Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  The number of federal ministries, however, had grown with each administration, going from 24 under Fernando Henrique Cardoso to 37 under Lula to 39 under Dilma. Each hung heavy with appointees and public servants. Together, they cost the taxpayer $27 billion in 2013.

  Voters had marched during the Confederations Cup. They could do so again during the World Cup and the Olympics, transforming what had been intended as the country’s moment to shine into a sharp-edged political rally.

  So, was the party over? Perhaps, but this was not all that bad.

  Eike’s empire had rested on debt and his high-wattage smile. Brazil, in spite of its serious structural problems, had a solid economy with a flawed but functioning democracy. It had grown in ways that mattered, that started with the economy but went well beyond. The June 2013 marches may have unnerved the president, but they were a symptom of this maturity.

  What the country needed most was, in fact, what the demonstrators had pointed out: painful, difficult, but necessary reforms. These included trimming government rolls, improving services and infrastructure, and tearing up the red tape that made running a business or renting an apartment so daunting.

  The tax code could be simplified. The school system, which favored universities accessible mostly to the elite over elementary education or technical training, could be brought to better balance. None of these things were easy, and they would not gain the economy traction immediately, but would get the country in shape for steady, if unspectacular, progress.

  So, in spite of Dilma’s words, oil would not, could not, be Brazil’s salvation. There would be no miracles.

  But increased cash flow could help, if well managed. There were niches in the national economy and in Rio’s landscape where this was already taking place. To understand the impact it could have, I visited Rio’s port, deep within Guanabara Bay’s embrace.

  The old docks had been the city’s engine for centuries. Smooth granite blocks, laid in the era before concrete, still lined the bay’s oil-slicked waters. The port had anchored Brazil’s naval industry through the late 1970s, when it was the second largest in the world, behind only Japan.

  Back then, it had housed the largest shipyard in South America, the Inhaúma, from which sailed the greatest ships ever assembled in the country—hulks such as the Tijuca, which could carry 311,000 tons in its steel belly. In the 1980s, the economy collapsed and took the entire industry with it.

  By the end of the 1990s, Brazil had stopped producing ships and oil platforms and the Inhaúma was abandoned. Bright orange blossoms of rust etched the picked-apart innards of the old yard and the vaulted ribs holding up empty warehouses. Only the long-limbed cranes remained standing, their spare bodies crumpling into themselves before the eyes of drivers on the overpass nearby.

  Now, with the certainty of oil waiting just beyond the horizon and beneath miles of ocean, sand, rock, and salt, the shipyard began to stir again. In 2011 an old ship slipped past the pillars of the Rio-Niterói Bridge and into Guanabara Bay. It was the tanker Titan Seema, essentially a bucket with a motor built in 1993 to ferry crude from port to port and retired two decades later, when its outdated engines made it too expensive to operate.

  When this giant pulled into the Inhaúma, it was the meeting of two veterans. The shipyard hadn’t built so much as a canoe in over a decade. And yet, it was tasked with transforming the Titan Seema into P-74, a floating industrial plant able to suck in oil from the deep, separate it from corrosive gases, water, and other gunk, store the fuel, and then offload it to ships in high seas, all the while keeping its position through storms, high wind, and the jostle of waves by relying on high-end computerized systems.

  By late 2013, the transformation that would bring the shipyard back into shape was well under way. The manager, Alexandre Cruz, walked with me through the Inhaúma’s innards and explained its complex and costly rebirth. Brazil’s shipping industry had deteriorated to such an extent it was virtually being created from scratch, he explained.

  Stocky and weathered by the sun, Cruz had close-cropped hair and a punctilious manner. He’d known the Inhaúma since the 1980s, when Brazil still had a fleet to be reckoned with. He worked on board Petrobras vessels and would dock there when the ships came in for repairs. Back then, the place had been alive with workers, he said; for every boat resting on the support pillars at the bottom of the Inhaúma dry dock there was another one waiting its turn outside.

  The slow collapse of the place tore at him. The single company that continued to use the yard for basic repairs cannibalized the broken machinery for parts needed to keep a few essentials in working shape; the ground was littered with their remains.

  When the commercial docks had died, they had taken the neighborhood, Caju, with them.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, Caju had housed gentry. Hand-painted, blue-and-white Portuguese tiles and granite doorways still decorated façades of the few colonial homes that stood. Once upon a time, not long after 1808, when the Portuguese royal family had settled in Rio, the emperor Dom João VI came to Caju for his medicinal ocean baths. The rest of the royals followed suit and started a fad, turning Caju into Rio’s first beach resort. Through the early twentieth century, bathers would board trolleys and head to its beach for a day at the sea.

  In the years that followed, Caju lost its shine and became an extension of the dock, the home of fishermen and stevedores. While the waterfront hummed with work, it remained vibrant, but when the country fell on hard times, the shipyard let its people go, and the neighborhood collapsed further into itself.II

  For decades, decay wore down the little peninsula. Abandoned trucks lay beached on the sidewalks, their husks stripped of anything that could be sold. The trash company stopped making its rounds, and refuse piled; no one filled potholes as they appeared in the streets, and when the sewage system backed up, it spewed unmolested, turning manholes into foul fountains. A favela sprouted among the wreckage.

  Now the shipyards and the docks at the heart of Caju were working again. Alexandre led me through a landscape of all-encompassing industry. Although we were by the water, not far from where small islands overflowed with exuberant greenery, we were battered by the screech of drills puncturing metal, the corrosive nose-feel of solvent, and the bustle of thousands of workers.

  We finally reached the ship itself, nested inside a dry dock. Even by the vast dimensions of the shipyard, it was extraordinary—an empty shell the length of a hundred-story skyscraper laid on its side.

  The race to reach the oil was such that the ship and the shipyard were being brought out of retirement at the same time, Alexandre explained. The six thousand welders, mechanics, painters, electricians, and others who hurried about, setting a frenetic pace, were evenly split between the two jobs. “We’ve already lost too much time as it is,” he said.

  The ship’s guts had been carved out to make way for the platform parts and lay beside it, a mountain of contorted steel. Metal­workers had examined its cavernous insides, capable of storing 1.4 million barrels of oil, to see where it had worn too thin for use. On the great upswell of its hull there were shiny scars where plates had been replaced as well as X’s, arrows, and circles drawn in chalk, hieroglyphics understandable only to the experts.

  The ship-cum-platform was about ready for a coat of paint. After refurbishing, it would go to the Paranaguá shipyard in southern Brazil to be topped with three stories’ worth of cutting-edge equipment before heading out to the pre-salt fields.

  It was that vast oil discovery that made the Inhaúma’s regeneration feasible, Alexandre said. Even now, the shipyard had an order to create four of these platforms for Petrobras.

  We turned away from the ship and began to head back to the entrance. I noticed the safety signs were in Portuguese and Mandarin. It’s because of the new cranes, Alexandre said; they came from China on board Korean ships. Three were already standing, red and white
, vibrant against the luminous gray sky. Another was perched on a ship, about to be offloaded and then assembled by the Chinese crew that came with it.

  I asked about the crumpled cranes that had dangled over the port for so many years. Their twisted shapes had come to stand in my mind for the desolation of the docks, and of Rio.

  Alexandre stopped, looked to where they had stood. The cranes had been taken apart, he said. It was one of the first things he did.

  “This is how I think about it: We’ve got this technical side. We have to get permits, refurbish, operate, all at the same time,” he said. “But there’s also the psychological side. We had to improve the way this looked. It impacted the morale of the workers, their productivity, our credibility. We had to show people things were changing.”

  After visiting the shipyard, I wanted to walk and think, to weigh the vigorous optimism of someone like Alexandre against the broader challenges facing Rio and Brazil. Since I was in Caju, and I’d always wanted to see the emperor’s bathhouse, I went looking for the place. It still stood somewhere in this neighborhood.

  Beyond the gates of the shipyard there were signs of improvement. Policing had returned when a UPP was inaugurated in early 2013; officers in their blue button-downs kept watch over narrow streets. Homegrown restaurants serving up rice and beans had sprung up to feed the workers who had returned. Trees had been pruned recently, and the piles of garbage were largely gone.

  Abandoned trucks still hogged the sidewalks, pushing me into roads where the sparse traffic raised little tornados of dust. Although it was early evening, there were streets in which I was the only pedestrian. Low-lying colonial houses with chipped blue windowsills and tired once-white walls were boarded up, their planks splintering.

  Of Caju Beach only the name remained. Landfill had pushed the ocean hundreds of feet away, and Praia do Caju was now the name of the street that lay where the bay once met the sand. Cobblestones paved the way to number 385, the bathhouse. Half a dozen palm trees stood guard before the modest whitewashed and green-shuttered house. The little plaza it faced would have been bucolic if it weren’t for the busy Rio-Niterói Bridge arcing above. Cars sped by, nose to tail, creating their own winds and ruffling the mop tops on the palms.

  The doors were locked. A sleepy-eyed man answered my knocks by opening a window. The bathhouse was closed. He didn’t know why, querida, he didn’t know when it would open, he didn’t know who to ask. “Volta mais tarde, meu amor.” Come back later. He just didn’t know.

  Not too far away, the Inhaúma was forging a part of Brazil’s future. Standing by Alexandre, I had felt its frenetic energy and through it, the country’s promise. Standing in front of the emperor’s bathhouse on the cobblestones still warm from the afternoon sun, faced with the guard’s eternal indifference, I felt the weight of Brazil’s past. What had been achieved in the past decade and a half—the stability, the decrease in inequality, the strengthening of the middle class—was tremendous. But there was a legacy of centuries to be surmounted.

  Two large, glossy cockroaches scuttled by my feet, resolute and innocent like windup toys. I turned to wave good-bye to the guard, but he’d already closed the shutters.

  * * *

  I. Private companies would also have to follow a host of stipulations during oil exploration. Brazil had switched from a concession-based system to a production-sharing one in which the fields remained in the hands of the government and the private sector partner got a share of oil for its participation. Under these rules, Petrobras would be the sole operator of the pre-salt fields and retain one-third of the control of all ventures. The Brazilian government would get a cut of at least 41.65 percent of the profit oil.

  II. Highways also severed Caju from the city and increased its isolation: first Avenida Brasil, in the 1940s, then the Linha Vermelha, a highway linking the airport to downtown.

  CHAPTER 17

  FUTEBOL NATION

  The idea was irresistible: the grandest soccer tournament in the world, hosted by the nation where “futebol is not only a sport, but a passion, a national passion.”

  With these words, Lula accepted the 2014 World Cup on behalf of Brazil. For once, the loquacious president was restrained. Ask Brazilians about soccer and you usually get breathless hyperbole. Other countries united around wars, raised their flag for myriad championships, annual independence parades, elections. Brazil waved its flag once every four years for the Seleção, the national team. The eleven men in canary-yellow jerseys were “the nation in cleats,” in the words of Nelson Rodrigues, one of Brazil’s best-known writers; their games were celebrated or mourned in great cathartic outpourings.

  Soccer alone provided this continent-sized nation with a shared ritual and a common narrative. Over decades, this connection to the sport had become mythical; if culture is the stories we tell about ourselves, Brazil’s story was spun around the ball.

  There was that style, the futebol arte, a playful dance with the ball that was seen as quintessentially Brazilian, born of the racial and cultural gumbo of our origins. More than an approach to the game, it was held up as a representation of who we were and how we lived. Brazilians saw themselves as a people who fought harsh conditions not with bloody insurrections but with their wits, their irreverence, and the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t dribble of the street-smart hustler. There was a pinch of this jeitinho in the way they played the game, there was jogo de cintura, rhythm, spontaneity. Futebol arte was held in contrast to stereotypical European style: organized, professional, disciplined—in other words, stiff, planned, boring.

  This way of playing took as much glee in showmanship, in leaving the opponent flummoxed and the audience delighted, as in driving the ball to the net. But it was also very effective. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, this style coalesced into three World Cup trophies in four tournaments. The 1970 World Cup was played during the worst years of the dictatorship. The national team won six of six matches, showing Brazilians that art could triumph even amid brutality, ignorance, and fear.

  All told, Brazil had five World Cup trophies, more than any other nation. Soccer was a reliable mirror that always showed the nation at its best. This made it beloved during the long years in which we had little else on which to stake our national pride.

  It also won Brazil much acclaim abroad. When the World Cup rolled around, the Seleção was nearly every country’s favorite after their own national team. This fondness came through for me more times than I can count, earning me instant favor with a near-deaf cobbler in a small Greek town, a free lunch from an Algerian bourek-maker squinting over a deep fryer, an appreciative nod from a cantankerous parking lot attendant in a Rome. What would start as a stilted, wordless transaction between two people who shared nothing would tilt once I pointed to myself and said, “Brazil!” Along a broad swath of the globe, this would spark a smile and the inevitable response: “Pelé! Pelé!”

  It was in this light that Lula welcomed the chance to host the World Cup. The appeal was obvious; why not harness all this goodwill to a broader political project?

  Brazil’s Cup would have two burdens. The first was to show off recent progress, prove the country could manage the logistics of a major international event, and assert the nation’s position internationally. The second was pure soccer: to reaffirm Brazil’s primacy on the pitch and heal an old wound.

  Two thousand fourteen would not be the first time Brazil hosted the championship. It had happened once before, in 1950. With Europe in tatters after World War II, FIFA had looked to South America. The war had been good for Brazil; industry and agriculture had prospered, and the country had assumed a leading political and economic role in the continent. For the young democracy trying to carve a global position for itself in the first years of the Cold War, the Cup would be a chance to spread a modern, progressive image. The sporting infrastructure would reflect Brazil’s engineering and technological capacities,
and Brazil’s prowess with the ball would further its nation-building project.

  This kind of dramaturgy deserved a stage to match, a stadium that was grand and contemporary, a reflection of the country’s might and the promise of its future. There was fierce resistance to such extravagance from a segment that wanted schools and hospitals instead, but after much debate in the media and at city hall, the municipal government approved the stadium’s construction. It would be the largest arena on the globe, and it would sit on the geographic heart of Rio like a giant buckle, connecting the wealthy south and the working-class north.

  Raising the stadium for that first Brazilian World Cup became a patriotic affair; construction funds were complemented by thirty thousand families in exchange for rights to a seat for a few years or in perpetuity. It was officially named Estádio Municipal, and later, Estádio Jornalista Mário Filho, after one of its most vocal advocates, but Cariocas nicknamed it Maracanã after the river that flowed nearby. That’s the name that stuck.

  The project was beset by problems and delays. Even on the day of the final World Cup match, July 16, 1950, the public had to step around exposed rebar to find their seats. No matter. Even unfinished, the Maracanã was elegant and powerful, a double-tiered colossus in white concrete, and a fitting crown for the nation’s certain victory.

  Brazilians expected nothing short of glory. The country entered the 1950 World Cup a strong favorite, and reached the finals with the makings of a champion. After a 2–2 stumble against Switzerland, they’d trounced Sweden and Spain. This left only Uruguay—tiny Uruguay. The Seleção had a one-point advantage. Under the rules of the time, they only needed a draw in that last game to win the Cup.

  Before the match, Rio’s mayor addressed the team through the state-of-the-art public address system.

  “You who will be consecrated within a few minutes as champions of the world, you who have no rivals on the planet, you who I already greet as winners . . .”