Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  The Maracanã was always more than just a stadium. In its original incarnation it was part of a larger integrated collection of public facilities conceived of and used as a genuinely public space. Alongside the football stadium, the complex included a beautiful mini-arena – the Maracazinho; a small athletics stadium and swimming complex, both of which were used by schools and the public for decades; a public primary school, which was considered among the very best in the city; and a superb if dilapidated nineteenth-century colonial mansion, the Aldeia Maracanã, which served as the Museum of the Indian. More than just concrete and plazas, the Maracanã was, for Cariocas and the futebol nation as a whole, a repository of historical memory, a site of national identity, a source of immense pride and, for all its faults, a continuing statement of Brazil’s rare moments of utopian, democratic populism. In 2009 the stadium was closed for a third renovation in anticipation of the World Cup, and this time there would be no mistakes: the football and architectural authorities intended to wipe out every last progressive element of that complex, every trace of its original generous aesthetic and political vision.

  Rebuilding the complex began in 2009 without a proper licence and was thus in contravention of the architectural preservation orders that had been placed on the stadium and the other buildings around it. The process was, from start to finish, entirely illegal under Brazilian law, a systematic transgression for which no one has been held accountable. The school, the athletics stadium and the swimming complex were all slated for demolition, with no plans to relocate or replace these vital public facilities. Massive public protest managed to save the school, but both sports facilities were closed and the athletics track demolished. A last-minute court injunction in 2013 saved the magnificent angular concrete stand that stood next to it. It now looks down on to a temporary car park and rubble, and no amount of screening will disguise it when the World Cup is held.

  The Museu do Índio had actually moved to Botafogo in the late 1970s, and the Aldeia Maracanã had stood empty, ruined and uncared for, for over two decades until it was squatted and renovated by indigenous Brazilians in 2006. Over a number of years they built a small functioning community. Needless to say, the authorities were determined to remove them, claiming erroneously that FIFA wanted them out, that the space was needed for emergency exits from the Maracanã and that it should be the site of a new Brazilian Olympic museum. All of this can be taken with a pinch of salt. As an ex-member of Brazil’s Olympic Committee put it, ‘Rio’s governor wants to polish the city, and the Indians are no good for this purpose. It is racial segregation and cruelty coming from an elite that harms Brazil.’8 In early 2013, as civic officials negotiated with the occupants, the military police stormed the building, using pepper spray, tear gas and rubber bullets against its unarmed occupiers. Rio’s mayor for sport and leisure caustically responded to critics by saying, ‘Real Indians live in the rainforest, right?’9 As of January 2014, a new preservation order on the building has been issued by the courts, preventing its destruction, and a small number of activists have reoccupied it.

  Appalling as all of these changes were, nothing compares to the act of architectural vandalism and cultural desecration that has been perpetrated on the Maracanã itself. Once the largest and most beautiful football stadium on the planet, it has been reduced to a parody of its former self. The internal two-level structure was gutted and an anodyne off-the-shelf single-tier stand rammed into the space. The once fabulous views of Rio’s skyline, clearly visible between the top of the stands and the roof, were obliterated. The roof itself, the crowning glory of the stadium, was, entirely illegally, demolished and replaced with a pathetic concoction of scaffolding and canopies. Where once the quadruple ellipses of pitch, stands and roof created an uninterrupted 360-degree panorama of simple but beautiful symmetries, the eyeline is now dominated by ugly gantries from which hang four gigantic television screens. These serve to distract the observer and, through carefully edited filming of the crowd, create the illusion that the stadium is full.

  The coup de grâce was delivered by the plan to privatize the Maracanã. After more than 1 billion reais of public money had been spent on it, the government intended to hand the complex over to private operators, who on a thirty-year lease would only be required to pay a small fraction of the costs of renovation (less than 20 per cent). Though they would also be required to spend money on completing the complex renovation for the 2016 Rio Olympics, there was little to suggest that this would be rigidly enforced. To no one’s amazement a committee of one awarded the contract to a consortium of IMX, Odebrecht and AEG: IMX was the main holding company of Eike Batista, then one of Brazil’s richest men, whose organization had done the original economic feasibility study on privatizing the stadium; Odebrecht, a huge construction firm with major links to the PT; and AEG, a US-based ‘entertainment’ conglomerate that administered over a hundred soulless arenas around the world. When the completed stadium was opened up to the press and public in April 2013, in anticipation of the Confederations Cup to be played later that year, campaigners against privatization protested from the stands and were, once outside, treated to plumes of tear gas. The global media didn’t seem to notice. Had they or indeed Brazil’s elites done so the events of June 2013 would have seemed less surprising and incomprehensible.

  III

  The Confederations Cup began life as a PR exercise for the House of Saud. Having built one of the most opulent but underused stadiums in the world – the King Fahd – the Saudis created the tournament in 1992 to fill up the schedule and play soft-power football politics. The cup pitted their own national side against a selection of leading international teams, invited on an all-expenses-paid jaunt. The King Fahd Cup was held again in 1995 and 1997, with the Saudis attempting to invite all the sides that had won their continental competitions (like the European Championships and the Asian Cup). In 2001 the tournament passed into the hands of FIFA, who have since staged it on a four-year basis as a warm-up and dress rehearsal for the World Cup. Korea-Japan 2001, Germany 2005 and South Africa 2009 all passed without comment or much incident. Brazil 2013 was meant to be the same.

  Through the autumn of 2012 and into early 2013 there were small but visible signs of discontent. The Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíadas, which had cut its teeth as the main opposition to the Pan American Games, maintained its regular protests in Rio and other cities over the wastefulness and corruption of the World Cup infrastructure programme, attracting 3–4,000 people to their anti-privatization marches on the Maracanã. At the same time increases in bus fares were attracting protests, led by the Movimento Passe Livre, most notably in Natal in late 2012 where buses were burned and police violently dispersed the crowds. In March 2013 the same pattern of events was seen in Porto Alegre when fare increases were announced, and in May much larger and fiercer confrontations took place in the inland city of Goiânia – a fact barely noted by the Brazilian media, let alone the rest of the world.

  Then on 6 June, just nine days before the Confederations Cup was due to begin, the Movimento Passe Livre began to demonstrate against bus-fare rises in São Paulo, blocking Avenida Paulista and other major thoroughfares. This could not be ignored. The police, as ever, reacted with the use of maximum force, and although the media were depicting the protest as an antisocial nuisance, the demonstrators’ bravery in the face of police brutality began to bring more supporters on to the streets. Organized through a complex mixture of social movements, personal connections and massive use of social media, demonstrations took place every day in São Paulo and were supported by marches in Rio, Brasília and Belo Horizonte of between 1,000 and 5,000 people. Almost immediately the protestors began to talk about more than just fare increases. Chants and placards soon made reference to the hopeless state of the nation’s public-education and health-care systems; the pervasiveness of political corruption; the unaccountability and brutality of the police. Yet for all this, the protests remained small and only partially connected acts of d
efiance. What turned these smouldering embers into a conflagration was the football.

  On 15 June the Confederations Cup opened in Brasília with the host nation playing Japan. Riot police used pepper spray and rubber bullets on a small demonstration close to the stadium where protestors carried signs like ‘Health? Education? No! Here everything is for the World Cup.’ FIFA president Sepp Blatter stood to give his speech and was roundly booed throughout. Blatter attempted to respond by asking the audience, ‘Where was the fair play in all of this?’, but he was booed even more loudly. President Rousseff was next up, and she too was booed while protestors unfurled a variety of banners inside the stadium. The disparate demands of the street were suddenly given a theme around which its many concerns could crystallize; the protean spasm of activism acquired a focus and a rhythm. The commercial sporting spectacular had brought the world’s cameras to Brazil; now a political and popular anti-spectacular would meet it head on. Hitherto the mainstream press had systematically tried to portray the protestors as extremists and marginal, and the football establishment had called for the futebol nation to go home and rally behind the Seleção. Now they would have to eat their words. The scale and range of protest, the existence of alternative media sources and the widespread public recognition that football, rather than just a source of unity and pride, now also exposed Brazil’s ugliest sides, rendered all of their arguments untenable.

  Two days later major demonstrations were held in twenty cities, 65,000 strong in São Paulo and more than 100,000 in Rio. A very small number of protestors attacked the state legislature where evidence emerged that the police were resorting to agents provocateurs as a way of justifying the use of violence against the protestors. In Brasília protestors climbed on to the roof of the Congress building. In Porto Alegre demonstrators set fire to a bus, and in Curitiba they attempted to force their way into the office of the state governor, but these were overwhelmingly peaceful protests policed as if they were an armed uprising. On 19 June, as Brazil faced Italy in Fortaleza, 25,000 people marched directly to the stadium, where they were met by the usual combination of armed brutality and incompetence.

  The following day was the occasion of the biggest demonstrations yet, as Brazilians took to the streets of 120 cities, including every state capital in the country from Rio Branco, deep in the Amazon on the Peruvian border, to Porto Alegre, 2,000 miles to the south. At least 300,000 people gathered in Rio alone and were once again met by chaotic and violent policing. The carnivalesque front of the march along Avenida Presidente Vargas was bombarded by tear gas and percussion bombs, destroying the bonhomie and internal order of the crowd. In the ensuing chaos looting broke out on some side streets, and as one eyewitness noted, the military police ‘roamed the streets like rabid dogs, guns pointed in everyone`s faces. Worse, they threw tear gas into restaurants.’10 Everywhere the crowds carried thousands of handmade, hand-drawn placards and banners. Truly a thousand voices were set free: from the instructional ‘This is about more than just bus fares, it’s a scream by people who cannot take corruption any more’ to the exasperated ‘Too many reasons to fit on here’; from the crude ‘Fuck off International Football Association’ and ‘FIFA the bitch’ to the entirely reasonable ‘Brazil, wake up! A teacher is worth more than Neymar’; and everywhere, sprayed on the bus shelters and in the underpasses, ‘The Cup kills the poor.’

  On 21 June President Rousseff made her move, going on television, accepting the right of the nation to protest and promising to address the people’s concerns by holding down bus fares, importing extra doctors from Cuba to fill the gaping holes in Brazil’s health service, reserving oil revenues for education, but defending spending on the World Cup. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to take the sting out of the movement. With truly remarkable haste Congress passed the necessary legislation, and the contentious laws on corruption and homosexuality as a treatable disease were withdrawn.

  Protest, though still widespread, thinned. In a final flourish 120,000 people marched from the centre of Belo Horizonte to the Mineirão as Brazil beat Uruguay in their semi-final. Activists occupied the state legislature and in the Sete de Setembro Square, the traditional place in which the Seleção’s victories were celebrated, the night ended with a fusillade of tear gas so vast that the huge obelisk in the centre, over thirty metres high, was completely obscured. Five days later, on the night of the final in Rio, a crowd of 5,000 marched on the Maracanã and was met by an enormous deployment of the Rio police department’s riot squads. The military police and the army were on standby, though as ever there was no medical care available to anyone but for the six volunteer medical students and their plant sprays full of milk of magnesia. Half a dozen helicopters swooped and hovered above the narrow canyon-like streets through which the crowds moved. While those inside the stadium sang the Brazilian national anthem, those outside took in the harsh symphony of tear-gas grenades, batons beating on riot shields and the relentless thudding and whirring of helicopter blades. Brazil won the match 3–0 as the crowd was charged, gassed and dispersed.

  Coda: February 2014

  In the months following the Copa das Manifestações the spirit of protest remained alive: strikes in July affected ten states and brought Brazil’s busiest port, Santos, to a halt. Public transport was at a standstill in most cities. Teachers and doctors continued to take to the streets, the Midia Ninja activists – a media collective born of the Copa – filmed and live-streamed them, while small anarchist groups, notably the Black Bloc, generally made trouble. Buses were torched in São Paulo, while protest and disruption brought the city’s metro to a halt. The Comitê Popular and other social movements kept up the pressure. Brazil’s friendly with Australia in Brasília in September saw a protest march that was repelled with multiple volleys of tear gas. Jérôme Valcke, FIFA’s general secretary, was met by protestors while on a visit to the calamitously late Arena Pantanal in Cuiabá in October. A series of small victories were won by threatened favela communities resisting eviction, and the privatization plans for the Maracanã were put on hold.

  More widely, there were reasons for some optimism that change was coming. The trial of the leading PT politicians who had orchestrated the mensalão, the vote-buying scandal which had almost brought down Lula in 2005, finally reached a conclusion with the Supreme Court imposing immediate prison sentences on some senior figures including José Dirceu, Lula’s chief of staff.

  The most widely reported resistance came, unusually, from within football itself. Towards the end of the season, many championship games began with an act of defiance from the players. On some occasions they simply sat down when the whistle blew to start the game and remained there for a minute. Sometimes they would aimlessly pass the ball among themselves or all twenty-two would form a circle in the centre of the pitch with their backs to the crowd. This was FC Bom Senso, ‘FC Common Sense’, an organization formed by a number of the more senior players in the league, which quickly attracted over 1,000 members. Their central grievance was the football timetable. Already clogged in 2013, 2014 was due to be even worse as space was cleared for the World Cup. The practical implication of this was that players would have less than a week’s holiday between the end of the 2013 season and the beginning of the next. The toll on players’ physical and mental well-being would be immense. In addition Bom Senso threatened a nationwide players’ strike unless the squad at Náutico, who had not seen their salary for months, were paid. As with the protest movement in June, the gathering sense of confidence and organization among the players led them to make bolder demands, insisting on financial transparency in Brazilian football and a players’ representative on the CBF. The CBF didn’t even refuse to negotiate, it simply tried to ignore them.

  If the mensalão trial and the emergence of Bom Senso suggested that some change had occurred in the futebol nation, there were many indications to the contrary. 100 Corinthian torcidas broke into their club’s training ground, using bolt cutters on the huge wire fences. Once
inside they physically attacked the squad and the coaching staff, berating them for their poor performances. Flamengo, the club of the people, were happy to set ticket prices for their Copa do Brasil final at more than twenty times the minimum wage. The prices being set for hotels and internal flights during the World Cup took on such astronomical proportions that the government convened a meeting of the airline and tourist industries in an effort to stop the rampant price gouging. Fluminense once again escaped relegation by pulling the right strings and getting lowly Portuguesa demoted instead.

  The World Cup construction programme remained desperately behind schedule with real concerns as to whether the stadiums in Curitiba, São Paulo and Manaus could be finished in time. The pace of work quickened at these sites and with it the death rate. In late November a giant construction crane was lifting the final part of the roof of the Estádio Itaquerão in São Paulo into place when it fell to the ground, dropping the 420-ton roof panel which sliced through a perimeter wall, damaging the roof and killing two people. Later it would be revealed that the crane driver had been working for weeks without a day off. In Manaus, where the long rainy season had delayed the completion of the stadium roof, Marcleudo de Melo Ferreira fell over thirty metres to his death while installing lights. The Ministry of Labour revealed that construction at the Manaus site had violated sixty-three of sixty-four health and safety labour codes. Sports minister Aldo Rebelo remained blithely optimistic though: ‘There is always a bride and a groom at a wedding and 100 per cent of the time the bride is always late but I have never known a wedding not to happen because of it.’1