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 Silva has been replaced by Aldo Rebelo who was involved in some small scandals in the Lula government.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.

Mobility, Death, Stadiums, Strikes: Normalcy

GEOSTADIA MILESTONE: 25,000 HITS!!!! 120 Countries!!! Thanks everyone!

Good news first – there is a plan to extend the Metrô across the bay to Niterói and São Gonçalo. The linha 3 project video link is here and is a much, much, much needed improvement in metropolitan mobility. No timeline has been set, but at least the state government has recognized the impossibility of transporting tens of thousands of people across a narrow bridge. There will even be a stop at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. Holding one’s breath for this project to be completed is not recommended.

Bad news. Really bad news. The quaint and picturesque bonde that shuttles people around Santa Teresa has had yet another accident. Remember that last year a bonde collided with a bus, crushing a woman to death. Last month a French tourist fell to his death off the aqueduct in Lapa. Ten days ago, five people died instantly and more than fifty were injured when the bonde brakes failed on its way down the hill. In most places in the world a major transportation line killing a handful of people and critically injuring others would be a major and permanent scandal – especially when the secretary of transportation blames the dead conductor instead accepting any kind of responsibility when only 7% of the maintenance budget had been spent. Apparently, instead of using nuts and bolts to secure the brakes, something else was used as a temporary fix. Rumor has it that instead of replacing the wheels of the trams with the same size, used wheels from the SuperVia trains were put on and these were perhaps too large for the bonde tracks. Who knows? What we do know is that the total disregard for public safety inevitably led to the evitable deaths of five people. There are some criticisms being launched in the proper directions but no real outrage, no one demanding the Governor’s head on a platter. The Transportation Secretary retained his post despite massive evidence of incompetence.

That there was a disaster waiting to happen is evidenced in this video that shows the bonde heading downhill against traffic.

More ridiculous news coming out of the Ministério do Esporte. The MoS, responsible for the governance of all sport in Brazil, paid R$6.2 million to register soccer fans. The money was delivered, the project never was. The problem is not only in that the project was not carried off or that the company hired to do it pocketed the money (at least temporarily) but that it never should have been considered in the first place. The Brazilian government has consistently and incrementally implemented a policy of criminalizing all football fans, but especially those who are members of the torcidas organizadas. The “registration” of torcidas organizadas is another step along the way to the hyper-surveillance of all fans and curiously one that the torcidas of Rio de Janeiro are willing to accept. For those interested in the minutiae of Brazilian football culture, the torcidas of Rio e Janeiro are the only torcidas in Brazil that are not affiliated with the national association. I’ll save the explanation for another post.

Not surprisingly, and as I predicted here, there is a shortage of qualified labor for the 2016 Olympic projects. It is a very good time to be a civil engineer in Brazil. The shortage of labor is being used as a justification by the Olympic Organizing Committee to elevate the salaries of the personnel that they already have under contract. This will also necessitate the imporation of more expensive experts from abroad, so those of you thinking of making the jump to Brazil , come on in, the water’s lovely, although you’re still likely to get your electronic goods stolen on the street (an Italian friend of mine was robbed twice yesterday, the second attempt, obviously, not as fruitful as the first as there was nothing left, coitados).

The general strike at the Maracanã continues! There was a brief resolution last week, but all work has stopped again and the Consorcio Maracanã (Odebrecht, Delta and Carioca) is making no attempt to re-start negotiations with the union. One of the major complaints of the workers is that they were being served rotten food and that even after the last round of negotiations, the food provider was not changed. There are likely two sides to this story, maybe even three, but serving rotten food to one’s workers is certainly not in the best interests of the nation. Come on Dilma, get your petit-bourgeois party back to the left it left ten years ago!

After strikes at the Maracanã and Minerão, threats of striking in Cuiabá, there is now the possibility of a strike at the Fonte Nova in Salvador. Salvage capitalism meets head to head with relatively strong syndicalism! Drama total!

In case you thought that no one in the government was watching what is going on with these insanely inflated budgets, the Tribunal das Contas Da União (TCU) identified some price inflation in the Maracanã project. The official cost is now around R$859 million, or R$11.300 per seat. By contrast, the new privately financed Grêmio stadium in Porto Alegre will only cost R$6.600 per seat and Palmerias’ Palestra Italia stadium in São Paulo will privately finance 45.000 at R$6.670 per seat. Corinthians’ publically financed stadium in São Paulo will cost at least R$12.000 per seat.  Lesson: where public money and post-Cup privatization contracts are happening, the pigs are at the trough. Where the private sector is involved, costs are much lower. Does this mean that all the WC stadiums should be privately financed? No. But it does mean that there is a pervasive culture of getting hands in the till as often and as deeply as possible and that there is little or no control over public spending in the pursuit of mega-event legacies [sic].

Festa Juninho (Pernambucano)

Here’s a big post to give everyone something to chew on for a couple of weeks.  I will be giving talks at:  Duke University in Durham, NC on June 22 (@ the Haiti Laboratory, Franklin Humanities Institute, Bay 4 Smith Warehouse, noon), The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism in São Paulo on July 2, and Intel in Santa Clara, CA on July 11. Details forthcoming.

Starting from the top down in classic mega-event style:

Leonardo Martins in Jornal do Brasil wrote,  “As UPPs são, antes de tudo, um projeto de poder, de controle de um espaço tradicionalmente submetido à opressão. Os novos Capitães, que comandam as UPPs são os novos “donos do pedaço”, em substituição aos traficantes que ali se encontravam. Autorizam bailes, mandam baixar o som dos moradores, escolhem as músicas que os moradores podem escutar, determinam horário e condutas pessoais, intimam e intimidam àqueles que tem uma opinião mais crítica acerca da função da polícia, como por exemplo o fechamento da rádio comunitária do Andaraí, pela Polícia Federal, sobre o pretexto de rádio pirata e atrapalhar o tráfego aéreo."

“The UPPs are, above all, a projection of Power, for control of a space that has traditionally been oppressed. The new Captains that command the UPPs are the “owners of the land”, substituting the drug traffickers that were there before. They authorize dances, tell the residents to turn their music down, choose the music that the residents can listen to, determine the coming and going and conduct of people, intimate and intimidate those who have a more critical opinion of the police function, as for example the closing of the closing of the community radio station in Andaraí by the Federal Police on the pretext that it was a pirate radio station and it interfered with air traffic.”

I haven’t been back to visit and UPPeed communities in awhile, so I don’t have much more to contribute to the debate than I had a few weeks ago. I hear adolescents around town say “UPP é o caralho” and have seen that succinct and poignant phrase scribbled on walls.

Mayor alert! EP twisted his ankle in a political minefield, but don’t worry, he’s going to be ok. O Principe’s attempts to manipulate the infrastructure of the Olympic machine didn’t sit too well with people more powerful and experienced than he. In trying to limit the powers of the APO, EP threw a few one-liners into the City’s Olympic act that he then had to beg some legislators to erase and pretend to everyone else that he wasn’t trying to maintain as much power for himself as possible. The story is much longer than that, of course, but takes a doctoral thesis to sort though. Fortunately, those are available.

Transoeste disaster

According to sources buried deep within the international press corps, The IOC has had all of their questions answered in regard to forced removals for Rio’s BRT lines. The Trans-Oeste BRT (Blown Right Through) is moving people out of the way faster than a turd in a hot tub. The results are shit.

Picture of housing demolitions carried
out by Rio's Housing Secretary along the Trans-Oeste BRT line, April 2011.
Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira foto.

Last one standing, Zona Oeste
Rio de Janeiro. Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira foto

Mayor alert! O Principe tried to stick the Olympic golf course in a closed condominium complex where the cheapest condo goes for R$2.1 million. Unfortunately, the land that he wanted to put the course on has been stuck in the judicial system. Apparently the news took the condo residents by surprise.  The is the kind of “planning” is happening on a metropolitan level, not just with the Olympic golf course.

According to the Union of Externally Controlled Federal Auditors (AUDITAR), “the new model of contracting banked by the base of Dilma Rousseff’s government in the house of deputies is going to make the public works for the World Cup and Olympics much more expensive.” This is not at all surprising given that the new laws are designed to “flexibilize” normal contracting processes.

Compounding the problem is that those who frequent stadiums end up paying for them three times. Once for construction. Twice for higher ticket prices. Third for world-class maintenance costs.  Even our illustrious Federal Deputy Romário is calling the stadium budgets into question.

The CBF brought their team back to Brazil for the first time in a long time to prepare for the Copa America in Argentina. The ticket prices were staggering and the games were seen as test venue for the CBF to employ private security guards (as will be the case during the World Cup). The Prossegur rent-a-cops did not take kindly to the unfurling of a banner by the ANT-GO crew and gave them some rough treatment for unfurling this lovely banner. Congrats to these brave formigas!!!

Ricardo Ali Baba Teixeira, OUT! For decades Brazilian football has been in the hands of incompetent and corrupt
officials, we demand the democratization of decisions related to Brazilian football with the participation of fans!
Neither FIFA, or the CBF, or Football is of the People!
National Fans Association

Here are the attendances and financial details from those matches:

Game	Paying Public	Gate Receipts	Average Ticket	Free tickets
BRA (0) x HOL (0)	36.449	R$3.120.625	R$85.81	7.000?
BRA (1) x ROM (0)	30.059	R$4.357.705	R$144.90	9.000?
	66.508	R$7.478.330	R$112.44	pqp

It’s impossible to tell how many tickets the CBF gave away to itself and to its sponsors. Interestingly and stupidly, the first match in Goiânia, resulted in Ricardo Teixeira (Mr. Jowls) promising a Copa America 2015 match to that city, even though they are not hosting any World Cup matches.  In Rio, tickets for Copa Libertadores matches in 2010-2011 started at R$75. In three hours of football,  the CBF made off with R$7.5 million and scored one goal. How expensive will tickets to the World Cup be? How expensive will the stadiums be?  This is a link to a professor from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas who is criticizing the Maracanã budgeting process. We have seen a 170% increase in construction costs since 2009. This is without multiple labor shifts, without increased raw material and labor costs, without counting the subsidy for imports, without counting the no-bid conracts, without the time crunch, etc.

But, this will give Brazil (and Rio in particular) the MOST MODERN STADIUMS IN THE WORLD!!!!!!

maracá mais moderno do mundo

What does it mean to have the most  “modern “ stadium in the world? The continual search for and production of the modern in Brazil has had very mixed urban, social, and environmental results. When the Maracanã was constructed, it was the most modern stadium in the world, was it not? Will not the host of the 2016 European Championships have the most modern football stadiums in the world? Why bother calling it the most modern stadium in the world?  It’s a stupid and completely relative question.

Modern could mean functional but certainly means secure and comfortable and bougie, but in the context of Brazil’s mega-events “modern” has become more associated with overspending on monumental mistakes that are guaranteed to bring diminishing economic returns in an attempt to appear modern for and to foreigners. The stadium, as such, does not have to be submitted exclusively to economic metrics as a measure of its value. In addition to agreeing to build economic black holes, the cultural costs have not been calculated in the production of the twelve stadiums for the World Cup. The Mané Garrincha Stadium in Brasilia had bleachers so well-made that it took three attempts to demolish them with explosives. They are installing an expensive house of cards in his place.

FIFA has chosen Rio de Janeiro as the host of the International Broadcast Center for the World Cup. It will, of course, be in Barra de Tijuca at the Rio Centro complex. This is interesting (though not surprising) for a couple of reasons. One is that it will develop further Barra’s emergent position as the high-tech and media production center of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. Why? Because in order to install something as sophisticated and grandiose as an IBC millions if not billions of fiber optic cables need to be stuck into the region, creating an information infrastructure that augments already profound structural inequalities within the city.

Secondly, the increasing and repetitive investment in communications infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro (and São Paulo) is consolidating the position of those cities in the hugely unbalanced urban hierarchy of Brazil. The choice of Rio will guarantee that it grows its media and communications industry at the expense of Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Porto Alegre, etc. Of course, wherever this kind of investment happens there are knock on geographic effects. However, the overwhelming Federal investment in Rio de Janeiro (at least R$100 billion between 2010-2016) is going to have long term consequences for a more balanced urban system. The FIFA media release is worth a read.

The Secretary of the Fazenda of Rio de Janeiro is trying to find ways to raise R$4 billion to finance public works for mega-events. His primary obstacle, according to Oh, Globo is the Law of Fiscal Responsibility (LRF), which prevents cities from emitting bonds while they are in debt. O Principe is still waiting for his R$ 2.5 billion loan to come in from the World Bank and until that happens, Rio is prohibited from borrowing more money. The strategy therefore is to wait until Henrique Mirelles (O Neo-Libertador) finally gets into power and then they’ll talk about how much debt they can saddle Rio with. This quote I found rather touching: Do ponto de vista político é muito delicado (mexer na LRF), mas do ponto de vista econômico, faria sentido", ressaltou a secretária. (From the political point of view it’s very delicate [to mess with the LRF) but from the economic point of view it makes sense). Head, shoulders, knees, and toes! Get flexible people!

Dilma and the PT get to work on the law

Did you know that trees are as flexible as stadia? Well, the revisions to the Forest Code that are getting crammed though the senate is going to surprise you, or not. The Amazon is being picked apart by agri-business, timber, and mining interests and the Worker’s Party is doing everything it can to hand the country over to capitalists. The passing of the mutilated Forest Code and the mega-event flex-laws are the priority of the new Minister of Institutional Relations. If Dilma’s government were any more flexible they’d call the county Shavasana.

World Cup FAIL

What is it about Rio de Janeiro that makes everything just a little more complicated than it has to be?  Is it possible that Jared Diamond’s environmental determinism has some merit? Why aren’t the football fans in this city totally revolted by what is going on?

O Maraca já era. Foto Raul Melo Neto.

The BIG NEWS coming out of the TCU (Federal Accounting Authority) is that the Novo Maracanã project is being carried off in R$1.5 billion illegal and opaque ways. There’s no surprise but to hear the same thing that I have been saying come from the very government that is financing the project is both refreshing and sad, as there is basically nothing that can be done about it. Why? Because the TCU has no power to initiate legal proceedings. Those must be taken up by the Ministério Público (Public Prosecutor). There, a very ambitious, brave, or stupid lawyer would have to get permission from her higher ups to initiate legal proceedings against the government officials in charge of the project. There is simply never going to be enough political cover for a lawsuit to be brought to bear, so while the TCU can make recommendations and use strong language, it’s very unlikely that the jeitinho is going to change. 

Let’s look at some of the details of the TCU’s report culled from a dozen different news sources (I have not yet been able to find Valmir Campelo’s relatório on the Byzantine TCU webpage, any help appreciated).

The report was firm in declaring that the Maracanã  contract process was completely opaque and that the budget “borders on complete fiction”. The TCU highlighted the fact that while the Minerão project in Belo Horizonte presented 1309 architectural drawings and the Verdão project in Cuiabá presented 702, the Maracanã presented 37. Thirty-seven drawings for a R$709 million project!?#!@$%!?  Fala sério. In the budget for the Maracanã, “multiple items are included multiple times, there are innumerable opportunities for inflationary costs to be written in, and items included in the engineering budget have nothing to do with engineering.” Pah! Ha ha ha! Tão de brincadeira?

This is what one gets when you take the same people that managed a 1000% cost overrun for the Pan American Games, give them more power, more money, less public accountability, and fewer transparency mechanisms. The TCU, which condemned Ricardo Leyser (head of the Pan construction projects and now head of the Empresa Brasil 2016, responsible for using R$30 billion [the initial Olympic budget, sure to double] to transform Rio de Janeiro forever), noted in their report that there is a risk of “added contractual costs, over-charging, un-necessary projects, and emergency contracting procedures that will follow in the pattern of the Pan 2007.” The report cites the case of the Nova Fonte Nova in Salvador, whose price went from R$ 400 million in 2009, to R$ 591 million in 2010, to an estimated R$ 1.6 billion in 2011. Tão de sacanagem, sim.

The TCU also confirms my suspicions about Orlando Silva’s renewed position within the Ministry of Sport saying,  “there are indications of a possible lack of accompaniment on the part of the Minister, a characteristic that will make controlling the projects more difficult.” Initially, Silva was nominated as a potential head for the APO (Public Olympic Authority, which will employ Leyser’s BRASIL 2016) but after some negotiation he remained in his post as MoS because the powers behind the powers know they can count on him to turn a blind eye to the proceedings.  

What the TCU report does, in addition to bringing to light what everyone has known all along, is warn the cities that they may actually be held accountable for what they are or are not doing. The very same TCU minister that produced this most recent report warned that Fortaleza is in serious danger of having their World Cup Host status revoked. The main issue cited is the forced removal of communities that are “in the way” of transportation lines designed to bring tourists from the beach to the stadium. As I have mentioned in other posts, the Fortaleza project is more about massive real-estate projects than anything else, as a massive residential complex is in the works right next to the suburban stadium. FIFA only ever asked for 8-10 cities, so there is a real possibility that one or two cities are going to fall off the World Cup map.

So what is going to happen now? The TCU has asked that BNDES, the Brazilian National Development Bank, suspend 80% of the financing for the Maracanã until SEMOP (Municipal Works Secretary), SUDERJ (State Sports Secretary), and Rio 2014 (the consortium of Rio’s big boy construction firms) can find a way to make their jogo-do-bicho a little more palatable to government authorities. BNDES has opened R$ 400 million in financing for all of the World Cup cities, a massive stimulus for the funneling of public money to private interests.

In the meantime, nearly all of the games of the Campeonato Carioca are being played at the Engenhão. Indeed, all of Rio’s teams are going to be playing their big matches in Engenho de Dentro until 2016. Once the Novo Maracanã  is finished, sometime towards the end of 2013, it will be used sporadically for clássicos in order to test new security systems and general functioning in the months leading up to the World Cup. After the World Cup, the stadium will undoubtedly suffer more investments in preparation for the 2015 Copa América and 2016 Olympics. Then, when Rio’s real-estate bubble bursts and the only people who can afford tickets to the Novo Maracanã are jumping off of their coberturas, who will go to the games? Not that the teams really want fans to go anyway as only 8% of their income results from ticket sales. (Last year, Flamengo offered tickets for R$10, filling the Fechadão and recording their highest receipts of the year, yet the club said that this was not a viable economic model because, “it’s complicated”) .

In other fun news that I culled from the TCU webpage, two of the major infrastructure works being planned for the World Cup have been paralyzed for lack of transparency in theitr contracting process. Rio Metrô has had their Linha 3 project stopped and São Paulo’s Garulhos (international) Airport has been halted. Here are the links: https://contas.tcu.gov.br/pls/apex/f?p=2207:4:4926169036331711::NO::P4_COD_OBRA:611

 https://contas.tcu.gov.br/pls/apex/f?p=2207:4:4926169036331711::NO::P4_COD_OBRA:913