Chapter 1

Brazil: “A Country for Everyone”

The City [of Rio] makes the poor even poorer, cruelly confronting them with mirages of wealth to which they will never have access—cars, mansions, machines as powerful as God or the Devil—while denying them secure jobs, decent roofs over their heads, full plates on the midday table.

—Eduardo Galeano1

In September 2012, I walked through one of the most destitute favelas in Rio. For all its poverty, there was also a sense of community one would be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in the wealthier communities of Brazil—or the United States, for that matter. This particular favela was situated on a hill in one of the city’s most upscale areas. The close proximity of these contrasting communities had a dizzying effect when I exited the favela. It was as though I was stepping through a portal from one world into another. Around the corner was a Starbucks with an armed guard out front, so the wealthy of Rio could get their lattes in peace. He had a hundred-yard death stare for anyone who paused to look longingly through the lightly frosted glass. In just yards, I had gone from open doors and hillside soccer games to bullets and baristas.

Walking to the Metrô, I passed yet another of Rio’s seemingly endless construction projects. I have been living in gentrifying cities for most of my life, so massive, dirty, congested landscapes are nothing new. What is different about Brazil is that the construction operations are usually branded with slogans that speak to a kind of “we’re all in this together” national unity. This one had a banner that read, “Brasil: Um Pais de Todos” (a country for everyone). It’s like Orwell for gentrifiers.

This particular mass of rubble was one of the many development projects in motion to get Rio ready for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. It cannot be overstated just how invested Brazil’s elite are in seeing these games come off without a hitch. Hosting mega-events is about projecting a message that reaches far beyond the sports pages. Larry Rohter proclaimed, in his book Brazil on the Rise, that the country “conceives of the two coming events as a sort of giant coming-out celebration announcing Brazil’s arrival as a player, not just in athletic competition but also on the global stage.”2

When Brazil won its bid to host the 2016 Olympics, the country was heralded as a capitalist success story, with the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other organs of the 1 percent engorged over a nation whose stock market, Bovespa, had grown at a rate of 523 percent over the previous decade. My favorite example of this neoliberal ardor was the Economist’s cover article “Brazil Takes Off,” illustrated with an image of Rio’s iconic Christ the Redeemer statue zooming into space like a rocket.3 Brazil, the article informed us, was once a country with “a growth rate as skimpy as its swimsuits, prey to any financial crisis that was around, a place of chronic political instability, whose infinite capacity to squander its obvious potential was as legendary as its talent for football and carnivals,” but which was now “on a roll.”4 For so many in Brazil, this was long overdue. Hosting these sporting events was about international recognition that Brazil’s day had come.

Georges Clémenceau, France’s prime minister during the last years of the First World War, was once famously quoted as saying, “Brazil is a country of the future, and always will be.”5 For Brazil’s wildly popular outgoing president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the fifty thousand cariocas (the nickname for Rio’s denizens) who jammed together and cheered as the decision was announced, the chance to host the Olympics was about putting Clémenceau’s infamous maxim to rest once and for all. Lula, as he is known, was in tears upon learning the news and spoke for many when he said, in a choked voice,

Today I have felt prouder of being a Brazilian than on any other day. Today is the day that Brazil gained its international citizenship. Today is the day that we have overcome the last vestiges of prejudice against us. I think this is the day to celebrate because Brazil has left behind the level of second-class countries and entered the ranks of first-class countries. Today we earned respect. The world has finally recognized that this is Brazil’s time.6

Lula himself had completed an utterly improbable journey: from working-class labor leader during a time of military dictatorship to the heights of political power. He ran for president four times before winning, and some joked his gravestone would someday read, “Here lies Lula, the future president of Brazil.” But Lula made it to the presidency and impressed the IOC enough to win the right to host the Games. With national soccer icon Pelé at his side, Lula had presented Brazil’s case and faced down the ghost of Clémenceau, not to mention some heavy hitters from Chicago: newly minted US president Barack Obama, first lady Michelle Obama, and, even more impressively, Oprah.

Yet those heady days in Copenhagen and among the throngs of Rio now seem like several lifetimes ago. Lula is no longer president; after serving out his terms he was diagnosed with throat cancer (now in remission) and stepped back from the spotlight. Brazil, whose 7.5-percent growth rate—even in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession—had made the Economist swoon, saw its economy sputter in 2012 toward a growth rate of just 0.9 percent.7 Despite the near-absence of economic expansion, spending on stadiums and infrastructure projects intended for the 2016 Olympics in Rio and for the 2014 World Cup in twelve cities across the nation has not skipped a beat. The facts on the ground in Brazil have changed, yet, ravenous and remorseless, the World Cup and Olympic golems continue to feed. Projections for how much they will cost the country keep ticking upward at a taxi-meter pace. It is difficult even to keep up with the parade of stories of dissatisfaction, waste, protest, and tumult that appeared almost daily as this book was going to press. They express what I saw with my own eyes.

Danger: Stampeding White Elephants

When I was in Brazil, I spoke with workers who were deeply concerned about the rush to build twelve new “FIFA-quality” World Cup stadiums. Their concern did not stem only from the fact that this country already has no shortage of well-equipped fields. They were also concerned about the round-the-clock hours, the exhaustion of those operating heavy machinery, and the unsafe working conditions. Then, in November 2013, a crane collapsed into Arena Corinthians (Corinthians Stadium) in São Paulo,8 sending an avalanche of newly cemented concrete to the earth below. This tragedy, which took the lives of two men, Fabio Luiz Pereira and Ronaldo Oliveira dos Santos, could have been far worse. One of their coworkers, José Mario da Silva, said, “I walked right underneath the crane on the way to lunch. If it hadn’t collapsed at lunchtime, a lot more people would have died.”

A reporter who happened to be present as the crane was collapsing snapped pictures with his cell phone. The instinctual response from an engineer for Odebrecht, the powerful Brazilian construction company in charge of rebuilding the stadium, as well as from several stadium security workers, was to assault the reporter and delete the photos from his phone.9 Yet they could not keep the story quiet; in short order it was international news. Sepp Blatter, the reptilian chief of FIFA, said that he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths, and FIFA issued its own statement that the “safety of workers is a top priority.” It is worth noting that Blatter voiced these comments just as FIFA faced international scrutiny about revelations of slave labor and multiple deaths during stadium constructions in Qatar, where the 2022 World Cup will take place.10 Weeks after the accident, we also learned that the crane operator had been working for eighteen straight days, just another cog in Brazil’s 24/7 sprint to complete stadium construction. Brazil’s sports minister, Aldo Rebelo, said nothing after the tragedy about confronting fatigue or labor abuses on work sites. Instead, he assured the media that “the stadiums shall be built on time.” As for the dead, Rebelo sent a tweet expressing “solidarity with the families of the victims.”11

The only true solidarity that the government has shown, however, has been with FIFA—to get the stadiums done, no matter the cost. As Romário, star of the 1994 World Cup, put it:

FIFA got what it came for: money. Things like transportation that affect the public after the tournament is over? They don’t care. They don’t care about what is going to be left behind. . . . You see hospitals with no beds. You see hospitals with people on the floor. You see schools that don’t have lunch for the kids. You see schools with no air-conditioning. . . . You see buildings and schools with no accessibility for people who are handicapped. If you spend 30 percent less on the stadiums, they’d be able to improve the other things that actually matter. . . . They found a way to get rich on the World Cup and they robbed the people instead. This is the real shame.12

What took place at Arena Corinthians was not an isolated incident. In April 2013, a worker was killed doing upgrades at Arena Palmeiras in São Paulo. At Arena do Grêmio in Porto Alegre, eight fans were sent to the emergency room when a guardrail collapsed. In Rio, Arena Engenhão, which will be used for both the World Cup and the Olympics, “had to be closed for repairs six years after it opened due to reports showing winds of 63mph could rip off a roof that is already suffering from corrosion.”13 In Salvador, right by the location of last December’s World Cup draw, where the groupings of the thirty-two participating national teams were announced, the roof of the brand-new Arena Fonte Nova collapsed. What provided the almighty structural pressure that caused it to fall? Rain.14

Judges have tried to halt the opening of stadiums deemed unsafe in several cities. Yet even the judiciary has been unable to slow down the FIFA-ordered sprint to the World Cup. After one judge attempted to stop a “friendly match” between Brazil and England because of unsafe conditions at a new “FIFA-quality” stadium, it went ahead as planned, despite areas “with scaffolding, cables and bolts jutting out from concrete.”15 In Curitiba, a conservative city in the south, a judge stopped the building process at Arena da Baixada because “countless infractions” put workers at risk of “being buried, run over and of collision, falling from heights and being hit by construction material.” The judge was overruled and construction began again.16

The need for compliant, cheap labor has led to even more embarrassing tales making it onto the international wires. There are stories about the use of slave and prison labor to make sure that the stadiums get built on time. In 2012 and 2013, according to the Associated Press, several thousand prisoners across the country were working to help construct several of the twelve new World Cup stadiums.17 The greatest embarrassment of all is that it is the ruling PT, a political party founded out of trade-union struggles and the popular resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship, that has overseen these appalling labor conditions.

Yet even though it is “their party” making these demands, workers have taken no small amount of industrial action and the speedups have led to strikes and walkouts at almost every stadium. I arrived in Brazil not long after a four-month university strike against the government. Frayed banners with strike slogans could still be seen from university windows. As one university employee said to me, “At least half a dozen stadiums have had work stoppages. The Workers’ Party government is now very against syndicalist movements and works actively to take apart unions. Which is an incredible irony. Just an incredible historical irony.”

Priorities

The stories emerging out of Brazil also speak to the irony and the oddity of building stadiums in cities where there are other, far more pressing needs. Multiple media outlets have been reporting from Natal, a city of one million people in the north, where dissatisfaction with the cost and waste of a new stadium has locals up in arms. One customs official told a reporter that the new stadium is “like a spacecraft [that] has crash-landed in the middle of our town.”18 Natal is yet another place where a perfectly good playing field was bulldozed to build a new one that would be up to “FIFA standards.” Jan-Marten Hoitsma, a project manager brought in to make sure Natal’s stadium gets finished on time and under budget, explained, “There are no big football teams here—the biggest team gets gates of around 5,000 and we’re building a 42,000-seater World Cup stadium.”19 In a city with immediate health care and education imperatives, where the absence of hospital beds, overcrowded classrooms, and high rates of illiteracy are a fact of life, the effort and attention devoted to the new stadium strike many residents as obscene. Graffiti around Natal, which urgently needs forty thousand housing units, reads, “We want ‘FIFA standard’ hospitals and schools.” Outside the stadium’s entrance someone has scrawled, “We want ‘FIFA standard’ work.”20

These are the continuing echoes from the summer of 2013, when thirty thousand people took to Natal’s streets—one link in a national chain of protest that brought millions into the streets. Regional economic secretary Rogerio Marinho said, “When the World Cup came to Natal, we felt as if we’d won a huge prize. The federal government had a specific plan for every city. We were going to get better streets, better public transport, all sorts of benefits. Most of those projects will not be ready in time.”21 Since the economic promises will not be met, Hoitsma has tried a different route: attempting to enlist the poor youth of Natal to train as “World Cup stewards” in order to “win over the community.” One thing the government is not doing to “win over the community” is paying the 1,900 construction workers a living wage. Most are working for the minimum wage and have undertaken wildcat strike action in protest.22

Then there are the airports. Brazil’s government sold two of the country’s main airports to private consortiums in November 2013 to bring down its World Cup and Olympic budget deficits. At a cost of nine billion dollars, they will now be owned by a Singaporean company called Changi and, of course, Odebrecht—the same Odebrecht whose staff members assaulted a reporter for daring to record the collapse at Arena Corinthians.23 As one environmentalist said to me, “If you think about the twelve World Cup cities and how they’re going to be stitched together, there’s no rail project whatsoever. Because there is no Brazilian rail system and no passenger trains, it is all going to be done with the airlines . . . so that the highest percentage of investment in transportation is air, and only the wealthy can really afford it.”

Protests are also now a regular feature as FIFA officials visit the country in the lead-up to the World Cup. Not even being accompanied by Brazilian soccer stars Ronaldo and Bebeto could shield FIFA secretary general Jérôme Valcke and other officials from being picketed when they arrived at the Arena Pantanal construction site in Cuiabá. A large group of teachers arrived with handmade banners reading “FIFA go home” and “Less World Cup, more health and education.” Their demonstration, although small, garnered international media play—partially because every crisis related to the World Cup will inspire attention, but also because the previous day police had attacked mass protests for higher wages in Rio. Teachers were among those tear-gassed and beaten.

Clearly the old ways are not going to cut it in Brazil. For every story of waste, corruption, and workplace accidents, there are even more stories of home evictions and new security protocols that would make Dick Cheney blush. I saw much of this with my own eyes. It paints a collective picture of a country that is attempting to use the World Cup and Olympics to both present itself externally to the world as a grand new power of the twenty-first century and continue internally a process of state-directed neoliberalism that puts profiteering ahead of human needs.

As Marcelo Freixo, Rio’s radical mayoral candidate (more on him later), said to me,

The truth is that the preparations are attending to the interests of big corporations and not of society. We had the experience of the Pan American Games in 2007 where no benefits were brought to the city. We have currently a city with enormous investments, but also enormous social aggravators. The federal ministry of health recently released a study showing that Rio has the worst public health system on offer in all of Brazil. Additionally, we have precarious and very expensive public transport. We also have a very low-quality education system—one of the worst. So it’s a city with enormous investments taking place, but one that can’t guarantee a minimum standard of living for its citizens.

All of this is happening, without so much stopping for a breath, in the aftermath of the largest series of protests Brazil has seen in thirty years. It is also happening with the partnership and encouragement of President Dilma Rousseff and her ruling Workers’ Party. They still push ahead, with FIFA deadlines as the lodestar of their actions. They still see it as Lula did five years ago when he said, of the Olympics, “It’s an opportunity like we’ve never had before to show the world what we are capable of, strengthen our self-esteem, and achieve new advances.”24 No one in power is adapting to the new economic reality, in which growth has slowed dramatically. No one is echoing the words of Romário, who said, “There’s no good schools, there’s no good hospitals—how can there be a World Cup?”25 There is no recognition that prioritizing the games above all else has rendered every new “white elephant” World Cup stadium a potent symbol of just how much people feel they are being left behind.

Dilma and the Workers’ Party were supposed to be different. Instead they continue the tradition expressed in a longstanding joke:

When God was creating Brazil, St. Peter was behind him, watching. God said, “I’m going to put beautiful mountains here.”

Peter said, “Great.”

“Beautiful beaches,” he said.

“Great.”

“A lot of land, producing everything. No desert.”

Peter said, “Great.”

God said, “Nice climate, lots of sun. . . What, Peter?”

“Lord, with all due respect, I must disagree.”

“Why, Peter?”

“You’re giving these guys too much.”

“Just wait, Peter. Wait to see what kind of government I’m going to put there.”

Brazilians are outraged that services like transportation, education, and health care are inefficiently run or woefully underfunded, yet spending for the World Cup alone could reach the fifteen-billion-dollar mark—which would make it more expensive than the previous three World Cups combined.26 In Rio, the legendary Maracanã Stadium has received a five-hundred-million-dollar facelift, with construction crews working around the clock to make the site of the 1950 World Cup final a twenty-first-century, “FIFA-quality” stadium. The construction companies, which are the largest political donors in the country, want to see this happen by any means necessary. Security firms have been hired to keep unsightly poverty out of view of the coming international audience. This means that new high-rises are going up, new high-tech security systems are being installed, new roads are being paved, and dozens of favelas have been demolished because they were built in areas deemed “high-risk” or “designated for public use.” Both of these phrases are extremely misleading. A “high-risk” area can mean anything from gang activity to landslides. Evicting people from spaces “designated for public use” is particularly ironic when you consider that razing a favela will eventually lead to the private development and ownership of highly valued hillside real estate. Author Bryan McCann quotes Paulo Muniz, a resident of Favela Vidigal, about the ways such threats have historically been used as excuses for ethnic cleansing. “They came with that story of risk of landslide,” said Muniz. “But if Vidigal was at risk, so were half the favelas in Rio, along with many of the luxurious homes in Gávea [a middle-class residential neighborhood nearby]. When we found out they had plans for development, we knew it was really about profit.”27

The human cost of designating areas as either “high risk” or “for public use” is starting to leak out into in the international press. Across Brazil, as many as two hundred thousand people are scheduled to be evicted from their homes as a direct result of the World Cup. The displacement toll on Rio, where the intersection of the World Cup and the Olympics will be most disruptive, is already touching off some of the most dynamic organization and acts of resistance the coastal megacity has seen in decades.

Renato Cosentino, a member of the World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janeiro wrote,

Today Rio de Janeiro’s poorest live in a lawless city. It’s as if a card emblazoned with the Olympic logo has given city authorities superpowers to ignore the Federal Constitution, international agreements signed and ratified by Brazil, and the recommendations of the United Nations. The federal government pretends not to see it and the International Olympic Committee hasn’t spoken out about the charges of human rights violations caused by the preparations for the Games. . . . At a time when Rio de Janeiro has a chance to show the world that it can overcome the social inequality that has marked its history, it is instead reinforcing that inequality.28

As one street sweeper, using his own job as a handy metaphor, said to me, “What is wealth for them? For them, it’s a red carpet, covering up the trash beneath it with a pretty cover. So the rich and the powerful walk on their red carpet, and they’re not really looking at what’s going on. Critical people need to lift up the carpet to look at what’s underneath.”

This process is more than immoral: it is actually unconstitutional. Brazil has some of the toughest squatters’ rights laws in the world. Anyone who built a house more than five years ago is supposed to be protected, according to both the Brazilian Constitution and local legislation, known as the Organic Municipal Law. If a resident accepts compensation, then, at least in theory, it is supposed to allow them to get comparable housing of at least equal value elsewhere. But that is not what is happening. As one Rio housing activist, João, said to me,

Money is handed to you and you take it or leave it. People have to live in the favelas because of the proximity to wealth. They need to be close to where their jobs are and they cannot afford transportation. For the wealthy, it’s like your Mexican immigrants in the United States: they hate the favelas but they need the individuals in the favelas to do all the work they do not want to do. The time they are serving the rich people, they are good; the time they are living nearby, they are bad and it’s the same people.

One of the main focuses of World Cup and Olympics development appears to be creating physical space between the favelas and the wealthy areas. This process is slightly more complicated in Rio, where the favela plans operate on numerous fronts. In tourist zones, there is a full-court press to pacify, sanitize, and Disneyfy the favelas. The goal is to incorporate them into the city, open them up to the formal market, and slowly gentrify them. This process involves evicting the pesky people who have to live in the favelas, the favelados, who are being pushed out to the distant edges of the city and beyond. To connect these people to their jobs, a new bus line is being built—and its construction is also displacing people.

“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 Chris 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.

In 2010 the pressure to move out began, with eviction notices and political harassment becoming a regular part of life for the occupiers. The activists attempted to meet with government officials but were not granted a meeting until 2012. The Sport and Leisure Ministry, the only people with any real say over the building and the space, chose not to attend, which sent a loud-and-clear message that the museum would be reduced to rubble to make way for World Cup and Olympic parking lots. The squat then became an occupation as the activists made clear their intentions to occupy the space as a peaceful protest. “We speak to the government and they just put us off,” Carlos told me. “But we will not leave because we want a place to show the power, history, and pride of the Indigenous people.”

In a country of two hundred million people that purports to celebrate its diversity like few other places on earth, it’s as if a velvet rope keeps Indigenous people out of the Carnival. The most recent census counted between 650,000 and 850,000 Indigenous people in all of Brazil, which is ludicrously low; Indigenous people in cities tend to not disclose their ethnic heritage because of the institutional racism and disrespect they still face.

The entire structure of the ICC building, with its gorgeous architecture and historical importance, could have been rebuilt as a locus of pride. Developers estimated the cost at a mere ten million dollars—a pittance compared to the Maracanã rebuild. It could have become a symbol of Brazil’s rich and diverse history. It could even have attracted tourists coming to Rio for the World Cup and Olympics, a feel-good advertisement for the beneficence of the Brazilian state. Instead, it’s slated to become parking lots.

The same logic that would bulldoze the ICC has also shaped the Maracanã renovation. We managed to tour the inside several days later, after much persistence, this time without Chris Gaffney. Although he is a walking encyclopedia of its history, I was grateful Chris was not there. He treasures this stadium for what it was—and what we saw in the bowl of the Maracanã was its negation. From the field to the upper decks, the history of the Maracanã was being unceremoniously ripped apart. The level of demolition was particularly shocking because of the two hundred million dollars spent on repairs just a few years earlier—yet another example of needed resources getting flushed in favor of cosmetic stadium rebuilds.

As I watched the destruction I thought about one of the Indigenous occupiers, a young, fiercely intelligent man named Arrasari, who said, “I am not moving. I will stay until I am no more than a pillar of salt. They think we’ll go because they’ve cut us down like trees. But the root remains.”

It is true that if you need to uproot a tree, you don’t try to cut it down: you bring a bulldozer. That is exactly what the Brazilian state did to the ICC. In March 2013, the bulldozers, backed by men with guns, stormed the cultural center. Two hundred police officers dressed in military garb, firing tear gas canisters and using pepper spray, took the center. Chris Gaffney was quoted in the New York Times: “By resorting to force, this reflects the general attitude of state authorities toward the people getting in the way of their sports projects.”32 I was relieved that Chris’s voice was a part of the article. The Times, however, quoted neither Carlos Tukano nor Arrasari. They were invisible to the end.

Environment

The environment is an extremely sensitive subject in Brazil, home to the “lungs of the earth.” The Amazon rainforest creates 20 percent of the earth’s oxygen and 25 percent of its drinkable fresh water.33 It has also been razed and burned with shocking speed as Brazil’s economy has hummed.

It is, of course, not difficult to understand why the last thing people in Brasília, Brazil’s capital, want to hear on the subject are lectures from the Global North. Lula once said, “What we cannot accept is that those who failed to take care of their own forests, who did not preserve what they had and deforested everything and are responsible for most of the gases poured into the air and for the greenhouse effect, they shouldn’t be sticking their noses into Brazil’s business and giving their two cents’ worth.”34 He certainly has a point, although it says something damning about our world that the logic of our system dictates Brazil’s sovereign right to destroy the “lungs of the world.” By making statements that make destroying rainforests sound like a bold act of Global South defiance, Lula also disregards the powerful history of Brazil’s own environmental community, which was critical in the founding of his own Workers’ Party and has been fighting for decades to preserve the Amazon. As legendary Brazilian environmentalist Chico Mendes put it, “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees; then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”35

The World Cup—which is a national operation, as opposed to the Rio-centric Olympics—means greater stress on this critical ecosystem. This can be seen most sharply in the efforts to build a “FIFA-quality stadium” in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil will be spending $325 million, almost forty million more than the original estimates, while uprooting acres of the most ecologically delicate region on the planet. Are the “lungs of the world” really the best place for a new stadium? Even those in Brazil who advocate for the national autonomy of the rainforest region, without interference from international environmental bodies, are crying foul. This particular stadium does not only defy environmental needs, it defies even its own logic. The Amazon is already home to a stadium that draws far less than its capacity. Why do all this for just four World Cup matches? Romário, our soccer star–turned–politician, called the project “absurd”: “There will be a couple games there, and then what? Who will go? It is an absolute waste of time and money.”36 Since this particular “white elephant” seems to be uniting opposition of both the “wasteful spending” crowd and the “pro-breathing” crowd, the government is looking for options for the stadium after the World Cup that seem fiscally sound. One idea being floated is to turn the entire stadium into a massive open-air prison—a use with a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.37

Security

Then there is the question of security, a word that means different things to different people. When the planners of the World Cup and the Olympics discuss security, they are speaking about the security of the wealthy to travel to Brazil and feel as safe as they would in a gated community. USA Today wrote, without attribution, that Brazil “has the seventh-highest homicide rate in the world and only eight percent of reported crimes are solved.”38 Every lurid new story from Brazil, including two grisly (yet entirely unrelated) beheadings, now receives more publicity in the United States than any crime in Brazil’s history, precisely because these stories are framed in terms of whether World Cup tourists will feel safely sheltered.

Yet the question of security, as we will see in chapter 6, is less about keeping tourists feeling unthreatened and unscathed than about introducing a profoundly intrusive “new normal” of surveillance. At a cost of nine hundred million dollars, the twelve World Cup host cities will be equipped with surveillance and integrated command centers staffed with police and military personnel, in addition to two large security centers in Rio and Brasília that will monitor security nationwide. More than a thousand surveillance cameras will be installed in Rio de Janeiro alone. “Because of the size of the event and the need of integration between the forces, strategic planning for it began nearly a year ago,” Rio state security secretary José Mariano Beltrame told USA Today Sports. “We bet on the modernization of police, from the academy to the fleet.” Beltrame does not mention that the police will be under the command of the military, an idea that last had currency during the dictatorship. He also doesn’t mention that drone surveillance planes will be flying over Rio, as they did for the Olympics in London. He especially does not mention that all of this will cost almost ten times the price of security at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. (I was in South Africa right before play started, and I cannot imagine what that security scenario would look like multiplied by ten.)

The security plan also includes creating “exclusion zones” around the stadiums, guarded by 1,400 armed troops, as well as “World Cup courts” aimed at fast-tracking judicial proceedings to charge, prosecute, and convict crimes ranging from robberies and assault to “ambush marketing in contravention of FIFA’s regulations.”39 That means open season on Brazil’s “informal economy” of street markets and stalls. Ramping up security also means ramping up police brutality, not a small concern since numerous recent incidents have drawn widespread public outrage. As Travis Waldron wrote,

Along with excessive spending and inequality, police brutality and corruption were among the complaints in last summer’s protests. According to government numbers, Brazilian police killed one in 229 suspects they arrested last year, one of the highest figures in the world (U.S. police kill one in every 31,575). Protests erupted in June against police over the death of a 17-year-old São Paulo boy killed in an earlier demonstration, then again in August over the case of Amarildo de Souza, a Brazilian man whose disappearance and subsequent death was blamed on police officers (25 were charged with his murder in October). Typical police responses to protests—tear gassing, pepper spraying, and excessive force—were also rampant throughout the demonstrations, drawing even more opposition from the protesters.40

These fears of police brutality cannot be found in the mainstream media, but graffiti and murals across the city speak about it, going up in the night faster than they can be painted over. “The walls,” as Eduardo Galeano wrote, “are the publishers of the poor.”

Older Brazilians see in this new security regime a jarring echo of the days of military dictatorship, yet with one critical difference. This time, instead of crushing revolutionary movements, the authorities are focusing their repression on squelching spontaneous rage at the priorities of commerce and on making sure the trains—and planes—run on time. If this all sounds very “Big Brother,” it is worth noting that the security operation at Maracanã goes by the official name of, yes, “Big Brother.”

Yet no matter the stated goals of World Cup security, the major concern is that the security protocols will remain even after the party ends and everyone has gone home. There are no external military threats against Brazil, and a standing, aggressive military and national police command structure can really only be aimed in one direction: inward. The internal threat, as the 2013 protests made clear, is that people are dissatisfied with the government taking public money and giving it to private corporations. If you want to keep that kind of anger bottled up, you have to militarize the cities.

To know the human cost of such an arrangement in Brazil, one only has to go back to the 2007 Pan Am Games and the Complexo do Alemão massacre. During the Pan American Games, the police staged a large-scale invasion and occupation of the Complexo do Alemão, a series of interlocking favelas in northern Rio. The pretext was a crackdown on drug traffickers, but police killed forty-four people, some of them execution-style. Many of the dead were later found to have nothing to do with drug trafficking or illicit activity.41

These instances of police brutality, harassment, and murder have also fallen disproportionately on Brazilians of African descent, who make up half of the country’s population. Henry Louis Gates, in his 2011 PBS series Black in Latin America, said that Brazilians “wanted their national culture to be ‘blackish’—really brown, a beautiful brown blend . . . in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.”42 This dynamic, as we will see, is deeply rooted in Brazil’s history.

Seizing land and homes, running roughshod over the rights of those of African and Indigenous descent, opening the doors for foreign plunder, the buzzsaw development of the Amazon, exporting Brazil’s culture, declaring an end to public space, militarizing the cities: all of these can be facilitated through laws described as “states of exception,” like those historically passed for the Olympic Games in which the usual rules (and constitutions) no longer apply. This is why mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York City and Richard Daley in Chicago—both cities pinnacles of gentrification—wanted the Olympics so desperately and why Lula fought so hard for them at the end of his presidency. In a rush of excitement, the land grab and the privatization of public space could proceed with abandon. These objectives touch on the deepest and rawest nerves in Brazilian history. The next chapter endeavors to give non-Brazilian readers some sense of that history, which is critical for understanding the present.