Brazil's Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Struggle for Democracy

Preface to the 2016 Edition

As this new Olympic edition of Brazil’s Dance with the Devil goes to press, the latest news out of Brazil is changing by the day. A political crisis involving hundreds of millions of dollars in bribery and budget fixing—known broadly as the Petrobras (the name of the mostly state-run oil industry) scandal—threatens to bring down President Dilma Rousseff’s Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) before the Olympic flame is even lit.

The book you are about to read is on one level about the World Cup and the Olympics, but it is also a case study in how one of the most celebrated democratic governments in the history of Latin America squandered all of its goodwill and popular support and opened the door for a defeated and demoralized right wing to stand on the precipice of seizing power. A judicial coup—in the words of Rio-based journalist Glenn Greenwald—could be under way with the centrist PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, or Brazilian Democratic Movement Party) of Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes and Governor Luiz Fernando Pezão poised to take power.¹

As São Paolo–based socialist activist Dylan Stillwood said to me:

Dilma has spent her entire second term desperately trying to appease every faction of the ruling class and the institutional right. This effort at an alliance has failed. The PT government has long consisted of a pact where investors profited mightily and the streets were quiet thanks to progressive reforms and the general sense that the left was in power, and this model was a smashing success for a decade. Domestically, their biggest partners in crime were state-centered heavy industry, especially the four construction giants—Odebrecht, OAS, Camargo Corrêa, and Andrade Gutierrez—and privatized or semi-privatized titans like Petrobras. They showed off their babies: big projects like the Belo Monte Dam and the redirection of São Francisco River, and the crowning glory on the world stage was supposed to be the World Cup and the Olympics. All this lies in ruins and the pact is over. The system is in crisis, economically and politically, and the PT no longer serves a purpose for capital, so scapegoating them is a convenient rallying cry for a new right-wing movement.

The Workers’ Party is not drawing millions of defenders into the streets, partly because there is mass dissatisfaction with the status quo and partly because—as I will detail in the following pages—the World Cup and the Olympics have exacerbated the hard times and highlighted a government woefully out of touch. The greatest contributing factor to the absence of engaged mass support for the Workers’ Party has been Dilma’s inability to follow through on her campaign promises to expand social spending and civil liberties. Instead, as Sean Purdy, a professor at the University of São Paulo, wrote in Jacobin, Dilma has backtracked, pushing through massive cuts to health care, education, social welfare, and pension rights that have been coupled with a government-sponsored anti-terrorist bill which may criminalize dissent and social movements.²

The result is that—as of this writing—68 percent of the country wants Dilma to be impeached or resign.³ But what’s waiting in the wings is very dark, very frightening, and getting organized. The investigation into corruption, money laundering, and budget fixing has been conjoined with a coordinated media offensive by the country’s largest outlet, the right-wing media conglomerate Globo, and mass demonstrations egged on by this Fox-News-on-steroids media giant. These protests have brought millions of people into the streets. NBC’s Chuck Todd retweeted a photo of this protest with the caption The People vs. the President.⁴ Yet this is an ugly and dishonest oversimplification. Unlike the marches against the World Cup, which are discussed in the conclusion of this book, these are not demonstrations of people across the political spectrum, enraged at a nation’s priorities of building stadiums and staging mega-events instead of meeting basic needs. These protests have had a decidedly right-wing, middle-class, militaristic character, with many in the streets openly calling for a military coup. In a country where that was a reality just a few short decades ago, it is a threat with teeth. The right is attempting to take advantage of this climate to create a kind of state with more in common economically with the dictator Augusto Pinochet’s neoliberal fever dream in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s than the current welfare state, however flawed. This is seen in one of the organizations at the heart of the protests, the Free Brazil Movement. As Rio-based freelance journalist Catherine Osborn reported, this group was founded by members and alums of another group that’s been spreading fast in this country: Estudantes Pela Liberdade, ‘Students for Liberty.’⁵

Students for Liberty is for cutting government spending, privatizing state companies, and reducing regulation. They have received funding from US right-wing billionaire Charles Koch’s foundation. This Koch vibe on the protests has been exemplified in one viral photo of two demonstrators—a white woman and man marching with their purebred dog while their nanny—who is black—pushes their two children in a stroller behind them.⁶

The role of the Olympics in the politics of impeachment is critical. There are enough lurid tales of kickbacks, bribery, and forced displacement swirling around these Olympic Games to keep the Brazilian judiciary busy for the next decade. Construction magnate Marcelo Odebrecht, whose family’s eponymous company helped build many of the World Cup and Olympic facilities, was sentenced to nineteen years in prison. News is now leaking that the charges against him link his role in the Petrobras scandal with Grupo Odebrecht’s World Cup construction.⁷ Yet there is not a word about the Olympics side of Grupo Odebrecht’s criminality and corruption. That line of demarcation between the World Cup and the Olympics is very important to understand. The World Cup projects were overseen by the Workers’ Party and sprouted all over the country. The Olympics will take place entirely in Rio, and that matters.

Theresa Williamson of the Rio grassroots organization Catalytic Communities told me:

The Olympics fit like a glove in Rio because of the propensity for corruption combined with the centrality of real estate and construction interests—those most set to gain from the Games. We all knew from early on that Rio would pull off the Games, that they would just leave works to the last hour so they could get away with hyping up costs. The fact that Odebrecht has been implicated in the corruption at the national level and is also building the Olympic Park is reflective of just how extensive its tentacles are, how widespread the corruption is, that it is all linked.

It strains credulity to think that Odebrecht acted in a corrupt manner with regards to oil but was squeaky clean on the Olympics. The only difference between Petrobras and the Olympics is that the Petrobras bribery and money laundering took place primarily under the eye of the PT, while the Olympic bids—unlike the World Cup—were organized by the centrist PMDB. Or as Williamson notes, The Olympics has been organized by a local/state coalition that barely includes the PT.

Paes and Pezão of the PMDB oversaw a process whereby Olympic facilities were bid upon by consortiums of real estate firms, like the Rio Mais (More Rio) syndicate, which included Odebrecht as well as the companies Andrade Gutierrez and Carvalho Hosken. Paes and Pezão ignored the Rio-based left-wing organizations and NGOs agitating against these kinds of consortiums. These activist groups demonstrated and argued against and even designed alternative Olympic plans to combat these syndicates, which they reasoned were both artificially inflating costs because of the absence of competitive bidding and colluding in transparent efforts to displace people in an effort to grab more of Rio’s valuable real estate. As Chris Gaffney, for years a Rio-based activist/journalist, said to me, The construction industrial complex of Brazil is similar to the military industrial complex of the USA. Instead of Halliburton and the Carlyle Group, Brazil has Odebrecht and all the rest. There is much speculation that the investigation could reach Olympics contracts, but as of this writing, there is no evidence of anyone in the judiciary making that obvious leap.

Numerous sources have also told me that there is widespread belief that if Dilma is impeached and deposed, especially if it takes place before the summer, then any investigations—no matter how shallow—into Olympics contracts would magically evaporate. And guess who would be installed in power if the Workers’ Party takes the fall for Petrobras and budget manipulation? Cue dramatic music: it would be the PMDB and perhaps Eduardo Paes himself. The PMDB is the biggest party in Brazil and has been part of the coalition of every government after the dictatorship, whether left or right wing. Lula campaigned for Pezão and Paes. Dilma’s vice president, Michel Temer, is a PMDB leader. As Stillwood said to me, This is the most dramatic example of the PT’s cynical alliances coming back to bite them hard in the ass.

And here is how the Olympics could lead to a judicial coup in Brazil: if Dilma’s government falls and the Games go smoothly, it could contribute to the utterly undeserved image that Rio mayor Eduardo Paes is trying to cultivate as a competent, pro-business manager who makes the trains run on time. This narrative ignores how the Olympics have been organized on the backs of the poor. It ignores the brutal debt, displacement, and militarization that have surrounded the Games. It also ignores news of Odebrecht’s list of politicians who take bribes (a list that includes Paes and nicknames him Nervosinho, or perpetually annoyed guy).⁸ These facts will be overlooked, helping to create a counter-narrative of a country cleansing itself through the successful staging of Olympics glory. This is a narrative that will thrill audiences, stoke Brazilian nationalism, please international investors, and make the Koch brothers light their cigars. Ignored will be the ways that the lighting of the Olympic torch could also facilitate the torching of Brazil’s fragile democracy. To understand the challenges facing the staging of the Olympic Games and get a sense of how we arrived at this point, I hope that the following pages will help untangle a situation that is getting more snarled, knotty, and dangerous by the day.

Introduction to the 2016 Edition

A major public health crisis is stalking Brazil in advance of the 2016 Olympics. The Zika virus, carried through mosquitos, has created a surge of birth defects, affecting the brains of newborn babies. The virus is thought to have arrived during the 2014 World Cup, from Polynesia, and has nested and found purchase in Brazil because of the climate, a poor public health system crippled by recession, and a substandard system of sanitation. Thousands of babies have already been affected by the Zika virus and that could mushroom into the hundreds of thousands. It has the feel of the Old Testament: disease, locusts, and a punishment from a wrathful God because of hubris, greed, corruption, and pretty much all of the seven deadly sins rolled up into one two-year bacchanalia. Yet for the oligarchs and political elites, who assumed the daunting task of playing host to the World Cup and Olympics in that two-year stretch, the rewards have been manifest. The poor, however, get the plague. It is as if God has gone neoliberal.

Juliana Barbassa, longtime Rio journalist and author of the utterly indispensable book Dancing with the Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink (a lot of devil-dancing in Rio) said to me, the

Rio de Janeiro government’s response to the spread of Zika has been slow and inadequate; support for families whose babies have suffered from the severe brain damage linked to the virus has been grossly inadequate. The state’s health care system (like its sewage system, its transportation system, et cetera) was underfunded and under tremendous strain before preparations for the World Cup and the Olympics siphoned away public funds. The additional burden of hosting these mega-events, together with a deep recession and a slump in the price of oil, has created a state of emergency. Hospitals have had to turn away all but the most extreme emergencies. Some even boarded shut their doors. All this raises further questions about the spending goals and priorities of the state’s and the city’s authorities.

But whether one views the crisis as something mystical or enragingly man-made, one fact is certain: the Rio 2016 Olympics will arrive caked in feces. There is the bullshit of broken promises about the benefits that the Games will bring—the kind that accompanies all the Olympics—and then there is the literal shit, long a reality in Rio and now visible to the world. The rivers, streams, and oceans are filled with floating feces, as the raw sewage of the city is, per custom, pumped directly into the water. Even the most pristine-appearing of beaches are, in the words of an Associated Press report, thick with putrid sludge, and periodic die-offs leave the Olympic lake, Rodrigo de Freitas, littered with rotting fish.¹

This is an Olympic-sized problem, as athletes who participate in open-water sports will carry, in the words of Kristina Mena, an expert in waterborne viruses, an infection risk of 99%.² One of these viruses has been identified as MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), a flesh-eating bacteria. As of this writing not one of the many water venues has been deemed safe for swimming or boating. The waterborne virus levels in the water amount to something in the neighborhood of 1.7 million times the level of what would be considered hazardous on a Southern California beach. John Griffith, a marine biologist at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, told the Associated Press, It’s all the water from the toilets and the showers and whatever people put down their sinks, all mixed up, and it’s going out into the beach waters. Those kinds of things would be shut down immediately if found here.³

Austrian sailors who practiced briefly in the Rio waters emerged with violent vomiting, fevers, and diarrhea. Their level of dehydration was so intense they needed IVs after arriving at shore. And these were sailors just practicing. Imagine those who compete in what is called The Olympic Marathon, a 10-kilometer race that requires competitors to spend as much as two hours in the water.

Emily White, cofounder of Dreamfuel and the manager of several elite, Olympic-level swimmers said to me,

There have been countless examples of terrible water conditions for our open-water athletes over the past decade; however, the water analyses coming out of Rio are truly horrifying. Yes, not every sport at the Olympics is on or in water, but clearly the choice in location of the open-water races in Rio did not take the athletes’ health or safety into consideration. Athletes are the reason the events exist in the first place—they need to be the absolute priority in all decisions made surrounding the races they compete in.

If nothing else, this horror story sheds light on what has been a consistent problem in Rio for decades, and one that has only become more intense as the city has become increasingly wealthy and increasingly unequal. As Barbassa said to me, Rio’s foul waters are a symptom of larger government inability to meet people’s basic needs.

This is accurate. Brazil is one of the wealthiest nations on earth: a twenty-first-century ascendant power with a nineteenth-century sewage system. One of the cruelest lies of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics double whammy that was foisted upon Rio is that hosting these international sporting events would provide an opportunity to finally upgrade its waste management system. Yes, the argument was that spending billions in public funds for the World Cup and the Olympics would be a more sensible path toward better sewage treatment than perhaps . . . just spending billions to upgrade the sewage system. As we are seeing right now in Brazil, the country is slashing costs for the Olympics. But luxury amenities are not being cut. Instead, false promises are made—that bringing the Games will also mean some kind of development that will aid the poor.

The only benefit of the Olympics—and it’s a benefit born of irony—is that at least we are talking about this constant health risk that has long stalked the people of the city. Yet crediting the Olympics for this is like crediting racist police officers for launching the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Yes, they were a necessary ingredient, but only in the cruelest possible way.

What is particularly noxious is that, with so many pressing needs in Rio, the favelados (people who live in the precarious communities known as favelas) are being blamed: as if the poor having nowhere to send their sewage are just piling it in the river. Actually, it’s the expansion of Rio, the growth of the massive mega-hotels and gated communities that is creating more waste and the need to pump poop into the waters. That is why some of the city’s most beautiful beaches have been abandoned.

These Olympic waters are hazardous for athletes and hazardous for the people of Rio. If there was ever a reason for the social movements of the city resisting the Olympic monolith and the athletes to come together, it should be for that most basic and elemental of rights: clean water. Whether this resistance takes place is an open question. As I will explain in the coming pages, the 2013 protests that swept Brazil presented a historic opportunity to expose the lies that accompany these kinds of mega-events. Yet the protests did not return for the World Cup. But I was there and the reasons they did not return say far more about Brazil and what is required in order to host these games than it does about people’s willingness to fight.

The Banality of Doves

Before the opening game of the World Cup, FIFA, the organization that oversees international soccer, thought it would be a good idea to have three Brazilian children each release a dove of peace. One of those children was Jeguaká, a thirteen-year-old boy from Brazil’s Guarani tribe. Jeguaká had the courage to make a political stand in front of seventy thousand soccer fans and what he thought would be an international audience. But even on the highest possible cultural platform practically surrounded by fireworks, sparkles, and a neon sign blaring LOOK AT ME his very presence was still denied.

The Guarani are Brazil’s largest tribal group. They have also been subject to incredible levels of violence by ranchers who occupy their land for cattle and sugar production. Driven onto reservations where disease and malnutrition are rife, their situation may actually be get- ting worse. The ruling Workers’ Party is attempting to take away even more of their land, which led to violent confrontations—and dramatic images—on the eve of the World Cup in the capital city of Brasília. The effects on the tribe are brutal. There is poverty, there is infant mortality, and in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul, the Guarani-Kaiowá, a Guarani subgroup, suffer the highest suicide rate on earth.

Young Jeguaká wasn’t going to allow himself to be feel-good FIFA scenery while his people suffered. After releasing the dove, he unfurled a banner that read, "Demarcação! or Demarcation Now!" This is the highly charged slogan used by indigenous groups attempting to retain their land rights.

Jeguaká’s father, Olívio Jekupe, said he had no idea that his son was going to do such a thing. Olívio added that the action showed the world that we are not standing still. . . . My son showed the world what we need the most: the demarcation of our lands. There was only one problem, however, with this brave display: the cameras quickly cut away. Young Jeguaká’s actions went undiscussed by broadcasters and analysts on the scene. As to who made the decision to cut the cameras, FIFA officials would only say, No comment. Whoever was responsible for censoring Jeguaká Mirim, the end result was that the only politics that FIFA allowed to be on display were the banality of doves.

The World Cup Seen Through Tear Gas

The corrupt ways of FIFA boss Sepp Blatter caught up with him in 2015 as his offices were raided by police, he was forced to resign, and at the time of this writing may be staring at a future in which he is wearing an orange jumpsuit. But just a few short months before his ignominious fall, Blatter was in Brazil, strutting like a rooster because of the absence of mass protests during Brazil’s World Cup. Where is all this social unrest? he asked in a mocking snark that, along with bribery and corruption, had long been his trademark. Then Blatter waxed rhapsodic about how football is more than a religion in Brazil, as if that explains the absence of millions of people marching on his FIFA-quality stadiums. Similar sentiments were expressed by Brazil’s deputy minister of sports, Luis Fernandes, who said that during the World Cup, the passion for football has taken over.

This position was echoed continuously in the US media. The Washington Post carried headlines that read, In Brazil, Smiles, Parties Have Replaced Protests and A Nation’s Haves, Have Nots Unite for a Common Cause. No need to pick on the Washington Post though, as this was the line in multiple media outlets during the tournament. As is often the case with the mainstream media, these journalists started with a predetermined narrative and then hunted for confirmations to match their own embedded perspective, a perspective shaped by Sepp Blatter, his broadcast partners, and a blinkered reality that comes from staying in five-star hotels. The closest they get to actual people in a host country is when their black SUVs get a flat tire and they need to hail a taxicab. Yes, it is certainly true that million-person protests did not take place during the World Cup, as they did during the 2013 Confederations Cup. But the conclusion that now everything is awesome and parties have replaced protests is simply not true. I saw a profoundly different reality. The fact is that there were protests, strikes, and battles with police happening every day. In the favelas, there were demonstrations against the police occupations because of the World Cup as well as protests over the shootings of children by police who were part of the favela-pacification project. If the protests were far smaller than the ones a year before, it is because the streets were militarized down to the last inch, ruled by a military police force that would gas or shoot at any group of people who attempted to gather and raise political demands.

I attended one of these FIFA Go Home demonstrations and it was a fearful exercise in facing state intimidation. The gathering was at a public square. An hour before the start of the march, the square was already surrounded by riot police with machine guns in hand. One would have had to gently push aside and say excuse me to someone with a machine gun and a badge just to get there. This was daunting for me as a journalist from the United States. Imagine if you are someone with a family, a job, and a life that you had to return to following the World Cup.

Then once we gathered together, the police would, every few minutes, randomly pick out someone in the crowd of five hundred and search his or her bag. People would chant and yell at the police, but five other officers surrounded the one doing the searching. The police kept their fingers on the triggers of their automatic weaponry at all times. One protestor took out a horn and played Darth Vader’s theme music from Star Wars, but other than that, there was little anyone could do. As the police beat their shields, a sizable group of World Cup tourists at an outdoor café cheered them on. They even produced a warped version of the classic soccer chant, Olé olé olé polícia! Then, the military police, positioned at a safe remove, established the reason for their presence and fired several large canisters of tear gas toward the protestors. What the military police possessed in presentation, they lacked in knowledge of physics, as the trajectory was flawed and the first round landed only about fifty yards in front of them. That, plus a strong headwind, sent the gas back onto the gas-mask-adorned troops, and back onto the cheering tourists, who quickly went from enjoying the show to wearing nothing but expressions of pain and panic, some stumbling while scooping up their crying, young children. (In full disclosure, I was also gassed, which may have created a bias against those firing tear gas. At the risk of stating the obvious, it burns like hell.) Within seconds, the tourists dispersed in a mad panic and a packed café became a chaotic mess of overturned chairs and unpaid checks. Technically, even if gassed, it was against the law for all these tourists to dine and dash, and that was more of a crime than anything I saw the protestors do. The protestors were trying to get as close as possible to legendary Maracanã Stadium, which was about to host a World Cup game for the first time in sixty-four years. The protestors were already surrounded by riot police with bat-length batons, so this particular line of armored officers, while very dramatic in appearance—with their all-black regalia and a line of horses wearing gas masks—seemed a bit superfluous initially, their purpose unclear.

The tear gas from the botched maneuver caused one addled, panicked police officer, as caught on camera by the Associated Press videographers, to fire live ammunition over the heads of protestors. Then the riot police moved in with baseball bat–sized batons. It was an altogether ugly exercise that provoked chants calling FIFA Brazil’s new dictatorship.

The demonstrations following the 2013 protests haven’t been as large because the military police have created a reality in which it is terrifying for people to express their dissent, all to the joy of Sepp Blatter. Larissa, an activist from São Paulo, explained the size of the demonstrations to Al Jazeera by saying, "Some of us are in jail, others are