How
Brazil’s Olympic dream died
Yes,
the games have been fun and successful so far. But when it’s over
Brazil will go back to being … Brazil.
By ANNABELLE TIMSIT
8/14/16, 12:28 AM CET
When the
announcement came in 2009 that Brazil would host the Olympic Games,
then-President Lula da Silva ran around the room hugging his aides
and friends with a Brazilian flag draped over his shoulders. That
triumphant moment for Brazil—the perennially struggling nation that
Charles de Gaulle once gibed “is the country of the future and
always will be”— symbolized its role as the rising star of the
“BRIC” bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the developing
world.
Now, seven years
later, the boycott of the opening ceremony of the games by Lula and
his political disciple, President Dilma Rousseff, has come to
symbolize a very different Brazil. Roiling underneath the success of
the games as they hit their midway mark—including the visually
stunning, sustainability-themed opening ceremony—is a country that
is in deep trouble with no obvious way out. It’s not just that
Rousseff faces an impeachment trial in the next few weeks, which the
Senate confirmed in an overwhelming majority three days ago; and that
her mentor Lula—perhaps the most influential Brazilian politician
of the past quarter century—is under investigation for corruption
and obstruction of justice in the giant Petrobras graft scandal.
It’s also that
Brazil has failed to live up to the promise of the games, which were
pitched as a chance for the country to reinvent itself and to
revitalize infrastructure, transportation systems, natural basins and
crumbling public finances. This all sounds great on paper (or in this
case, on TV) but the national self-congratulations underway in Rio is
belied by the reality on the ground. Those who know the country well
say that its political, economic and social fabric has been
deteriorating these past few years, not improving. And the Olympics
themselves are a perfect symbol of that double standard.
* * *
Consider
environmental sustainability, so memorably highlighted in the opening
ceremony, which featured videos of rising sea levels drowning
coastline cities such as Amsterdam, Dubai, Florida, Lagos and, yes,
Rio de Janeiro.
Rio’s Organizing
Committee launched a sustainability management plan in 2013 aimed at
making this year’s games the most “sustainable” ever. Instead,
ecological scandals have been plaguing the country since the 2009
announcement. Despite promises from Olympic officials that the games
would be a great opportunity to use public funds to clean up Rio’s
water sources, the World Health Organization issued awarning that
some of those sources failed to meet Brazilian water quality
standards before the games and would be classed under WHO guidelines
as “poor or very poor.” Athletes have been advised not to drink
the water, which is full of viruses, bacteria and feces. And this
problem is not, as many would like to suggest, a natural byproduct of
the fast modernization required of any Olympic host city: As early as
2011, periodic monitoring showed that the Urca and Bica beaches were
unfit for swimming for 95 percent of the year, Leblon and Arpoador
for 50 percent of that time, and Ipanema (where the highest
concentration of tourists will settle for the duration of the games)
40 percent.
Meanwhile, in the
Guanabara Bay, the site of sailing events during the games, raw
sewage and trash float on top of the water, readily apparent. Despite
securing more than $400 million for cleanup efforts, officials say
that only about 50 percent of the sewage that flows to the bay is
treated.
Then there are the
carbon emissions that appear to betray the Olympic promise of a
“clean games.” Olympic officials boasted of forest restoration in
areas of the Atlantic Forest in Rio state as well as sustainable
architecture aimed at reducing residual carbon emissions from the
games. The opening ceremony featured videos of the earth’s
temperature spiking over time and how drastically the Antarctic ice
sheet has dwindled in recent decades. But coming from a country that
is home to about one-third of the world’s rain forests and whose
government has steadily been encouraging deforestation through the
building of megadams in the Amazon basin, the warning sounded hollow.
In fact, the Rio
Olympics is simply not on any legitimate ground to be giving the
world a lesson in sustainability. Among the many scandals plaguing
the games is the situating of the Olympic golf course in a section of
the city that overlaps with the Marapendi Environmental Protection
Area, a coastal habitat for highly diverse native vegetation and
animal life, some of which is unique to Brazil. It was built there
even though Rio already has two regulation golf courses, sparking
protests all over the city, with activists denouncing it as an
“ecological holocaust.”
Of course, none of
this political and ecological turmoil has been mentioned much during
the games or the opening ceremony, which was presided over by interim
President Michel Temer—who, by the way, has also been accused of
corruption in the Lava Jato scandal.
* * *
Societal tensions
have also played a huge role in the ugly reality behind the glamorous
sporting events now underway in Rio. Racism is one of the toughest
problems facing Brazil’s ethnically diverse population.
Afro-Brazilians are routinely abused by the police and are often the
first victims of the violence of the favelas. The Brazilian
government could have used the games as an opportunity to build
sustainable public housing and reduce violence in the streets.
Instead, it forcefully displaced hundreds of families living in
favelas ahead of the games and spent more than $200,000 erecting
opaque boards on a wall to hide Maré, a complex of 16 favela
communities, from incoming tourists’ view.
Meanwhile, the
Brazilian police remains one of the most brutal police forces in the
world; according to ThinkProgress, although Brazil’s population is
50 percent smaller than that of the U.S., its police forces have
killed the same number of people in the past five years as American
police have in the past 30 years.
And then, of course,
there is the problem of public corruption. The Olympics are costing
Brazil $12 billion, one of the highest figures in Olympic history; in
trying to convince the world that it could manage that number, the
city of Rio claimed that most of the costs would be put up by the
private sector. But according to independent research, nearly the
opposite has happened: A flood of public money is being returned to
Brazilian billionaires, who own the land that will host Olympic
attractions, in the form of tax breaks, government loans and land
transfers.
How did that happen?
Rio’s charismatic and popular mayor, Eduardo Paes, tried to use the
Olympics as an excuse to modernize his city. But in doing so, he
ceded land rights and development concessions to private companies
with plans to gentrify, not just develop, Rio. One of those
businessmen, Carlos Carvalho, who owns the land in Barra where the
Olympic Village was built, got into trouble last year for tellingThe
Guardian that he wanted to turn Barra into “a city of the elite, of
good taste.” In a very Brazilian twist, Carvalho was revealed to be
one of the top donors for Paes’s 2012 reelection campaign.
And after the games
are over, all 31 of the Village’s 17-story towers will be
transformed into luxury condos. There are no plans to dedicate any of
this land to affordable public housing. The plan to modernize Rio,
then, came with strings attached, and a desire to give precedence to
luxury development that has snowballed into a social cleansing
project.
The games have also
suffered from a lack of coordination between the different levels of
government. The mayor’s office and the state government have been
trading accusations over the ecological problems and other scandals
plaguing the games. At the end of the day, both the cleanup of
pollution in Guanabara Bay and the coordinated response to rising
crime in Rio are the responsibility of the state-level government,
not the city, and in the vacuum, no one has taken responsibility for
cleaning up the mess.
It would be
difficult to name anyone who is even in a position to take this
political and fiscal responsibility. President Rousseff, long seen as
a strong and steady leader, is hated by a vast section of her
country’s population. In fact, she has the worst approval ratings
for a Brazilian president since 1992. Accused of spending money
without congressional approval and taking out unauthorized loans from
state banks to boost the national budget ahead of her reelection
campaign, it is looking increasingly likely that she will be
impeached in the weeks following the Olympics, and replaced by her
vice president, who is no stranger to corruption charges himself.
Meanwhile, former President Da Silva is being charged with alleged
obstruction of justice, the first step in a process that will lead to
a trial for Da Silva’s role in the infamousLava Jato scandal. He
could spend the rest of his life in federal prison.
Knowing all this,
it’s no surprise that neither politician chose to attend the
Olympic opening ceremony. In fact, Dilma told Radio France
Internationale that she had no intention of taking “a secondary
position” to her mentee-turned-replacement, Michel Temer. The
question of who will take up the mantle and lead Brazil through its
post-Olympics development, for now, has no answer.
The situation is not
all dire. The Olympics have resulted in some improvements for the
people of Rio, including safer infrastructure and an expanded subway
system. The Brazilian government has also enacted some innovative
measures to try to counter negative carbon effects. But an Olympic
Games meant to serve as a unifying political and societal celebration
of Brazilian culture has actually reduced the quality of life of many
Brazilians and re-emphasized socio-economic and cultural fault lines.
And that is the reality all Brazilians will return to when the fun
and games are over.
Annabelle Timsit is
a researcher for Politico Magazine.
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