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

  In 2010 the pressure to move out began, with eviction notices and political harassment becoming a regular part of life for the occupiers. The activists attempted to meet with government officials but were not granted a meeting until 2012. The Sport and Leisure Ministry, the only people with any real say over the building and the space, chose not to attend, which sent a loud-and-clear message that the museum would be reduced to rubble to make way for World Cup and Olympic parking lots. The squat then became an occupation as the activists made clear their intentions to occupy the space as a peaceful protest. “We speak to the government and they just put us off,” Carlos told me. “But we will not leave because we want a place to show the power, history, and pride of the Indigenous people.”

  In a country of two hundred million people that purports to celebrate its diversity like few other places on earth, it’s as if a velvet rope keeps Indigenous people out of the Carnival. The most recent census counted between 650,000 and 850,000 Indigenous people in all of Brazil, which is ludicrously low; Indigenous people in cities tend to not disclose their ethnic heritage because of the institutional racism and disrespect they still face.

  The entire structure of the ICC building, with its gorgeous architecture and historical importance, could have been rebuilt as a locus of pride. Developers estimated the cost at a mere ten million dollars—a pittance compared to the Maracanã rebuild. It could have become a symbol of Brazil’s rich and diverse history. It could even have attracted tourists coming to Rio for the World Cup and Olympics, a feel-good advertisement for the beneficence of the Brazilian state. Instead, it’s slated to become parking lots.

  The same logic that would bulldoze the ICC has also shaped the Maracanã renovation. We managed to tour the inside several days later, after much persistence, this time without Chris Gaffney. Although he is a walking encyclopedia of its history, I was grateful Chris was not there. He treasures this stadium for what it was—and what we saw in the bowl of the Maracanã was its negation. From the field to the upper decks, the history of the Maracanã was being unceremoniously ripped apart. The level of demolition was particularly shocking because of the two hundred million dollars spent on repairs just a few years earlier—yet another example of needed resources getting flushed in favor of cosmetic stadium rebuilds.

  As I watched the destruction I thought about one of the Indigenous occupiers, a young, fiercely intelligent man named Arrasari, who said, “I am not moving. I will stay until I am no more than a pillar of salt. They think we’ll go because they’ve cut us down like trees. But the root remains.”

  It is true that if you need to uproot a tree, you don’t try to cut it down: you bring a bulldozer. That is exactly what the Brazilian state did to the ICC. In March 2013, the bulldozers, backed by men with guns, stormed the cultural center. Two hundred police officers dressed in military garb, firing tear gas canisters and using pepper spray, took the center. Chris Gaffney was quoted in the New York Times: “By resorting to force, this reflects the general attitude of state authorities toward the people getting in the way of their sports projects.”32 I was relieved that Chris’s voice was a part of the article. The Times, however, quoted neither Carlos Tukano nor Arrasari. They were invisible to the end.

  Environment

  The environment is an extremely sensitive subject in Brazil, home to the “lungs of the earth.” The Amazon rainforest creates 20 percent of the earth’s oxygen and 25 percent of its drinkable fresh water.33 It has also been razed and burned with shocking speed as Brazil’s economy has hummed.

  It is, of course, not difficult to understand why the last thing people in Brasília, Brazil’s capital, want to hear on the subject are lectures from the Global North. Lula once said, “What we cannot accept is that those who failed to take care of their own forests, who did not preserve what they had and deforested everything and are responsible for most of the gases poured into the air and for the greenhouse effect, they shouldn’t be sticking their noses into Brazil’s business and giving their two cents’ worth.”34 He certainly has a point, although it says something damning about our world that the logic of our system dictates Brazil’s sovereign right to destroy the “lungs of the world.” By making statements that make destroying rainforests sound like a bold act of Global South defiance, Lula also disregards the powerful history of Brazil’s own environmental community, which was critical in the founding of his own Workers’ Party and has been fighting for decades to preserve the Amazon. As legendary Brazilian environmentalist Chico Mendes put it, “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees; then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.”35

  The World Cup—which is a national operation, as opposed to the Rio-centric Olympics—means greater stress on this critical ecosystem. This can be seen most sharply in the efforts to build a “FIFA-quality stadium” in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. Brazil will be spending $325 million, almost forty million more than the original estimates, while uprooting acres of the most ecologically delicate region on the planet. Are the “lungs of the world” really the best place for a new stadium? Even those in Brazil who advocate for the national autonomy of the rainforest region, without interference from international environmental bodies, are crying foul. This particular stadium does not only defy environmental needs, it defies even its own logic. The Amazon is already home to a stadium that draws far less than its capacity. Why do all this for just four World Cup matches? Romário, our soccer star–turned–politician, called the project “absurd”: “There will be a couple games there, and then what? Who will go? It is an absolute waste of time and money.”36 Since this particular “white elephant” seems to be uniting opposition of both the “wasteful spending” crowd and the “pro-breathing” crowd, the government is looking for options for the stadium after the World Cup that seem fiscally sound. One idea being floated is to turn the entire stadium into a massive open-air prison—a use with a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.37

  Security

  Then there is the question of security, a word that means different things to different people. When the planners of the World Cup and the Olympics discuss security, they are speaking about the security of the wealthy to travel to Brazil and feel as safe as they would in a gated community. USA Today wrote, without attribution, that Brazil “has the seventh-highest homicide rate in the world and only eight percent of reported crimes are solved.”38 Every lurid new story from Brazil, including two grisly (yet entirely unrelated) beheadings, now receives more publicity in the United States than any crime in Brazil’s history, precisely because these stories are framed in terms of whether World Cup tourists will feel safely sheltered.

  Yet the question of security, as we will see in chapter 6, is less about keeping tourists feeling unthreatened and unscathed than about introducing a profoundly intrusive “new normal” of surveillance. At a cost of nine hundred million dollars, the twelve World Cup host cities will be equipped with surveillance and integrated command centers staffed with police and military personnel, in addition to two large security centers in Rio and Brasília that will monitor security nationwide. More than a thousand surveillance cameras will be installed in Rio de Janeiro alone. “Because of the size of the event and the need of integration between the forces, strategic planning for it began nearly a year ago,” Rio state security secretary José Mariano Beltrame told USA Today Sports. “We bet on the modernization of police, from the academy to the fleet.” Beltrame does not mention that the police will be under the command of the military, an idea that last had currency during the dictatorship. He also doesn’t mention that drone surveillance planes will be flying over Rio, as they did for the Olympics in London. He especially does not mention that all of this will cost almost ten times the price of security at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. (I was in South Africa right before play started, and I cannot i
magine what that security scenario would look like multiplied by ten.)

  The security plan also includes creating “exclusion zones” around the stadiums, guarded by 1,400 armed troops, as well as “World Cup courts” aimed at fast-tracking judicial proceedings to charge, prosecute, and convict crimes ranging from robberies and assault to “ambush marketing in contravention of FIFA’s regulations.”39 That means open season on Brazil’s “informal economy” of street markets and stalls. Ramping up security also means ramping up police brutality, not a small concern since numerous recent incidents have drawn widespread public outrage. As Travis Waldron wrote,

  Along with excessive spending and inequality, police brutality and corruption were among the complaints in last summer’s protests. According to government numbers, Brazilian police killed one in 229 suspects they arrested last year, one of the highest figures in the world (U.S. police kill one in every 31,575). Protests erupted in June against police over the death of a 17-year-old São Paulo boy killed in an earlier demonstration, then again in August over the case of Amarildo de Souza, a Brazilian man whose disappearance and subsequent death was blamed on police officers (25 were charged with his murder in October). Typical police responses to protests—tear gassing, pepper spraying, and excessive force—were also rampant throughout the demonstrations, drawing even more opposition from the protesters.40

  These fears of police brutality cannot be found in the mainstream media, but graffiti and murals across the city speak about it, going up in the night faster than they can be painted over. “The walls,” as Eduardo Galeano wrote, “are the publishers of the poor.”

  Older Brazilians see in this new security regime a jarring echo of the days of military dictatorship, yet with one critical difference. This time, instead of crushing revolutionary movements, the authorities are focusing their repression on squelching spontaneous rage at the priorities of commerce and on making sure the trains—and planes—run on time. If this all sounds very “Big Brother,” it is worth noting that the security operation at Maracanã goes by the official name of, yes, “Big Brother.”

  Yet no matter the stated goals of World Cup security, the major concern is that the security protocols will remain even after the party ends and everyone has gone home. There are no external military threats against Brazil, and a standing, aggressive military and national police command structure can really only be aimed in one direction: inward. The internal threat, as the 2013 protests made clear, is that people are dissatisfied with the government taking public money and giving it to private corporations. If you want to keep that kind of anger bottled up, you have to militarize the cities.

  To know the human cost of such an arrangement in Brazil, one only has to go back to the 2007 Pan Am Games and the Complexo do Alemão massacre. During the Pan American Games, the police staged a large-scale invasion and occupation of the Complexo do Alemão, a series of interlocking favelas in northern Rio. The pretext was a crackdown on drug traffickers, but police killed forty-four people, some of them execution-style. Many of the dead were later found to have nothing to do with drug trafficking or illicit activity.41

  These instances of police brutality, harassment, and murder have also fallen disproportionately on Brazilians of African descent, who make up half of the country’s population. Henry Louis Gates, in his 2011 PBS series Black in Latin America, said that Brazilians “wanted their national culture to be ‘blackish’—really brown, a beautiful brown blend . . . in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.”42 This dynamic, as we will see, is deeply rooted in Brazil’s history.

  Seizing land and homes, running roughshod over the rights of those of African and Indigenous descent, opening the doors for foreign plunder, the buzzsaw development of the Amazon, exporting Brazil’s culture, declaring an end to public space, militarizing the cities: all of these can be facilitated through laws described as “states of exception,” like those historically passed for the Olympic Games in which the usual rules (and constitutions) no longer apply. This is why mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York City and Richard Daley in Chicago—both cities pinnacles of gentrification—wanted the Olympics so desperately and why Lula fought so hard for them at the end of his presidency. In a rush of excitement, the land grab and the privatization of public space could proceed with abandon. These objectives touch on the deepest and rawest nerves in Brazilian history. The next chapter endeavors to give non-Brazilian readers some sense of that history, which is critical for understanding the present.

  Chapter 2

  “There Is No Sin Below the Equator”

  If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.

  —Eduardo Galeano1

  The Brazilian flag, with its uniquely radiant colors, is featured in murals and street art throughout the country. Its green symbolizes the lush rainforests of Brazil’s interior; yellow stands for the gold once believed to reside under its earth in inexhaustible abundance. In the flag’s center is a blue globe with Ordem e Progresso, or “order and progress,” in small lettering across its circumference, making it one of the few flags on earth emblazoned with a slogan: a cartoonist’s dream. I saw it replaced with with “Corruption and Anger,” “Disorder and Retreat,” “Smash This State,” or—one that elicited laughter when I asked for a translation—“Revolution in the Streets and Bedrooms.”

  The quest for “order and progress” goes on amid a national history more defined by a series of extremes: booms and busts, the beautiful and the brutal, the anarchic and the totalitarian, the joyous and the tragic. In Brazil, the search is not for a “more perfect union” but for how to harness (and, yes, exploit) its remarkable wealth, culture, and resources—while becoming more than just the beaten-down junior partner of the United States and Europe.

  In this brief chapter, I am not going to attempt to summarize Brazil’s incredibly complicated whirling dervish of a five-hundred-year history. I do want to take a highly selective tour through this past, though, to help those outside Brazil understand why the spending, security practices, and evictions that have come with hosting the World Cup and the Olympics provoke such a strong reaction. Some Brazilians are excited about their country being recognized, through hosting, as the world power it is. Some are fearful that this is yet another instance of euphoria before the bottom falls out of the economy. Others are repulsed at the United States and particularly Europe—seen as the power behind FIFA and the IOC—descending once again on their country like spring-breakers at Carnival. Many in Brazil see FIFA and the IOC as no different than Justin Bieber, whom the paparazzi caught stumbling out of a famous Rio brothel in October 2013—nothing on their minds but how to take a piece of the country and leave some cash on the dresser on their way out the door.

  Understanding the psychology of Brazil has to start with the awe Europeans felt on the first day they stepped off their boats and saw a verdant beauty beyond their extent of their imaginations. One Jesuit priest reputedly said in the early 1500s, “If there is a paradise here on earth, I would say it is in Brazil.”2 Yet the people who first came to its shores were not here to spread a religious gospel. They believed they had found a country bursting at the seams with riches—not to mention several million Indigenous people incidental to that quest. The story of the next few centuries is one of single-minded plunder of each of the nation’s resources until the soil, workers, or slaves were exhausted and could give no more, then moving onto the next. Its plunderers truly believed there would be no end to this bounty. There is even an old Brazilian proverb that speaks to this: “God repairs at night the damage that man does by day.”3

  Slavery in Brazil

  There is a (very) old joke about a lumberjack who brags to a prospective employer that his previous job was in the Sahara Forest. When the boss say, “Don’t you mean the Sahara Desert?” he replies, “Exactly!” Brazil, along these lin
es, is named for a tree that for almost all intents and purposes no longer exists: the Brazilwood tree. The Brazilwood was once so plentiful that it dominated the Atlantic rainforest. The Atlantic rainforest is also a tiny fraction of its former size. The reddish Brazilwood was a critical source of red dye for the textile manufacturers of Europe, who chopped them down until the forests were incapable of regenerating. If you want to see a Brazilwood tree in 2014, your best bet would be a botanical garden. Whether Brazilwood, rubber, coffee, diamonds, gold, or—today—cattle, soy, oil, and the Amazon rainforest, Brazil’s bounty has long been plundered by adventurers, colonists, and oligarchs. FIFA and the IOC are only the latest groups to come from foreign shores and look upon the remarkable vistas of Brazil with dollar signs in their eyes.

  To get an idea of how early European arrivals saw Brazil’s Indigenous population, we can look to the most influential chronicle of their lives: German explorer Hans Staden’s 1557 book titled, in the understated style of the times, The True History and Description of a Land of Savage, Naked, Fierce, Man-Eating People Found in the New World. Staden’s text, as subdued as its title, is filled with pulpy, overheated, fabricated stories of orgiastic cannibalism. The book had a ready audience, however, among the Catholic hierarchy and the Portuguese throne. Plunder became an act of humanizing, civilizing mercy; the Europeans saw the Indigenous people of Brazil as deserving to be both enslaved and conquered. If you want to understand how a soccer stadium could be built in the middle of the Amazon or how an Indigenous museum could be evacuated with military force and then torn to the ground, here is where that starts.4

  In Portugal, people heard tales of “endless fertility” and riches for anyone willing to take them. The problem with Portugal, as anyone who has ever seen a map can tell you, is that it is somewhat smaller than Brazil. How much smaller? Portugal is roughly thirty-five thousand square kilometers. Brazil is almost three and a half million square ­kilometers, more than half of what would become known as South America. This difference in size determined how conquest was organized; its repercussions have lasted until today. Rather than try to overwhelm the Indigenous population militarily, the Portuguese created a network of trading centers, each backed by the military, and attempted to graft a European-style feudal system onto the areas developed around these trading posts. In 1534, Portugal’s King Dom João III tried to organize this sprawling, ecologically diverse landmass by dividing it into twelve hereditary captaincies, with grantees controlling each section. It was not successful, but this sixteenth-century practice of decentralized domination was reflected in the oligarchic fiefdoms that defined the country for centuries.5