Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)
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The Nobodies
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the
no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life,
screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police
blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
—Eduardo Galeano23
If you have made it this far, you may have noticed that I’ve started almost every chapter of this book with a quote by the great author Eduardo Galeano. If you have never had the privilege, please read Galeano’s book Soccer in Sun and Shadow. It captures what I believe will be the most difficult part of seeing the destruction of Brazil over the next several years: the fact that many of us who are horrified at every eviction, every instance of police brutality, every community destroyed, will also be swept up in the energy, color, nationalism, and yes, joy of the World Cup and the Olympics. Soccer in Sun and Shadow attempts to square the beauty, adrenaline, and—heaven forbid—fun of sports with the ways it can be used to crush the very human spirit it purports to promote.
If we love Brazil, if we love its culture, play, dance, and energy, then we have to reckon with the fact that everything we love about it was created by the very “nobodies” who, in the eyes of FIFA and the IOC, “are not worth the bullet that kills them.” If we love soccer and all sports—the creative mayhem amid structure, the improvisation amid order, the ability of players to discover new boundaries and a higher sense of confidence within themselves—then we also have to love every nobody we’ve ever played pickup ball with, every nobody who created the beauty of the “beautiful game,” whatever we may feel that beautiful game to be. We also have to realize that the death of public space, the death of leisure time, the death of security, and the fostering of fear means the death of sports as well.
If we get swept up in the World Cup but forget the nobodies who are swept away, then we should not be surprised when FIFA or the IOC comes calling again in our own towns and we find ourselves branded nobodies. Galeano once said that he does not believe in charity—he believes in solidarity, because solidarity is horizontal and carries within it the understanding that we can learn from others. I would argue that it also implies that our collective destiny is tied up with every eviction, every surveillance camera, and every cracked skull on the road to the World Cup and Olympics. It is their World Cup. But it is our world.
Notes
Introduction
1. Adrian Grant, Michael Jackson: Making History (London: Omnibus Press, 1998). When this song is remembered, it’s usually for its unfortunate use of anti-Semitic phrases like “Jew me” and “kike me” in the lyrics (which Jackson later changed and apologized for). Bigotry aside, that “They Don’t Care about Us” has been forgotten is a damn shame.
2. Diana Jean Schemo, “Rio Frets as Michael Jackson Plans to Film Slum,” New York Times, February 11, 1996, www.nytimes.com/1996/02/11 /world/rio-frets-as-michael-jackson-plans-to-film-slum.html.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Larry Rohter, Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
6. Amnesty International, “Focus on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and Police Violence in Brazil,” August 5, 2013, www.amnestyusa.org/news/news-item /focus-on-indigenous-peoples-rights-and-police-violence-in-brazil.
7. Wright Thompson, “Generation June,” ESPN: The Magazine, December 5, 2013.
Chapter 1
1. Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pilage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 248.
2. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 7.
3. Economist, “Brazil Takes Off,” November 12, 2009, www.economist.com /node/14845197.
4. Ibid.
5. Silvia Salek, “Brazil: No Longer ‘Country of the Future,’” BBC News, March 6, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17270649.
6. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 223.
7. Economist, “Has Brazil Blown It?” September 28, 2013, www.economist .com/news/leaders/21586833-stagnant-economy-bloated-state-and-mass -protests-mean-dilma-rousseff-must-change-course-has.
8. Gerard Aziakou, “Two Dead in Brazil World Cup Stadium Accident,” Agence France-Presse, November 27, 2013, www.google.com/hostednews /afp/article/ALeqM5iu9pX6v9R3al0ALLHV8UlBVk6bzw?docId=5f7d23ce -5cf7-49c9-81b0-8158c56a85f1.
9. Jonathan Watts, “Two Killed as Crane Collapses at Brazilian World Cup Stadium,” Guardian, November 27, 2013, www.theguardian.com/football /2013/nov/27/crane-collapse-corinthians-brazil-three-killed.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Sam Borden, “Romário, a World Cup Champion, Is Now a World Cup Dissenter,” New York Times, October 15, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/10 /16/sports/soccer/romario-a-world-cup-champion-is-now-a-world-cup -dissenter.html?_r=0.
13. Reuters, “Construction Accident at Brazil World Cup Stadium Kills Two,” November 27, 2013, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/11/27/uk-soccer -brazil-stadium-idUKBRE9AQ0UT20131127.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. ESPN.com, “2014 World Cup Guide: Curitiba,” December 2, 2013, http://espnfc.com/news/story/_/id/1584760/venue-guide-arena-da- baixada-curitiba-2014-world-cup-stadium-brazil?cc=5901.
17. Associated Press, “Labor Slaves, Prisoners Helping WC Prep,” February 22, 2012, http://espn.go.com/sports/soccer/story/_/id/7600446/brazil -using-prisoners-labor-slaves-prep-2014-world-cup-venues.
18. Rob Walker, “Brazil World Cup Host City Natal Seethes at Cost,” Guardian, November 28, 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28 /brazil-world-cup-natal-cost.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. David Biller, Christiana Sciaudone, and Taís Fuoco, “Singapore Changi, Odebrecht to Buy Rio Airport for $8.3 Billion,” Bloomberg News, November 23, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-22/singapore-munich -operators-to-pay-9-1-bln-for-brazil-airports.html.
23. Walker, “Brazil World Cup Host City Natal Seethes.”
24. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 225.
25. Borden, “Romário, a World Cup Champion.”
26. Guilherme Cruz, “Brazil Running Out of Time to Get Things Done for World Cup 2014,” SB Nation, December 4, 2013, www.sbnation.com /soccer/2013/12/4/5174850/world-cup-2014-brazil-stadiums.
27. Bryan McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Durham, NC: Duke Press, 2014), 2.
28. Renato Cosentino, “Largo do Tanque: One More Summary Removal for the Rio Olympics,” Rio on Watch, February 26, 2013, http://rioonwatch .org/?p=6980.
29. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 40.
30. Michael Kimmelman, “A Divided Rio de Janeiro, Overreaching for the World,” New York Times, November 25, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013 /11/26/world/americas/a-divided-rio-de-janeiro-overreaching-for-the -world.html.
31. For the sake of clarity, figures are given in US dollars.
32. Simon Romero and Taylor Barnes, “Police Storm Squatters at Rio Stadium Site,” New York Times, March 22, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013 /03/23/world/americas/brazilian-police-storm-indigenous-squatters-at -maracana.html.
33. World Wildlife Fund, “Amazon,” 2014, http://worldwildlife.org/places /amazon.
34. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 221.
35. Rainforest Foundation, “25 Years: In Honor of Chico Mendes,” December 20, 2013, www.rainforestfoundation.org/article/25-years-honor-chico-men
des.
36. Sam Borden, “Building a World Cup Stadium in the Amazon,” New York Times, September 24, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/09/25/sports/soccer /in-building-world-cup-stadium-in-amazon-rain-is-just-one-challenge.html.
37. See Dave Zirin, “Soccer on Chile’s Killing Field,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 2006, www.latimes.com/news/la-oe-zirin12dec12,0,4806850 .story#axzz2qrw776fX.
38. Anna Jean Kaiser, “Can Brazil Deliver on Safety for World Cup, Olympics?” USA Today, July 24, 2013, www.usatoday.com/story/sports/soccer/2013 /07/24/brazil-sports-security/2584905/.
39. Owen Gibson and Jonathan Watts, “Brazil Plans ‘World Cup Courts,’” Guardian, December 4, 2013, www.theguardian.com/football/2013/dec /04/brazil-world-cup-courts.
40. Travis Waldron, “As Attention Turns to World Cup, Brazil Ramps Up Security to Prepare for More Protests,” Think Progress, December 4, 2013, http://thinkprogress.org/sports/2013/12/04/3020751/attention-turns -world-cup-brazil-ramps-security-prepare-protests.
41. A video of the massacre is online at OVGuide, “Watch Complexo Do Alemão Massacre Video,” undated post, www.ovguide.com/complexo-do -alemao-massacre-9202a8c04000641f8000000006bbbbdf.
42. PBS, “Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” Black in Latin America website, 2011, www.pbs.org/wnet/black-in-latin-america/featured/qa -with-professor-henry-louis-gates-jr/164/.
Chapter 2
1. Quoted in Saleem Badat, The Forgotten People: Political Banishment under Apartheid (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013), xxvi.
2. E. Bradford Burns, A History of Brazil, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1.
3. Ibid., 1.
4. Hans Staden, Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil, ed. Neil L. Whitehead, trans. Michael Harbsmeier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
5. James Minahan, Ethnic Groups of the Americas: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2013), 49.
6. Thomas E. Skidmore, Brazil: Five Centuries of Change, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15.
7. James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 16.
8. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 47.
9. Kátia M. de Queirós Mattoso, Arthur Goldhammer, and Stuart Schwartz, To Be a Slave in Brazil: 1550–1888 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987).
10. Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 369.
11. Atlanta Black Star, “Afro-Brazilian Story II: Slavery, Identity and the Question of Racism,” November 18, 2013, http://atlantablackstar.com /2013/11/18/afro-brazilian-story-ii-slavery-identity-question-racism.
12. Mattoso, Goldhammer, and Schwartz, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 10.
13. Skidmore, Brazil, 26.
14. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 57.
15. PBS, “Q&A with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.”
16. Henry Louis Gates, Black in Latin America (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 43.
17. Mattoso, Goldhammer, and Schwartz, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 41.
18. Gloria Kaiser, “January 9, 1822: Fico—I Am Staying,” The World of the Habsburgs, 2011, www.habsburger.net/en/chapter/january-9-1822-fico-i -am-staying.
19. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 178.
20. Herbert S. Klein and Francisco Vidal, Slavery in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter 5.
21. Skidmore, Brazil, 39.
22. Ibid., 39.
23. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 14.
24. Skidmore, Brazil, 18.
25. Atlanta Black Star, “Afro-Brazilian Story II.”
26. Skidmore, Brazil, 69.
27. Antônio de Castro Alves, “O Navio Negreiro (Slave Ship),” 1880, available with English translation at AllPoetry.com, http://allpoetry.com/poem /8560731-O-Navio-Negreiro-Part-1.—With-English-Translation—wbr —by-Antonio-de-Castro-Alves.
28. Neill Macaulay, Dom Pedro: The Struggle for Liberty in Brazil and Portugal, 1798–1834 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986), 147.
29. Skidmore, Brazil, 68.
30. Ibid., 70.
31. Manu Herbstein, Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, digital ed. (ereads.com, 2000).
32. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 22.
33. Boris Fausto and Arthur Brakel, A Concise History of Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 158.
34. Skidmore, Brazil, 77.
35. Ibid., 86.
36. Ibid., 87.
37. Richard Bourne, Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, 1883–1954: Sphinx of the Pampas (London: C. Knight, 1974), 195.
38. June Edith Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women’s Rights in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), xvi.
39. Louise Sherwood, “Brazilian World War II Workers Fight for Recognition,” BBC News, August 8, 2010, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america -10787714.
40. Skidmore, Brazil, 118.
41. Bourne, Getúlio Vargas of Brazil, 195.
42. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 99.
43. Economist, “A Giant Stirs,” June 10, 2004, www.economist.com/node /2752700.
44. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 216.
45. David Goldblatt, The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 368.
46. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Jânio da Silva Quadros,” accessed February 2, 2014, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/485946/Janio -da-Silva-Quadros.
47. Tanya Ogilvie-White and David Santoro, eds., Nuclear Dragon: Disarmament Dynamics in the Twenty-First Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 152.
48. Peter Kornbluh, ed., “Brazil Marks 40th Anniversary of Military Coup,” National Security Archive, March 31, 2004, www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv /NSAEBB/NSAEBB118.
49. Ibid.
50. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 155.
51. Ibid., 212.
52. Ibid., 212.
53. Ibid., 138.
54. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 48.
55. McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City, 5.
56. Skidmore, Brazil, 160.
57. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 143.
58. McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City, 5.
59. Paul Chevigny, Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas (New York: New Press, 1997), chapter 6.
60. McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City, 5.
61. Palash Ghosh, “Candelaria Church Massacre: Brazil Marks 20th Anniversary of Police Murders of Homeless Street Children,” International Business Times, July 25, 2013, www.ibtimes.com/candelaria-church-massacre -brazil-marks-20th-anniversary-police-murders-homeless-street-children.
62. John Lyons, “As Crime Rattles Brazil, Killings by Police Turn Routine,” Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2013, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles /SB10001424127887323836504578553643435119434.
63. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 142–45.
64. Ibid.
65. Kenneth Maxwell, “The Two Brazils,” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1999, www.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/two-brazils.
66. Index Mundi, “Brazil – Population below Poverty Line,” 2010, www .indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=br&v=69.
67. Kenneth Maxwell, Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues (New York: Routledge, 2003), 254.
Chapter 3
1. Perry Anderson, “Lula’s Brazil,” London Review of Books, March 31, 2011, www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n07/perry-anderson/lulas-brazil.
2. Ibid.
3. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 140.
4. Ibid., 166.
5. Luis Fleischman,“Brazil’s Tilt Towards Chavez and Iran,” Center for Security Policy, October 8, 2009, www.centerforsecuritypolicy.org/2009 /10/08/brazils-tilt-towards-chavez-and-iran-2.
6. Rob
ert Minto, “Lula For World Bank,” Financial Times, February 17, 2012, http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/02/17/guest-post-how-about -lula-for-world-bank.
7. Rohter, Brazil on the Rise, 275.
8. Ibid., 146.
9. Ibid., 153.
10. Al Jazeera English, “Lula Bids a Tearful Goodbye,” December 30, 2010, www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2010/12/2010123054815679161.html.
11. Anderson, “Lula’s Brazil.”
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Tom Lewis, “What Change Will Lula Bring?” International Socialist Review 26 (November 2002), www.isreview.org/issues/26/Lula.shtml.
20. Daniel Bell, quoted in Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 51.
21. Klein, Shock Doctrine, 51.
22. Ibid., 15.
23. Ibid., 17.
24. Sarah LeBlanc Goff, “When Education Ceases to Be Public: The Privatization of the New Orleans School System after Hurricane Katrina,” master’s thesis, University of New Orleans, 2009.
25. Kevin Sullivan, “Brazil Brings Haiti a Joyful Respite,” Washington Post, August 19, 2004.
26. Tom Phillips, “Brazil Announces Troop Pullout of Haiti,” Guardian, September 30, 2011.
27. Mark Doyle, “Haiti Cholera Epidemic ‘Most Likely’ Started at UN Camp—Top Scientist,” BBC News, October 22, 2012, www.bbc .co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20024400; BBC News, “Haiti Protestor Shot Dead by UN Peacekeepers,” November 16, 2010, www.bbc .co.uk/news/world-latin-america-20024400.
28. Taylor Barnes, “Brazil’s Bolsa Família: Welfare Model or Menace?” Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2013.
29. Anderson, “Lula’s Brazil.”
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Andre Soliani and Helder Marinho, “Brazil’s Pre-Salt May Hold 25–100 Billion Barrels,” Bloomberg News, September 29, 2009.