumed an increasingly important role in global affairs. The dominant trends towards neo-liberalism in the global political-economy are being reproduced within the context of a state structure that has traditionally occupied a central role in the national economy. While transitions to neo-liberalism at the national scale will take time to implement, it is within the urban context that agents of global capital are able to shape most effectively space and social relations to maximize accumulation strategies. In this sense, sports mega-events function as mechanisms for the implementation of neo-liberal modes of governance within urban contexts. This paper will examine the processes through which mega-events in Rio de Janeiro are using the city as an active laboratory for new models of neo-liberal governance that are accelerating the transformation of Brazilian society.

The Wire, Season 6

At the end of April, three major international organizations visited Rio to deal with Olympic related developments – The IOC, the UN, and Amnesty International. You can probably guess the tone of each of their public statements. I attended the public meeting between the IOC, the Prefeitura, and Rio 2016 which was used as an opportunity to present the new transparency [sic] website Cidade Olímpica (www.cidadeolimpica.com). 

The website presentation was undertaken by the Olympic Parrot, Felipe Goes, and was an embarrassingly shallow testament to the mind-numbing obtuseness of discursive Olympism. The website is slick and paints a picture of “progress” without social, economic, environmental, or structural costs. If you want to sit in an office in Switzerland, São Paulo, or New York and check on the strides that the Cariocas are taking to make you more money, than this is the perfect instrument. If you want to know how and where public funds are being spent, how to interact with the process, or get real information about anything, then just sit back and wait for the bulldozer to come. The website provides 360 degree views of construction sites, tidy videos with carefully crafted interviews, unknown academics talking about Rio’s “transformative” history, and nary a word of opposition or a hint of discord. Everything will happen smoothly, the city will undergo a ‘natural and naturalized’ transformation bringing untold benefits to untold millions. I encourage readers to go through the website to see the projects underway. If you are able to find out any information that goes beyond mere presentation, please let me know so I can have them take it off the website.

The euphemistic void of the new website made me nostalgic for the old black box of www.transparenciaolimpica.com.br. In returning to it after a month away, I was stunned to find that they had reconfigured the site and taken out what little information there was. It’s a joke, an Olim-piada. 

For instance, click on this link and try to get information about the VLT Centro line: http://www.transparenciaolimpica.com.br/projetos2.htm. This brings you to a continual feedback loop which, ironically, functions much like the VLT (Light Rail) line which is projected to circulate only through the Porto Maravilha development project, avoiding connection with the Metro, Rail, and Ferry lines. I shake my head so much in disbelief that I’m developing preternaturally strong neck muscles.

Having read Raquel Rolnk’s UN report denouncing the violations of human rights that are already happening throughout Rio as the government bulldozes homes and building to make way for transportation projects and stadia, I was eager to hear what the Olympian Cerberus had to say about the very strong denunciations.

Geostadia: This has been a very important week for the government and for Rio 2016. Not only is the IOC evaluating developments but the UN and Amnesty International have condemned the government for severe violations of human rights and non-compliance with international treaties to which Brazil is a signatory. I would like to hear how the Prefeitura, Rio 2016, and the IOC are responding to these charges.

Eduard Paes (summary of): I don’t think that the UN is going to need to respond to this question so I’ll just deal with it myself. You have to separate the transportation projects from the Olympic project…

Geostadia (incredulous): But you just presented a whole website link…

Eduardo Paes (irritiated): It will be much easier to get through this if you let me finish.

Carlos Nuzman (bored, thinking about lunch, never looking at the press corps)

Eduardo Paes: As I was saying, these removals have nothing to do with the Olympics because you have to separate the Olympic Facilities from the other infrastructures.

At this point I stopped writing, stopped listening. My head filled with the sound of all of the world’s national anthems being played at once.

As Paes tried to close the door on the subject by asking for another question, Gilbert Felli, head of the IOC delegation took the microphone, answering me directly.

Felli: We don’t want to give the impression that the IOC doesn’t care about these questions. We understand that many of the benefits that the Olympics bring come with consequences and we will be asking Rio de Janeiro for a list of all of the disappropriations being made. We have this problem in all Olympic cities [and how, I thought (two million people in 20 years)], and we are looking to establish more relationships with local and international NGOs in order to deal more effectively with the problem.

There were a couple of other questions regarding the massive flooding that happened around the Maracanã, effectively shutting down the Tijuca region of the city for three days. Of course, but of course, there are project under way to fix this problem, but the reality of the situation is that when it rains in Tijuca and the tide is high, there is nowhere for the water to go and the Maracanã becomes a mud bath.

(I also need to point out that after the official launching of the website, the site didn’t get on air for two days. During the presentation, the Olympic Parrot had to keep pecking at off-line videos to show content. Yet another show at the Rio 2016 amateur hour).

Privatized Mud Bowl

We knew it was coming but have finally had official confirmation. The Maracanã will, after undergoing more than a R$ 1,5 billion of reforms over six years, be given over to a private concession. Sergio Cabral made the announcement here, saying that “a stadium like the Maracanã simply doesn’t fit into the hands of public power”. So, after 60 years, the Maracanã, once the greatest and grandest public space in Rio, Brazil and the Americas, will be fully privatized. As I have been saying in my recent pieces for Brazilian audiences, the Maracanã is dead and we are just entering into stages of denial. The mourning process hasn’t even begun.

Paul McCartney 1 Fla-Flu 0

The Brazilian national championship is going to kick off in two weeks but no games will be played in Rio de Janeiro. Vasco and Botafogo are away and Fla and Flu will have nowhere to play because Paul McCartney is going to be using the Engenhão. With the Maracanã closed to general use until the end of the Paralympics in September of 2016, when big shows come to town three of the big four have to find somewhere else to play. How is it that Rio de Janeiro does not have the capacity to have both Paul McCartney and football occur on the same weekend? No one knows where these games are going to be played yet, which is making it mighty difficult for the Associação Nacional dos Torcedores to organize a protest. Come on CBF, get your s#!@# together so the formgias can take it apart!

Tropa do Elite III

The forced evictions in Rio are accompanied by two major resettlement projects, Morar Carioca and Minha Casa, Minha Vida. The majority of these settlements are in the far, far western suburbs where the presence of milícias is particularly strong. Milícias are the Rio equivalent of 19^th century New York ward bosses that control the provision of water, gas, electricity, cable, security, drugs, and transportation for poor neighborhoods. Comprised of off-duty cops and other civil servants, the milícias were the subject of the Tropa do Elite 2 film. They are clearly a major problem and represent a parallel state structure that is completely intertwined with the democratically elected government. Given the more generalized confusions it came as a shock to hear the Municipal Secretary of housing, Jorge Bittar, announce that there is no way to get rid of the milícias operating in the Minha Casa Minha Vida projects. This is an admission that the state has failed in a large geographic area and has allowed that vacuum to be filled by armed gangs who are much more powerful than the drug trafficking factions that have been the target of the UPP installations throughout the city.

Stringer Bell, Marlow Stanfield, Tommy Carcetti, José Maria Beltrame, José Pataro Botelho de Queiroz

Another two pieces of the personality puzzle fell into place over the last ten days. Maria Silvia Bastos Marques will take control of the newly formed Municipal Olympic Authority and Brazil’s top international cop José Ricardo Pataro Botelho de Queiroz will take control of the special security organization. The list of names, players, companies, and institutional arrangements is beginning to fill out. All we need now is for someone to start making a mocumentary like this one about the preparations for the Sydney Olympics:

The Olympic Park Project (OPP)

And finally, the contest to design the Olympic park has begun. This Olim-piada deserves book length treatment. Some highlights:

• The Olympic Park project is isolated from the city, making an integrated urbanization project nearly impossible
• There is a 25 meter “environmental zone” around the perimeter, ostensibly to protect the lake, but really, it’s there to eliminate houses in the Vila Autódromo.
• The majority of the houses in the Vila Autodrómo fall outside the project area, rasing questions about the Prefeitura’s intentions for the community.
• 40% of the park area must be given over to sporting infrastructure (CTO, Centro de Trinamento Olímpico) and 60% for real-estate speculation. 
•  The project should not cost more than R$590 million
•  Only companies that have prior experience with Olympic projects can apply
•  The material was published on May 5 and the deadline is June 30
•  All of the proposals will be evaluated and the results published on July 13 (a two week evaluation period for a concusro that will undoubtedly receive scores of proposals from all over the world)
•  900 pages of information

·         This edital substitutes the previous attempt by Rio 2016 to cram though the Olympic Park project without competition. The IAB (Brazilian Architects Institute) cried foul over a lack of transparency during the initial process in September 2010. It remains to be seen how transparent this process will be as the evaluation committee has yet to be named.

As this process develops over the coming months, Geostadia will be laying a heavy hand on the winning proposal with extreme prejudice. For now, I hope to have given you enough things to chew on for two weeks as I take a little break to work on some other projects. Please keep linking the site to yours and please send comments!  

Ocupações, demolições, e concentrações, oh my!

Sunday in Rio started off with the occupation of seven favelas in the center of the city. The expansion of the Rio State Government’s UPP project continues to successfully remove armed drug traffic from select favelas in the city. The popular consensus is that the UPPs are making the city a safer place but some lingering questions remain. The city government continues to remove favelas in the paths of the ill-conceived BRT lines and are meeting with some stiff resistance from residents. This is in complete concordance with the Olympic Plans for the city. And to complete the rational for the title of this article, the UPPs are concentrating drug traffickers and drug trafficking in other parts of the city and state.

OGlobo’s mission is not to report fully the story but to spin what the government is doing in such a way as to make it more palatable to the middle and upper middle classes. This is why OGlobo continually refers to the occupation of favelas via the installation of UPPs as “The War of Rio”. It’s not a war, porra! These are military actions to gain control of strategic areas of the city. The general hope is that once the presence of the state is installed through violence (or the threat of), that other state functions such as education, sanitation, water provision, and health care will begin to appear. So far, these programs have been limited to massively centralized, top-down projects. It will take years to evaluate the effectiveness of these new projects. The concentration of military force and urbanization projects in the Olympic Zones of Rio is compounding the already grossly unequal urban, social, and economic geographies of Rio.

The economic and geographic logics for the occupations are clear. UPPs function to install the state in the areas within the so-called Olympic Rings of Rio traffickers so that:

 1) New consumers can be added to the market. Form Ancelmo Gois today, “Mintues after BOPE occupied the São Carols yesterday, an elite troop of Sky salespeople (a cable provider) disembarked in the carioca favela. They set up headquarters on top of the hill…to take advantage of the presence of the law in the community that will put an end to the pirating of cable services.” Nossa senhora. So now, when BOPE goes into a favela they have embedded commercial interests? This is not the first instance of this trend. Light, the electricity provider, is giving away free refrigerators in the Complexo do Alemão, as long as the new consumers legalize their electricity service.  By pacifying the favelas, the state opens up new markets for service providers. That they act in such a concerted manner is reflective of the general logics of capital accumulation (insert your favorite David Harvey quote here:).

 2) Real estate values can be unlocked. The mere mention of the installation of a new UPP increases real-estate prices in the targeted favelas and their surrounding neighborhoods. (insert favorite Raquel Rolink quote here).

3) The new security regime of Rio can be broadcast to the world announcing that the city is safe for accelerated capital accumulation. While I don’t think that UPPs are only a Potemkin exercise, the ostentatious displays of power are not only for local audiences. What is not reported in the national media is that while the international showpiece city of Rio de Janeiro is becoming safer, the entire northeast of Brazil is exploding in violence. The cities of Salvador, Natal, Recife and Fortaleza will all receive World Cup projects and all have seen dramatic increases in violent crime in recent years. The massive investments in the South-east of the country not only increase geographic and social inequalities within the cities themselves, but extend this inequality to other parts of the country. This is one of the issues that we’ll be taking up in the Mega-events observation project.

4) Armed drug trafficking will become increasingly concentrated in other parts of the city and state so that the police will be able to more easily eliminate it. From p.12 of today’s paper: “Traffickers from the Complexo de São Carols and the favelas of Santa Teresa, knowing that the occupation was coming, fled to Rocinha, Costa Barros, the favelas in Caju, and communities in Enenho da Rainha…Residents of Santa Teresa were adamant in saying that traffickers had fled once the governor announced that the favelas would be occupied.” Ok, fine, they’ve left for other communities. But is that the end of the story? What is happening in the places where the traffickers go to? Are these places becoming more violent? I assume that a higher concentration of violent people with more weapons would make for a more hostile place to live. The map below would suggest the same. Is the government working to identify how the dislocations of armed and violent drug traffic to other parts of the city and state are negatively affecting hundreds of thousands of people in the same way that OGlobo crows about the numbers of people “benefitted” by the UPPs? Given that the demand for drugs is never, ever going to diminish, how will the government “regulate” it? Are they trying to move the sale of marijuana to the middle class kids of the Zona Sul? Why is “Toke” the sponsor on the jerseys of the referees in the Campeonato Carioca? (para os Brasileiros, em inglês, “Toke” quer dizer dar uma tapinha num baseado). Perhaps this explains some of their bizarre decisions.

5) To demonstrate that the city, state and national governments are inveting massively in public works that work for the public. However, the total investments in urbanization of favelas and the occupation of communities in Rio will probably only total around R$2-3 billion, while the spending just for the Maracanã reforms will be around R$1.5 billion and the proposed budget for the Olympics is R$ 30 billion. So while it is laudable that the government is finally putting some money where its mouth is, they are talking more to FIFA and the IOC than to the people, communities, and entities with whom they have a longer standing and more substantial contract.

The movement of drug trafficking and drug traffickers within Rio de Janeiro is making the coming Battle of Rocinha and the Battle of Vidigal even more complex than they were. These battles will happen either this year or next. Maybe before the Jogos Militares in July? (Will someone please correct their English on this site? Nossa. “Meet the history of Santa Cruz air base”.  I offered to help, but received no reply).  

In happier news, Vasco da Gama finally won, giving them 4 points after 6 games.

It is WAR! Unless it is something else…um complexo

For those that have been living under a Barack there has been more violence that usual in Rio over the past week. As I was headed to the market in Gloria yesterday morning a troop transport stuffed with camouflaged soldiers rolled to the Zona Norte. I had a quick snapshot of what it must have been like to live in Brazil under the military dictatorship (1964-1985). Later on in the day, I found the scene on the beaches of Leme, Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon to be like any other November weekend. Sun, beer, altinha, fute-voli, bunda e sunga, mar, ambulates, areia, paz, e relax. But everyone was talking about the same thing: the massive military action to “pacify” the Vila Cruzeiro and the Complexo do Alemão – Rio’s drug trading center and second largest favela complex.

Last Monday, bandidos associated with Rio’s very well entrenched and organized drug trafficking factions began to burn cars and buses, carrying out a general and decentralized campaign of mayhem that was begging for a response from the state. The large media outlets claimed that this sudden outburst was a response to the continued installation of UPPs. I have my doubts about this claim as only 13 of Rio’s 1000+ favelas have been “pacified”.

The military responses over the following 6 days have changed forever the profile of drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. What the media is calling the “War for Rio” returned two massive areas of the city to state control after years of a parallel, autonomous form of government. How and why this happened, as well as the residual effects of this week will take a long time to sort out, but I’ll give it a go from where I sit (Center of Rio) and with the information I have at my disposal. (I also highly recommend reading these commentaries: Luiz Eduardo Soares; Gustavo Barreto).

I’m going to start with the premise that this is not a “war”. In a war, there are generally two sides battling, some casualties on both sides, and official declarations of intent. In this case, there were ZERO fatalities on the side of the invading forces and a very ambiguous death toll on the side of the drug trafficking factions. A 14 year old girl was killed inside her home, struck in the chest by a stray bullet and a reporter was shot in the arm. There was undoubtedly more “collateral damage” including the general casting aside of human rights that always accompanies massive military action. Many people (via fbook, twitter, conversations) were demanding the summary execution of all the drug traffickers, calling for helicopters to fly in a give a general strafing, celebrating the sudden death of individuals with as much sentiment as playing a video game. Others have been calling this state-sponsored terrorism. I thought it might be a kind of civil war, but have come to the realization that it’s a class struggle, where the state is intervening to correct some “inadequacies” in the social, geographic, and economic structures of Rio de Janeiro in order to better prepare it for the free circulation of capital that mega-events both stimulate and demand. This is the military version of Ireland’s structural adjustment plan.

The violence in Rio has many of the characteristics of war but cannot be rightly identified as such. It could be part of a larger training regimen for Brazil’s police forces, an opportunity to test new systems of centralized command in preparation for the gazillion mega-events coming to Rio, or simply an opportune time to obtain one of the necessary geographic objectives to establish the rule of law in Rio de Janeiro. Since the announcement of the Olympics, Rio de Janeiro has been pushed into a continual state of emergency where extraordinary measures have become “necessary” instruments to “prepare” the city for these events. The World Cup and Olympics are invoked, chanted, mantra-fied, in order to justify just about anything that will accelerate capital flows and secure urban space.  Without question, the “taking” of the Complexo do Alemão is a fundamental piece of the puzzle and one that can be elaborated with a quick anecdote.

When I was returning to Rio from Buenos Aires, coming into Galeão at night, the flight path took us from West to East over Rio. The final approach brought us along the South face of the Complexo do Alemão. As we passed, first one, then two, then three high powered green lasers began to flash by the windows. It was evident that the plane was being tracked as it landed. Were these lasers attached to high powered rifles? RPGs? Are there anti-aircraft guns hidden in the hills? It would only take one airplane going into the ground as a result of gun-fire from the Complexo to ruin the tourist economy, put an end to the mega-event wet-dream of the Brazilian Brahmans, and to install a general panic about the capacity of the state to control the beast it has so diligently created. As I watched the lasers flash in my window, it occurred to me that I was sitting in a nice, meaty, flammable, spectacular, undefended target.

The Face of Terror: Mister M
His mom convinced him to turn himself in, the only one to do so.

How many people died this week? More than 100? 200? We’ll never know. Why did the violence flare up this week, so soon after the elections? Theories abound. Were election promised unfulfilled? Did the orders to start “blowing shit up” come from the prisons as a reaction to the continued installation of UPPs? Were these autonomous collectives out for some incendiary fun all over the city? Why start this fight now? What are the immediate results and the next steps?

Economic and geographic logics are fundamental here. Let’s look at some consequences of this week’s violence.

More than 40 toneladas of marijuana were found in the military operations this week. 40 tons. That is 80,000 pounds of weed, people. To my knowledge, no one has yet undertaken a scientific analysis of the street value of 40 toneladas (my estimate is US$20-25 million), but it is certainly enough to get the entire world high for the month of the World Cup. This massive seizure has permanently altered the nature of the drug economy in Rio. If we assume that a large part of the power wielded by traffickers was their ability to exchange maconha for money and weapons, then this was a major setback for organized drug trafficking. I don’t think the police expected to find as much as they did. I don’t think that the plan was for them to take the Complexo this week, but the opportunity presented itself and they had to take it. This also makes me think that there was no coordinated plan of systematized violence on the part of the drug factions, or else they would have taken their cash crop with them to other parts of the city. Could the provocations have been a huge miscalculation that resulted with the end of armed drug trafficking in Rio?

What are the police going to do with all that pot? If we assume that the invasion of the Complexo do Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro has cost the state a lot of money (another thing that is never discussed), wouldn’t it make sense to try to recuperate some of that money through the reselling of the spoils? What better time to legalize marijuana than when the state has just come across a bumper crop? By legalizing, regulating, and selling the drugs obtained in this raid the state has a chance to regularize and make permanent the changes that this week’s military operations as well as recuperate the money spent on the raid. The structural change has already occurred; the sensible action would be to make the social change at the same time.

The scope and scale of arms encountered in the Complexo do Alemão surprised even the police. Life will be much better for residents with only one armed group running the show. Let’s hope there is going to be an increased presence of the state in regard to urbanization, education, health, and environment. The day after the invasion of the Vila Cruzeiro, the mayor announced a program to invest R$400 million in projects for the Penha region. This is a good start, though it is only one third of what the state is investing in the Maracanã. If these projects were so ready to fly into the press, why weren’t they announced until the day after the invasion? Who was blowing up all those cars and buses anyway?

As Raquel Rolink noted in a talk she gave at a Seminar on the Challenges of Mega-Events last week, a state of war is the ultimate instance in which the state can impose its authority through its refusal to impose the rule of law. That is, the state makes exceptions and exemptions to the law when there are states of emergency. In addition to the permanent emergency status that Rio is in because of the deadlines imposed by mega-events, the extra emergency of “war” allows for the further suspension of normalcy.

What this week’s battle in Rio reminded me of was the USA invasion of Iraq. This was a show of highly technologized, overwhelming force against an enemy that had been portrayed to be deadlier than deadly, more organized than the police themselves. The television outlets gave too many details about the kinds of tanks and weaponry employed (a spectacularization of power as the traficantes fled helter skelter into the kills, running for their lives). Detailed maps showing the routes of invasion, the locations of drug and arms caches, and high definition images of night vision goggles, BOPE training, sequences of command, and all of the accoutrements of a war gave me the sense that all of this was happening in a far off country, where I could watch the bombs fall and see the flames rise, but not have to deal with the untidy mess of exploded limbs and charred remains. This “war” is produced and consumed and instantly historicized (naturalized) like any other. OGlobo works with BOPE and the Rio PM in the same way that CNN and Fox worked with the US DOD.  The terminology used, the smug images of Sergio Cabral (Brazil’s George W.) overseeing the operation from on high, the video montages, the absence of critical perspective…it’s all the same. Shock and Awe, baby. Come on down to Rio for the World Cup y’all – we’ve done got rid of the band-ee-toes.

In her talk, Rolink also highlighted the role of the state in “unlocking” value. This is undoubtedly an important element of what is going on in Rio. We have see this with the installation of the UPPs, where rents and land values have increased by 400% in the favelas and more than doubled in the asfalto neighborhoods around them. The “pacification” of Alemão, combined with some confused projects like the teleferico (which turned into a symbol of conquest as the Brazilian flag was hoisted), will undoubtedly allow for the continuation of real estate speculation in Rio, allowing money to flow from areas in which is was trapped by the presence of the drug traffickers and the absence of the state.

The “Battles” of Alemão and Vila Cruzeiro had to happen if the governments of Rio de Janeiro were to ever get control of their urban space (no matter the secondary and tertiary motives). The installation of UPPs in the favelas of the Zona Sul has concentrated arms and drug trafficking in the major favelas of the Zona Norte and Rocinha. Whatever one thinks of the way in which this has all happened, the fact is that last week, the Complexo do Alemão was under the martial law of the drug dealers, and this week it is under the control of the state. This is an important and critical moment in the geo-political history of the city that will have profound and rippling effects.  Next up is Rocinha, which received words of warning all week from the PM: “Keep quiet over there, lads, if you know what’s good for you.”

No word about how the governor and mayor are planning on dealing with the dozens of favelas controlled milícias, (organized crime run by cops that give the big bosses political support), or the other favelas occupied by armed drug factions.

I don’t know what more to say about this other than that it’s complicated, historically situated, confusing, contradictory, and apparently inevitable.

Raining Toads

Tropa do Elite 2, Expo Estadio, Expo Urbano

Films are so powerful because the are able to bring us to times and places that we have never been (or never existed). I always suggest that visitors to Rio de Janeiro watch a series of films before they come so that they can educate themselves about the social, urban, and geographic contexts that they are about to plunge into: Bus 174 , Orfeu Negro, Central do Brasil, Cidade do Deus, O Que Isso companheiro? (Four days in September), Favela Rising, Blame it on Rio, Moonraker (rs), and Tropa do Elite I and II.

Tropa do Elite II debuted in Rio today, just after the elections. Poor timing but given the content of the film one can understand why it wasn’t released sooner. For those not familiar with the first, the Tropa movies take as their focus a Colonel in the Rio state government’s elite police force, BOPE. The first images that pop up on a search give a pretty clear picture of the tactics and mentality of the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais.  The Rio State police forces do not have a good human rights record, a point that the film hammers on, but manages to complicate the discussion to the point where one gets an acute sense of the hopelessness of a “just” solution to the more generalized problem of corruption and violence that encompasses the whole of Brazilian society.

The basic story line is one that follows reality in nearly every detail. The absence of the state in Rio’s favelas created a power vacuum filled by drug traffickers. Not good. BOPE and the State invaded favelas both continually and from time to time, locking some people up, killing others, shooting down from helicopters into houses – a seemingly endless and deadly game of cat and mouse that was perpetuated by corruption all around. War is probably the most profitable human endeavor, after all. In the film, a decline in drug sales reduced the “rents” that the traffickers were paying to the cops. So the cops stepped in to run the other profitable elements of informal settlements: cable, gas, water, electricity. This was extremely lucrative and since the communities were “freed” of the drug traffickers, the cops could basically do as they pleased and got very rich doing so. Corrupt? Yes. Illegal? Yes. Control through violence and all its derivative forms? Yes. Better than the rule of the drug traffickers? Not really. The groups of cops and firemen who ran the favelas are known as milícias. Because the milicias are comprised of active duty cops involved in illegal activity, the conflicts become clear. However...

The favelas are and were places where the old clientelist political games of Latin America still hold steady. The milícias were able to deliver votes to politicians and received protection in return. Our good, yet deeply disturbed, BOPE Coronel begins to realize just how twisted the system is and he begins to fight it, trying to tear the entire apparatus down. Most of the political figures in the film are intended to represent their fleshy counterparts, in particular Anthony Garotinho, who was incredibly elected as a federal deputy this week despite being convicted and condemned to two and a half years in prison for the formation of an organized crime ring  As one person expressed to me this week, “the people get what they deserve.” Anyone voting for Garotinho deserves uma tapa na cara.

Tropa II hits all the right notes. It’s got good pace, good dialogue, good directing, good acting. When I left the theatre I was literally scratching and shaking my head at the intractable complexity of it all. And just yesterday I was nearly raving about Brazilian democracy. Oh well.

I went from the film directly to the Expo Estádio / Expo Urbano. I covered this same event when it was in São Paulo last year. In case you don’t want to go back and read that post, the Expo Estádio is a showroom for all of the shiny metal and plastic and membraney bits that one needs to put together a World Cup stadium. There was hardly anyone there. The Expo Urbano part was non-existent, I have no idea why that is there. Presumably, the polished interiors of a VIP box at the stadium are going to be the same kind of polished interiors in which “global clients” will be sucking down their imported vodka in their apart-hotels, nightclubs, condos, roof top flats, or restaurants (where they will only encounter people just like them or people who are serving them). Basically, the Expo is an opportunity to see, spread across a showroom floor, all of the component elements that go into constructing a very limited, air-conditioned, sanitized class world.

Of special interest to me was a booth specializing in work visas for foreigners. How long, typically? I was desperate to know.  30 days or less. [Inserir sequencia de palavrões aqui]. In order to capture my information, the guy at the booth leaned across with a scanner and zapped my name tag. I felt violated, somehow, and as I had nothing to zap him with I pulled out my can of mace and did by best Hunter S. Thompson impersonation.

Leaping three stairs at a time, I found the “information session” I had trekked to the Expo Estádio to see: Projects, Technologies, and Equipments for Mega-Events. I was ASTOUNDED to see that a Major from BOPE was presenting. I arrived a few minutes into the presentation and was one of 7 people in the room. Not long after I sat down the decidedly amateurish powerpoint started showing video clips of BOPE testing all of the different machine guns that they were buying in order to beef up security for mega-events. As the guns blew things apart, the major commented, “from England. This one’s German. This one is American.” Nice to see that the international arms trade is alive and well.

There wasn’t much information in the BOPE presentation that was new, but it’s always interesting to hear these things come out of the horse’s mouth. BOPE is installing a massive operations  center ("the largest and best in Latin America") near the international airport in order to “protect” the Linha Vermelha, Linha Amarelha, Avenida Brasil, and to be close to the center of “80% of Rio de Janeiro’s criminal activity.” Illegal criminal activity, that is. The public security budget is staggering. The PMERJ (RJ State Military Police): R$ 1 billion over the next 4 years. BOPE: R$500 million. SESEG (State Secretary of Security): unlimited? No one knows. People just want the problem of violence solved. Understandable, but is the total militarization of public space the best and only way to go about it? Apparently. That’s why Rio 2016 contracted Rudy Giuliani and Tony Blair, isn’t it? How else can you convince the public that buying surveillance helicopters and airplanes, plus “microphones that will be able to pick out a single person’s words in a stadium crowd from 100 meters”, and stockpiling advanced weaponry to ward of a non-existent terrorist threat is better than putting that same kind of money into education or health care or housing. Ah yes, the public does not need convincing. They’ve elected Garotinho and Chiquinho to do the thinking for them.

It’s obvious what I think, but this is what I think: There is a MASSIVE investment in weaponry and police training in order to securitize the public and private spaces of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil so that capital (symbolic, political, economic, and cultural) can flow more fluidly along fixed paths to strategic points of accumulation (Barra, Zona Sul). The investments in stadium infrastructure and security apparatuses on display at the Expo Estádio are intended to demonstrate to highly mobile and selective global clients that there are investments and profits to be made here. We are spending billions and billions on the construction of a kind of Bladerunner-esque class world that will be hyper-secure and very deadly for those who do not comport themselves properly within it or who threaten to interrupt the flow of capital from Brazil to gringolandia (esteja onde for), or from the povo to the elite.

The World Cup is a private event. FIFA takes control of stadiums, highways, airports, public spaces that are constructed and securitized with public money. South Africa lost US$4 billion during the World Cup. FIFA made US$4 billion. In a month! In reality, these are not events but decades’ long processes of constructing, sanitizing, and securitizing urban space for the maximum accumulation of capital in the shortest possible time frame.

No one disputes the fact that public security is an element of Rio de Janeiro that needs to be addressed urgently.  Tropa do Elite II shows just how complex that reality is. Expo Estádio, and the overblown events that it attends to, is stimulating the development of security apparatuses that will not serve the general needs of cariocas for safe transport, clean air, clean water, good schools, living wages, rights to housing and all of the other elements that comprise a more general conception of “security”. Just the opposite. Expo Estádio is furthering the production of militarized urban spaces that attend to the fetishized demands of a global consumerist/tourist class that will start raining on Rio de Janeiro like toads  at the onset of the apocalypse.