by Zirin, Dave
Back in 1996, Michael Jackson had to helicopter in to get to the top of the hillside. Now Santa Marta has a funicular tram. Then Santa Marta felt hidden behind a dark curtain. Now it is on official tourist maps of the city. In fact, there is a tourist checkpoint at the bottom of the hillside along Rua São Clemente, complete with multilingual guides who hand out maps of the favela and offer tips to visitors. The guides were, granted, lonely; there did not appear to be a rush of people clamoring to see the favela up close. Their brochures welcome people to the “Rio Top Tour” (in English) and promise to point out “historic community landmarks.”
We ventured up ourselves, since neither of us knew where the Michael Jackson statue was. At first we decided to walk up the steep hill, testing my lung capacity. (Zach is a soccer player and his ability to walk quickly without losing his breath soon filled me with murderous thoughts.) I made the case that we should wait for the tram, to “have the experience.” The wait was long; we were behind a group of young men carrying massive speakers that eventually filled half the tram by themselves. Most of the other half of the tram was filled by cases of beer. No one waiting seemed particularly put out by this. It was Saturday night and all of this was for a huge outdoor party that evening on the hilltop.
Two men in delivery uniforms were waiting alongside us with a mammoth mattress and matching box spring. There was also a group of moms with small children and grocery bags. Once we made it onto the tram, I argued that we should go to the top for the view and then find the Michael Jackson statue by traversing downhill. (Again: it was steep.) Maybe my motives were cardiovascular, but no one would have argued with the results. We walked out to an astounding view of one of the most beautiful cities on earth. The panorama unfolded in front of us: brown granite hills jutting up dramatically from gentle green slopes, a thick urban patchwork of roads and buildings, the shimmering water of the Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, and then the ocean just beyond.
Kids were throwing paper planes off the hillside and chasing after them as they floated gently down. Music echoed off the squat little houses, cobbled together at odd angles. Neighbors shouted to each other across a passageway. Of course there was a dusty soccer pitch at the top of the hill, just beyond the small plaza where the tram ended. Looming over the pitch was a new-looking building painted bright blue and emblazoned with the abbreviation UPP. We were to learn a great deal about the UPP, the “Pacifying Police Unit” making the favelas safe for tourists and real-estate speculators alike, in the days ahead. The UPP building was perhaps the largest in the community; its roof was festooned with high-tech surveillance and satellite equipment.
Just to the left of UPP headquarters, we had a clear view of the highest grouping of houses on the hillside, roughly fifty yards away from our perch. Massive painted protest slogans were grouped in front of them, almost certainly visible for miles. The signs read “SOS” and then, in Portuguese, “What kind of ‘model favela’ is this?” “Peace without a voice isn’t peace, it’s fear,” and “Don’t erase our history.” We thought that the signs were protesting the UPP and the evictions and demolitions leading up to the World Cup and Olympics. We learned later that these very homes, which had stood for more than fifty years without falling, had been slated for removal on the pretext of “landslides.” There was a rumor (accepted as common sense) that the real reason these homes would be destroyed was that a Brazilian billionaire wanted to build a private estate.
We ogled the view for a few more minutes and then decided to descend the hillside in an attempt to find what our map called “Michael Jackson Square.” Our tourist map, however, was utterly incapable of guiding us through the narrow passageways and staircases jutting at seemingly impossible angles between, across, and through the squat houses. The compactness of the space in the favela was an incredible experience in itself, at least for Americans unaccustomed to this type of urban environment. It was a vast assemblage of humanity. We passed a cafe selling soda, beer, and grilled meats. We saw young boys playing an arcade game, a young family sitting around a grill, a door that opened directly onto a tiny, cramped bedroom. The smells of open sewage and of delicious cooking food intermingled. As we walked past a large boulder with two tiny kittens huddling on top of it, a rat that looked like the kittens’ big brother waddled by. It was the first favela we visited. It would not be the last.
Finally, after asking directions from many bemused people sitting outside their homes, we arrived at Michael Jackson Square, a small plaza built into the hillside with another incredible view. To the left was a wall with a large mosaic depicting Jackson; just beyond the wall, on a small patch of concrete jutting out over the hillside, was the statue of the King of Pop. It was . . . small. Maybe five feet tall. Jackson was smiling, sunglasses resting on his surgically pointed nose, with none of the rage he showed in the video.
As metaphors go, this is good as any. Rio is being sanitized. To a New York City boy who does not recognize the place where he was raised, the signs felt all too familiar. Not even Michael Jackson’s rage is permitted for public consumption. He smiles, his hand reaching out over a view of the entire city, almost as if he is saying, “The world is yours.” But wipe that happy smile off his face and he could also be saying, just as clearly, “They don’t care about us.”
Brazil Is Not for Beginners
Of course I needed to write a book about Brazil. In fact, according to family, friends, and colleagues, it would be irrational if I didn’t write a book about Brazil. I had done investigative journalism in Vancouver before the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, in South Africa before the 2010 World Cup, and in London before the 2012 Olympics. I had also written extensively on the Greek Olympics in 2004, China’s 2008 Beijing Games, and Vladimir Putin’s Sochi Winter Games in 2014. With the news that Brazil would host not only the 2014 World Cup but also the 2016 Olympics, the first country in the twenty-first century to attempt the daunting “twofer,” this story seemed to demand a deeper level of analysis and examination. A country world-renowned for its ability to throw a party would be host to two of the most raucous global celebrations in existence. When you factor in the incredible role of soccer in Brazil’s history and the drama that normally surrounds the funding and staging of these events, it just seemed like just too good a story to miss.
Brazil’s economy, I knew, had grown dramatically over the last decade, barely slowing a whit with the Great Recession of 2008. I also knew that the demands of the World Cup and the Olympics—the massive increase in security funding, the displacement and eviction of the city’s poorest residents, and the explosion of costs—would be a recipe for tensions and conflicts that would be difficult to keep under wraps. And I was fascinated by how the staging of the World Cup, in a dozen cities across the country, would differ from that of the Olympics, entirely situated in Rio. I wondered how the various construction projects and pressures would complement and complicate each other. I assumed that in Rio the World Cup would set the stage for the Olympics, with soccer-loving Brazil saying nary a word about the Cup; I reasoned that protests, if any, would be laser-focused around the Olympic Games. Factor in Brazil’s unique political, economic, and social history and bada-bing: I would have myself a book.
It all seemed so very straightforward. But then I told my plan to Marcos Alvito, a professor and lecturer with expertise in both sports and the country’s labyrinthine history. He looked at me for a long time and said, not without kindness, “Brazil is not for beginners.” His words were meant to temper my ambitions. They were also an act of mercy. There are people who spend their entire lives studying and attempting to comprehend this remarkably complex country and still come up lacking a full understanding of what they see. It is a country whose very vastness is not only about geography but also a history that defies easy understanding. If Brazil were a movie, it would be the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing: you have to see it and experience it repeatedly, and every time you look you notice something that affects what you thought you understood.
Understanding Brazil is particularly difficult for people from the United States. Brazil is like a funhouse mirror of the United States (or maybe the United States is a funhouse mirror of Brazil—it’s all about on which side of the equator you stand). Like the United States, Brazil is a mammoth landmass of incalculable wealth and seemingly inexhaustible resources. Like the United States, its land was developed through the slaughter and displacement of the Indigenous population, followed by the African transatlantic slave trade. But imagine a United States where the fight to decolonize was led by the royal family of the colonizing country. Imagine a United States with huge areas of Indigenous land never brought under centralized control. Imagine a United States more than half of whose population was enslaved. Imagine a United States where, instead of criminalizing “miscegenation” or “race mixing,” the state had actively encouraged interracial relationships (albeit using similar pathologies of social Darwinism and white supremacy). Imagine a United States without Jim Crow, where the cultures of the many celebrated in more than just a superficial manner. Imagine a United States without the pall of Puritanism, where, under the watchful eye of a hundred-foot Jesus Christ, a Carnival of masks and sexual fluidity flourishes. Imagine a United States where twelve families own the overwhelming majority of the land. Imagine a United States where a small group of oligarchs makes all of the decisions, ignoring any formal concepts of democracy (all right, maybe that’s a little easier to imagine).
No, Brazil is not for beginners. It is a country of two hundred million people on an area larger than the continental United States. It possesses the largest economy in the Global South and the fifth-largest on the planet. It has more people of African descent than any country on earth outside of Nigeria, more people of Japanese descent than anywhere outside of Japan, and more Italians anywhere outside of Italy.5 It is the friendliest nation you could ever hope to visit—and its police have killed ten thousand people in the last decade.6 It has a history more complicated than a Russian novel and no less difficult to grasp.
There is no way I can fully explain every nuance of this country. It is simply not knowledge I possess. What I can do is demonstrate why the World Cup and Olympics come at an extremely perilous time for Brazil, a time when every nerve is exposed. I can talk about the way the needs of the World Cup and Olympics reveal like nothing else the profoundly different interests of different sectors of Brazilian society. I can show how the twenty-first-century, post–9/11 demands of the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the governing bodies of the World Cup and the Olympic Games, have exacerbated all of these concerns. I can also attempt to show just how the World Cup and Olympics can bring a country together only to tear it apart.
To get this done, I start by writing about some of what is happening right now in Brazil, with an emphasis on Rio de Janeiro. Then in chapter 2 I sketch a very basic history of Brazil, which I believe is an absolutely essential prerequisite for understanding everything that is roiling the nation right now—in particular the existential fear that the current moment is yet another tenuous boom for Anglo-European consumption of Brazil’s exports, soon to be followed by a bust that breaks the nation’s back.
Chapter 3 explains just what is happening to Brazil’s current “economic miracle” under the leadership of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT), with an emphasis on whom Brazil’s recent economic growth has benefited and who is being left behind. Chapter 4 discusses the central role of soccer (or futebol) in Brazil’s history and culture, as well as the roles of some of its key figures. Chapter 5 looks at the history of the Olympics, while chapter 6 focuses on recent sports mega-events, including both Olympic and World Cup events, and their effects on host countries to make clear why the World Cup, the Olympics, and twenty-first-century Brazil are such a combustible mix. In chapter 7 we’ll look at the displacements and evictions I witnessed in Brazil, as well as some of the stories I had the privilege to hear about how the poorest residents of one of the most economically unequal countries on the planet have fought back. These struggles laid the groundwork for what in 2013 became the largest protests the country had seen in decades, coinciding with its hosting the Confederations Cup soccer tournament.
The sight of millions of Brazilians in the streets, marching on a soccer stadium, was enough to give President Dilma Rousseff and the powers that be at FIFA and the IOC night sweats. These protests also had the support of 75 percent of the Brazilian population.7 This book looks at what exactly sparked that anger and made those protests so historic. If Brazil’s Dance with the Devil can spark a discussion that challenges the conventional wisdom that hosting these kinds of sporting mega-events is something to which countries should aspire, then the flights, the interviews, and the patience and understanding of my family will not have been in vain.
One thing is certain. My respect for the people I met in Brazil—the fighters for social justice, the community organizers, the residents trying to save their homes—is infinite. No, Brazil is not for beginners. But we all have to start somewhere—and attempting to understand Brazil is critical for understanding what is happening in cities across the world.
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 t
hat 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.