by Zirin, Dave
Yet those heady days in Copenhagen and among the throngs of Rio now seem like several lifetimes ago. Lula is no longer president; after serving out his terms he was diagnosed with throat cancer (now in remission) and stepped back from the spotlight. Brazil, whose 7.5-percent growth rate—even in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession—had made the Economist swoon, saw its economy sputter in 2012 toward a growth rate of just 0.9 percent.7 Despite the near-absence of economic expansion, spending on stadiums and infrastructure projects intended for the 2016 Olympics in Rio and for the 2014 World Cup in twelve cities across the nation has not skipped a beat. The facts on the ground in Brazil have changed, yet, ravenous and remorseless, the World Cup and Olympic golems continue to feed. Projections for how much they will cost the country keep ticking upward at a taxi-meter pace. It is difficult even to keep up with the parade of stories of dissatisfaction, waste, protest, and tumult that appeared almost daily as this book was going to press. They express what I saw with my own eyes.
Danger: Stampeding White Elephants
When I was in Brazil, I spoke with workers who were deeply concerned about the rush to build twelve new “FIFA-quality” World Cup stadiums. Their concern did not stem only from the fact that this country already has no shortage of well-equipped fields. They were also concerned about the round-the-clock hours, the exhaustion of those operating heavy machinery, and the unsafe working conditions. Then, in November 2013, a crane collapsed into Arena Corinthians (Corinthians Stadium) in São Paulo,8 sending an avalanche of newly cemented concrete to the earth below. This tragedy, which took the lives of two men, Fabio Luiz Pereira and Ronaldo Oliveira dos Santos, could have been far worse. One of their coworkers, José Mario da Silva, said, “I walked right underneath the crane on the way to lunch. If it hadn’t collapsed at lunchtime, a lot more people would have died.”
A reporter who happened to be present as the crane was collapsing snapped pictures with his cell phone. The instinctual response from an engineer for Odebrecht, the powerful Brazilian construction company in charge of rebuilding the stadium, as well as from several stadium security workers, was to assault the reporter and delete the photos from his phone.9 Yet they could not keep the story quiet; in short order it was international news. Sepp Blatter, the reptilian chief of FIFA, said that he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths, and FIFA issued its own statement that the “safety of workers is a top priority.” It is worth noting that Blatter voiced these comments just as FIFA faced international scrutiny about revelations of slave labor and multiple deaths during stadium constructions in Qatar, where the 2022 World Cup will take place.10 Weeks after the accident, we also learned that the crane operator had been working for eighteen straight days, just another cog in Brazil’s 24/7 sprint to complete stadium construction. Brazil’s sports minister, Aldo Rebelo, said nothing after the tragedy about confronting fatigue or labor abuses on work sites. Instead, he assured the media that “the stadiums shall be built on time.” As for the dead, Rebelo sent a tweet expressing “solidarity with the families of the victims.”11
The only true solidarity that the government has shown, however, has been with FIFA—to get the stadiums done, no matter the cost. As Romário, star of the 1994 World Cup, put it:
FIFA got what it came for: money. Things like transportation that affect the public after the tournament is over? They don’t care. They don’t care about what is going to be left behind. . . . You see hospitals with no beds. You see hospitals with people on the floor. You see schools that don’t have lunch for the kids. You see schools with no air-conditioning. . . . You see buildings and schools with no accessibility for people who are handicapped. If you spend 30 percent less on the stadiums, they’d be able to improve the other things that actually matter. . . . They found a way to get rich on the World Cup and they robbed the people instead. This is the real shame.12
What took place at Arena Corinthians was not an isolated incident. In April 2013, a worker was killed doing upgrades at Arena Palmeiras in São Paulo. At Arena do Grêmio in Porto Alegre, eight fans were sent to the emergency room when a guardrail collapsed. In Rio, Arena Engenhão, which will be used for both the World Cup and the Olympics, “had to be closed for repairs six years after it opened due to reports showing winds of 63mph could rip off a roof that is already suffering from corrosion.”13 In Salvador, right by the location of last December’s World Cup draw, where the groupings of the thirty-two participating national teams were announced, the roof of the brand-new Arena Fonte Nova collapsed. What provided the almighty structural pressure that caused it to fall? Rain.14
Judges have tried to halt the opening of stadiums deemed unsafe in several cities. Yet even the judiciary has been unable to slow down the FIFA-ordered sprint to the World Cup. After one judge attempted to stop a “friendly match” between Brazil and England because of unsafe conditions at a new “FIFA-quality” stadium, it went ahead as planned, despite areas “with scaffolding, cables and bolts jutting out from concrete.”15 In Curitiba, a conservative city in the south, a judge stopped the building process at Arena da Baixada because “countless infractions” put workers at risk of “being buried, run over and of collision, falling from heights and being hit by construction material.” The judge was overruled and construction began again.16
The need for compliant, cheap labor has led to even more embarrassing tales making it onto the international wires. There are stories about the use of slave and prison labor to make sure that the stadiums get built on time. In 2012 and 2013, according to the Associated Press, several thousand prisoners across the country were working to help construct several of the twelve new World Cup stadiums.17 The greatest embarrassment of all is that it is the ruling PT, a political party founded out of trade-union struggles and the popular resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship, that has overseen these appalling labor conditions.
Yet even though it is “their party” making these demands, workers have taken no small amount of industrial action and the speedups have led to strikes and walkouts at almost every stadium. I arrived in Brazil not long after a four-month university strike against the government. Frayed banners with strike slogans could still be seen from university windows. As one university employee said to me, “At least half a dozen stadiums have had work stoppages. The Workers’ Party government is now very against syndicalist movements and works actively to take apart unions. Which is an incredible irony. Just an incredible historical irony.”
Priorities
The stories emerging out of Brazil also speak to the irony and the oddity of building stadiums in cities where there are other, far more pressing needs. Multiple media outlets have been reporting from Natal, a city of one million people in the north, where dissatisfaction with the cost and waste of a new stadium has locals up in arms. One customs official told a reporter that the new stadium is “like a spacecraft [that] has crash-landed in the middle of our town.”18 Natal is yet another place where a perfectly good playing field was bulldozed to build a new one that would be up to “FIFA standards.” Jan-Marten Hoitsma, a project manager brought in to make sure Natal’s stadium gets finished on time and under budget, explained, “There are no big football teams here—the biggest team gets gates of around 5,000 and we’re building a 42,000-seater World Cup stadium.”19 In a city with immediate health care and education imperatives, where the absence of hospital beds, overcrowded classrooms, and high rates of illiteracy are a fact of life, the effort and attention devoted to the new stadium strike many residents as obscene. Graffiti around Natal, which urgently needs forty thousand housing units, reads, “We want ‘FIFA standard’ hospitals and schools.” Outside the stadium’s entrance someone has scrawled, “We want ‘FIFA standard’ work.”20
These are the continuing echoes from the summer of 2013, when thirty thousand people took to Natal’s streets—one link in a national chain of protest that brought millions into the streets. Regional economic secretary Rogerio Marinho said, “When the World Cup came to Natal, we felt
as if we’d won a huge prize. The federal government had a specific plan for every city. We were going to get better streets, better public transport, all sorts of benefits. Most of those projects will not be ready in time.”21 Since the economic promises will not be met, Hoitsma has tried a different route: attempting to enlist the poor youth of Natal to train as “World Cup stewards” in order to “win over the community.” One thing the government is not doing to “win over the community” is paying the 1,900 construction workers a living wage. Most are working for the minimum wage and have undertaken wildcat strike action in protest.22
Then there are the airports. Brazil’s government sold two of the country’s main airports to private consortiums in November 2013 to bring down its World Cup and Olympic budget deficits. At a cost of nine billion dollars, they will now be owned by a Singaporean company called Changi and, of course, Odebrecht—the same Odebrecht whose staff members assaulted a reporter for daring to record the collapse at Arena Corinthians.23 As one environmentalist said to me, “If you think about the twelve World Cup cities and how they’re going to be stitched together, there’s no rail project whatsoever. Because there is no Brazilian rail system and no passenger trains, it is all going to be done with the airlines . . . so that the highest percentage of investment in transportation is air, and only the wealthy can really afford it.”
Protests are also now a regular feature as FIFA officials visit the country in the lead-up to the World Cup. Not even being accompanied by Brazilian soccer stars Ronaldo and Bebeto could shield FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke and other officials from being picketed when they arrived at the Arena Pantanal construction site in Cuiabá. A large group of teachers arrived with handmade banners reading “FIFA go home” and “Less World Cup, more health and education.” Their demonstration, although small, garnered international media play—partially because every crisis related to the World Cup will inspire attention, but also because the previous day police had attacked mass protests for higher wages in Rio. Teachers were among those tear-gassed and beaten.
Clearly the old ways are not going to cut it in Brazil. For every story of waste, corruption, and workplace accidents, there are even more stories of home evictions and new security protocols that would make Dick Cheney blush. I saw much of this with my own eyes. It paints a collective picture of a country that is attempting to use the World Cup and Olympics to both present itself externally to the world as a grand new power of the twenty-first century and continue internally a process of state-directed neoliberalism that puts profiteering ahead of human needs.
As Marcelo Freixo, Rio’s radical mayoral candidate (more on him later), said to me,
The truth is that the preparations are attending to the interests of big corporations and not of society. We had the experience of the Pan American Games in 2007 where no benefits were brought to the city. We have currently a city with enormous investments, but also enormous social aggravators. The federal ministry of health recently released a study showing that Rio has the worst public health system on offer in all of Brazil. Additionally, we have precarious and very expensive public transport. We also have a very low-quality education system—one of the worst. So it’s a city with enormous investments taking place, but one that can’t guarantee a minimum standard of living for its citizens.
All of this is happening, without so much stopping for a breath, in the aftermath of the largest series of protests Brazil has seen in thirty years. It is also happening with the partnership and encouragement of President Dilma Rousseff and her ruling Workers’ Party. They still push ahead, with FIFA deadlines as the lodestar of their actions. They still see it as Lula did five years ago when he said, of the Olympics, “It’s an opportunity like we’ve never had before to show the world what we are capable of, strengthen our self-esteem, and achieve new advances.”24 No one in power is adapting to the new economic reality, in which growth has slowed dramatically. No one is echoing the words of Romário, who said, “There’s no good schools, there’s no good hospitals—how can there be a World Cup?”25 There is no recognition that prioritizing the games above all else has rendered every new “white elephant” World Cup stadium a potent symbol of just how much people feel they are being left behind.
Dilma and the Workers’ Party were supposed to be different. Instead they continue the tradition expressed in a longstanding joke:
When God was creating Brazil, St. Peter was behind him, watching. God said, “I’m going to put beautiful mountains here.”
Peter said, “Great.”
“Beautiful beaches,” he said.
“Great.”
“A lot of land, producing everything. No desert.”
Peter said, “Great.”
God said, “Nice climate, lots of sun. . . What, Peter?”
“Lord, with all due respect, I must disagree.”
“Why, Peter?”
“You’re giving these guys too much.”
“Just wait, Peter. Wait to see what kind of government I’m going to put there.”
Brazilians are outraged that services like transportation, education, and health care are inefficiently run or woefully underfunded, yet spending for the World Cup alone could reach the fifteen-billion-dollar mark—which would make it more expensive than the previous three World Cups combined.26 In Rio, the legendary Maracanã Stadium has received a five-hundred-million-dollar facelift, with construction crews working around the clock to make the site of the 1950 World Cup final a twenty-first-century, “FIFA-quality” stadium. The construction companies, which are the largest political donors in the country, want to see this happen by any means necessary. Security firms have been hired to keep unsightly poverty out of view of the coming international audience. This means that new high-rises are going up, new high-tech security systems are being installed, new roads are being paved, and dozens of favelas have been demolished because they were built in areas deemed “high-risk” or “designated for public use.” Both of these phrases are extremely misleading. A “high-risk” area can mean anything from gang activity to landslides. Evicting people from spaces “designated for public use” is particularly ironic when you consider that razing a favela will eventually lead to the private development and ownership of highly valued hillside real estate. Author Bryan McCann quotes Paulo Muniz, a resident of Favela Vidigal, about the ways such threats have historically been used as excuses for ethnic cleansing. “They came with that story of risk of landslide,” said Muniz. “But if Vidigal was at risk, so were half the favelas in Rio, along with many of the luxurious homes in Gávea [a middle-class residential neighborhood nearby]. When we found out they had plans for development, we knew it was really about profit.”27
The human cost of designating areas as either “high risk” or “for public use” is starting to leak out into in the international press. Across Brazil, as many as two hundred thousand people are scheduled to be evicted from their homes as a direct result of the World Cup. The displacement toll on Rio, where the intersection of the World Cup and the Olympics will be most disruptive, is already touching off some of the most dynamic organization and acts of resistance the coastal megacity has seen in decades.
Renato Cosentino, a member of the World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janeiro wrote,
Today Rio de Janeiro’s poorest live in a lawless city. It’s as if a card emblazoned with the Olympic logo has given city authorities superpowers to ignore the Federal Constitution, international agreements signed and ratified by Brazil, and the recommendations of the United Nations. The federal government pretends not to see it and the International Olympic Committee hasn’t spoken out about the charges of human rights violations caused by the preparations for the Games. . . . At a time when Rio de Janeiro has a chance to show the world that it can overcome the social inequality that has marked its history, it is instead reinforcing that inequality.28
As one street sweeper, using his own job as a handy metaphor, said to me, “What is wealth for
them? For them, it’s a red carpet, covering up the trash beneath it with a pretty cover. So the rich and the powerful walk on their red carpet, and they’re not really looking at what’s going on. Critical people need to lift up the carpet to look at what’s underneath.”
This process is more than immoral: it is actually unconstitutional. Brazil has some of the toughest squatters’ rights laws in the world. Anyone who built a house more than five years ago is supposed to be protected, according to both the Brazilian Constitution and local legislation, known as the Organic Municipal Law. If a resident accepts compensation, then, at least in theory, it is supposed to allow them to get comparable housing of at least equal value elsewhere. But that is not what is happening. As one Rio housing activist, João, said to me,
Money is handed to you and you take it or leave it. People have to live in the favelas because of the proximity to wealth. They need to be close to where their jobs are and they cannot afford transportation. For the wealthy, it’s like your Mexican immigrants in the United States: they hate the favelas but they need the individuals in the favelas to do all the work they do not want to do. The time they are serving the rich people, they are good; the time they are living nearby, they are bad and it’s the same people.
One of the main focuses of World Cup and Olympics development appears to be creating physical space between the favelas and the wealthy areas. This process is slightly more complicated in Rio, where the favela plans operate on numerous fronts. In tourist zones, there is a full-court press to pacify, sanitize, and Disneyfy the favelas. The goal is to incorporate them into the city, open them up to the formal market, and slowly gentrify them. This process involves evicting the pesky people who have to live in the favelas, the favelados, who are being pushed out to the distant edges of the city and beyond. To connect these people to their jobs, a new bus line is being built—and its construction is also displacing people.
