Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  “Now we have BRT, Bus Rapid Transit,” João said to me. (Yes, its name is in English.) “We don’t need to spoil [the wealthy areas] with another favela. It means that rich people can live their lives without acknowledging the slums on the hill. . . . It will be like magic: the favela where one in five of us live disappears, and the people disappear as well.”

  This accelerated change from third-world city to first-world economy is also fundamentally changing the time-honored ways Brazil does business, known as the “Brazilian cost”—a system involving patronage, bribes, personal connections, and, if you are so inclined, charity and a helping hand. As Larry Rohter wrote, “There is a growing tension between the old highly personal way of doing things and the new, which calls for impartiality.”29 In neoliberal Brazil, the worst part of the Brazilian cost—the cronyism and corruption—remains, while the part that emphasizes the humanity of everyone involved, even at the expense of efficiency and the bottom line, is gone.

  As Graça da Guarda, a guide at a local museum, said to me, “Our whole city is going to became just a venue for mega-events and the price we are being asked to pay is the price of evicting people. . . . Even when Brazil was at its most impoverished, when we had the highest poverty rates in the world, there was this thing called a legitimate middle-class existence. Now the mere thought of that is a joke.” Not long after we spoke, during the stadium protests of 2013, the so-called “middle classes” hit the streets out of fear for their own survival. Their fears are grounded in the changing world around them. As the New York Times noted, Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes,

  is saying all the right things about combating sprawl, beefing up mass transit, constructing new schools, and pacifying and integrating the favelas, where one in five city residents lives, with the rest of the city. But as months of street protests illustrate, progressive ideals run up against age-old, intractable problems in this city where class difference and corruption are nearly as immovable as the mountains. This is a city divided on itself.”30

  The Times is correct that the city “is divided on itself,” but it is incorrect to ascribe progressive ideals to Paes and the integration of the favelas. Instead, Paes’s model of urban planning has far more in common with the Times’s own backyard, New York’s Times Square, and former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gentrification mission to build a city that can only be enjoyed as a “luxury good.”

  This effort to turn Rio into a Bloomberg-esque “luxury good” is seen not only in the spiraling real-estate prices, constant construction, and agita-producing upheaval, but also in the presence of police officers calmly patrolling these areas with body armor and machine guns. The most heavily armed of these watchmen are overseeing a four-billion-dollar redevelopment project surrounding Rio’s port. This project aims to take a historic, ethnically mixed neighborhood defined by cobblestone and masonry and turn it into what is being called “Little Manhattan,” a commercial real-estate hub anchored by something ominously called the Museum of Tomorrow. It speaks volumes that the Museum of Tomorrow will be lavishly funded, while a museum that aims to examine Brazil’s past at that same port operates as a bare-bones operation and a labor of duty and love.

  The Museum of the Slaves

  The Rio port area has in recent years been a working-class district, home to artists and squatters as well as regular workers. It has twenty-first-century Brooklyn’s feel of creative ferment without its odor of ethnic cleansing. Street murals everywhere express discontent about the construction efforts and evictions in the area.

  I am there to investigate a small, unassuming building known as the Museum of the Slaves. Once a family home, this museum houses Rio’s first and only known slave burial ground. Not too long ago, the owners planned renovations and started digging under the foundation. Just below the surface they found a monstrous number of skeletons. When they contacted the city government, nobody showed any interest in finding out the story behind the bodies buried under their house, so they contacted archeologists at one of Rio’s universities. The archeologists determined that these bones were old—and that they belonged to enslaved Africans who had been brought across the Atlantic by force to work in the American colonies. The sheer number of those who died on the Middle Passage or shortly after arriving still holds the power to shock. They were buried here, within walking distance of the port’s bustling slave market. At this particular site it is estimated that, over sixty years, one hundred thousand dead Africans were buried. There were so many corpses that the slave runners had to use fire and compression to break them down and make room for more.

  Since this site reveals a history that the city government would rather go unremembered, it has declined to take part in its preservation or to invest funds in deeper excavations. It has chosen to ignore this incredible feat of historic and cultural preservation. The family who originally found the bones bought the house next door and opened a modest museum with the help of the university. The museum showcases the history of slavery in Brazil, along with stories of individual Africans who arrived in Rio under bondage.

  While the walls are packed with exhibits, the museum centers on the floor: sections of it are made of glass, and you can look down and see piles of broken bones beneath your feet. The mass grave has been maintained as a reminder of a history many want forgotten. Even with the glass, the work of cataloging the bones and attempting to figure out who is underground continues. It is remarkable that this research is being done almost entirely with personal resources. The state, finally—after the museum had been open for a decade—made a single donation, paying for the glass over the dig sites.

  A hidden history of violence lies just under the surface of modern Rio. Life is cheap. We’ve spent the past few hours walking through sites of intense violence and death—the passageway where drug traffickers walked their execution victims to die; the cliffs from which the dead were thrown, the staircase where cops had shootouts with gangs; the slave cemetery where the lifeless bodies of those stolen from their homelands were unceremoniously dumped, crushed, and burned. It is a past that today’s urban developers and mega-event funders desperately want to leave in the ground, to build over and push out of sight.

  It is a laudable goal to try to create a city in which such violence is a thing of the past. It is hard to imagine that happening, however, through a renewed set of violent dispossessions or by organizing amnesia about the nation’s past. But that is the price of the real-estate speculation taking place across the country. “It is sharper in Rio but it is happening everywhere,” said Marcos Alvito.

  It’s in every city, certainly every World Cup city, it’s unbelievable what’s going on. Belo Horizonte, same thing. São Paulo, same thing. Cuiabá, in the middle of freaking nowhere . . . hotter than balls, in the winter it’s forty degrees [Celsius] there. It is hotter than balls. Real estate is going through the roof! And it’s all the same kind of development, closed condominiums. So there’s this homogenization of lifestyles that’s happening across Brazil.

  But nowhere is the symbolism of what Brazil was, compared to what it is becoming, more acute than at soccer’s Taj Mahal, the most holy site of Brazil’s national obsession: the Maracanã.

  The Maracanã and the Death of Crowds

  All stadiums have ghosts. Every game, every brawl, every collective howl is a new phantom that adds an imperceptible layer of energy to the structure. That is why an old stadium makes you feel that buzz of anticipation when you enter its gates. That’s also why a new stadium, no matter the architect’s intention, can feel as sterile and antiseptic as a hospital bathroom. Rio’s Maracanã Stadium, otherwise known as the “Sistine Chapel of international football,” has hosted some of the most famous matches and concerts in the history of the world. It is also undergoing a “five-hundred-million-dollar face-lift”—but this is less a nip and tuck than full-scale vivisection.

  The reinvention of the Maracanã has been happening for fifteen years, but Rio activist and former professional soccer player C
hris Gaffney described it to me better as the “killing of a popular space in order to sell Brazil’s culture to an international audience.” In 1999, the Maracanã had a capacity of roughly 175,000, although total crowds could reach near 200,000 when people jammed themselves into the standing-room-only open seating on the top level. Most famously, a 1963 contest between historic rivals Flamengo and Fluminense drew a record 194,000 people. The energy of that day is discussed in the hushed tones of folklore.

  In 2000 the number of seats was reduced to 125,000. In 2005, it was reconfigured to seat only 85,000, at a cost of two hundred million dollars,31 to get Brazil ready for the Pan American Games. Now, as epicenter of the World Cup Finals and the Olympic Games, it will seat only 75,000 and will also include a shopping center. In an eerily symbolic construction move that mirrors the erasure of the favelas, the upper deck, once the famed low-cost open seating area for ordinary fans, will now be ringed by luxury boxes. An area that once sat thousands will, according to FIFA dictates, be a VIP-only section where modern Caesars can sit above the crowd. Those boxes will, in true US fashion, be sold off to private business interests after the 2016 Games.

  Gaffney has researched and written extensively about the history of the stadium. He pointed out to me that “the Maracanã was known for its large crowds, and many people refer to games by the number of people that were there to see them, not necessarily by what happened on the pitch.” Yet when soccer fans discuss “what happened on the pitch,” they do so with emotion. The Maracanã entered Brazilian lore as a place “born in traumatic circumstances.” It was built to host the 1950 World Cup—a massive engineering project intended to showcase Brazil’s potential as an emergent South American nation in the wake of World War II. At the 1950 finals, Brazil lost to Uruguay 2 to 1 in front of an estimated 220,000 spectators, one-tenth of Rio’s entire population at the time. As Alcides Ghiggia, who scored Uruguay’s winning goal in that decisive final game, put it: “Down through its history, only three people have managed to silence the Maracanã: the Pope, Frank Sinatra, and me.” The Maracanã is where the four major soccer clubs of Rio—Botafogo, Flamengo, Fluminense, and Vasco da Gama—have played out their historic rivalries. It is where Pelé scored his one-thousandth goal.

  The stadium has come to symbolize the national character of both soccer and celebration. It is also seen as a reflection of Brazil’s worst problems during the time of dictatorship. In the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, when Brazil’s cities suffered from mismanagement and capital flight, so did the Maracanã. Despite the fact that it was falling apart, and even after a section of the stands collapsed in 1992, it was still home to the largest crowds in the world. As Professor Alvito explained to me,

  When Brazil started to enter more into the global economy and FIFA started to host events here, starting with the Club World Championships in 2000, there was a tremendous external pressure to eliminate the standing sections: you had to put in luxury boxes. And so it started undergoing these reforms, these middle-aged reforms, the sort of “nip and tuck” (which is also a very Brazilian thing to do). Dye the hair, stick in some fancy bits, sell yourself again to an international audience.

  What is being “nipped and tucked” is the populares section. This is where the masses have always stood together. The change—from the masses standing as one in the upper deck to a ring of luxury boxes—could not be more jarring for followers of the sport and devotees of the Maracanã. Just as the Maracanã’s dramatic alterations symbolize, to many, a new, two-tiered Brazilian culture that excludes the masses, it can also be seen as an example of something being transformed to sell its “Brazilianness” at the expense of actual living, breathing Brazilians: another economic example of a Brazil in thrall treating its very culture as an export commodity to market abroad.

  Limiting the Maracanã’s capacity has obvious, blaring, subtle-as-a-blowtorch symbolic implications. Brazil has always—from its beginnings, as we will see—chosen to present itself as a mass mosaic, as opposed to the “melting pot” ideal promoted in the United States. Teddy Roosevelt famously railed against a multicultural ideal, saying that “there is no room in [the United States] for a hyphenated American,” but Brazil has always taken a different approach that pushes back against assimilation as an ideal. Brazil would be a multitude of different groups, but all together: something even greater than the sum of their parts. The Maracanã was the place where that mosaic of the cultural multitudes could form, where people could see themselves in the context of their adopted country. For that to change in such a dramatic fashion is difficult enough. To have it happen because an external, European body—FIFA—says that “no international sanctioned match can take place if people are standing” is really more than many cariocas can possibly bear. This, as we will see in the next chapter, speaks to an area of profound sensitivity in Brazil, rooted in its very founding as a country: the idea that Europe would exercise power over any hopes of sovereignty Brazilians might possess. As Graça said to me, “It’s like canceling your culture because of FIFA.” Or, as Gaffney put it, it’s “an insult to the rich culture of the stadium.”

  Brazil is now left in a situation very familiar to those of us in the United States whose cities have built mega-stadiums with public funding: the people who pay the taxes that made a new Maracanã now cannot afford tickets to the Maracanã. “A modern stadium that we cannot enter,” as Gaffey called it. Alvito, his voice riddled with pathos, pointed out that the Maracanã “was made for crowds; crowds roar. Crowds litter. They cry. It is not just two hundred thousand to seventy-five thousand that is the issue. It is who is going to be allowed in. It is the death of crowds.”

  On a sunny weekday in September 2012, Chris Gaffney took me down to the Maracanã for a sanctioned tour of the construction taking place inside the stadium. He provided running commentary about what he clearly believed to be a sacred space. “For fifty years, this was the largest stadium in the world,” he said. “But now we have developers and the government that are blinded by money, blinded by the project, and blinded by this neoliberal way of thinking about the world.” As we approached the stadium, we saw, heard, and felt the thrumming rhythm of neoliberal Brazil: jackhammers and construction trucks, shuttling back and forth on suspension that magnifies the rumble of their engines. Among the cranes was a sea of workers in matching blue hardhats. Chris informed us that the stadium construction employs five thousand workers. Gutting and rebuilding the Maracanã is a twenty-four-hour job: three eight-hour shifts, with a constant flow of workers punching in and punching out. They have had to go on strike on several occasions, to protest not only for higher wages but to get the toilets unclogged and make the cafeteria food edible.

  But before we could see the inside, we got a taste of the “Brazilian cost”: we were denied entry, as well as our formal media tour, because someone did not tell someone else we were arriving. We had to reschedule for later that week, but this misfortune proved to be an unbelievable blessing. Gaffney suggested we go next door to the Indigenous Cultural Center (ICC), where we met Carlos Tukano.

  Carlos is about fifty. He is an Indigenous Brazilian, born in the state of Amazonas, who has worked for thirty years to build a collective organization of Brazil’s dozens of Indigenous groups. When Carlos lived in Rio at the ICC with eleven other families, he had a hard time sleeping—the stadium renovation to end all stadium renovations was taking place right next door, at all hours of the night. But the noise wasn’t the only reason Carlos couldn’t sleep. He and the other residents feared they would be swept away with the construction’s debris. (Their fears eventually came to pass when, a year later, the ICC was torn to the ground.)

  When I met them at the still-standing ICC, the families were living in trailers next to the museum in protest of its dilapidation, disrespect, and neglect. Founded in 1910, the ICC is an achingly beautiful three-story structure with twenty-foot ceilings; like the old Maracanã, it vibrates with history. The original museum was dedicated as a space for Indigenous
studies just two decades after the country formally abolished Indigenous enslavement. Teddy Roosevelt—apparently not terrified by “hyphenated Brazilians”—visited the locale with Cândido Rondon, the great Brazilian explorer, supporter of Indigenous rights, and first director of Brazil’s Indian Protection Agency.

  Even though the formal museum was shuttered by 2012, Carlos and the other occupiers were holding lectures and displaying several makeshift cultural exhibits. Most of this happened in the yard outside the building because its interior was in terrible disrepair, the floors covered in rubble. The wrought-iron stairs still had their skeletal shape, but the handrails and marble stair treads had been ripped out. Climbing them was like going up sixty feet on a diagonal ladder, and it was a long way down. I made it up, but kept my eyes straight ahead.

  In 1977, the property was abandoned in the wave of economic crisis and decay plaguing Brazil at the time. The following year a new Indigenous museum was opened in a different part of the city, the Botafogo neighborhood. For many years this building fell into disuse and disrepair.

  In 2006 Indigenous families arrived from across the country to retake the space. For one year they lived in total peace. That changed in 2007, when FIFA announced that Brazil would host the 2014 World Cup. Despite rumblings that the Maracanã would need a serious upgrade, Carlos and everyone at the ICC believed that they would be left alone. Sure enough, they were entirely unbothered between 2007 and 2010. They simply held the space and opened their own makeshift museum. Student groups, tourists, and researchers came to learn about the history of Indigenous Brazil and participate in cultural events. Its new curators resuscitated this place of profound historical importance.