This had all been the case for some time. The question, then, is why the protest should have erupted in June 2013. Significantly perhaps, participants and observers struggled to name the events. The Vinegar Revolution was tried out – a reference to its use as a tear-gas antidote and the arrest of a number of protestors merely for carrying vinegar in their bags. Others opted for the Brazilian Spring. The comparisons with the Middle East were real but limited: the events’ reliance on social-media networks and the collective disbelief of rulers and ruled alike that this was happening had shades of Egypt. However, Brazil had been booming economically, it had no really problematic foreign entanglements and it was not under military rule. Perhaps the best option was Copa das Manifestações – the Demonstrations Cup. For what gave rhythm and focus to the protests was the simultaneous staging of the 2013 FIFA Confederations Cup; and what allowed the many grievances of the Brazilian public to coalesce into this wave of outrage were the economic costs and the social impact of staging the 2014 World Cup to come.
Protestors chanted, ‘Hey hey, FIFA, pay my bus fare’ or held placards that contrasted the shiny new football temples with the peeling paint of the average Brazilian school classroom and called for ‘Education – FIFA quality’. FIFA may have come in for a mauling, but the crowd did not spare its own elites, sporting and political, for their institutionalized corruption and unaccountability to the public. Even FIFA, whose own probity was profoundly compromised, had recognized these traits. The organization’s report into the ISL scandal, in which members of the FIFA executive committee had received considerable kickbacks from the sale of World Cup media rights in the 1990s, described the behaviour of both João Havelange and Ricardo Teixeira as ‘morally and ethically reproachable’, and went on to say:
It is certain that not inconsiderable amounts were channelled to former FIFA president Havelange and to his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira . . . there is no indication that any form of service was given in return by them . . . These payments were apparently made via front companies in order to cover up the true recipient and are to be qualified as ‘commissions’, known today as ‘bribes’.1
The extraordinary fact that until very recently Swiss law did not recognize the crime of bribery or corruption in international organizations like FIFA saved the pair from criminal proceedings. Teixeira, who must have seen the writing on the wall, turned a period of sick leave into retirement in early 2012, standing down from the CBF, the World Cup organizing committee and his positions at FIFA. Havelange stood down from the IOC but hung on as honorary life president at FIFA – only to resign in early 2013. Teixeira’s farewell speech was read out by his deputy and successor, José Maria Marin. Rather like George W. Bush’s take on Iraq, Teixeira believed that it was ‘mission accomplished’. Marin ended by saying, ‘The stupendous work that was being done by Ricardo Teixeira will continue.’2
The CBF was certainly passing to the right person for that to happen. Marin had made his first career in politics, as a member of the party descended from Salgado’s 1930s fascists and then as a willing stooge of the military dictatorship’s pet party ARENA serving as governor of São Paulo. Two months earlier he had been handing out the winners’ medals at the final of a São Paulo youth tournament. Captured live on television and endlessly repeated on ESPN, Marin clearly takes one of the medals, carefully folds the ribbon around it and then slips it into his trouser pocket. Corinthians’ goalkeeper Mateus, for whom the medal was meant, shuffled down the line and got nothing. Marin first denied the incident, and then tried to laugh it off as ‘a real joke’.
No one expected the Copa das Manifestações, and it is not clear that anyone can fully explain it now. What is certain is that there was plenty of tinder ready to burn and plenty of sparks to light the conflagration.
II
‘This is the chronicle of a mess foretold,’ wrote Juca Kfouri in the final months before Rio staged the Pan American Games in 2007. ‘Everyone knew when Brazil won the right to host the Games that the moment would arrive when the organizers were going to blackmail the government and that all the normal regulations on bids and oversight would be thrown out the window in the name of haste and avoiding a stain on Brazil’s reputation.’3 Exactly how much the Games cost is a matter of some dispute but it was at least 5 billion reais, which was roughly six times the original budget. This might not have been so bad had any of that money been spent on desperately needed transportation infrastructure, but the new highways and light-rail projects that were part of the package never materialized. Similarly, the planned clean-up of Guanabara Bay, now a toxic pool of sewage and industrial effluent, never started. There was, however, money for security, with an extra $300 million made available for 18,000 additional police to be on duty and 1,700 CCTV cameras to be installed.
The athletes’ village was located in the wetlands to the west of the city, in Barra da Tijuca. The ground here was so unstable and waterlogged that the builders had to sink forty-five-metre concrete pylons into the earth, making the seventeen apartment blocks enormously more expensive than planned. The project was bankrolled by the Workers’ Support Fund, which had been established by the federal government to provide loans and unemployment insurance to its low-paid workforce. Needless to say, the kind of leverage available to the fund was not used to ensure some element of social housing in the project and so the whole shoddily built edifice was flogged off to upper-middle-class buyers. The government ended up suing the contractors for systematic malfeasance, grotesquely and falsely inflating wage bills and unfinished work.
The Marina da Glória in Parque do Flamengo was the intended location of the sailing competitions at the Games and plans were laid to build a gigantic fortified complex there, including a convention centre, shopping malls and a huge car park. Together with the space required to host the various sporting events of the Games, all of this would have necessitated a massive transfer of public space and parkland to the private sector and the creation of buildings so high that they would steal the view of Guanabara Bay from everyone else. This flagrant act of theft was eventually stopped by local protests and the courts. Three major complexes that did get built included the Estádio Olimpico João Havelange, known as the Engenhão, the Maria Lenk swimming complex and the Arena Multiuso. All came in many times over budget. The Engenhão, which was intended to be the centrepiece of the Rio Olympics bid, was so shoddily built that the roof let in the rain, and it was closed in March 2013 by the city’s mayor for safety reasons. The swimming complex, though functional, was not built to Olympic specifications and has been neither adapted nor made available for public use. Exactly the same was true of the velodrome. All of them, during and after the Games, functioned as highly fortified and protected enclaves in the city rather than as a part of the public urban fabric. Teresa Caldeira’s description of this central element of modern Brazilian urbanism captures them perfectly.
They are physically demarcated and isolated by walls, fences, empty spaces and design devices. They are turned inward, away from the street, whose public life they explicitly reject. They are controlled by armed guards and security systems, which enforce rules of inclusion and exclusion . . . They are private property for collective use and they emphasize the value of what is private and restricted at the same time they devalue what is public and open in the city.4
The Games themselves were attended almost exclusively by Rio’s middle and upper-middle classes, who had the internet access necessary to buy the tickets and the money to pay their very high prices. All the venues and their management corresponded to Caldeira’s description. In this regard the Pan American Games in Rio were not greatly different from other sporting mega-events in the rest of the world which have become increasingly security-conscious, but for one important fact: the police and the military were conducting massive operations in the city’s favelas before and during the Games themselves. The security operation began in May, and two weeks before the Games started 1,350 heavily armed police stormed the C
omplexo do Alemão in the north of the city, taking on the drug-trafficking gangs (traficantes) who were the de facto authorities in the area. Veja referred to it as ‘a necessary war’, Época praised it as ‘an innovative attack’.5 Nineteen people died and nine were injured on the first day of the operation. Over the next month, as the Games took place, the entire zone was in a state of military lockdown, with residents unable to attend schools or health clinics, while rubbish and sewage piled up. By late July the death toll had climbed to forty-four. While some of these were the results of gun battles and stray bullets, both federal government and human rights groups concluded that there had been many executions as well.6 In the years since, these operations have been formalized in Rio as the process of pacification, where military-level assaults have been used to clear the traffickers from the favelas, after which the Brazilian flag is hoisted and the regular police move in.
Thus the 2007 Pan American Games became the template for the way in which Brazil planned for, built and staged sporting mega-events. The country could put on a slick spectacular for a privileged local audience and the TV cameras in fortified enclaves, secured by a mixture of flagrant media boosterism and harshly authoritarian political and policing practice. Financially the show rested on a huge transfer of resources and land from the public to the private sector. There was no meaningful democratic consultation or planning, helping ensure that money was lost, embezzled and wasted, and almost no thought was given to post-Games planning and legacies. None of this, not even the slaughter at the Complexo do Alemão, gave FIFA or the IOC pause for thought as they handed the hosting rights for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics to Brazil and Rio respectively.
Brazil had known it would be getting the World Cup long before it was made official. In the wake of the controversial decision to give the 2006 World Cup to Germany rather than the favourites, South Africa, FIFA make a knee-jerk decision that future World Cups would be rotated around the continents (a practice they would later abandon). The 2010 World Cup would be held in Africa, ensuring South Africa got the tournament, and 2014 would be in South America. Colombia toyed with the idea of bidding for the tournament, but in a classic behind-closed-doors stitch-up the rest of the continent’s football associations had long thrown their weight behind Brazil. Colombia withdrew from the fray and in 2007 Brazil was duly awarded the games.
The choice of World Cup host cities provides an insight into the politics of the tournament. FIFA required a minimum of eight cities and a maximum of ten for the competition, but Brazil insisted on twelve. This would create innumerable logistical problems in a continent-sized country, as would the decision to send teams around the country rather than geographically grouping their games. But advocates argued, not unreasonably, that it would allow more of the country to be shown off, and it also allowed more patronage to be handed out in the right political places. In São Paulo the obvious choice for a World Cup stadium was to renovate São Paulo FC’s Morumbi, but the long-standing political feud between the club’s president, Juvenal Juvêncio, and Ricardo Teixeira at the CBF meant that a vastly more expensive new stadium would be built for Corinthians instead. The nordeste, Lula’s political stronghold, got four host cities and Fortaleza was given the privilege of holding six games, including a quarterfinal; but the then state governor of Ceará, Cid Gomes, was a well-known ally of Lula and Dilma Rousseff and a useful regional counterweight to the presidential ambitions of Eduardo Campos, governor of Pernambuco. In the north both Manaus and Belém were in contention. Eduardo Braga, former governor of Amazonas, was on the rise, and seen as a future leader of the Senate, while Ana Júlia Carepa, governor of Pará where Belém is situated, was heading for electoral defeat. Manaus won over Belém. Brasília, the capital, was always going to get a stadium, but the initial plans to build a reasonably sized 40,000-seat arena, given the tiny crowds for the local football teams who would inherit the facility, were overtaken by the desire of local politicians to secure a quarter-final of the World Cup for their city. For this they required a much more expensive 70,000-seat stadium, which was duly agreed. Most contentious of all was the choice of Cuiabá, the capital of the central state of Mato Grosso and a city without any professional football at all. However, the long-standing governor of the state was Blairo Maggi, the country’s biggest soya-bean producer and a major funder of the PT.
Brazil’s relationship with FIFA also proved to be a highly politically charged affair. The Lei Geral da Copa – the general law of the cup – is the legislation that FIFA requires all of its hosts to sign up to. The law, which is meant to stand above all national laws, makes special provisions for FIFA itself, like generous tax provisions, but also specifies a whole series of legal requirements that must be adhered to during the tournament: for example, ensuring the protection of FIFA sponsors’ brands from ambush marketing and local competition. Two issues proved to be particularly contentious: FIFA’s insistence that alcohol, specifically sponsor Budweiser’s beer, be available for sale in World Cup stadiums in contradiction of Brazil’s 2003 law which banned this; and Brazil’s desire to preserve reduced-price seats for seniors and students. In addition, FIFA and President Rousseff clashed over changes to Brazil’s visa regulations and immigration law. On all these issues Congress, after much huffing and puffing, just had to play ball.
Perhaps the most pernicious of all FIFA’s micro-regulations was their decision, following the vuvuzela experience in South Africa in 2010, to ban musical instruments from the stadiums. Brazilian efforts to devise more melodious instrumentation than the vuvuzela, though equally cheap and easy to play, were rejected, and thus in the society where football and music are most closely correlated in the global imagination there will only be the dire offerings of the official PA. If the Confederations Cup is anything to go by, samba football will be played to the sledgehammer rhythms of AC/DC’s ‘Hell’s Bells’ and whatever curious mutant emerges from the Sony Corporation’s competition for a new World Cup song – to be recorded by the Puerto Rican Ricky Martin.
Agreeing the host cities and passing the laws was the easy bit. Then the new stadiums had to be funded and built. Alongside this the government proposed the largest programme of new infrastructure ever associated with a World Cup, including a complete renovation of the country’s antiquated airports and air-traffic-control technologies; new monorails in Rio and Manaus; and high-speed bus routes everywhere, as well as light-rail projects, bridges and highways. An agenda of this level of ambition required some degree of haste, but as a representative of Brazil’s construction industry put it, ‘We won the right to host the World Cup in October 2007 but we didn’t decide what needed to be done until January 2010. In 2008 and 2009 we did little or nothing. You can call it lack of money, or will, or competence, but there was definitely a lack of something.’7 Some transport projects were cancelled because the initial plans were so badly put together that they couldn’t go ahead. Others were halted by judicial interventions that disclosed corruption and incompetence, or tried to defend the rights of the thousands of families whose homes were under threat from these projects.
Those that did go ahead were often achingly slow. By mid-2013 it was obvious that neither São Paulo nor Rio would have any working rail links to either of their two airports by the time of the World Cup. The airport-renovation programme was so behind schedule that most of the extra capacity would have to be handled by temporary hangars and shelters that would disappear after the tournament. In Brasília, work started on tramlines to the airport but was then halted in 2011 when a judge ruled the contractors had massively overpriced the job. Manaus cancelled its monorail and bus lanes. A year before the World Cup kicked off it was clear that none of Salvador’s planned new roads or rail links would be ready for the tournament, while in Fortaleza no work had even started.
The story of the stadium-building programme was not dissimilar but without the luxury of cancellation, prompting FIFA president Sepp Blatter to tell a Swiss newspaper in January 2014 that Braz
il was further behind in its preparations at this stage than any other country during his time with FIFA. Four were still unfinished, and Curitiba, in the state of Paraná, looked like it might be completed so late that crowds could expect to be using portable toilets. The later the stadiums and the transport projects were finished and the more maniacal the timetable, the more expensive they became: the stadiums alone were going to cost $3.5 billion. According to Brazil’s National Court of Auditors, public expenditure on the World Cup was expected to reach $13.5 billion, making 2014 the most expensive World Cup ever – enough money to pay the entire country’s annual Bolsa Família bill twice over.
The single infrastructure project that best illustrated the preparations for the 2014 World Cup, and certainly the most publicly symbolic, was the reconstruction of the Maracanã in Rio. It was first renovated in the late 1990s in preparation for the inaugural FIFA Club World Championship in 2000. A large, ugly glass box was fixed to one side to ensure that the elite wouldn’t have to mingle, at any point, with the riff-raff and could enjoy their own dedicated entrance and secure facilities. A whole series of executive boxes were installed on the upper level, which aside from their ugliness also served to reduce the air circulation in the stadium, making it unpleasantly hot and humid. The upper-level terraces were filled with plastic seats, reducing the stadium’s capacity from 175,000 to 103,000. The stadium was closed again in 2005 and underwent a two-year refit for the Pan American Games. This time the changes were more than merely cosmetic. Despite the high water table in the area, the pitch was sunk by over a metre, leading to endless problems with the playing surface. More significantly the geral, the open area in the lower stands where fans could enter the stadium for less than a single real and stand, was obliterated. Despite promises from the stadium authorities to provide cheap seats, the newly configured Maracanã made only a tiny number of low-price tickets available and these were sold at more than ten times the cost of the entrance to the geral. A vast investment of public money had been used to exclude the public.
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