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

by Zirin, Dave

  My lasting memory from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics will always be that the Vancouver Olympic Committee was forced to import snow—on the public dime—to make sure that the Games could proceed as planned. This use of tax dollars was just the icing on the cake for angry Vancouver residents. Unlike the snow, that anger still simmers years after the fact.

  When I arrived in Vancouver several weeks before the start of the Games, the first thing I noticed was the frowns. The IOC had leased every sign and billboard in town to broadcast Olympic joy, but they couldn’t pay the local populace to crack a smile. It’s clear that the 2010 Winter Games had darkened the mood in the bucolic coastal city; the vibe was decidedly overcast. Even the customs police officer checking my passport started grumbling about “five-thousand-dollar hockey tickets.”

  Polls released on my first day in Vancouver backed up my initial impression. Only 50 percent of residents in British Columbia thought that the Olympics were a positive thing, and 69 percent said too much money was being spent on the Games.18 “The most striking thing in the poll is that as the Olympics get closer, British Columbians are less likely to see the Games as having a positive impact,” said Hamish Marshall, research director for the polling firm Angus Reid. “Conventional wisdom was that as we got closer to the Olympics, people here would get more excited and more supportive.”19 If the global recession hadn’t smacked into planning efforts the previous year, with corporate sponsors fleeing for the hills, maybe the Vancouver Olympic Committee would have found itself on more solid ground with residents. But public bailouts of Olympic projects are hard to swallow when people see their own jobs and social safety net slashed. In fact, on my first day in Vancouver, a local newspaper ran a story about the need to import snow—alongside another piece about funds for physical education being cut. It does not take a media studies degree to see these two articles side by side and fume.

  I spoke to Charles, a bus driver, whose good cheer diminished when I asked him about the Games. “I just can’t believe I wanted this a year ago,” he said. “I voted for it in the plebiscite. But now, yes. I’m disillusioned.” This disillusionment grew as the financial burden of the Games was increasingly revealed. The original cost estimate was $660 million in public money. At the time of my visit, it was admitted to be six billion dollars and steadily climbing. An early economic impact statement forecast that the Games could bring in ten billion dollars—but then PriceWaterhouseCoopers released its own study showing that the total economic gain would be more like one billion dollars. In addition, the Olympic Village came in a hundred million dollars over budget and had to be bailed out by the city. As for security, the estimated cost was $175 million. At that point, it was already clear that any economic gain would be swallowed by cost overruns.

  These budget overruns coincided with drastic cuts to city services. On my first day in town, the cover of the local paper blared cheery news about the Games above the fold, with a headline announcing the imminent layoff of eight hundred teachers much further down the page. As a staunch Olympic supporter, a sports reporter from the Globe and Mail, said to me, “The optics of cuts in city services alongside Olympic cost overruns are, to put it mildly, not good.” But to Vancouver residents—particularly those living in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood, the most impoverished area in all of Canada—these weren’t just public-relations gaffes. Carol Martin, who works in the blighted neighborhood, made this clear: “The Bid Committee promised that not a single person would be displaced due to the Games, but there are now three thousand homeless people sleeping on Vancouver’s streets—and these people are facing increased police harassment as they try to clean the streets in the lead-up to the Games.” When I explored the backstreets of Downtown Eastside, I found police congregated on every corner, trying to hem in a palpable anger. Anti-Olympic posters plastered the neighborhood, creating an alternative universe to the cheery 2010 Games displays by the airport. The Vancouver Olympic Committee tried to quell the crackling vibe by dispersing tickets to second-tier Olympic events like the luge. It wasn’t working.

  Officials were feeling the anger—and the independent media, frighteningly, was paying the price. In November 2009, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman was held while trying to cross the border for reasons that had nothing to do with the Olympic Games. In an interview with CBC News, Goodman recalled that the border agent

  made it clear by saying, “What about the Olympics?” And I said, “You mean when President Obama went to Copenhagen to push for the Olympics in Chicago?” He said, “No. I am talking about the Olympics here in 2010.” I said, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that.” He said, “You’re saying you’re not talking about the Olympics?” He was clearly incredulous that I wasn’t going to be talking about the Olympics. He didn’t believe me.20

  Derrick O’Keefe, co-chair of the Canadian Peace Alliance, said to me, “It’s pretty unlikely that the harassment of a well-known and respected journalist like Amy Goodman . . . was the initiative of one overzealous, bad-apple Canadian border guard. This looks like a clear sign of the chill that the IOC and the Games’ local corporate boosters want to put out against any potential dissent.” Harsha Walia, member of No One Is Illegal and the Olympic Resistance Network, confirmed when we spoke that such treatment has become standard practice:

  In the lead-up to the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, we have witnessed and been subjected to an increasingly fortified police state, including intimidation and harassment of activists by security and intelligence forces as part of an unparalleled one-billion-dollar security and surveillance network. In contravention of basic rights, police have stated their plans to set up checkpoints, search people without cause, and erect security exclusion zones.

  The Canadian government was leveling public housing, stifling civil liberties, and harassing local activists. The last thing it wanted was someone like Amy Goodman telling the world.

  For those with just a passing knowledge of our northern neighbors, this must all seem quite shocking. When we think of human rights abuses and suppression of dissent, Canada is hardly the first place that comes to mind. But Canada has its own history of cracking down on peaceful protestors, as anyone who attended the 2001 demonstrations in Quebec against the FTAA trade agreement will attest. But the people of Downtown Eastside and beyond developed a different outlet for their Olympic angst: a full-scale protest to welcome the athletes, tourists, and foreign dignitaries. Vancouver residents put out an open call for a week of anti-Games actions, organizing demonstrations on issues ranging from homelessness to Indigenous rights. Protestors from London and Russia, sites of the next two Olympics, joined in. Tellingly, polls showed that 40 percent of British Columbia residents supported the aims of the protestors, compared to just 13 percent across the rest of Canada. Harsha Walia said to me, “We are seeing increasing resistance across the country as it becomes more visible how these Games are a big fraud.”

  The Games also coincided with the largest and longest-standing annual march in Vancouver: the February 14 Memorial Women’s March, which calls attention every Valentine’s Day to the hundreds of missing and murdered women (particularly Indigenous women) in British Columbia. The Vancouver Olympic Committee asked the Memorial March organizing committee if they would change the route of the march for the Olympic Games. Stella August, one of the organizers with the Downtown Eastside Power of Women Group, told me that wouldn’t happen: “We are warriors. We have been doing this for nineteen years and we aren’t going to bow down to the Olympics.”

  But it’s not just the Olympics. All international sporting events tend to act as neoliberal Trojan horses, preying on our love of sports to enforce a series of policies that would in any other situation be roundly rejected. Nowhere have I seen this more clearly than in South Africa in 2010, before that country’s historic turn as host of the most popular tournament on earth.

  South Africa 201021

  If you stepped off a plane in Johannesburg International Airport in 2010, the first imag
e you would have seen was a mammoth soccer ball hanging from the ceiling. It read, “Let’s Go! WORLD CUP!” If you swiveled your head, you would see that every sponsor from Coca-Cola to Anheuser-Busch had joined the party and branded its own banners with the FIFA seal. When your head dipped down, you would see another, less sponsored universe. Even inside this state-of-the-art airport, men from the ages of sixteen to sixty would ask if they could shine your shoes, carry your bags, or even walk you to a cab. It’s the informal economy fighting for breath under the smothering cloak of official sponsorship.

  Welcome to South Africa, a place of jagged contrasts: rich and poor, black and white, immigrant and everyone else, the dispossessed and the self-possessed fighting for elbow room. The old system of racist apartheid, as many are quick to point out, has been supplanted with “economic apartheid,” a reality visible throughout the country if you choose to see it. It is not uncommon, but always entirely tragic, to hear black South Africans reflect on how some parts of their lives were easier under apartheid. Under apartheid there was a welfare state. There was employment. There was massive state intervention in the economy. The white minority in power made these investments to stave off inevitable social unrest. Today, it’s a free-marketeer’s paradise. These are the normal conditions, the normal contrasts. But the 2010 World Cup took these contrasts and inflated them to the bursting point.

  The lead-up to the World Cup in South Africa could best be dubbed “Invictus in reverse.” For those who haven’t had the pleasure, the film Invictus dramatizes how Nelson Mandela used sports, particularly the nearly all-white sport of rugby, to unite the country after the fall of apartheid. The World Cup, in contrast, provoked efforts to camouflage every conflict and present the image of a united nation to the world. As Danny Jordaan, the World Cup’s lead South African organizer, said, “People will see we are African. We are world-class.”22 Note that the concern was with what the world would see, not what South Africans would see. What South Africans saw, as one young man told me, was that “football is looting our country.”

  The contrasts became conflicts because the South African government, at the behest of FIFA, was determined to put on a good show no matter the social cost. Thousands were displaced, forced from their homes into makeshift, tin-roofed shantytowns, to make way for stadiums and ensure that tourists could avoid unseemly scenes of poverty. The United Nations even issued a complaint on behalf of the twenty thousand people removed from the Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town, which World Cup organizers called an “eyesore.” The homeless were packed into guarded settlements hundreds of miles from the action. Johannesburg councilor Sipho Masigo justified their removal by saying, “Homelessness and begging are big problems in the city. You have to clean your house before you have guests. There is nothing wrong with that.”23

  There was also a heavy crackdown on those who make their living selling goods by the stadiums. Authorities told Regina Twala, who has been vending outside soccer matches for almost forty years, that she and others must remain at least one kilometer from the stadiums at all times. “They say they do not want us here,” Twala told the Sunday Independent. “They do not want us near the stadium and we have to close the whole place.”24

  To make matters worse, FIFA pushed the South African government to announce that it would arrest any vendors who tried to sell products emblazoned with the words “World Cup” or even the year, 2010. One young woman whose mother works in a clothing factory told me of the factory manager looking on hurriedly to make sure that “2010” didn’t find its way onto any of the labels. In addition, local beers, soft drinks, and fast foods not branded with the FIFA label could not be sold in close proximity to the stadiums. A once-vibrant landscape of small shops selling locally made, artisanal goods and food became dotted with the fast-food chains common in any American suburb. The areas around soccer stadiums started to resemble descriptions of the Green Zone in Iraq: an unreal, transplanted, homogeneous landscape. Samson, a trader in Durban, said to me, “This is the way we have always done business by the stadium. Who makes the laws now? FIFA?”

  Samson was only referencing the threats toward vendors, but his criticism was an equally valid description of the series of legal ordinances South Africa passed to prepare for the tournament. Declaring the World Cup a “protected event,” the government, in line with FIFA requirements, passed bylaws that put in writing “where people may drive and park their cars, where they may and may not trade or advertise, and where they may walk their dogs.” These laws also made clear that beggars or even those caught using foul language (presumably off the field of play) could be subject to arrest.

  Then there were the assassinations. In a story that made international news but gained next to no notice in the United States, two people were assassinated for “whistleblowing” on suspected corruption in the construction of the $150-million Mbombela Stadium. The Sunday World newspaper obtained a hit list with twenty names, including two journalists and numerous political leaders. Accusations swirled that the list was linked to the ruling African National Congress (ANC), which the ANC has denied in somewhat bizarre terms. “The ANC wants to reiterate its condemnation of any murder of any person, no matter what the motive may be,” said ANC spokesperson Paul Mbenyane.25 It’s never a good sign when you have to make clear to the public that you are staunchly opposed to murder.

  To add to this shadow of political violence, an extremist right-wing white-supremacist organization, the Suidlanders, was found to be stockpiling arms in advance of the tournament. After the April 2010 murder of white-supremacist leader Eugene Terreblanche, the Suidlanders held meetings around the country and encouraged people to boycott the World Cup in solidarity with their cause. “The time has come for people to realise they cannot be on the sideline any longer and everybody’s participation is needed to defend the last bastion of a true Christian nation against total annihilation,” read the statement on their website. While the Suidlanders committed no violence during the World Cup, the fear factor enhanced the ANC’s efforts to create a security state.

  All of this—displacements, crackdowns on informal trade, the rumblings of a terrorist white minority, even accusations of state-sponsored assassinations—echoed the days of apartheid. Responsibility for this state of affairs falls firmly on the shoulders of FIFA, but also on the ANC. After all, South Africa’s turn hosting the World Cup was meant to bolster both “brands.” I saw this firsthand when I took a private tour of the breathtaking $457 million Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban, South Africa. I left the stadium utterly stunned, for both better and worse.

  Named after the late, legendary leader of the South African Communist Party, the stadium is a stylistic masterpiece. The eggshell-white facility is visible for miles, its milky waves rising from the earth in sharp contrast with the dusty urban environs that surround it. The open roof has a graceful, slender arc connecting one side of the stadium to the other. The arc itself is a wonder: it starts as one clean curve, then splits into two separate stretches of white. This is an homage to the postapartheid South African flag, whose stripes symbolize “the convergence of diverse elements within South African society, taking the road ahead in unity.”26 Well-heeled adrenaline junkies can even go to the top of the arc and bungee-swing across the pitch. Unity is now a thrill-ride for the benefactors of the postapartheid regime.

  On one side of the stadium, behind the goal, is a completely open vista that majestically welcomes the Durban skyline into the stadium. But the true engineering achievement of Moses Mabhida Stadium is its bleachers. They angle up with such subtlety that the effect is of a saucer instead of a bowl. Each of the seventy-four thousand seats has a picture-perfect sightline on the action, whether you are in the nosebleeds or the corporate boxes. The seats themselves are painted in rich colors: the first level is royal blue to represent the ocean, the middle one is green to signify the land, and the top is brown, as a sportswriter said to me, “so it looks full on television.” (Sure enough, filling the stadium
—and all the new stadiums—in the two years since the World Cup has been a quixotic effort.) The most striking color in the stadium is not in the bleachers, though. It’s the grass, which is a green so bright it hurts the eyes, as if every blade were painstakingly colored with a magic marker. The shade was achieved with the aid of near-infinite gallons of crystal-clear water, which I saw constantly irrigating the field.

  I raise the issue of the stadium’s incomparable beauty because South African politicians in support of the World Cup accused detractors of what they called “Afro-pessimism.” They alleged that critics lacked faith that South Africa could host an event of this magnitude. They held up the steady stream of racist invective in the European press about the “looming disaster of the South African World Cup” to implicate any critics, no matter their motives. If the World Cup “lost,” they argued, then Africa would also lose. But this argument was aimed at squelching dissent, not challenging European prejudice. When a country already dotted with perfectly usable stadiums spends approximately six billion dollars on new facilities, that’s an unconscionable squandering of resources no matter the continent. The situation grows even more egregious when you learn that 48 percent of South Africans live on less than 322 rand (about 42 dollars) a month.27

  At the stadium, it became clear that the health of the grass took precedence over the health of South Africa’s poor. In townships across the country, lack of access to water spurs regular protests. As Simon Magagula, who lives in a mud house near one of the new stadiums, said to the New York Times, “We’ve been promised a better life, but look how we live. If you pour water into a glass, you can see things moving inside.”28 To see an architectural marvel like Moses Mabhida Stadium in a country where so many lack access to basic, affordable shelter is to witness politicians’ interests colliding with those of the citizens they’ve been elected to serve. And to see such a stadium named in honor of Moses Mabhida, who symbolizes the struggle against poverty for millions of South Africans, is to stare at irony in at its most lurid form.