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

by Juliana Barbassa

  Brazil stopped to listen. The stadium could hold 170,000, but that day around 200,000 packed its stands, nearly 10 percent of Rio’s population at the time. Among them were perhaps three hundred Uruguayan fans. Thousands of Cariocas encircled the arena to listen and be close to the action; millions listened on their radios at home.

  “. . . I have been true to my word and have built this stadium,” the mayor concluded. “Now fulfill your duty and win the World Cup.”

  The moment was seared into the memory of twelve-year-old Léo Rabello. He had followed every turn of the 1950 championship. When we met, sixty-four years later, he could still recite the names of players, scores, and the tense moments in each game.

  His father, a military man, had been among those who’d done his duty and bought a permanent seat in the stadium. The exhilaration of the twelve-year-old soccer fanatic still rang in his voice decades later. Léo remembered the day of that final match in detail.

  He took the tram with his parents and joined the throngs flowing into the Maracanã. The stands were packed; they found their seats. The mayor spoke. Anticipation clenched his throat. Léo, his parents, the team, all of Brazil hung breathless, together, waiting for the shrill sound of the referee’s whistle.

  The game started. Over the next forty-five minutes, the public had to swallow a tight, scoreless match. The tension rose; Brazil could win with a tie, but it was too close for comfort. Two minutes into the second half, Brazil scored: 1–0.

  A collective exhalation rose from the crowd, then an explosion of fireworks.

  “We felt like everything was resolved,” Léo said. “It was a sense of total bliss.”

  The second half ticked by, each passing minute bringing Brazil closer to victory. In the sixtieth minute, Uruguay scored. It was 1–1. This shook Brazilian confidence, but the end was near. Brazil just had to keep the game tied. As the score held and the minutes flew, FIFA’s president, Jules Rimet, left to oversee Brazil’s victory commemoration. When he returned five minutes later, he was met by a morbid silence. Uruguay had scored. Again.

  “It was as if the world had ended,” said Léo. “No funeral wake has that silence, the silence of two hundred thousand people.”

  It is still possible to read the shock of the moment and watch it crumple into sorrow on thousands of faces captured on the grainy, black-and-white footage of the time. Brazilians of all backgrounds, gathered as one, gave themselves over to grief. Perfectly coiffed women in strings of pearls turned aside, trying modestly to hide their tears; working men in shirtsleeves raised thick-knuckled hands to their faces, eyes brimming over, or let sinewy arms hang, useless. Léo saw his father cry for the first time.

  That day, Brazil lost much more than a game. Because of the buildup and the ties to national identity, the defeat was a blow to the core, a public deflation of the country’s pride and its aspirations. It cast doubt on our worth as a people and as a nation.

  The Seleção cast aside the white jerseys in which they had played that day; they’d never wear them again. The press, which had praised Brazil’s mixed-race team and their unique style as a reflection of our best selves, now turned the myth inside out, singling out the black players, and particularly the goalie, as scapegoats for the disaster. Brazil wouldn’t have another black goalkeeper for forty-five years.

  “It was irreversible, that loss. We never recovered,” said Léo. “Brazil might have won other times, in other places, but that loss was a wound that wouldn’t heal.”

  He should know. Léo dedicated his life to soccer and made it his career. After rising through the administrative ranks to the top of his own his club, Flamengo, he recognized the market potential of Brazil’s great players. These were men who could be geniuses on the field but often knew next to nothing about negotiating contracts and building a brand. Léo became FIFA’s first licensed agent; his registration number is 001. Over the years, he shepherded generations of footballers from club to club in Brazil and around the world, and watched as the game he loved was profoundly transformed.

  Players who were once locally grown and locally loved became global commodities; the sport moved billions of dollars. The Maracanã also suffered profound changes. Over time, it lost its democratic essence as a series of reforms wiped out the cheap standing-only section, installed VIP boxes, and destroyed all of the internal architecture. Its open, concrete bleachers were swapped for numbered chairs in molded plastic that held just over 78,000 fans, nearly 100,000 fewer than the original Maracanã.

  The game and the stadium were much changed by 2014, but the symbolic weight of a World Cup in Brazil was still there. If anything, the burden on the Seleção was heavier. Sixty-four years after that traumatic loss, futebol was being called on, once again, to elevate Brazil on the field and beyond it. The final game of the 2014 Cup would be in the Maracanã. Brazil would finally have a chance to repair that old injury with a victory in what was still one of the sport’s most hallowed grounds.

  Irresistible, right?

  No one, not the FIFA officials who handed the World Cup to Brazil, nor Lula, who accepted it, had thought the path to 2014 would be smooth. But the ride had been more harrowing than anyone anticipated, and from its start, the year of the Cup—the year that should have been all glee and giddy high hopes in the country of futebol—felt strained, dangerous.

  A stagnant heat hunkered over the city in the first months of 2014, blocking the cool southern breezes and withering any clouds. The sun, relentless as a curse, baked the streets, strained the energy grid, and torched the vegetation. It was the hottest summer in half a century. There was no relief: the ocean’s surface felt like a warm shower. A five-hundred-mile-wide mass of dead algae hovered just off the coast like a bad omen.

  The stifling temperature left Cariocas on edge, and barbed everyday exchanges with impatience. But it wasn’t just the weather. Aspects of life in Rio that had seen real improvement or that had offered well-founded reasons for hope just a handful of years ago—the economy, the environment, the feeling of safety when walking down the street at night—had recently suffered reversals or ended in failure. There was a sense of expectations pushed too far. What had been the punch line to a joke—imagina na Copa!—became a sarcastic mantra. Imagine during the Cup. What if Brazil fell apart as the world watched?

  After years of sluggish growth, the economy was showing signs of real stress. The federal government’s efforts to control the cost of living by artificially capping fuel and electricity prices were revealing themselves for what they were: gambiarras, makeshift solutions designed to get the country to the October presidential elections, leaving costs and consequences for later.

  Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company, predicted it would have to spend $18.8 billion in 2014 to keep the country running on subsidized fuel. The electric sector stayed afloat with a $5.4 billion government-engineered loan, but this would have to be paid back through substantial rate increases in the years to come.

  None of these mechanisms kept inflation from punching through the projected ceiling. Economists forecast another year of very low growth and floated ugly words like “recession.”

  Brazilians felt this as prices spiked in places that hurt: education, food, transportation, and housing led the list. As consumer debt hit record highs, banks raised interest rates, squeezing the new middle class. Each uptick pushed families closer to missing payments on their kid’s braces, their teenager’s English classes, the parents’ new Volkswagen.

  Even the traditional Carioca options for blowing off steam, soccer and the beach, were soaring out of reach. The first game I attended in the refurbished Maracanã set me back $30 for the cheapest ticket, about one-tenth of a month’s minimum wage salary. A coconut from the beach vendor’s cooler cost $3; a fashionable bikini went for a stratospheric $200. Even the bus fares had inched up once the protests of 2013 were a safe distance away.

  Any careful obse
rver picking up the newspaper could see the escalation of government spending, the lackluster stock market, and the unfavorable trade balance. By the end of summer, Standard & Poor’s had cut Brazil’s standing to its lowest investment-grade rating. No one was surprised.

  Rio embodied this sense that Brazil’s moment might be passing before it arrived. The city had been in dire need of investment for decades. Cariocas had high hopes that the international events that started with the Pan-American Games would bring measures to curb chronic congestion, pollution, and violence.

  But they were learning, at great cost, that massive sporting events have short-term objectives and tight deadlines that do not mesh well with long-term city planning goals. In Rio, contracts bound resources to the needs of external organizations, creating a permanent state of exception that left no room or time for debate, consideration of broader needs, or the reform of flawed institutions. On the contrary, these pressures reinforced the existing hierarchies; the rush to kickoff or the torch lighting justified the further concentration of power and shortened decision-making processes.

  Over four years, I’d seen this at work in the removal of favelas without due process; in the scrapped environmental reviews; in social cleansing policies that targeted street vendors, prostitutes, drug users, and the homeless; and in the further arming of a police force still lacking accountability. Gentrification worsened an already serious housing crisis even as favela-upgrading programs like Morar Carioca were cut off at the root.

  With a couple of months to go before the World Cup and two years until the Olympics, many of the projects that were put in place were proving insufficient or poorly planned, with budget overruns, lapsed schedules, and unforeseen social or environmental costs.

  Take transportation. Improved mobility was billed as an important legacy of hosting these sporting events, but one of the first projects to fall by the wayside was the bullet train between Rio and São Paulo. Only half of the transit projects in the twelve World Cup host cities were delivered in time. Of those, one-third were incomplete. Many were abandoned, which critics pointed out was not all bad, as they had been terrible ideas from the start.

  The undersupply of mass transit, the myriad construction projects, and the continued federal tax incentives for buying cars had tipped Rio’s infamous traffic from frustrating to unbearable. To Cariocas, this meant time wasted and extra gas that cost drivers more than $13 billion in 2013 alone, according to Rio de Janeiro Federation of Industries, FIRJAN. No wonder motorists leaned on their horns, blasting out their anger.

  The environment continued to suffer as more users were introduced to already overtaxed systems. Manhole covers exploded because of underground gas leaks; massive water mains ruptured, destroying homes and drowning residents; the sight of backed-up sewage pipes burbling in the gutters of my neighborhood no longer surprised me.

  The push to clean up waterways was so behind schedule as to be practically abandoned by that summer. The promise had been to treat 80 percent of the sewage going into lakes and the bay, but Guanabara was still a toilet, while the state government acknowledged that less than 15 percent of the promised $4 billion needed to complete the sewage treatment plan was available.

  Garbage was on everyone’s mind—and nose—that summer. Rio’s trash collectors went on strike during Carnaval, demanding a raise to their $360 a month salary. Mountains of refuse left to rot in the sun exacerbated the usual city-wide hangover and left entire neighborhoods gagging.

  In the midst of the strike, the mayor was caught on camera tossing half-munched fruit over his shoulder during a political event. The message was clear: even the poster boy for the city’s anti-littering campaign had failed to change his habits.

  The scent wafting off the bay, the garbage bags rippling with flies, the rising prices, and the heat, the unrelenting heat—all this left Cariocas chafing. But perhaps the deepest disappointment concerned security. By the summer of 2014, several cases of explicit police violence had raised questions about the possibility of improving one of the state’s most corrupt institutions.

  After he took over as head of state security, Beltrame had pushed through reforms to make the police force more professional, more accountable, and less violent. By 2010, Rio’s streets were safer than they had been in years. Crime had decreased, but perhaps just as important was the belief that improvement was possible. The experiment with Pacification Police Units within favelas left 74 percent of Rio residents feeling safer, according to a 2012 survey. This sense of safety, both real and perceived, was riddled with caveats: it was frail and it was unequal, hovering protectively over some people and some neighborhoods, eluding others. Still, it heightened expectations and fed demands even among those whom it did not reach.

  These changes had started with real promise. In early 2011, during the months that followed the takeover of the Alemão complex, law enforcement faced some of its most glaring failings as investigations revealed corruption, murder, and cover-ups among rank and file as well as leadership.

  The police chief, Mário Sérgio Duarte, had promised zero tolerance for the lawlessness that he called “a plague” within the force. During his tenure, he’d pushed out dozens of dirty officers, including heads of UPP units. Still, evidence of gruesome crimes by police continued to surface, and pressure mounted on the commander. He managed it all—until August 2011, when events took a turn straight out of mafia playbooks.

  A state judge known for being tough on rogue police was shot twenty-one times with police-issued bullets in front of her house. Judge Patricia Acioli’s murder was seen as a warning to the entire legal establishment. Eleven officers from the town of São Gonçalo were arrested and charged in her death. Among them was Cláudio de Oliveira, then in his first position of authority as chief of São Gonçalo’s police battalion. His old friend from BOPE training days, Mário Sérgio, had nominated him for the job.

  Police refer to purges among their ranks as “cutting our own flesh.” Mário Sérgio had often taken that knife to others during his tenure. When he was faced with accusations against his friend and appointee, he turned the knife on himself. As chief of state police, all nominations were his responsibility. He took the blame and resigned. All eleven police officers were found guilty in the judge’s murder, including the head of the battalion, Cláudio de Oliveira. As the summer of 2014 wound down, the men were sentenced to up to thirty-six years in prison.

  Cariocas had last seen their police chief at the top of his game, addressing his troops from a caveirão and claiming victory on TV over the adversary in the hills. Now they watched the man brought down by the police corps’ biggest challenge—the enemy within, the banda podre.

  The case buried Mário Sérgio’s career. The ambitious cop’s cop took a job in the interior and spent his free time writing or helping his wife with their twins. With his chiseled features, ramrod sense of right and wrong, and unwavering loyalty to a fallen friend, he embodied the schizophrenic currents that coursed within state’s police. Rio’s criminals and cops were intimately twined, and the effort of pulling them apart could fray the fabric of the force to the highest levels; it could destroy even the most dedicated individuals.

  The trust of Cariocas in the UPP program was also suffering under mounting evidence of dishonesty and brutality. One case came to represent its failures: the disappearance of a construction worker named Amarildo de Souza within the Rocinha favela. After an investigation, twenty-five UPP officers were indicted as suspects in his kidnapping, his torture within their base, and his murder. By the summer of 2014, the state government issued a statement officially presuming him dead. The announcement would have to suffice for Amarildo’s wife and seven children. They never got a body to bury.

  In the face of the police force’s weakened credibility, gangsters staged coordinated attacks against UPP bases across Rio that summer; shoot-outs shut down the city’s main tunnel and left half a dozen pacification officer
s dead, four of them in Alemão.

  That sprawling community was once again representative of the troubles afflicting the city as a whole. Shock troops reinforced strategic points; residents suffered searches and restrictions on their movement. Gun battles canceled classes for thousands of children and forced shut for days the gondola service that the president had inaugurated with pomp. Alemão’s community health center was attacked, its computers and equipment destroyed. Doctors quit.

  Its borders, which had grown porous to outsiders like myself, began to close down again. Walking through the alleys I felt that familiar reluctance of ordinary people to speak openly to a stranger. The attacks against the police, the uncertainty over who was the dono do morro, left locals feeling exposed.

  “I was one of the people who stood here and waved a white banner out the window when the police first came,” said one man, the owner of a hole-in-the-wall paper goods store. He shook his head, as if chiding himself for the naïveté of a few years ago. “Now, how can we trust them, if they can’t even defend themselves?”

  If anyone gained from the experiment, it was Diego, the Red Command trafficker who had turned himself in to face justice. Ever the hustler, he remade himself even as the police chief who had orchestrated his rendition went down and the favela that was once his home slid into chaos.

  The murder charge against him hadn’t stuck; after a year in prison he walked free. He found a niche as a cameraman for a nonprofit that worked rehabbing former traffickers and had discovered a talent for American football, which was growing in popularity. The young man who couldn’t leave Alemão for fear of arrest or death at the hands of police now traveled the country as a middle linebacker with the Botafogo Mamutes.

  His mother, Dona Nilza, still worried. Mothers will. Diego earned very little compared to his days as Mr. M; she wondered if he wouldn’t tire of life on the straight and narrow. There was also the violence ripping through Alemão again. Would it reach her son, through a quest for revenge or sheer envy? Even as she continued to run the van service and cook for the drivers, she kept a close eye on her Diego. She had nine other children, she said, but this one needed her most.