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

by Zirin, Dave

  The directors of FIFA were inspired to start a World Cup by the 1924 Olympic finals, which drew sixty thousand spectators for the final between Uruguay and Switzerland. The idea was received enthusiastically in South America and most of Europe. (Interestingly, the English, thinking the tournament beneath them, did not vie for the Cup until 1950.)32 Soccer has a contradictory political history, as we have seen: one that has both aided dictators and provided support and organization for movements against dictatorship. The history of FIFA, founded in 1930, is less complicated than that of the sport it purports to celebrate. It has time and again sided decisively with authoritarian rule.

  This longstanding attraction to authoritarian environments has had a decisive effect on the beloved World Cup from its first tournament. In 1934, the fascist dictator Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini made sure the referees knew that the tournament was Italy’s—and Italy’s alone—to win. In a 2013 presentation at an academic conference partially sponsored by FIFA, Italian researcher Marco Impiglia showed that Italy’s 1934 World Cup victory and Argentina’s 1978 title were both altered, if not outright fixed, by the bloody dictators in power in the two countries. Impiglia presented research showing that a series of decisions by referees either connected to or fearful of Mussolini was decisive in the outcome.33 “It’s the same old story: Sport and politics are brothers and sometimes sport is under the other brother,” he told the Associated Press.34 Mussolini actually did not like soccer—he thought it was “unmanly”—but he saw its potential power as a pump for political propaganda. Il Duce eventually came to view the tournament as a way to create the “myth of a new Italy,” a use Impiglia describes as “political abuse”: “It was a questionable win and it raised many doubts at the time.”35 Inside Italy, such doubts were whispered in furtive tones. Il Popolo d’Italia—Mussolini’s government newspaper—described only the “vision of harmony, discipline, order, and courage” displayed by the national team. In 1938, Italy won again. Before the final, the team received a three-word telegram from Il Duce. It read: “Win or die.” They did win, then marched in military uniforms at a procession presided over by Mussolini.36

  Forty-four years later, the situation was similar. The host country was Argentina, led by its dictator, General Jorge Videla. Before the tournament began, Videla pinned a medal on the chest of a beaming Havelange. Standing next door to a structure the dictator had used as his torture and death chamber, Havelange said, “At last the world can see the true face of Argentina.”37 But Videla wanted more. He wanted Argentina to raise the cup. As the tournament progressed, his dreams appeared to have been dashed. Argentina needed to defeat Peru by at least four goals in the semifinals. They won 6 to 0 in a widely recognized farce, described at the conference as “notorious.” After the match, Videla embraced the team and used star player Mario Kempes in much the same way Brazil’s General Medici had used Pelé on campaign posters in 1970.38

  In 2012, former Peruvian senator Genaro Ledesma confirmed that this triumph was a sham. The Peru result had indeed been brokered by the dictatorships of the two countries. Ledesma, now eighty-two, was an opposition leader in 1978. He testified under oath in a Peruvian court that Videla said he would not follow through on a deal with the Peruvian government to imprison and torture its political prisoners illegally unless Peru agreed to lose the semifinals by enough goals to ensure that Argentina would make the finals. “Videla needed to win the World Cup to cleanse Argentina’s bad image around the world,” testified Ledesma. “So he only accepted the group if Peru allowed the Argentine national team to triumph.”39 Latin American historian Ranaan Rein confirms that “there is in fact no question about it. It not only stains the military regime but it also stains the national team, and they had a great national team. In many ways, they deserved to win the World Cup.”40 After the 1978 World Cup ended, one of the military strongmen who made it possible, Admiral Carlos Lacoste, was named vice president of FIFA.

  As shocking as these revelations are, even more gobsmacking was FIFA’s reaction. At the conference itself, this bombshell garnered only a shrug from FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke, who acknowledged that “working with democratically elected governments can complicate organizing tournaments that require billions of dollars of investment in stadiums, airports, roads and hotels.”41 FIFA went on to prove that this mindset was not a relic of history with its decision to host the coming 2018 Cup in Putin’s Russia, where the 2014 Sochi Olympics were created on a foundation of cronyism, corruption, and waste, and in 2022 in Qatar, an absolute monarchy already facing international outrage for using slave labor in building its World Cup stadiums. It’s the FIFA way.

  Here is the Michael Jackson statue, found in Favela Santa Marta in the heart of Rio. Jackson filmed the video for his protest song “They Don’t Care about Us” partially in the favela.

  Protest graffiti against the coming World Cup. I thought that the World Cup would be greeted with open arms and the Olympics would become the focal point of protest. Murals like this were an early indication that I was wrong.

  Here is a huge billboard showcasing for passers-by what Olympic construction will look like when completed. The favelas are wiped out of the photos.

  A sign in Vila Autódromo, a favela leading one of the most public Olympic fights. The slogan, translated, is “A Rio without forced removals.”

  This is Ana, resident of Autodromo, telling us that even without legs, she will fight to stay.

  This is a mural with the Portuguese word for “freedom” replacing the familiar slogan of “Order and Progress.”

  This is Armando, explaining with passion and grace why he refuses to leave his home in Vila Autódromo.

  Former professional soccer player, author, and activist Christopher Gaffney, showing how he feels about wholesale renovation of the sacred soccer space that is Maracanã Stadium.

  Carlos Tukano in the now-demolished Indigenous Cultural Center. The Maracanã is in the background.

  As we arrived in Brazil, a national university strike had just ended in defeat. The Workers’ Party won. The workers lost. This is a banner that no one took down.

  Another billboard heralding what Providência will look like without the favela that bears its name. The massive sign is like a threat hanging over the entire community.

  This is Glorinha. She recently heard that the government would be evicting her. “Like it or not, I have to go. I’ve been displaced. I have no place,” she says. “My dream is not to leave here, for sure. But orders are orders. They gave us orders to leave. . . . I don’t want to fight, I just want to be somewhere safe.”

  A view of how steep the favelas can be. Many of the homes are built at creative angles to match the hills.

  Mauricio Hora, award-winning photographer and son of one of Providência’s first drug traffickers. His perspective was invaluable.

  More political wall art. The pig is a rather universal symbol.

  At the Museum of the Slaves, built on top of a mass burial ground, you can see the bones through the glass in the floor.

  Me inside the Maracanã, walking among the construction and destruction. It was enraging to see this temple of soccer history get its guts torn out.

  Protesters gather in the streets of Divinópolis in June 2013. Photo by Fernando H. C. Oliveira.

  Chapter 6

  Neoliberal Trojan Horses and Sporting Shock Doctrines

  Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others—the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

  —Eduardo Galeano1

  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When you are the IOC and FIFA, every country, no matter how unique, is subject to the same sets of expectations. These organizations have proven, particularly in recent years, their relentless intention to hammer any peg, no matter how square, into the round holes t
hey require—which means infrastructure, displacement, security, corporate branding on anything that stands still, and of course billions upon billions of dollars in state spending. This is particularly the case in the post–9/11 period where terrorism fears—both real and imagined—have provided a pretext for security details that resemble occupying armies. Any look at sporting mega-events over the previous ten years confirms this. It is difficult to imagine countries more different than Greece, Canada, South Africa, Russia, China, and the United Kingdom. Yet the demands—and the dangers—are eerily similar.

  Greece 20042

  The 2004 Athens Olympics were supposed to recall the antiquity and grandeur of the original, ancient Olympic Games. Instead they were a harsh reflection of the violent new realities we have reaped in the twenty-first century. These Games were the first held after the attacks of 9/11; under orders from the IOC, the Greek authorities were more than prepared. Greece’s politicians overrode their own constitution by allowing fifty thousand Israeli, British, and US Special Forces troops to patrol the streets, their job to monitor not only external but also internal threats. Anger had been running particularly hot in Greece, for reasons that never made it onto the sports broadcasts. Amnesty International estimated that forty construction workers died in workplace accidents while building Olympic facilities.3 The new center-right government of Kostas Karamanlis, terrified of international embarrassment for its less-than-modern infrastructure, turned the screws to finish the facilities on time by any means necessary.4

  In the last push of round-the-clock preparation alone, thirteen laborers were killed making Athens, in the words of one Olympic official, “habitable for a global audience.”5 As Andreas Zazopoulos, head of the Greek Construction Workers’ Union, said, “We have paid for the Olympic Games in blood.”6 Five hundred people, amid an atmosphere of tremendous repression, rallied on behalf of the dead and placed olive wreaths on thirteen crosses planted in the earth outside Greece’s parliament. City authorities also spent the final days before the Games “rounding up homeless people, drug addicts, and the mentally ill requiring that psychiatric hospitals lock them up. Also affected by Athens Olympic clean-up [were] refugees and asylum seekers, some of whom [were] targeted for detention and deportation in the days leading up to the Games.”7 Inmates of six prisons protested against the government’s decision, justified in the name of security, to stop authorizing parole while the Olympics were in town. A Greek organization with the name Revolutionary Struggle also began setting bombs in uninhabited buildings. After blowing up an empty police station, the group released the following statement: “With regard to the Olympic Games, we say that Greece’s transformation into a fortress, NATO’s involvement, the presence and activities of foreign intelligence units show clearly that [the Olympics] are not a festival like Games organizers say, but it’s a war.”8

  The true crisis of the Olympic Games in Greece was in the costs. For six years, Greece had been mired in an epic debt crisis, one that is still ongoing today. Amid the stories of general strikes, growing fascist movements, and the evisceration of working-class living standards, what gets discussed far less is the role that the Olympics played in aggravating that crisis. When Athens “won” the Games in 1997, city leaders and the IOC estimated the cost to Greece at $1.3 billion. By the time the detailed planning was done, the price had jumped to $5.3 billion. By the time the Games were over, Greece had spent some $14.2 billion, pushing the country’s budget deficit to record levels. Then IOC chairman Jacques Rogge said, “At Athens the legacy will be a new airport, new metro, new suburban train—this is a legacy the Greeks will be proud of.”9 The actual lasting legacy can be seen where some of city’s homeless find shelter: they squat in dilapidated, unusable Olympic structures.10

  Beijing 200811

  Not since Marco Polo has anyone traveled so far up China’s Silk Road with such amoral élan. But there was Jacques Rogge, not only president of the IOC but also, incidentally, a knight of the court of King Leopold’s Belgium and a three-time Olympian in the grand sport of yachting, standing astride Beijing at the close of the 2008 Olympic Games. In front of a stunning ninety thousand people at the closing ceremony, he said, “Tonight, we come to the end of sixteen glorious days which we will cherish forever. Through these Games, the world learned more about China, and China learned more about the world.”12

  But what did the world really learn? From the ratings-rich coverage alone, not all that much. We learned that China is remarkably beautiful, Michael Phelps can really swim, and Usain Bolt is truly quite fast. Oh, and there are cute pandas. We can’t forget about the pandas. The amount of China that remained hidden from view was not lost on some members of the media. Veteran Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell wrote from Beijing, “In all my decades at the Post, this is the first event I’ve covered at which I was certain that the main point of the exercise was to co-opt the Western media, including NBC, with a splendidly pretty, sparsely attended, completely controlled sports event inside a quasi-military compound. We had little alternative but to be a conduit for happy-Olympics, progressive-China propaganda. I suspect it worked.”13

  We should applaud Boswell for his honesty, but it is hard not to feel contempt for the aside that journalists “had little alternative” but to dance the infomercial shuffle. Boswell and the press made a choice the moment they stepped on China’s soil. They chose not to seek out any of the almost two million people evicted from their homes to make way for Olympic facilities. They chose not to report on the Chinese citizens who tried to register to enter the cordoned-off “protest zones” only to find themselves in police custody. They chose not to report on the foreign nationals held in Chinese prisons for daring to protest. (According to the Associated Press, the US Embassy pleaded with China to free protestors, gently suggesting that China could stand to show “greater tolerance and openness.”) They chose not to report on the Tibetan citizens removed from their service jobs by state law for the duration of the Games. They chose not to ask what forty-two billion dollars, the price tag of the Games, could have meant to earthquake-ravaged Sichuan.

  They chose to not point out the bizarre hypocrisy of seeing Michael Phelps—with full media fanfare—taking a group of Chinese children to their first meal at McDonald’s (an Olympic sponsor). (Even though Phelps famously eats twelve thousand calories a day during training, I can’t imagine much of it comes from Mickey D’s.) They chose not to ask why George W. Bush was the first US president to attend the Olympics on foreign soil or why the State Department, in April 2013, took China off its list of nations that commit human rights violations. They chose not to ask whether it was a conflict of interest for General Electric, which owned NBC at the time, to be one of the primary sponsors of the Games as well as the supplier of much of their high-tech security apparatus, including three hundred thousand closed-circuit cameras. All indications are that these cameras remained in place once the world turned its attention elsewhere.14

  They chose not to ask (and keep asking) why the Games were held in Beijing in the first place, considering that Rogge and Beijing organizing committee head Liu Qi both promised that the Olympics would come alongside significant improvements in human rights.15 As Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch said:

  The reality is that the Chinese government’s hosting of the Games has been a catalyst for abuses, leading to massive forced evictions, a surge in the arrest, detention and harassment of critics, repeated violations of media freedom, and increased political repression. Not a single world leader who attended the Games or members of the IOC seized the opportunity to challenge the Chinese government’s behavior in any meaningful way.16

  The legacy of the Beijing Games is China’s dominance in winning more gold medals than the United States, the aquatic dominance of Michael Phelps, and the blistering triumph of Usain Bolt. But we should also remember the ravaging of a country sacrificed at the altar of commercialism and “market penetration.” And we should recall a mainstream pres
s, derelict in its duty, telling us they had “little alternative” but to turn this shandeh into a globalization infomercial.

  Liu Qi called the Olympics “a grand celebration of sport, of peace and friendship.” Not quite. Instead it was a powerful demonstration of the way the elephants of the East and West can link trunks and happily trample the grass.

  Vancouver 201017