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

by Zirin, Dave

  As the price and FIFA’s demands grew more onerous, many South Africans had second thoughts. Zayn Nabbi, a sports correspondent for South Africa’s E Television, gave me a stadium tour. He said, “We were all so caught up in the love story of winning the World Cup—the romance of it all—we didn’t grasp or we weren’t told the repercussions. We all got caught up in the spin. I put myself in that category certainly. The hangover when this is all done will be brutal, man.” Youth activist Peter drew a similar conclusion: “The World Cup is like a marvelous party, but what happens the next day when we’re hung over and the bill comes due?”

  But the hangover started before the party ended, as these stark contrasts provoked fierce, wholly predictable resistance. In a normal month, South Africa has more protests per capita than any nation on earth. During the World Cup crackdown, the numbers skyrocketed. More than seventy thousand workers took part in strikes connected to World Cup projects, with twenty-six strikes between 2007 and 2010. A woman named Lebo said to me, “We have learned in South Africa that unless we burn tires, unless we fight police, unless we are willing to return violence on violence, we will never be heard.” Patrick Bond of the Center for Civil Society in Durban commented to me that protests should be expected: “Anytime you have three billion people watching, that’s called leverage.”

  The struggles on display put the concept of ubuntu to the ultimate test. Ubuntu is a treasured Bantu term roughly translated as “unity.” But “unity” doesn’t quite do it justice. Nobel Prize–winning Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee defined it as meaning “I am what I am because of who we all are.”29 During South Africa’s decades-long struggle against apartheid, ubuntu meant unity of purpose among the country’s black majority against brutal oppression. It meant asserting humanity in the face of an inhuman system.

  The sacred word resurfaced, unsurprisingly, amid South Africa’s lead-up to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. This time, though, ubuntu was used quite differently in speeches and rallies held by the ruling ANC. It still meant unity, but now its use was cheapened to pep talks. It was also used against people who dared ask uncomfortable questions. As Saleh, a youth activist in Johannesburg, said to me, “If someone stood up at a [council meeting] and said, ‘Why are we spending so much on stadiums? Why are we giving the police so many powers?’ we were told that we were violating the spirit of ubuntu.” Although the ubuntu soured far sooner than anyone could have predicted, the 2010 World Cup was without question a major sporting success for South Africa. The gleaming fields opened on schedule, new airports welcomed scores of visitors, and with cameras ready to catch it, disparate groups of South Africans who usually self-segregate exulted together in public. But now the party’s over. The country was subsequently hit with massive strikes involving 1.3 million public-sector workers, including teachers, civil-service workers, and health workers. The public-sector strike was particularly shocking, for South Africans and international observers alike. When striking workers marched through a police line while sounding the World Cup’s iconic vuvuzela, they were assaulted with rubber bullets.30

  The strikes, as well as the rapid-fire erosion of the World Cup’s ubuntu, speak to a serious political crisis facing South Africa’s scandal-plagued president, Jacob Zuma. They also reveal deep fissures between the ANC government and its base of support. The ANC has benefited greatly from its reputation as the freedom fighters who led South Africa’s struggle against apartheid. But in today’s South Africa, sixteen years after the end of apartheid, 1.9 million people (15 percent of the total population) live in shacks. More than half of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds are unemployed, with unofficial numbers likely much higher. Rates of rape and violent crime keep climbing. Meanwhile, the top twenty paid directors at companies listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange make 1,728 times the average income of a South African worker. And on August 16, 2012, South African security forces killed forty-four people, the majority of whom were striking mineworkers, in what has become known as the Marikana massacre. This was the most deadly act by the South African state since the darkest days of apartheid.

  For a nation forged in a struggle against injustice, this situation is intolerable. The ANC depends on its tripartite alliance with the South African Communist Party and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which is behind the recent strikes. If you’re a part of the new black middle class, one of the “Black Diamonds,” as they’re known, you probably have a positive view of the party. If you live in the townships or are a young member of COSATU and your existence has been defined by economic apartheid, it’s not enough. Indeed, the ANC now finds itself in direct conflict with the very unions that traditionally comprised its spine.

  A resurrection of ubuntu is surely on the agenda in South Africa. But it’s an ubuntu that could leave the ANC out in the cold—that could well take form against the ANC—as South Africa’s youth and workers demand economic justice and strive to reclaim their country.

  There is a scene in Invictus where Morgan Freeman’s Mandela says, alluding to the famous poem, “I thank whatever gods may be for my unconquerable soul. I am the master of my fate.” Indeed, the people of South Africa consider themselves unconquerable, whether they face apartheid, FIFA, or their current government. By insisting on the notion of sports as an apolitical space, we do a great disservice to those facing the realities of “event sports.” When athletic mega-events like the Olympics and World Cup come to town, people face very real police abuses, displacement, and onerous taxation. Media outlets do their best not to discuss these issues so as not to ruin the big party—but if we don’t talk about them, Brazil will continue paying a terrible price.

  In the poem “Invictus,” from which Mandela took so much inspiration, William Ernest Henley writes,

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the Horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.31

  It’s a poem about taking control of our own destinies, no matter the obstacles. Sporting mega-events shape the economic, political, and personal destinies of masses of people, with zero accountability for the trail of displacement, disruption, and destruction they leave behind. Brazilians are already showing themselves to be “unafraid” as they attempt to master their fate. They will remind the world that the party has a price.

  London 201232

  Forty-eight thousand security forces. Thirteen thousand five hundred troops. Surface-to-air missiles stationed on top of residential apartment buildings.33 A sonic weapon that disperses crowds by creating “head-splitting pain.” Unmanned drones peering down from the skies.34 A safe zone cordoned off by an eleven-mile electrified fence, ringed with trained agents and fifty-five teams of attack dogs.35

  One would be forgiven for thinking that these were the counterinsurgency tactics used by US army bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps the military methods taught to third-world despots at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security and Economic Cooperation (formerly the School of the Americas) in Fort Benning, Georgia. But instead of being used in a war zone or theater of occupation, this was in fact the very visible security apparatus created in London for the 2012 Summer Olympics.36

  London already had the most street cameras per capita of any city on earth, and for the seven years since the terror attacks of July 7, 2005, its political leaders have spared no expense to monitor their own citizens. But its Olympic operation went above and beyond anything ever before seen when a Western democracy has hosted the Games. Not even China in 2008 used drone planes or ringed the proceedings with a massive, high-voltage fence. But there was London, preparing a counterinsurgency and parking an aircraft carrier right in the Thames. There was London, adding “scanners, biometric ID cards, number-plate and facial-recognition CCTV systems, disease tracking systems, new police control centres and checkpoints.”37 Stephen Graham at the Guardian referred to the entire state of affairs as “Lockdown London”: “th
e UK’s biggest mobilisation of military and security forces since the second world war.” He is not exaggerating in the slightest. The number of troops exceeded the number of forces the UK ever had on the ground in Afghanistan.38

  What was striking about this wasn’t just the costs or the incredible invasions of privacy. It was the powers given to police under the 2006 “London Olympic Games Act,” which empowered not only the army and police but also private mercenaries to deal with “security issues” using physical force. These “security issues” were broadly defined to include everything from “terrorism” to peaceful protestors to people selling bootleg Olympic products on the streets and any corporate presence that didn’t have the Olympic seal of approval. For help with the last part, “brand protection teams” were set loose around the city. These teams also operated inside Olympic venues to make sure no one would “wear clothes or accessories with commercial messages other than the manufacturers” who are official sponsors.39 The security operation also meant street harassment of young people—that will sound familiar to readers in the United States. As the Guardian reported, police were given “powers to move on anyone considered to be engaged in antisocial behaviour, whether they are hanging around the train station, begging, soliciting, loitering in hoodies or deemed in any way to be causing a nuisance.”40

  Not to shock anyone, but there are no signs that any of the security apparatus has been dismantled since the Olympics were staged. Local police forces were given an inordinate number of new toys and the boxes have been opened, the receipts tossed away. London has been left with a high-tech police force, terrible debt, higher taxes, and a camera around every corner. The total cost to Londoners ran about fifteen billion dollars.41 The ones who left this party enriched were those in the private security industry, which touted “the peace” as its personal accomplishment—encouraging more of the global 1 percent to seek more guards, more walls, and more separation from the great unwashed.

  There is no reason the Olympics have to be this way. There is no reason that an international celebration of sports—particularly sports more diverse than our typical US high-carb diet of football, baseball, basketball, and more football—can’t take place without drones and aircraft carriers. There is no reason athletes from across the globe can’t join together and showcase their physical potential. But the Olympics aren’t about sports any more than the Iraq war was about democracy. The Olympics are not about athletes. And they’re definitely not about bringing together the “community of nations.” They are a neoliberal Trojan horse aimed at bringing in business and rolling back the most basic civil liberties.

  Sochi 201442

  It was Josef Stalin who uttered the demonic (though possibly apocryphal) truism that, when it comes to the human attention span, “One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic.” Stalin’s political descendant, Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin, is now proving that this applies to the world of sports and corruption. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft set the sports press on fire in 2013 when he revealed that, in 2005, Putin stole his Super Bowl ring. This was caught on camera and generated a lot of laughs: the video shows Putin trying it on at a press event and then walking out of the room as a slack-jawed Kraft looked on. The Patriots organization played it off as an intentional gift. But Kraft later revealed that it was a straight theft, with the comically alpha-male Putin icily looking at Kraft and saying, “I can kill someone with this ring.” Then, in Kraft’s words, “I put my hand out and he put it in his pocket, and three KGB guys got around him and walked out.”43

  The intervention of George W. Bush, the man who once said he had “looked into Putin’s soul” and seen a great person, stopped Kraft from pursuing the matter. “I really didn’t [want to]. I had an emotional tie to the ring, it has my name on it,” Kraft said. “I don’t want to see it on eBay. There was a pause on the other end of the line, and the voice repeated, ‘It would really be in the best interest if you meant to give the ring as a present.’”44 It’s a great, punchy story, and I don’t blame sports reporters for flocking to it like a seagull to a dead hermit crab. It also fits with a US foreign policy narrative that makes Putin look only slightly more rational than Bill O’Reilly. But when the story broke, it was galling that this snapshot of Putin’s character got so much attention while a massive thirty-billion-dollar sports-related theft goes undiscussed.

  I’m referring, of course, to the 2014 Winter Olympics, which were held in the subtropical region of Sochi. According to a report issued by Russian opposition leaders in May, businessmen and officials close to President Putin stole up to thirty billion dollars from funds intended for Olympic preparations.45 This pushed the cost of the Winter Games, historically far less expensive than the Summer Games, to more than fifty billion dollars. As Andrew Jennings, the most important Olympic investigative reporter we have, said to me, “Original cost projections had them costing twelve [billion dollars]. That fifty-billion-dollar price tag would make them the most expensive ever”—more expensive even than the 2008 pre-recession spectacle in Beijing. “The Games have always been a money spinner for the cheerleaders in the shadows. Beijing remains impenetrable but is likely to have been little less corrupt than Putin’s Mafia state,” Jennings added. “Mafia state” may sound extreme, but these Winter Games will go down in history as perhaps the most audacious act of embezzlement in human history.

  The costs were not accrued because of security concerns, although there were thirty thousand soldiers on the ground and an unprecedented amount of surveillance. The bill is a result of some of the most brazen cronyism imaginable.46 Industrialists Arkady and Boris Rotenberg have been Vladimir Putin’s friends since childhood. They received twenty-one government contracts worth seven billion dollars—more than the entire cost of the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. Meanwhile, a thirty-one-mile railway from the Olympic Village to the mountains cost a staggering $8.7 billion. Russian Esquire estimated that, for that price, the tracks could “have been paved entirely with a centimeter-thick coating of beluga caviar.”47 As Russian opposition leaders Boris Nemtsov and Leonid Martynyuk wrote,

  Only oligarchs and companies close to Putin got rich. The absence of fair competition [and the presence of] cronyism . . . have led to a sharp increase in the costs and to the poor quality of the work to prepare for the Games. . . . The fact is that almost everything that is related to the cost problems and abuses in preparation for the Olympic Games was carefully concealed and continues to be covered up by the authorities.48

  Even worse was the shoulder-shrugging of the IOC. Jean-Claude Killy, the French Alpine star who now heads the IOC’s coordinating commission for the Sochi Games, sounded fatalistic about the corruption in the Russian city on the Black Sea. “I don’t recall an Olympics without corruption,” Killy said. “It’s not an excuse, obviously, and I’m very sorry about it, but there might be corruption in this country, there was corruption before. I hope we find ways around that.”49

  The IOC also chose to turn a blind eye to a series of laws aimed at criminalizing the LGBTQ community in Russia. Putin and his government have set about criminalizing every aspect of gay life. In 2013, the Russian Duma (parliament) voted 436 to 0 in favor of banning “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations.” This law is so broad that it threatens prison time for anyone who acknowledges the mere existence of LGBTQ people in any public forum: the Internet, a classroom, or even a street corner. Putin also signed a law banning the adoption of Russian children not only by gay couples, but by any single people or unmarried couples who reside in a country where marriage equality is on the books. And he still wasn’t done. He also approved legislation that hands out two-week jail sentences to any tourist suspected of being gay. (Four Dutch tourists were in fact recently arrested for “suspicion of promoting homosexuality to children.”50) Many see this spate of legislation as connected to a string of brutal beatings and several grisly murders.51 The government doesn’t track antigay hate crimes, but in one poll, 15
percent of LGBTQ people in Russia said they had been physically assaulted for their sexual orientation in the past ten months.52 Some lawmakers also threatened “homosexuality-promoting” Olympic athletes with arrest. This led to hasty pronouncements by Putin himself that “the Games will be held in full accordance with the Olympic Charter—without any discrimination for any reason.”53 Putin also banned demonstrations for the sixty-day period leading up to the Games. During the Games themselves, demonstrations could only take place in a pen seven and half miles away from the site. As for the IOC, it said nothing, except that politics should not be a part of the discussion and that athletes would be punished if they so much as painted their fingernails in rainbow hues. The Olympics provided cover and legitimacy for Putin, in a way that actor and LGBTQ activist Harvey Fierstein called a disturbing echo of the 1936 Berlin Games.54

  But the problems run even deeper. In Sochi itself, thousands of families have been forcibly displaced. According to Human Rights Watch, the village of Akhshtyr, which has 49 homes and a population of 102, has been without water for a year because of Olympics-related construction. This isn’t an Olympics—it’s a scene from Goodfellas. It also isn’t something any sports fan with a conscience should support. As for Putin, he can keep the ring.

  Qatar 2022

  FIFA’s construction operation in Qatar, site of the 2022 World Cup, makes Brazil’s look positively benign. Guardian reporter Pete Pattisson, doing the kind of journalism that sometimes seems extinct, has written a series of articles about Qatar’s stadium-building policies, which have already resulted in the deaths of dozens of Nepalese migrant laborers. Unlike other Olympic-sized projects with a body count, the deaths are not primarily a result of workplace accidents, but of heart failure—healthy young men having heart attacks: