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

by Zirin, Dave

  There is a story of a woman player saying, back in 1984, “Today, when I came onto the field, I heard a guy say that I should be at a laundry sink, washing clothes. But I did not bother to reply to him, although I was angry. My reaction came later, with the ball at my feet.” One player who has challenged sexist assumptions about the place of women in the sport and made the beautiful game her own is soccer superstar Marta Vieira da Silva. Marta is an absolute genius with the ball, her plays YouTube-friendly highlights the likes of which are often forbidden to the men in the new, regimented soccer. Marta was named FIFA World Player of the Year five consecutive times, between 2006 and 2010.59 Yet even she has had to fight for every bit of respect, signing a protest letter with teammates that said simply, “We need help.” During the 2007 Pan American Games, when she was twenty-one years old, she said, “I hope that our successes will change everything. I’ve gone through hell myself.” But the hell continues.

  Neither Lula nor Dilma, in all their crowing about the benefits of bringing the World Cup to Brazil, has said a word about how hosting the Cup could benefit women’s soccer. Without a movement to demand it, it is difficult to see how women won’t be left behind once the Cup is done.

  The Neoliberal Game

  The reckless abandon, improvisation, and joy associated with Brazilian futebol has always been reflected the stands as much as on the pitch. Whether through song, dance, or celebration, the passion and creativity of Brazilian fans have always been a part of the show. Brazilian soccer matches were the first sports games in the world to feature fireworks shows at halftime, which were first remarked upon as early as the 1940s. The practice of having every fan hold up a colored card, which the NFL now has fans do to send messages of support for the US armed forces, started in the stands of Brazil. Then there are the costumes. Covering the body in wildly vibrant colors has historically been a statement all its own. In a nation whose different cultures clang together on a daily basis, where economic class separates people with grand chasms, the stands have always been the place where commonalities could be found and a national identity forged.60

  Soccer has also reflected the contradictions of a country at once plagued by violence and blessed by joy. As Bellos wrote, “Brazilians are a happy, creative, excessively friendly people, yet—because of the country’s social problems—they live with levels of murder and violent crime almost equivalent to a country in civil war.”61 Today, however, the contradictions are being ironed out, as Brazil’s elite prepare to sell its national identity and culture by the pound for an international audience. Nowhere is this more evident than in the transformation of the Maracanã (discussed in chapter 1).

  It can also be seen in the exploitation of the players. In November 2013, several Brazilian teams took the field with their arms folded, vowing “drastic measures” if the Brazilian Football Confederation refused to alter their intense, nearly nonstop schedule. Players also demanded “more vacation time, longer preseasons, fewer games and a bigger voice in decision making.”62 Some kept their arms folded throughout the contests. In other games, players passed the ball from one end of the field to the other after the referees threatened to give them yellow cards. At one match, during the national anthem, players from both sides unfurled a banner in the middle of the pitch that read, “For a football that is better for everyone.” As their organizing body, Common Sense Football Club, posted on its Facebook page: “If there are attempts to prevent players from expressing themselves in a peaceful way, drastic measures will be taken. We expect an official position followed by moves that will benefit Brazilian football.”63 They even threatened to wear clown noses on the pitch if changes were not forthcoming.

  The protests are understandable, if you know the reality of life for a Brazilian pro soccer player. Top guns on the best teams earn salaries that compare favorably to those on many of the best teams in Europe, but the overwhelming majority work for poverty wages, with 90 percent earning less than fifty dollars a month.64 For all its bread-and-butter demands, though, this protest was really about corruption and exploitation in the CBF. Not even Pelé, with all of his cultural capital, could defeat that. The normalization of corruption as just a part of the sport is also far too familiar a theme in Brazilian soccer. This corruption, magnified by the demands of the World Cup, was the catalyst for the 2013 protests.

  The truth is that Brazilian soccer has been corporatized and privatized half to death. Fábio Menezes once said, “The best way to project yourself in Brazil is either to start a church or a football club. . . . People use football clubs to serve their own interests.”65 Teams exist to sell players to the next level, mirroring what we have seen in the Brazilian economy: just another market-based product. The soccer historian Bellos said that researching the commercialization of the sport reminded him “of the latifundios [the old slave-based plantation estates]. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of sugar, coffee and footballers. I began to see the country like a big estate where the agricultural product is futebol. The country is a sporting monoculture. And football mirrors the old hierarchies. The oligarchic powers are sustained by those at the bottom who, like the cane-cutters, live on almost nothing.”66

  The CBF is a private organization that has corruption in the marrow of its bones. From 1997 to 2000 its revenue quadrupled, but it still somehow did not manage to pay off its debts. The aforementioned Ricardo Teixeira and his friends at the top, however, voted themselves pay increases of more than 300 percent. As they were paid more, they spent less on developing and expanding soccer. In 2000 alone, this cartel spent sixteen million dollars on air travel, “enough for 1,663 first-class tickets from Rio to Australia.”67 Summing up the conclusions of a congressional investigation, Senator Álvaro Dias described the CBF as “a den of crime, revealing disorganization, anarchy, incompetence and dishonesty.”68 In 2012 Teixiera stepped down after a Swiss judge found that he and his former father-in-law had taken forty-one million dollars in bribes from different companies vying for exclusive World Cup marketing rights. Despite the stench that surrounds him, Teixiera has not served any time for his obvious and extensive corruption.

  Neoliberalism is making Brazilian soccer as static as the European game from which it once joyfully emancipated itself. Brazilians rightfully recognize this as a tragedy. If soccer is not Brazilian, then what is Brazil? They fear that Brazil does not have the time or space to answer these questions with the World Cup and Olympics breathing down its collective neck. They fear that, like the tree in Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which gave everything it had until it was just a stump to be sat upon, Brazil has given all it has to give and is now compelled to offer up its culture to the world to sit upon. What is most personal becomes the last commodity to offer up to the European powers that are coming to call.

  Chapter 5

  Killing Santa

  Warped mentalities and cracked personalities seem to be everywhere and impossible to eliminate.

  —Avery Brundage1

  I lived in Chile as a student in 1995, just after the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. That was where I first heard the term “shock treatment” as meaning something other than a drastic method of therapy. In Chile, “shock treatment” was what Pinochet and the Chicago School–trained economists under his command did to Chile’s economy after they slaughtered, tortured, and exiled the thousands who could have stood in their way. As Chile’s citizens saw political murals painted over, schools closed down, their neighbors disappeared, their soccer stadiums turned into internment camps, and their rivers literally red with blood, the “shock treatment” began. Workplace protections were gutted, tariffs removed, and the economy privatized within an inch of its life. More than a few veterans of the struggle against the dictatorship expressed gallows humor that they did not know what was worse: the shock treatment to the economy or the shock treatment they personally received at the hands of Pinochet’s sadistic torture guards. This idea of catastrophe, in this case a military coup leading t
o economic shock reform, inspired Naomi Klein to write The Shock Doctrine. In this modern classic of political journalism, the Canadian journalist writes about the ways those in power across the globe exploit horrifying political crises and natural disasters. She explores how tragedies become opportunities for people in power to enact brutal neoliberal reforms and massive redevelopment projects, ones they could never get away with if their populations weren’t in a fever shock of trauma and mourning. But what to do if you are a leader who wants to enact “shock reforms” but don’t have the patience to wait for the next tsunami? Enter the games.

  Global mega-events like the World Cup and Olympics have become incredibly effective tools for reorganizing an economy on neoliberal grounds. It is not that these events are not profitable. It is a question of who sees the money and who pays the price. (As 1968 Olympian John Carlos often says, “Do you know why they only have the Olympics every four years? It takes them four years to count the money.”) But a high-octane money grab, festooned with flags and streamers, is just the tip of the iceberg. To understand what these events do to a country, we need to look at their history. In this chapter we’ll examine the age-old underbelly of athletic mega-events and how they have been staged in decades past in order to understand what they have become.

  For most of their respective histories, nationalism aside, the World Cup and Olympics—not to mention their ruling bodies, FIFA and the IOC—were profoundly different kinds of operations. The World Cup, a global soccer tournament, was launched a quarter of a century after FIFA began, as a method to codify the global rules of the game. It needed soccer fields, a modicum of security to crack the heads of the stray hooligans here and there, and—oh yes—a ball. The Olympics, even in its early decades, was always a much more pungent kettle of fish. Mass evictions, police repression, and economic boondoggles with no use beyond the Games themselves have always been a part of the Olympic operation. Since 9/11, however, both of these tournaments have started to seem like conjoined twins. Together they now resemble what soccer writer Simon Kuper called “the sort of common project that otherwise barely exists in modern societies.”2 Both demand of would-be host nations the latest in high-tech security and surveillance, infrastructure, and new stadiums. Both now also require people—and this privilege is reserved almost exclusively for the poor—to be forcibly moved from their homes to make way for it all. As FIFA president Sepp Blatter said during Brazil’s nationwide protests in 2013, “Brazil asked to host the World Cup. We did not impose the World Cup on Brazil. They knew that to host a good World Cup they would naturally have to build stadiums. But we said that it was not just for the World Cup. . . . There are other constructions: highways, hotels, airports . . . items that are for the future. Not just for the World Cup.”3 Indeed. The official FIFA slogan should be “I was evicted for the World Cup and all I got was this lousy airport.”

  As former professional soccer player–turned–mega-event critic Jules Boykoff has written, both of these global mega-events fall under the heading of what could best be called “celebration capitalism.” As Boykoff writes,

  Celebration capitalism is disaster capitalism’s affable cousin. Both occur in states of exception that allow plucky politicos and their corporate pals to push policies they couldn’t dream of during normal times. But while disaster capitalism eviscerates the state, celebration capitalism manipulates state actors as partners, pushing economics rooted in so-called public-private partnerships. All too often these partnerships are lopsided: the public pays and the private profits. In a bait and switch that’s swaddled in bonhomie, the public takes the risks and private groups scoop up the rewards.4

  Celebration capitalism also provides a “once-in-a-generation opportunity [for police and military forces] to multiply and militarize their weapons stocks, laminating another layer on to the surveillance state. The Games justify a security architecture to prevent terrorism, but that architecture can double to suppress or intimidate acts of political dissent.”5 This has certainly been my experience covering these mega-events over the last ten years, as chapter 6 will show in detail. What is important, however, is seeing the massive security operations, graft, and evictions not as add-ons to a healthy celebration of national pride but as tightly intertwined with one another, part of the same sporting shock doctrine. Countries don’t want these mega-events in spite of the threats to public welfare, addled construction projects, and repression they bring, but because of them.

  This can be seen most clearly by examining the history of the Olympic Games. Nationalism plus sports metastasized quickly into Barnum-esque spectacle—and host nations became the devil’s workshop.

  In the Beginning

  In 1896, when the modern Olympic Games began, the world was undergoing cataclysmic, unprecedented changes. Imperial rivals like France, Britain, and the emerging United States were in the process of slicing and dicing the globe, from Cuba to the Congo to the Philippines. One of their most important tools in justifying this project was nationalism. As Indiana senator Albert Beveridge said in 1897, “American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.”6 In the period before World War I, it was fashionable among the upper echelons of Western society to believe that a globe constituted of hyperpatriotic, battle-ready societies was actually the secret to ending wars between nations. (Turns out this view was not entirely accurate.) When French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin launched the first International Olympic Committee at the end of the nineteenth century, he and his cohort were at the heart of these conversations among the world’s elite. The initial members of the IOC were five European nobles, two generals, and nine of Europe’s leading industrialists. Between 1894 and the turn of the century Coubertin added ten more barons, princes, and counts. The Games allowed these leaders to use sports as an amphetamine to spur fevered nationalist frenzies and, according to Courbertin (a master rhetorician), the promotion of sports was “an indirect preparation for war. In sports all the same qualities flourish which serve for warfare: indifference towards one’s well being, courage, readiness for the unforeseen. . . . The young sportsman is certainly better prepared for war than his untrained brothers.”7

  Critical to Coubertin’s Olympic ideal was his belief in amateurism —no professional athletes allowed, only those playing for love. This was seen as a nod to Greek antiquity, which is so central to the Olympic ethos. The only problem with this is that all available evidence indicates that ancient Greek athletes were rewarded quite substantially for their efforts, according to Patrick Hruby, who has written extensively on the topic. I spoke with him and asked him to elaborate:

  Modern Olympic amateurism was a fraud, rooted in a willful misreading of ancient Olympic history. The sports-loving Greeks of classical antiquity would have scoffed at the snooty, classist Victorian Era notion that athletes shouldn’t be compensated for their hard work and on-field achievements—after all, ancient Olympic winners received prize money, prime amphitheater seats, generous pensions and other goodies; according to historians, one Games winner even parlayed his victory into an Athenian senatorial seat. Indeed, the ancient Greeks didn’t even have a word for “amateur.” The closest term? Idiotes. Which really needs no translation.

  This “amateurism” was actually a concept that arose at the end of the nineteenth century to make sports the province only of those wealthy enough to not worry about being paid: “Specifically, snooty British elites who enjoyed rowing, winning, and keeping the unwashed, day-laboring masses at arm’s length.”

  When US colleges copied this notion of amateur sports (which still underpins university athletics today), their motivations had less to do with high-minded ideas about education and the creation of gentleman-athletes than about enforcing a social caste system: “Both in America and in England a gentleman might hire an ex-prizefighter, a golf trainer or a tennis teacher to coach his son and
might even brush up his own game in a round with the professional,” said Hruby. “But when it was over, the pro left by the service entrance and the gentleman went in to tea.” Keeping the great unwashed from competing was in step with the IOC’s origins among the sorts of reactionary aristocrats and international nobility. After the 1922 rise of fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, when the ruling followers of fashion found fascism, the IOC became a place where even the more extreme forces of the far right could feel at home. It became the kind of place where a man like Avery Brundage could thrive.

  Nazism, the Olympics, and the Birth of Hypernationalism

  The dominant Olympic figure of the twentieth century was not Jesse Owens, Nadia Coma˘neci, or Mark Spitz. It was Avery Brundage. As IOC president, Brundage never failed to use his politics to sculpt who and what the Olympics would glorify. Born, raised, and educated in material comfort in Illinois, the man who came to be called “Slavery Avery” was an athlete who competed in the pentathlon and decathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. He lost both events to the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe. Thorpe was later stripped of his gold medals when it was discovered that he had earned fifty dollars playing semiprofessional baseball before competing, making him insufficiently amateur. Brundage was a ferocious defender of the “amateur ideal” and held throughout his career held the line that Thorpe had violated that sacred tenet. Speaking on the benefits of amateurism, he once said that “when colleges pay boys for playing football, they destroy many illusions; the spirit of loyalty, the satisfaction that comes from successful play, the fun of it, the amateur spirit. It is like killing Santa Claus.”8 Yet Avery Brundage was so feared and so isolated, it is easy to imagine him saying this and actually believing in Santa Claus, with his coterie of hangers-on and lickspittles fearful to correct him.