In six months time the world’s biggest sporting event will get underway in Rio de Janeiro. Here, Jules Boykoff, author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics” takes a look at the winners and losers in the race for financial, rather than Olympic, gold.

By Jules Boykoff
Rio de Janeiro and Portland, Oregon

When Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff appeared at the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee headquarters brandishing a plaque with her “Ten Commandments of the Rio 2016 Games” – a list of social legacy-oriented good intentions – in November, the cameras dutifully snapped and flashed. The plaque was a gift from Eduardo Paes, the beer-quaffing, English-speaking, mediagenic mayor of Rio, a politician well versed in the art of the photo-op. But with the Games opening in only six months, many of those “commandments” now ring painfully hollow.

This might make Rousseff and Paes Olympic sinners. But as the Games approach, there are also real winners: well-positioned real-estate moguls, construction magnates, and perhaps Paes himself. Meanwhile, ordinary Rio residents are left with only shattered promises, with some even being forcibly displaced to make way for the Games.

These days, very few Cariocas believe the Olympic hype. In 2011, 63% in Rio thought that sports mega-events like the Olympics and 2014 World Cup would bring the city great benefits. By the end of 2015, only 27% shared that illusion.

As with much Olympics-induced public relations, the “10 Commandments” ripple with vapid prattle — one vows to “deliver a better city after the Games,” whatever that means. But some of the promises are quite specific, such as “use private money for the majority of the costs.”

This is relevant because in recent years the Olympics have been unmasked as a fiscal boondoggle, despite five-ring honchos in Rio asserting at every opportunity that taxpayer reais will make up less than half of the overall costs of the Games, with private interests paying the rest. Mayor Paes unswervingly repeats the assertion that private sources are paying for two thirds of the Rio Olympics bill.

But this statistic is extremely misleading. It fails to consider the quiet ways that Rio 2016 shifts public resources into private hands, ginning up large profits for well-connected impresarios with connections.

For starters, Rio 2016 brings enormous tax breaks. One study found that Olympic tax exemptions would be around four times higher than those of the World Cup, where tax breaks were nearly $250 million. In addition, public banks in Brazil are taking on speculative business risks to backstop Olympic projects. Also, local authorities have used the Olympics as a smokescreen to bestow valuable public land to developers at bargain-basement prices.

Nowhere has the transfer of public wealth into private hands been more brazen than in the construction of the Rio 2016 golf course. The Rio Olympics mark the return of golf to the Games after a 112-year hiatus. As was touted in Rio’s original Olympic bid, the metropolis already has two elite golf courses that have staged major tournaments. One of these could have been renovated to meet Olympic standards.

But in an audacious maneuver Mayor Paes decided to locate the golf closer to the Olympic complex in Barra da Tijuca, a wealthy western suburb, even if that meant plunking the course inside the Marapendi Nature Reserve, home to numerous threatened species.

In doing so, Paes teed up a staggering deal for billionaire developer Pasquale Mauro. As long as Mauro paid the bill for the golf course — between $20 and $30 million — he’d also win a contract to build 140 luxury apartments around it.

While the mayor’s office has pointed out the benefits of no public money being used in the construction of the site, these units start at $2 million, with penthouse condominiums pushing upwards of $6 million. It doesn’t take a math whiz to calculate the value of this multi-million dollar sweetheart deal, gift-wrapped by City Hall.

If the Olympics are all about real estate, Exhibit B has to be the Olympic Village. Built by Brazilian construction behemoth Carvalho Hosken, the Village will be converted after the Games into a luxury-housing complex called “Ilha Pura” (“Pure Island”). But Ilha Pura isn’t even an actual, geophysical island.  Carlos Carvalho — founder of Carvalho Hosken and campaign donor to Mayor Paes — explained to The Guardian that the name in fact referred to a “social island,” saying that he wanted to create “a city of the elite, of good taste…For this reason, it needed to be top class housing, not housing for the poor.”

But weren’t Rio’s poor supposed to benefit from the Games? One ‘commandment’ vowed to “Prioritize the neediest areas and the poorest part of the population.” But Rio authorities are acting as if “prioritize” means “prioritize for eviction.”

Since the International Olympic Committee awarded Rio the Games back in 2009, around 77,000 Cariocas have been displaced. “The number is likely much higher, since these are official statistics that traditionally undercount favela residents in all aspects of data collection, much less eviction,” Theresa Williamson, founder of Catalytic Communities, a Rio-based NGO that monitors human-rights issues in favelas, told From Brazil.

“Without the pretext of the Olympic deadline, very few of the evictions undertaken by the Paes administration would have been possible,” she added. “Thanks to the state of exception created by the Games, a small, insular group of people close to the mayor have been making broad decisions during the pre-Olympic period.”

Paes’ office has denied any wrongdoing. “City Hall does not use the instrument of compulsory removal, when families are evicted without prior knowledge or a transition process, and new housing is not offered. In any situation where people have to leave their homes, they only leave with the guarantee of a new home or compensation,” it said in a statement last August.

The experiences of one community, however, tell a rather different story. Vila Autódromo, a small, working-class favela on the edge of the Olympic Park, has found itself in front of the Olympic steamroller. As Rio stretched westward in the 1990s, Mayor Paes, then a young deputy mayor of Barra da Tijuca, alleged the neighborhood was causing environmental and aesthetic damage, and required demolition. He has since led the charge to expel every last resident of Vila Autódromo. In June 2015, efforts by the police to forcibly evict residents even turned violent.

Recently the psychological seesaw has verged on psychological warfare. Authorities have cut the favela’s water and electricity. Residents have experienced out-of-the-blue “lightning evictions” carried out by the Municipal Guard. Even the Polícia de Choque (Rio’s heavily armed and armoured shock troops) have played a part, intimidating locals and erecting a wall so obtrusive it would make Donald Trump proud. Meanwhile, on the other side of fence, Rio Mais, the construction consortium building the Olympic Park, cranks away.

“The Municipal Guard has protected the interests of the Rio Mais consortium against the interests of the population,” Larissa Lacerda, an organizer with the Popular Committee for the World Cup and Olympics in Rio de Janeiro who has worked closely with residents in Vila Autódromo, told From Brazil.

Although Vila Autódromo has been decimated, some families have refused financial compensation and are determined to stay in their homes. “Cruelty in Vila Autódromo has increased day by day, with City Hall doing everything it can to make life there unbearable. Yet a group of residents continues the resistance,” Lacerda explained.

In late November, I attended a cultural festival in Vila Autódromo that doubled as a solidarity rally. A large group —comprised of residents as well as busloads of community allies who traveled from other parts of Rio — assembled at the community’s cultural center, for music, information-sharing, food, and fun.

But even amid the good cheer, latent frustration bubbled up. Throughout Vila Autódromo slogans — photos of which are posted here — were scrawled in spray paint on the standing walls of demolished homes and on the white wall separating the community from the Olympic zone.

Wending through the rubble afforded an appreciation of the community’s grit and creativity in the face of peril. Someone had written “Paes Sem Amor” (“Paes Without Love”) on the wall that separates the community from the Olympic construction zone: a play on the phrase “Paz e Amor” (“Peace and Love”). Another took aim at a certain construction baron with a penchant for social stratification: “Carlos Carvalho, Não Somos Pobre/Você Sim é Pobre” (“We Are Not Poor/Rather, You Are Poor”).

But the predominant slogan around the favela was “Lava Jato Olímpico,” a reference to the widespread corruption scandal gripping Brazil’s political class by the gullet. The fiasco has, quite understandably, gobbled up the media’s collective attention. One side effect is that Operação Lava Jato has deflected attention from the Olympic build-up and all its deficiencies.

In a way, the double-whammy of political and economic crisis has been a blessing for Olympic organizers, allowing their logistical hiccups to fly under the public radar. But as the Games draw closer, more people are pointing out the stark fact that billions are being spent on the Olympics at the same time as social services in Rio are being slashed. Public spending reveals priorities and values. With the Rio Olympics, it is not hard to see who is being prioritized and valued and who is not.

“Favelas are not always a problem. Favelas can sometimes really be a solution, if you deal with them, if you put public policy inside favelas,” Mayor Paes explained in a slick Ted Talk in 2012. One such “public policy” was Morar Carioca, an ambitious favela upgrade program designed to bring basic infrastructure like paved roads, sewer systems, and improved electricity lines.

In 2010, Paes said that thanks to “Olympic inspiration” the Morar Carioca program would be a lasting legacy of Rio 2016. But by 2014, the program had stagnated and Paes had made a political U-turn, asserting Morar Carioca had absolutely nothing to do with Olympic legacy. The original collaborative spirit of the program has vanished, even if the Morar Carioca label is occasionally trotted out and pinned to public works projects.

If Rio 2016 runs smoothly, Eduardo Paes may be able use his platform as five-ring kingpin to catapult to higher office. Eduardo Cunha, the scandal-wracked Speaker of the lower house of Congress currently being investigated for having millions of dollars reportedly squirreled away in Swiss bank accounts, has anointed Paes as his favored candidate for the 2018 Brazilian presidential election.

The Olympic Games inevitably feature winners and losers on the track, in the pool, and on the velodrome. But Rio 2016 Olympic luminaries vowed to make ordinary Cariocas into winners as well. “Leave a legacy for the entire population of the city,” chirps one of the commandments. With the Games only six months away, this hopeful boast reads like gripping fiction of the cruelest sort.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Working at the Car Wash:

In 2015 the sheafs of stodgy political news that take up the front sections of most Brazilian broadsheets finally contained something to interest ordinary readers, as the Federal Police’s Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) investigation into corruption at giant state-controlled oil company Petrobras dominated the headlines.

The probe into the billion dollar bribes racket has seen the arrest of top executives from a number of Brazil’s leading construction companies, along with several major political figures, including the former treasurer of the governing Worker’s Party, João Vaccari Neto. It has also made a household name of the scheme’s bagman turned informant Alberto Youssef, and earned Newton Ishii, known as O Japa or “The Jap”, a police officer present at many of the arrests, his own carnaval theme tune.

Despite the damage wreaked upon Petrobras and an already reeling economy, many observers have suggested that by bringing down senior business leaders and crooked politicians Operation Car Wash represents proof that Brazil has finally sickened of its seemingly ingrained culture of impunity, and also demonstrates the healthiness of the country’s separation of powers, plus the strength of its judiciary – Lava Jato has brought about the first ever arrest of a sitting Brazilian senator, Delcídio do Amaral.

Cynics, however, would point out that much the same was said around the time of Brazil’s last enormous corruption scandal, 2005/2006’s Mensalão (“Big Monthly Payment”) swindle (and the enormous corruption scandal before that, and the one before that…), and suggest that it will take decades to root out the institutionalised culture of graft that riddles the country’s political framework.  

Protest Songs:

If things were bad in Brazil in 2015, then at least there was no shortage of people willing to speak out against them.  Many of the year’s demonstrations had an anti-government theme – from the panelaço (pot-banging) demonstrations that echoed from the balconies of apartment buildings in August, to the hundreds of thousands that took to the streets in the same month to call for impeachment, an end to corruption, and in some disturbing cases, military intervention.

Critics, meanwhile, dismissed such protesters, who in many cases were drawn from the better-off sections of Brazilian society, as merely reflecting upper middle class self-interest. In response, pro-government supporters took to the streets in smaller, but still significant, numbers in December.

Perhaps more encouraging than such partisan affairs was the #NãoFechaMinhaEscola (“Don’t Close My School”) protest movement in São Paulo, where thousands of students occupied their threatened schools and eventually forced the state government to suspend an educational reform programme that would have meant the closure of hundreds of learning institutions.

There was also what at least one article described as an embryonic “Women’s Spring” movement – a series of public actions in support of women’s rights, built around opposition to proposed law changes that would further hamper Brazil’s already extremely limited access to abortion.

Further highlighting the wrongs of the country’s often unpleasant culture of machismo was the online #MeuPrimeiroAssedio (“My First Harassment”) campaign, where, following the posting of a number of lewd comments about a 12-year-old female contestant on Brazil’s MasterChef Junior TV show, tens of thousands of Brazilian women used social media to recount the first time they had suffered sexual harassment.

Fear and loathing on the internet (and everywhere else):

If social media has allowed many of Brazil’s previously disenfranchised groups to find their voices, it has also given other sectors of society space to share the rather less edifying contents of their minds, and 2015 saw a number of incidents of online racism. Comments such as “I’ll pay you with a banana” and “lend me your hair so I can wash the dishes” were left on the Facebook page of black actress Taís Araújo in November, while TV journalist Maria Julia Coutinho suffered similar abuse in May.

Imbecilic TV comedy show Pânico Na Band, meanwhile, briefly thought it would be acceptable to feature a character known only as The African, played by a “blacked-up” white actor, who spoke only in grunts and shrieks and acted in what the show’s creators appeared to believe constitutes typical “African” behaviour – scratching at parts of his body, tearing at plants and leaves and performing a dance of thanks for the judges of a cooking contest.

Away from the headlines, such high-profile instances of prejudice reflected the reality of life for millions of black and working class Brazilians. The country’s social divisions came to the fore once again in September when, following a number of mob robberies on the city’s beaches, Rio de Janeiro police instigated searches of public buses running from the poorer northern suburbs to the wealthier seafront districts of Zona Sul.

At the same time, local residents set up vigilante groups to deal with the threat. “We’re looking for kids in cheap flip-flops, who look like they haven’t got R$1 in their pockets,” said one of the brave urban warriors. “It’s obvious that they’re here to steal,” said a shop worker from Copacabana. “If they want terror, we’ll give them terror. It’s self-defence.”

The Ballad of Dilma…

The storm clouds of impeachment have arguably been building in Brazil since President Dilma Rousseff narrowly clinched a second term in office back in October 2014, following a surly and spiteful contest. At the time, opposition leader Aécio Neves claimed he had lost not to a political rival but to a “criminal organisation”, while his PSDB party muttered darkly about being the victims of electoral fraud. Rousseff’s foes have been gunning for her and her governing Worker’s Party ever since.

The argument for impeachment often seems to follow one of four strands: (a) we don’t like Dilma very much (Rousseff’s approval rating sank as low as 8% in August) (b) Dilma used to be president of Petrobras (see Operation Car Wash, above) and so must be a crook (c) we don’t like Dilma very much and (d) the government’s pedaladas fiscais, or financial manoeuvres, where transfers to banks responsible for making a number of welfare programme payments are deliberately delayed, making the overall financial situation look rosier (or at least less terrible) than it actually is. Such manoeuvres, say those calling for impeachment, are illegal.

The pro-impeachment movement believe the pedaladas fiscais represent their smoking gun, and proceedings against Rousseff are now underway. The government, meanwhile, say the pedaladas have been common practice since 2000, when the opposition PSDB was in power, while Brazilians who oppose impeachment describe the process as a coup. No one knows how this particular novela will end, but two things are guaranteed – it won’t be short, and it won’t be pretty.

…and Eddie

No pantomime would be complete without a villain, and there have been few shadier politicians in Brazil in 2015 than Eduardo Cunha, dubbed the country’s Frank Underwood by a number of commentators. While Cunha has not (yet) pushed a reporter under a speeding subway train, his skulduggery in other areas seems unbounded.

“In all my time in politics, he’s the most Machiavellian figure,” Ivan Valente, the experienced president of the left wing opposition party PSOL, told The Guardian in an interview in October. “Cunha is a politician who is opportunistic, intelligent, ambitious and corrupt.”

Since being elected Speaker of the Lower House in January, Cunha – whose PMDB party remain, officially at least, Rousseff’s allies – has made it his mission to add to the President’s woes at every turn, leading campaigns to overturn government sponsored legislation or pushing through his own, usually government-unfriendly, bills.

At the same time, Cunha has been accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes as part of the Petrobras swindle, and of stashing the money in Swiss bank accounts. At least his alleged machinations have lent the often deadening weight of the recent corruption sagas a touch of glamour – Cunha’s wife reportedly used some of her husband’s ill-gotten gains to pay for lessons at Nick Bollettieri’s exclusive tennis academy in Florida.

At the same time, he has attempted to use his authority to accept or reject impeachment petitions to curry favour with both the opposition and the government.

Cunha, an ultra-conservative evangelical Christian who supports the creation of a “Heterosexual Pride Day” in response to what he sees as a growing “gay ideology” in Brazilian society, finally pulled the trigger to initiate impeachment proceedings mere hours after Worker’s Party deputies announced they would support an Ethics Committee investigation into his denials of the existence of the (alleged) Swiss loot.

Despite recently having had to endure the indignity of an early morning police raid at his home, Cunha snorts at suggestions he might step down, as well as the Frank Underwood comparisons. “He’s a thief, a murderer, and a homosexual,” he is reported to have said, “and I’m not”.

Sweet River No More

One of the most distressing sights of the year was the devastated landscape around the town of Mariana in the state of Minas Gerais after millions of gallons of mining waste burst free from a collapsed tailings dam.

At least 15 people are known to have died in the flood, and the ensuing environmental damage is likely to be catastrophic, with the sludge now having flowed down the Rio Doce (“Sweet River”) to reach Brazil’s Atlantic coast. “This is a permanent blow. The cost is irreparable. A lot of life forms are never coming back,” Professor Carlos Machado, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in Rio de Janeiro, told the LA Times in December.

Describing the dam burst as a natural disaster is misleading, however. This is a tragedy with human hand-prints all over it, with the aftermath revealing both the potential negligence of the mine’s operator, Samarco (a joint venture between the Anglo-Australian mining company BHP Billiton and the Brazilian firm Vale), and the failings of Brazil’s “outdated mining code and decrepit regulatory system”. According to an article in The Daily Telegraph, only 400 of Brazil’s 15,000 mining dams were inspected in 2014.

The environmental news was little better elsewhere – a critical water shortage saw São Paulo suffer long periods of water rationing as the south east of Brazil underwent its worse drought in 80 years, while almost a thousand towns and cities in the dry inland regions of the north east of the country declared a state of emergency because of a lack of water.

The Killing Fields

Police killings in Brazil are hardly a recent development – according to a report by the São Paulo based Brazilian Forum on Public Safety there were 11,197 homicides carried out by police between 2009 and 2013, a rate of six a day. Even so – perhaps it was down to greater media awareness or the ubiquitous presence of cell phones, useful for filming or photographing wrongdoing – the relentless stream of negative headlines involving Brazil’s police forces this year felt unprecedented.

From 10-year-old Eduardo de Jesus Ferreira, who was shot and killed by police in the Complexo do Alemão favela in April (his mother claimed that a policeman standing over her child’s body told her “I might as well kill you, just as I killed your son, because I killed a bandit’s son”) to the five young men slaughtered when their car was sprayed with bullets in the Lagartixa community in the north of the city in November, Rio de Janeiro was the scene of many of the police killings.

The September murder of four young men outside a pizza restaurant in Carapicuíba in Greater São Paulo (a police officer, who claimed the men had mugged his wife, was later arrested and accused of the crimes), and the death of 20-year-old Alisson Campos da Silva, shot and killed by police as he reached for his cell phone – which the officer in question believed was a gun – in Recife earlier this month, shows that Brazil’s police murders, whether in the form of trigger happy cops on duty or extra-curricular vigilante killings, and which invariably seem to involve young working class black or dark-skinned men – are a national, not a local, disgrace.

As the writer and journalist Xico Sá put it when writing about such young men in an essay inspired by the footballer Flávio Caça-Rato (Flávio the Rat Catcher), who grew up in poverty in Recife – “some, like Flávio, escape, thanks to football, funk or rap, but most are lost along the way, little Rat Catchers doomed to a life amidst the human refuse or, worse, ended by the bullets (nothing stray about them) of the police – almost always dead by the time they are 30.”

With many Brazilian schoolchildren already enjoying their summer holidays, thousands of pupils in São Paulo have been protesting to save their schools from closure. Their efforts have provided a welcome break from the unseemly behaviour of the country’s adult political leaders in Brasília. 

By Gill Harris
São Paulo

As the Operation Car Wash investigation into the massive bribery scandal at state run oil company Petrobras rumbles on, impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff get underway, and Eduardo Cunha, the corruption-dogged speaker of Brazil’s Lower House, has his home searched by police while dressed in his pyjamas, a rather more edifying political movement has taken place in São Paulo.

In early October pupils across the state discovered their schools were to undergo what was described by Governor Geraldo Alckmin as a “restructuring” of the education system, a move that would have entailed the closure of 93 schools and the transferal of over 300,000 pupils. The state government claimed a new system based on ciclos (which roughly translates as year groups) would benefit students’ learning.

Many critics of the reforms suggested that the government’s proposed changes were economically driven and pedagogically flawed: simply an attempt – and a fairly transparent attempt at that – to cut costs.

Either way, São Paulo’s outraged students were not about to take the closures lying down, and around a month later began to occupy the threatened schools. What had begun as just a few students camping out in classrooms swiftly turned into a regional insurgence against the government’s education policy, a movement that spread across social media via the hashtag: #naofechaminhaescola (“Don’t Close My School”).

On November 12, BBC Brasil reported students were camping out in several schools throughout the state, and by the end of the month almost 200 schools had been occupied.

Despite increasing pressure from the politicians and police, who in some cases treated students with truculence and aggression, the youngsters held firm, and last week Alckmin was forced to suspend his plans for reform.

While maintaining the position that the reorganisation would benefit students, Alckmin recognised the need to involve students more directly in any decision made on the matter. “In 2016 we will begin to engage in debate. We will open up dialogues, school by school,” he said. Amidst the backpedalling, state secretary for education Herman Voorwald resigned.

More cynical critics, however, have suggested that the decision to suspend the changes only came after Alckmin’s popularity took a battering.  Recent figures released by Datafolha showed approval for the governor had dropped to just 28%, the lowest in his time in office.

In spite of the suspension, however, protests against the restructuring in downtown São Paulo have continued, although the number of occupied schools has fallen to 57, according to the state education department.

Students from Fernão Dias Paes State School in Pinheiros, in the west of São Paulo, one of the schools that initiated the protests, told BBC Brasil they considered the battle to be only half won, while another newspaper report described the students’ belief that the suspension is merely a conciliatory strategy. The protesters are demanding an official statement from the government that the reforms will be dropped permanently from the agenda.

17 year-old Ana Luisa has been occupying two different schools for the past two months: one in outlying São Vicente until the evening, and then another in Praça Roosevelt in the centre of the city, where she spends her nights.

“With all the protesting and travelling I’ve barely had time to eat. I’ve lost three kilos,” she told From Brazil in early December, showing the space around her waistband. “But it’s worth it. Things here have reached a critical moment. We students know we’re making history. And we’re not going to stop until we have official proof from the government that they’re listening to us.”

The demonstrations come at a pivotal moment for the culture of public protest in Brazil. While the massive 2013 marches against political corruption, poor public services and the money spent on last year’s World Cup briefly captured the public imagination, their effectiveness was ultimately diluted by the sheer breadth of demonstrators’ complaints, and despite a vague, panicky government response that made promises of investment in public transport and political reform, few concrete benefits have emerged.

That movement has since been replaced with this year’s anti-government, pro-impeachment rallies, largely middle class affairs where protesters have dwindled in number as the spectre of impeachment has moved closer to reality, while this week saw around 50,000 demonstrators gather in São Paulo to protest against the impeachment campaign, which they describe as a coup. Politicians, meanwhile, have annexed the spirit of as ruas (“the streets”) for their own ends.

Against such a backdrop, and compared with the sordid political capering of the likes of Eduardo Cunha in Brasilia, this youth movement, along with other organic demonstrations such the recent public actions in support of women’s rights, feels refreshingly heartfelt and optimistic.

University professor and state deputy Carlos Giannazi has praised what he calls this “Arab Spring” of student politicisation, while Folha de São Paulo columnist Raquel Rolnik, a professor of architecture and urban planning, has called the movement “the most important political event of the year.”

The mother of one young protester, Rose, meanwhile, told the BBC that the protests were restoring her faith in politics: “it’s a lovely sight to see. These teenagers are taking to the streets to demand better quality education; we’ve never seen anything like it before.”

With growing mistrust in those who run their country, these children are taking their education into their own hands. A similar school occupation movement has begun in the mid-western state of Goiás, where organisers say they have been inspired by events in São Paulo, and a website, www.queronaescola.com.br (“What I Want In School”), posts videos of pupils demanding a more wide-ranging curriculum, school trips, and opportunities to discuss issues such as racism and misogyny.

In São Paulo, meanwhile, the debate as to who rules the school continues. “We might just be kids,” Ana Luisa said, “but I think we could do a better job of it than the adults.”

Editor’s note: On Friday (18th) one student group, the Comando das Escolas em Luta (“Fighting Schools Command”) announced it would end the school occupations, and that it was “time to change tactics”. Other students, however, said they had yet to decide if they would call a halt to their occupations. 

As the Rio Olympics draw closer, organizers are cutting costs – but it may have more to do with Brazil’s crumbling economy than IOC initiatives or financial good governance. Jules Boykoff, author of “Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics” explains.  

By Jules Boykoff
Rio de Janeiro

Back in 2009, when the International Olympic Committee awarded the 2016 Summer Olympics to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s economy was riding high. The Rio 2016 bid book boasted of “financial certainty” and assured IOC bigwigs that Brazil’s “proven economic policies” would “provide a solid economic foundation to support Games delivery.” Later that year The Economist published a cover featuring the iconic Cristo Redentor statue blasting off like an unstoppable rocket.

But no amount of Photoshop trickery can get around the fact that since then, Brazil’s economy has tanked. Despite those “proven economic policies,” the country’s financial tectonics have shifted mightily. In the past year alone, the real has lost 70 percent of its value against the dollar. Inflation has spiked to close to 10 percent.

At the same time, President Dilma Rousseff’s popularity ratings have plummeted into single digits and now hover around 9 percent. The scandal-wracked political system seems dangerously close to implosion, with impeachment being bandied about the halls of political power and the Frank Underwood-esque speaker of the lower house, Eduardo Cunha, threatened with removal on corruption charges. This is the worst recession the country has suffered in 25 years, and economists expect it to extend through the Rio 2016 Games.

In the Olympic world, the tectonic plates have also moved since Rio won the Games. In December 2014, the IOC unanimously passed a slate of recommendations called “Olympic Agenda 2020.” This was a direct response to the fact that the Olympic movement itself had hit a low point. To host the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Russians spent $51 billion, a gob-smacking total that surpassed the costs of all the previous Winter Olympics combined.

In addition to that boondoggle, bidder interest in the 2022 Winter Games was wilting, with only two candidates still in the race — Beijing, China and Almaty, Kazakhstan — both of them anti-democratic, repressive states. IOC President Thomas Bach needed to take urgent action — or at least appear to do so. After all, a Tupac-style hologram of reform might just do the trick.

Enter “Olympic Agenda 2020,” a set of nebulous recommendations, rather than full-force policies. The recommendations spoke of the obvious need to halt runaway spending. Host cities were encouraged to use existing arenas and would now be allowed to hold Olympic events outside city limits.

The goal was to reduce the number of venues destined to become what sports mega-event mavens call “white elephants”: hulking, underused structures that drain city coffers through pricey maintenance costs long after the sporting spectacle leaves town.

The IOC also streamlined the bidding process, reducing it from a forest to a mere meadow of paperwork. Overall, while Agenda 2020 is awash with jargon about “synergies” and “stakeholders,” the wider goal of reducing host-city costs makes sense.

In 2009, when Rio bid jockeys floated their plan, extravagance was the order of the day. Olympic “gigantism” — high-priced five-ring spending sprees on supersized events — reigned supreme. President Bach hyped Rio’s mega-plan at a glitzy gala one year before the Games were to begin: “This will be the biggest urban redevelopment project since the Barcelona 1992 Olympic Games.”

Indeed, Rio organizers plotted a complex path, with four venue pods in different parts of the city and a gaggle of brand-new arenas and structures built exclusively for the Games.

Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes used the Olympics to spur development in Barra da Tijuca, Rio’s relatively affluent western suburb and a kaleidoscopic consumer paradise. Real estate tycoons — many of whom helped fund Paes’ re-election campaign in 2012 — grinned from ear to ear. Brazilian property baron Carlos Carvalho revealed to The Guardian that in Barra he hoped to forge “a city of the elite, of good taste.”

For this to happen, Mayor Paes needed to bash down the barriers to profit. This included clearing longstanding communities such as Vila Autodrómo, a favela perched on the edge of the Olympic blueprints where residents have put up a spirited fight that continues today.

After all, as Carvalho saw it, “the new city” in Barra da Tijuca was meant to be “luxury housing, not housing for the poor.” According to one survey, since Rio was handed the Olympics in 2009, some 60,000 favela residents have been displaced due to urban interventions or because they live in supposed “zones of risk.”

But even with a bevy of building barons on their team, Mayor Paes and the Rio 2016 Olympic Organizing Committee struggled to keep construction moving apace. Back in 2014, IOC Vice-President John Coates rattled Rio’s cage when he declared that organizers’ preparations were “the worst I have experienced” and even “worse than Athens” where construction for the 2004 Summer Games ran notoriously behind schedule.

In recent months, however, Rio 2016 appears to have rallied. The venues are only slightly delayed, and the gap appears closeable. Even so, there’s a borderline iron law of Olympic development: the closer the deadline, the higher the costs.

So, what does the IOC’s “Agenda 2020” have to do with Rio 2016? Turns out, not much. To be sure, Agenda 2020 recommendations, if converted into actual toothy reforms, could have benefited the Rio Games by limiting the number of freshly built venues.

But as Rio 2016 was chosen in 2009, its organizers are not bound by Agenda 2020 recommendations. That, however, hasn’t stopped the event’s luminaries from making strategic use of the program’s loose lingo. When in doubt, they trot it out.

For the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee, Agenda 2020 has become a strategic shield used selectively to deflect criticism and to defend its deficiencies. When construction delays forced Rio 2016 officials to consider shifting preliminary water polo matches from the Julio Delamare Aquatic Park to the main Olympic Park’s Maria Lenk Aquatic Center, they claimed this was simply in tune with the Agenda 2020 rationale. A spokesperson said, “One of the pillars of Rio 2016 is to deliver games that are economically sustainable and that is in line with Agenda 2020 framework.”

When the international swimming federation complained that Rio’s Olympic aquatic center was substandard compared to London 2012, the Rio Organizing Committee’s retort was that building a smaller facility simply chimed with Agenda 2020 sustainability principles. Rio 2016 issued a statement asserting, “everyone knows that the goal of Rio is to deliver sustainable Games in accordance with Agenda 2020.”

Then again, forging tactical connections to a phantom document is better than insulting the world’s top athletes. Recently, Rio Organizing Committee President Carlos Nuzman did just that. During an Olympic test-event for BMX racing in October, a brouhaha broke out when participants blasted the track as too dangerous.

Citing safety concerns, athletes banded together and unanimously refused to ride. “We shouldn’t have to race on such sub-standard tracks,” British BMX world champion Liam Phillips posted on social media. Nuzman responded with a glib dismissal. “Whoever wanted to race, should have raced,” he said. “Whoever chose not to race…I think they should look to be in another sport.”

In light of Brazil’s economic woes, Rio 2016 organizers recently announced a 30 percent cutback to the Games’ operating budget. Fernando Meirelles, the Brazilian filmmaker who is overseeing the Olympic opening ceremony, revealed, “Since we joined the project the money has been cut, cut, cut.” He added, “We’re in a crisis and there are better places to put money in Brazil than just the opening ceremony.”

Rio 2016 will also replace a number of sturdier, more permanent structures with tents, the ticketing system will be revamped to cut costs, and the volunteer program will be slimmed. Organizers also recently said that the Olympic Village will not be equipped with fixed air-conditioning units, with athletes being forced to rent portable devices instead.

Rio 2016 Communications Director Mario Andrada told the BBC, “People get upset about luxury and excess, we have to tighten our belts.” But the projects listed by the BBC as on the fiscal chopping block did not include the “luxury and excess” that IOC members have come to expect. Will such cost-trimming apply to the Olympic Brahmins who will jet into Rio, quaff fine wine, and luxuriate in five-star hotels?

The IOC was conspicuously mute about the budget cuts, although it did deliver a statement to Inside the Games that was a blend of the vanilla and telltale: “We will discuss this topic over the next few weeks with the Rio team, as we continue to look at how the implementation of Olympic Agenda 2020 can help Rio to make its Games as economically sustainable as possible.”

The statement was in fact revealing, capturing as it does precisely what is wrong about the idea of over-hyping the IOC’s moves toward reform. While the idea behind the Olympic Agenda 2020 program has potential, the reality is rather more PR masterstroke than genuine change. Another Tupac hologram—and this one is wearing Olympic laurels.

While much has been made of Brazil’s economic downturn, a toxic political climate is equally responsible for the current woes of President Dilma Rousseff and her government. Mauricio Savarese looks at the complex backdrop to the crisis.

By Mauricio Savarese
São Paulo

There is no easy explanation as to why, just under a year after being reelected by a narrow margin, President Dilma Rousseff runs the risk of not completing her term in office. It took respected consultancy firm Eurasia months, for example, to weigh up all the factors and raise the chances of her resigning or being impeached from 30% to 40%. But one thing is easy to predict: whatever the outcome, the current climate of polarization is here for a while – perhaps even until after the next elections.

Although opposition militants argue that Rousseff has only herself to blame for her troubles, pro-government forces place the blame on kingmaker party the PMDB, and defeated PSDB presidential candidate Aécio Neves. Leftist groups continue to defend Rousseff’s mandate but oppose her fiscal policies. While it is difficult to know where the saga will end, there are clear reasons behind Brazil’s political crisis.

The aggressive, toxic campaigns waged by both candidates in last year’s elections are as good a place to start as any. Rousseff came close to defeat against Neves, who himself only made it to the second round run-off on the final straight – environmentalist Marina Silva had been running second in the polls until then. And the contest was only so tight in the first place because of a sluggish economy and the emergence of a new wave of scandals involving key members of the government. In 2013 most bets had been on Rousseff’s reelection.

After a narrow defeat, Neves barely recognized his opponent’s victory in his concession speech. Such a tight margin, the closest in Brazilian history, had two immediate effects: a smaller mandate for the winner and more sore loser griping from the other side. Impeachment talk emerged right after Rousseff was proclaimed the victor, and today it often feels as though the election never ended.

After a leftist-sounding campaign, the president turned her attention to the financial markets in a manner that shocked many of her voters. After much indecision, she picked American-trained Bradesco Bank economist Joaquim Levy to be her Finance Minister, and appointed a number of other conservative ministers, some of whom would have been more comfortable in a Neves cabinet. Before the end of the year she had managed to lose touch with her base, while at the same time failing to win over her adversaries.

Since then the crisis has all been about the government’s controversial ally, the PMDB. The centrist party, which has itself been associated with scandal more than a few times in the past, was never 100% on Rousseff’s side, and today it would be a push to argue that even 50% of its deputies and senators are still with the president. During the campaign some of the party’s key figures were already placing their bets on Neves, and the division has remained even after the president’s victory. Opposition forces were strong enough to elect her main PMDB adversary, congressman Eduardo Cunha, to the role of Speaker of the Lower House until February 2017.

Rousseff believed that her decisions would restore the credibility she had lost in her first term thanks to growing spending and the use of backpedaling, a form of delaying repayments to lenders who had provided money to pay for welfare programs, making the country’s books appear more robust than was actually the case – a breach of fiscal responsibility laws say the opposition, but common accounting practice according to the government.

But in fact those unpopular steps, which contradicted profoundly with the tone of Rousseff’s campaign, were eating away at her popularity. The Lower House, led by Cunha, began to think of ways to put further pressure on an already unpopular president.

The lack of enthusiasm for the new administration had been evident since January 1st, when Rousseff’s somewhat flat inauguration was attended by less than 5,000 people – around 10 times fewer than at the start of her first term. Rousseff picked a number of ministers that patently had few qualifications for their positions, solely to maintain the support of their parties in Congress. Cunha’s election as speaker may have been the first sign that the strategy had failed, but others have followed.

Despite being involved in multiple scandals, including the Petrobras investigation, Cunha is a wily strategist. With the speakership he had the power to define the Lower House voting schedule, and to choose which congressional inquiries would move forward. This latter power includes what is described as “an atomic bomb” in Brasilia: in other words, whether or not to allow an impeachment process against the president to progress.

When Rousseff’s popularity sunk to single digits, all the opposition, which had been repeatedly stirring up protests against the president, needed was a motive to seek impeachment, and in Cunha they had found a willing ally.

Three possibilities have now emerged. One is to find a direct link between the president and the Petrobras scandal, while another option is for the Superior Electoral Court to strip both her and Vice-President Michel Temer of their positions because of the use of supposedly illegal funds in their election campaign. The third potential outcome, meanwhile, is to accuse Rousseff of breaking fiscal responsibility laws in the form of the aforementioned backpedaling.

All these three possibilities remain in play, but none are conclusive. If proven, they would also result in different outcomes: in the first and the third cases, Temer would take over from Rousseff, although rumors have suggested the vice-president himself may be implicated in the Petrobras scandal – something he has already denied.

If both Rousseff and Temer go, runner-up Neves would take over, with even those in opposition recognizing that such a decision by the Superior Electoral Court would not necessarily give them the legitimacy they would need to govern. Since the restoration of democracy in Brazil in 1985, impeachment charges have been brought only against President Fernando Collor de Mello, in 1992, when he was directly linked to corruption scandals that had emerged during his term, showing the difference between the two cases.

Rousseff has relied on a number of factors to keep her job. The first is her turbulent yet enduring relationship with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the main power behind the Worker’s Party. She also hopes to maintain her alliance with the president of the Senate, Renan Calheiros, who could also yet be implicated in the Petrobras scandal. The third is the pragmatism of many business leaders, who think impeachment would represent a major setback for a young democracy.

Further complicating matters is that in the event that impeachment proceedings are instigated in the Lower House, Rousseff may decide to take her case to the Supreme Court. Unlike congressmen, Brazilian supreme court justices have little interest in the polls and nor are they yet much concerned with the investigations of the Petrobras scandal. It appears impossible to tell what the outcome of such an action might be. Brazil is not for beginners, as the songwriter Tom Jobim once memorably said – and the complexities of the current political crisis show that his words are as true now as ever.

Respondents are given three options. They can rate the government “good/great,” “regular,” or “bad/terrible.” Well, there are actually four, as you can say you don’t know. But by now (she was elected in 2010), pretty much everyone has an opinion.

Observe that her “good/great” numbers were quite high until 2013 (when protests broke out), and now they are at a pitiful 10%. But the people essentially saying “meh” has not dropped so much. Those two groups add up to 34%, while a whopping 65% actively disapprove of her government.

So her numbers are terrible, just terrible. But it’s not accurate to say that everyone in the country hates her, either.

Brazilians’ love for soccer has been exploited by crooks, dictators, and dirty politicians for decades. Above, dictator Emilio Médici celebrates after his country’s 1970 World Cup victory.

By Mauricio Savarese

When former Brazilian soccer boss José Maria Marin was arrested in Switzerland at the end of May, most fans here just knew him as the old guy that stole a medal from a teenage player in 2012. His predecessor, Ricardo Teixeira, was a much more famous figure, famously involved in various corruption scandals. But as the media dug deeper into the 83-year-old Marin’s career, it became clear that the frail man who chaired Brazil’s football confederation (the CBF) during last year’s World Cup was one more example of how politics and football work hand in hand in Brazil.

But it’s been that way for a long time. Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Rocky start

Brazilian politicians didn’t fall in love with soccer at first sight. Soccer and politics became entwined here just weeks before the 1950 World Cup, as Brazilians took to the streets in protest.

They didn’t demonstrate against high costs in the construction of Maracanã stadium, but small protests before the first World Cup in Brazil did have something in common with protests here in 2013 and 2014. They started against a rise in transportation costs, and then the tournament served to put a spotlight on the demonstrations and the issues they raised, such as economic policy changes undertaken by President Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946-1951), the man who brought the tournament to Brazil. One year later, former dictator Getulio Vargas would channel that frustration and win a democratic election.

With only 13 participants, the first World Cup in Brazil, seen by many as a test event for the country after World War II (1939-1945) was an organizational success. But the shocking loss to Uruguay in the final was felt as a failure of the country itself. Many politicians decided to stay away from football as a result, with the exception of some that were fans first and public figures second – such as São Paulo mayor Porfirio da Paz, a founder of São Paulo FC.

The rise of Brazilian football, and the rise of Brazil

When Brazil won the 1958 World Cup, however, politicians changed their minds. President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), a former player at América in Minas Gerais, used the iconic players as a symbol of the modernization of the country – as he also used bossa-nova music and the construction of the new capital, Brasília. Brazilian soccer was moving past the shame of the 1950 loss and the country now actually had high hopes for the future.

That sentiment only grew after a second title was won in Chile, in 1962. But then the military dictatorship came, and took soccer with it.

In the first years of the regime, which began in 1964, it wasn’t clear what would happen with soccer, or indeed with politics.

Brazil had its worst World Cup campaign ever in England 1966, where the country failed to even advance past the group stage. Pelé, the national hero, was injured by Portugal’s constant kicks.

In Brasília, the capital, military leaders couldn’t decide whether they would remain in office. Their excuse for the coup was always that they would free Brazil from alleged communist influence and President João Goulart (1961-1964) and hold new elections, but they were holding on to power. Football club executives were lost: they didn’t know whether to be friends with the generals or hold on to old ties.

The dictatorship takes control of the pitch

Generals sent mixed messages by keeping Congress and a functioning Supreme Court open while also interfering. But when they decided to remain in power definitively and issued the dictatorial decrees of 1968, they also took hold of Brazilian soccer as a propaganda tool.

CBF chairman João Havelange, a cheerleader of military administrations, was watching. Although he named communist journalist João Saldanha as coach Brazil in 1969 (a move to calm the press after a number of bad results), Havelange was dying to please dictator Emilio Médici (1969-1974).

Opportunity knocked. Médici wanted “Fearless João” to take clumsy centerforward Dadá Maravilha to the Mexico World Cup in 1970.

Coach Saldanha wouldn’t have it. “I don’t pick his ministers and he doesn’t pick my players.” As a replacement, Havelange chose Mario Zagallo, a two-time World Cup champion who was present in the 1950 tragedy as a young Army recruit. The dictator Médici, a violent man that the Flamengo crowd loved seeing in the Maracanã every now and then, got even more attention from the CBF – military personnel dominated Brazil’s preparation for the tournament: fitness coaches, junior executives, and travel organizers, were all linked to the Armed Forces.

The dictatorship supported that Seleção, or national team, so much that Brazil’s leftist and liberal militants promised to cheer against it. But those people, unlike Médici, were only human…they ended up cheering anyways. The 1970 team was so fantastic that dictatorship propaganda is now the last thing most Brazilians think of it. Upon their return, friends of the armed forces were all over the players – São Paulo’s appointed mayor Paulo Maluf even gave them Volkswagens.

And Medici remained popular for a while, but the dictators would soon find out that you can’t win a World Cup every day.

White elephants to prop up the military, and the fall

There were two political parties in Brazil’s fake democracy in those days: Arena (the National Renewal Alliance) to support the military and MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement), which brought together all kinds of opposition parties, from socialists to free-market liberals. They competed for seats in Congress and for a few mayoral positions – but never in large capitals, of course.

Wherever friends of the dictatorship couldn’t gather much popular support, soccer was the solution: a new stadium would pop up and a local team would be included in national tournaments. Many white elephants were inaugurated at the time, such as the Castelão in Fortaleza (1973) and the Mané Garrincha in Brasilia (1974). They would be later renovated to become brand new white elephants for the 2014 World Cup.

It was during the dictatorship that now-disgraced Marin first appears in Brazilian soccer as an executive. Formerly a mediocre player for São Paulo FC, he used a position in the club as a ladder to his political aspirations. In 1975, as a very conservative state congressman in São Paulo, he started a campaign against journalist Vladimir Herzog, a key editor at Cultura, the state-owned TV channel. Weeks later Herzog, was killed by those who tortured him in prison. Herzog’s family holds Marin responsible, among others, for the assassination to this day.

This was the beginning of the end for dictators Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) and João Figueiredo (1979-1985). Geisel didn’t profit much from soccer, but he did try hard. Brazil was defeated in the 1974 World Cup by Holland and in 1978 by Argentina, then ruled by an even more violent dictatorship. Brazil’s economic miracle was proving to be a farce and the regime decided to inflate soccer’s first division to maintain some of its popularity.

That move would lead stars like Zico, Falcão and Socrates travel to small towns to please crowds. The number of clubs playing in the Brazilian championship from 1975 to 1979 rose year after year: 44, 54, 62, 74 and then an astonishing 94. And though generals stayed in control of the CBF, Brazil without Pelé wasn’t as big of a propaganda machine. When the Seleção became great again, in 1982 already under Figueiredo, it was filled with pro-democratic players and captained by activist Socrates.

The end of Marin

After his time as a São Paulo legislator that pushed against allegedly communist journalists, Marin took another job he didn’t get a single vote for: he became governor of São Paulo between 1982 and 1983, appointed by the dictatorship, at the same time he was the president of São Paulo’s soccer association. But when Brazil became a democracy again, in 1985, he had no trouble adapting: he spearheaded the Seleção organization for the Mexico World Cup. When Ricardo Teixeira took over the CBF in 1989, he was one of his vice-presidents. In 2012, after his tutor got in trouble with Swiss courts, he rose to the top, since he was the oldest on the job.

In the 13 years he spent as CBF vice-president, in a more and more democratic Brazil, Marin was very discreet; to Brazilian ears he sounded like a politician from the sixties. Yes, he is a man of soccer and politics, but he wasn’t nearly as popular as club officials that got to Congress to get better kickbacks from sponsors, or businessmen that bought clubs to launder money for political campaigns. He was surely no Teixeira, who managed to turn President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva from a critic into a whiskey buddy on lazy Brasília Saturday afternoons.

Marin is one of the survivors that used old political ties to remain connected to soccer — ties that stopped former guerrilla and now President Dilma Rousseff from taking pictures near him. In prison, he must be thinking of all the favors he made to connect his successor and right arm at CBF, new president Marco Polo del Nero, to the main leaders of the opposition, such as defeated presidential hopeful Aécio Neves. Too bad his long experience with Brazilian politics and soccer won’t be of much use with the FBI.

Mauricio Savarese is a freelance journalist based in São Paulo and co-author of A to Zico: an Alphabet of Brazilian Football

Why do ‘pro-government’ protesters battle cops, while pro-impeachment protesters hug them? Which team are these guys on, again? A guide to the current crisis

Vincent Bevins
São Paulo

I just spent a month away from Brazil, which served to remind me of just how inscrutable the struggles currently rocking this country are to foreign observers. They may know that things are not as rosy as they were a few years ago, or that “the government” has messed up or is in trouble. But the contours of the battles are extremely blurry.

For example. Last week, protesters clashed violently with police outside Congress in Brasília during a demonstration against a new legislative project (pictured above). A few days later, on Sunday, a much larger group of protesters, some of whom smiled and posed for selfies with heavily armed cops, cheerfully filled streets around the country,

It is indicative of the topsy-turvy world that crisis-ridden Brazil has entered that the bloody demonstrators battling cops were the ‘pro-government’ protesters, while the cheerful, carnavalesque crowds were calling for the president to be impeachment and her party to be demolished.

That’s because “the government” is not just one government these days, and a number of players (some even less scrupulous than the others) are currently engaged in a fight for its future.

So who are they? What do they want? What are their chances?

The government, part 1 (executive)

President Dilma Rousseff, of the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT), was re-elected in October and began her second term in January.

The PT has controlled the Presidency since Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva took over in 2003. By any global standard, Lula’s time in power was good for Brazil. Buoyed by high prices for its commodities, the economy surged forward, and moderate social programs helped roughly 40 million people rise from poverty into the “new middle class.” He left office with record levels of support.

Dilma, former left-wing guerrilla and Lula’s hand-picked successor, took over in 2011 and enjoyed widespread support for a while. But the commodity boom ended and the economy slowed down amid mistakes made by Dilma’s government. Then the June 2013 protests happened, and so did the World Cup, which only turned out pretty well in contrast to the mess it was expected to be, and because Brazilians were polite enough to keep their rage about wasteful spending to themselves while the foreign fans were here.

By the 2014 election, Dilma had lost much of the goodwill Lula had bestowed to her. She barely beat out opponent Aécio Neves (PSDB) by frantically appealing to the working poor and middle-class leftists, denying many of the economic problems the country faced and promising what we all knew she couldn’t deliver in the short term.

She won, promptly installed a Finance Minister that her core supporters (and probably she herself) consider ‘neoliberal,’ who embarked on a series of painful adjustments as the dire economic straits Brazil finds itself in became exceedingly obvious. For the first time since 2003, regular people’s lives not only stopped improving, but in some cases, began to get worse. And all the while, since the middle of last year, it slowly emerged that the Federal Police have built a credible case that the state-run oil company, Petrobras, funneled billions of dollars to huge construction companies, who then passed some of the bribes on to political parties.

The government, part 2 (legislative)

If Brazil were a monarchy, that would be it. Rousseff would be “the government.” But Brazil is a loose federal republic with a staggering 28 parties active in its two legislative houses, and 26 state governors who each control their own police forces.

Much of Lula’s success was attributable to his ability to cobble together an unlikely coalition of parties and economic actors and thus keep the party going. This group has included right-wing parties, major figures Lula used to bitterly oppose, one president already impeached for corruption, and big parties who may not believe in much, other than the spoils of power.

Maintaining this kind of a coalition is a lot easier if you have Lula’s charisma and political capital. It’s even easier if you have so much money flowing in that you can make everyone in the country richer at the same time.

Dilma has none of this at the moment, and it’s all falling apart.

Amidst the chaos and political weakness of the first few months of Dilma’s second term, the PT lost control of Congress. The “catch-all, pork loving” PMDB has gained control of the Presidency of both houses and is openly rebelling against Dilma. Eduardo Cunha, an evangelical Christian, has been especially combative. Contributors to this blog have made it pretty clear who these guys are. It is not only that have they taken advantage of Dilma’s weakness. They are also reportedly furious that both of their Congressional leaders, Renan Calheiros and Cunha, have been named in the investigation into the Petrobras corruption scandal.

Recently, they have been pushing a bill that allows for more companies to treat employees as contractors. The PT hates this law, and so do the left-wing and union protesters that marched against it last week in Brasília. That’s who battled cops in Brasília last week, decked out in red. They support “the government” (Dilma) against right-wing threats, but despise Cunha and company.

Many people want Neves and the PSDB in power. Many, but less than before, want Dilma’s PT to hold on and thrive. But few people will tell you they love these guys.

The protesters, 2015 edition (green and yellow)

On Sunday, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets around the country to denounce Dilma and call for her impeachment. This was less than they mustered a month earlier, but this group and its demands are not going away.

These protesters want Dilma gone, now, and mostly hate the PT passionately. A small minority call outright for military intervention. Anecdotally speaking, these people have not felt represented by the PT government in years, and their anger has exploded further since the October election. Studies suggest they are wealthier and whiter than average Brazilians, and that they are most likely to take their cues from Brazil’s most right-wing major publication.

According to this study, they also hold some strange beliefs. A majority said they think the PT “wants to impose a communist regime in Brazil.” The Economist recently called them a “Tropical tea party.” They are usually law and order voters, which explains why some of them embrace the police that terrify many poor Brazilians and traditional protest groups.

But it is not enough to just wave one’s hands, and say that Brazil has always had a small but powerful right-wing section of the elite, that they never liked the PT anyways and hold views that many English-language readers would find bizarre. That may describe some of the core demonstrators who are actually in the streets. But it’s also important to recognize why they’ve been able to step into the spotlight now, and that many regular people are sympathetic to their broader demands.

Another recent poll made very difficult reading for the PT. Datafolha reported that 63% of respondents support an impeachment process against President Rousseff. And 3/4 of respondents said they supported the recent protests around the country.

This must include many people that voted for her. And it’s not hard to see what explains this swing. Things have gotten worse.

Social movements, unions, and the left (protesters in red)

But it’s not just the rich, white, and conservative that are upset. Many of the core supporters of the PT project had hoped that Dilma would follow up on her left-wing campaign with a shift to the left. She did not. They were doubly mortified to see the country fall into the hands of her former conservative allies in Congress, who have been eager to push an agenda they consider homophobic and a serious threat to labor rights.

In much smaller numbers, they took to the streets yesterday, alongside fast food workers, to protest this new direction. These guys come from the traditional left, and have traditionally clashed with police at times.

And while they bitterly oppose the other group of protesters, accusing them of being golpistas, they are also an outgrowth of real discontent with the status quo. They would argue that to tackle the very real popularity problems the Datafolha survey revealed, the PT should return to its left-wing roots.

It’s also notable that Brazilians, perhaps fed up with the system in general, have been quite eager to support all kinds of protests recently. In 2013, a remarkable 89% supported the protests started by an anarchist-leaning student group after they exploded into wider demands for better public services and an end to corruption.

Who will triumph? (pure speculation)

Marxists and free-market liberals alike sometimes make the mistake of thinking that if things just get bad enough, a solution they like will appear. The radical left looks to 1917, and liberals look to 1989, as evidence of this. But what happens more often is that things just sort of muddle along, in a dispiriting and crappy way, with no easy way out.

While admitting that anything could happen, I’ll venture three possibilities for the next few years. The first is that the political and legal circumstances change, and Dilma is actually impeached. For now, this seems unlikely, but it is possible. In any case, it would only be a victory for the yellow-green protesters in that it would be a blow to the PT. Their preferred representatives would be extremely unlikely to take over. Another possibility is that the PT manages to retake control of the situation, getting the economy back on track and moving into a position in Congress where it can satisfy some of its core supporters. This road looks very difficult from here.

But more likely, in my opinion, is that Dilma will remain weak for the near future, with Minister Levy managing to do enough with the economy to avert disaster, but unable to unleash the country’s full potential, while a rudderless Congress is taken in a new and sometimes strange direction.

Not very exciting, I know. But those are the battle lines for now.

For years, crime, classism and old habits have kept Brazil’s well-to-do away from the messy reality of the country’s streets. But the World Cup, and now, anger at the government, have brought them back onto the scene.

By James Young

“Go downtown?* Are you crazy! It’s far too dangerous!” (*Or “Go to the football” or “Take the bus”).

The refrain, usually uttered by upper middle class Brazilians, is familiar to many foreigners coming to live in the country. Worried by eye-popping murder rates (according to WHO figures, there were over 64,000 homicides in Brazil in 2012) and alarmed at the thought of a naïve gringo or gringa ending up in a darkened alley, such over-protectiveness on the part of the locals was arguably understandable.

Yet an additional subtext lay behind such fears. For years, driven indoors by the levels of violence of the society that surrounds them, Brazil’s upper classes have hidden from public life, seeking refuge in gated communities and behind the high walls of luxury apartment buildings, in shopping malls and expensive restaurants. The result was that with some exceptions (the beaches of Leblon or Ipanema, or the metro system of São Paulo, for example) the country’s public spaces – the streets, public transport networks, football stadiums, even large parts of the carnaval celebrations of a number of cities, became the near-exclusive redoubt of less well-off Brazilians.

Now, however, things may be changing. Brazil’s upper social classes appear to be stirring.

The long-established polarization of Brazilian society came to the fore recently amidst the toxic atmosphere that surrounded the presidential elections, notably in the form of frustrated PSDB supporters attacking PT voters for being “ill-informed” and dependent on welfare programs such as bolsa familia. Although the fault lines were in fact blurred, many chose to see the contest between Dilma Rousseff and Aecio Neves as a straight poor Brazil vs. rich Brazil battle.

But as this blog explored previously, Brazil’s class divisions are more complex, not helped by the bewildering array of definitions and terms used to describe social class. According to figures released by the government’s Strategic Matters Department in 2012, the country can be divided into eight social classes – three of which are described as poor or vulnerable, three of which are defined as middle class, and two of which are upper class.

Such definitions reflect the rise of Brazil’s so-called nova classe media (“new middle class”), who, according to the government, earn between R$291 (currently U$90) and R$1019 (U$317) per capita a month and represent over 50% of the population, their numbers boosted by those moving out of poverty as a result of (now stalled) economic growth, an increased minimum wage and social benefit programs.

In recent years the nova classe media has been touted as Brazil’s rising demographic and economic star. The newfound spending power of its members boosted the economy, and suddenly Brazil’s new middle classes were everywhere – from the country’s airports (traditionally another upper class fortresses) to its TV screens. Brazil’s novelas (soap operas) had always been dominated by characters drawn from the wealthy of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, with the occasional token storyline given over to poorer Brazilians, and usually played for laughs. That changed in 2012 with Avenida Brasil, described by many as a “Classe C novela”.

At the same time, much of the nova classe media is far from any middle class that northern European or North American readers would recognize. A family of four in the middle of the government’s scale would have an income of around R$2,600 (U$850) per month, perhaps enough to buy a flat screen TV, smart phone or small car on a lengthy purchase plan, but hardly sufficient to move into an upmarket part of town. Plenty of Classe C (another term used for the nova classe media) neighborhoods in the periferias of Brazil’s major cities, particularly in the nordeste of the country, are unsafe, lack basic sanitation services and have unpaved roads.

Now, it seems, it’s again time for Brazil’s upper classes to grab the spotlight, and the coming out party of the classes altas was last summer’s World Cup. Whereas Brazil’s run-down football stadiums had previously been seen by many better off Brazilians as dangerous no-go areas, ruled over by the notorious torcidas organizadas (there have been at least 234 football related deaths in Brazil in the last 25 years), the expensive tickets and safe, comfortable World Cup arenas, meant that the Copa, in terms of Brazilian fans at least, became a very upper middle class affair. Throughout the tournament the stadium jumbotron TV screens showed images of shiny-toothed, wealthy looking fans beaming into the cameras, and a Datafolha survey of the crowd during Brazil’s 7-1 humiliation against Germany found that 90% were from Brazil’s upper classes, and only 9% were Classe C.

And then there is carnaval. While the profile of foliões (“revelers”) varies from city to city (“carnaval has always been about the people in the street and the rich on their verandas” MPB legend Gilberto Gil has said of the festivities in Salvador), two of the most notable developments of recent carnaval celebrations have been the popularity of blocos da rua (“street parties”) in São Paulo, particularly in the upper middle class neighborhood of Vila Madalena, and the growth of the festival in Belo Horizonte. For years the main carnaval in Brazil’s third biggest city took place in a grotty outer suburb, but this year over a million people celebrated across the city, with many blocos attracting crowds of wealthier Brazilians.

Brazil’s largest upper class explosion came just two weeks ago, however, when anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1.7 million (estimates vary wildly) people took to the streets to protest against political corruption and president Dilma Rousseff’s government. There had been similarly large scale demonstrations during the Confederations Cup in 2013, but the profile of the crowd then (young and middle class), was markedly different to those that took to the streets this month.

At the protest in Belo Horizonte’s leafy Praça Liberdade, for example, the vast majority of the 25,000 or so demonstrators seemed to be drawn from the city’s upper social classes. Most were wearing Brazil football shirts and sunglasses, and chatted happily as they waved placards calling for the impeachment of Rousseff. There were plenty of family groups, and several residents of the expensive apartment buildings nearby had brought their Pekingeses or Shih-Tzus along for a walk. Afterwards, the bars and restaurants of the entertainment district of Savassi were filled with people tucking into hearty lunches after a tough morning’s protesting. As at least one site has noted, it was sometimes hard to tell if it was a political protest or a World Cup match. Meanwhile a survey of the 100,000-strong demonstration in the southern city of Porto Alegre found that over 70% of the crowd earned more than six times the minimum monthly wage.

At the same time, the surprisingly large scale of events means that disparagingly classifying the protests as solely the raging of Brazil’s burguês (“bourgeois”) or elite branca (“white elite”) is unlikely to tell the whole story – frustration with the country’s governing classes runs far deeper than that.

The debate over the return of Brazil’s upper classes to the streets and football stadiums, like the rise in visibility of Classe C before it, has once more brought to the surface the simmering class tensions that underlie the country’s society. Class boundaries in Brazil may be blurring, but its social divisions, and the fear and loathing that surrounds them, are as marked as ever.

I’ve left the bitterness of São Paulo on a brief vacation outside of Brazil, but I wanted to share insights into the country’s current situation from two excellent commentators that generally hold the “pro-market” viewpoint.

The first is from Tony Volpon of Nomura Securities:

Structurally, the end of the commodity boom can now be dated to 2011, one year into [Dilma’s] first term, as Brazil’s terms of trade began to deteriorate and the country began to see a marked economic deterioration.

Though the opposition, often with reason, blames Rousseff’s policies for economic underperformance, these policies were, however inadequate, genuine attempts to respond to a much less supportive external environment.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the external factors are going to be better over the next four years; it seems that the years in which all Brazilians could improve their lot in life are over, for now. Choices will have to be made and priorities will have to be set.

President Rousseff will now have to look beyond the class struggle rhetoric of her campaign and show whether she can regain the trust of the south and southeast of the country that voted for the opposition by a 2:1 margin, and is responsible for around 70% or more of the country’s GDP. Without their support there is little chance that Brazil will see investment rates – which at a paltry 17% of GDP are the lowest of any of the major emerging market economies – rise.

For me, three eminently reasonable things stand out here that are intentionally excluded from the hyperbolic partisan rhetoric dominating the country on both sides right now. First, just as the economy under Lula was boosted hugely by the Chinese-led commodities boom, the end of the boom explains most of the economic problems since 2011. Dilma’s very real “interventionist” errors are only one part of this.

Secondly, Dilma wanted and wants conventional economic success. Measures taken since 2011 very often misfired, but to paint her administration as dangerously radical or anti-growth is just campaign rhetoric or noise from the radical fringe.

Third, whether Dilma voters like it or not, we need the confidence and participation of international capital as well as local investors to make this economy grow again. If the PT actually had some kind of a plan to fully nationalize Petrobras, create socialist firms, or massively expand public investment, we might take that plan seriously. They most certainly do not. So despite the excitement on the left at Dilma’s guerrilla campaign themes, the short-term hard truth is that investors must be placated, and soon.

The second comment comes from Helen Joyce, International Editor at The Economist, who served as Brazil Correspondent until the end of 2013.

“I am absolutely sure Aecio’s economic platform was better – for all Brazilians. But when I see the prejudiced comments about stupid or lazy nordestinos sucking the state dry, I understand why so many didn’t turn to him.

Do these people have no idea that (a) a democratic government must seek to govern for all, and (b) that it’s corporate welfare and the vast privileges of Brazil’s elite that are sucking the country dry, not the very modest handouts for the poor??”

The Bolsa Familia program is only 0.5% of Brazil’s GDP. And the election was not only about policy, but ended up being about cultural, class and regional battles.

So, in the short term, our pressing problem is economic. But the long-term problem is much bigger, and it is social.

Photo above is of street vendors outside a new mall in Minas Gerais. All links inserted by me.

Sunday was full of surprises, and most of them dispiriting for the groups that thought they’d made gains during last year’s protests. Here’s the five biggest.

By Mauricio Savarese

1 – Marina Silva out of the run-off

From presidential front-runner to the falling star of Brazil’s politics. The former environment minister was a bad player from the start of her campaign. Not all of her demise is her fault, of course. As usually happens with third way candidates, she preached new politics and became an easy target for the left and right. But her defeat doesn’t have to do only with her rivals: she flip-flopped on gay rights, lost many of the staff that were working with her deceased former running mate Eduardo Campos, avoided openly supporting of conservative politicians, played victim too soon, failed in answering criticisms from Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves (who are now heading to the run-off), and failed to make Brazilians more confident about what kind of president she would become. In the end, anti-government voters left her when it became clear Aécio Neves might have a better chance of actually taking down Rousseff.

After getting roughly same vote she did in 2010, it’s hard to see her as a presidential contender again. For now, supporting Neves in the run-off is all that is left for her – and if he loses that will show her political leverage is even smaller than many expected.

2 – Increase in abstention after street protests

Street protests last year suggested new political forces would appear. That was not the case, at least at the ballot box. What was more noticeable was a rejection of candidates in general. The number of Brazilians who chose not to show up (voting here is mandatory), or cast votes for no one reached 29% this year, the highest level since 1998. This is only a small uptick, but it would be impossible to say that street protests re-energized the country politically, at least in the electoral sense.

It is hard to see Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves as so exciting to all the voters that went to the streets last year. And those voters are not putting forward any policies that could be embraced by the candidates. If you look at the first round results, June 2013 looks like too much ado for nothing, at least in terms of the ballot box.

As one left-leaning friend in São Paulo put it on Facebook:

“What happens in June
Stays in June.”

Or, here’s some alternate theories from Rio Gringa.

3 – Brazil’s conservative Congress

Preachers, the military, policemen…Brazil’s new Congress is has become more conservative. Almost 40% of the Congressmen are rookies, which makes for the biggest shakeup since 1998. The Worker’s Party suffered a major defeat: they lost 18 seats and will have 70 in 2015. PMDB comes right next, with 66 seats — they had 71. The most voted-for candidates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are extremely conservative politicians Celso Russomano,  Jair Bolsonaro, and Marco Feliciano.  If Dilma Rousseff is elected, that means her reform agenda will be even more difficult to carry out. If Aécio Neves wins, there may be more reforms, but some of them could be very controversial: allowing minors to be tried as adults is one example.

Bolsonaro, above, says that the government supports gay pride marches so that it can tear apart ‘the fabric of society’ and make it easier to control the population. In other charming moments, he has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship.

4 – São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin wins easily

There is a water crisis in Brazil’s wealthiest state. There are various corruption allegations about a cartel that operated for years in subway here. São Paulo’s military police provided, with their brutality, the spark to set off the biggest street demonstrations that the country has ever seen. Yet governor Geraldo Alckmin, who could be held accountable for all those events, breezed to re-election. He won in all cities of the state but one.

Depoliticized voters, plus a lack of enthusiasm for a Paulista third way, represented by businessman Paulo Skaf, gave the 2018 presidential hopeful a shockingly easy ride. Some analysts expected him to win – his power in the Paulista countryside is unmatched. But so easily? That was shocking.

5 – PT wins in Minas and Bahia

This was a major blow to Aécio Neves in his home state and a surprising victory in the battleground state of Bahia. The best news for Dilma Rousseff was that the gubernatorial races there ended in the first round. Taking Minas Gerais from Neves’ allies means governing Brazil’s second most important state with a close friend of hers, Fernando Pimentel. Rui Costa’s victory in Bahia keeps in PT hands a state that was on the verge of going to the opposition. None of those two results were expected a few months ago. In Costa’s case, it wasn’t expected a few days ago.

Follow Mauricio Savarese on Twitter

Brazil is divided economically, socially and politically between its two major population centers, the wealthier Southeast and the historically richer Northeast, so much so that prejudice still exists. Far too few appreciate the ways in which the fiercely proud, culturally rich Northeast revels in its uniqueness. 

by James Young

A week after Brazilian football was rocked by the racist abuse of Santos goalkeeper Aranha by Grêmio fans during a game in the south of Brazil, veteran Ceará midfielder Souza wanted to talk about a different type of prejudice after his team were knocked out of the Copa do Brasil by Rio side Botafogo.

“I don’t want to play the victim, but I’m nordestino, [from Brazil’s poor Northeast]. I’ve seen this happen plenty of times. When it comes to the crunch, they always favor the other side and hurt teams from the nordeste. How can I go home and explain this to my kid?” he said, in protest at a number of controversial refereeing decisions made during the game.

It may have only been football, and worse, Brazilian football, where conspiracy theories blossom like flowers in the spring. But Souza had touched upon one of Brazil’s most virulent, though often overlooked, forms of prejudice.

While Brazil’s racial and social divisions are well documented (as in this article by Vincent Bevins), the country’s regional schisms are perhaps less well publicized. But subtle or not so subtle prejudice against those from the northeast of Brazil is a common occurrence.

Football, as it so frequently does in Brazil, provides a convenient illustration of the ills of the country’s society – in this case the lack of respect with which nordestinos are often treated. It is hard to imagine a journalist from a major US or German broadcaster, for example, asking a famous athlete if people from his or her part of the country are “different because they’re funny” and if “it’s their accent that makes the rest of the country think they’re so funny” – as a journalist from the Esporte Interativo channel asked Brazil international Hulk, from the northeastern state of Paraíba, this June.

The roots of Brazil’s regional divisions are historical. There were times in the dim and dusty past when the nordeste was the country’s powerhouse – Salvador was the country’s colonial capital until 1763, while Recife remained a city of major influence until the beginning of the 20^th century. “People like us from the interior of Bahia used to look at Recife like the world looked at Paris,” said MPB legend Caetano Veloso. 

But a number of interrelated factors – among them the decline of the sugar trade (the region’s staple industry), the poverty and social disadvantages of huge swathes of the population, many of whom were descended from freed or escaped slaves, the harsh terrain of the sertão (the parched nordeste backlands), which forced hundreds of thousands to migrate to state capitals ill-prepared for their arrival, the indolence and self-interest of the area’s ruling classes, and a lack of investment by both state and federal governments – brought steady decline.

Now, tragically, the nordeste is best known in Brazil for its poverty, and the region trails the south and south east of the country in every social and economic indicator. A 2012 study by research agency IBGE found that more than half of the 12.9 Brazilian adults who are unable to read or write are nordestinos, while Veja magazine recently stated that the region is home to 52% of Brazilians who claim Bolsa Familia, the Brazilian government’s basic welfare program strongly associated with the ruling Worker’s Party (PT). According to a 2011 study by research agency IBGE, 9.6 million people in the nordeste live below the government’s definition of extreme poverty (U$30 a month). It is such hardship that forced hundreds of thousands of nordestinos to the south and south east, to work in cities such as São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, where if they were lucky they found a menial job and managed to eke out a basic living, as well as being almost universally nicknamed “paraibanos” – regardless of what state they actually came from.

Even today the more unreconstructed of southerners perpetuate the nordestino stereotype, blaming the people of the region for maintaining the grip on power of the PT of Lula and Dilma Rousseff by voting out of ignorance or under the influence of coronelismo (the abuse of power by wealthy landowners or politicians), and portraying them as toothless, illiterate simpletons. Never was this clearer than in 2010, when a court found São Paulo law student Mayara Petruso guilty of discrimination and sentenced her to community service after she tweeted “Nordestinos aren’t people. Do São Paulo a favor – drown a nordestino!” after Rousseff won the presidential election.

At the same time it is impossible to deny the vivid differences between the south and southeast of Brazil and the northern half of the country, whether it is in terms of climate (whereas Minas Gerais and points south shiver through chilly winters, the nordeste basks in summery temperatures all year round), food (from the acarajé of Bahia to buchada de bode, a backlands dish not unlike the Scottish haggis, though made from the innards of a goat, rather than a sheep), music (such as forró) or accent and dialect (the manioc plant, known as aipim in Rio de Janeiro and mandioca in other parts of Brazil becomes macaxeira in the nordeste).

“From its larger coastal cities, the Northeast can look very like the Southeast,” wrote Peter Robb in his intoxicating interpretation of Brazilian culture and history, A Death In Brazil. “But these appearances deceive. The Northeast is different. The past is present in the Northeast. Rio and São Paulo destroy as they grow, but walk down certain streets in a north-eastern city and you might be in the 1940s. There is the cream painted curved art deco cinema…there are the lean men with hats over their faces, asleep on the tray of a beat up old truck.”

Robb was writing over ten years ago, however, and the nordeste has changed a great deal over that period. While the expansion of Brazil’s welfare state arguably began during the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, it was the election of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, born in the hardscrabble backlands of Pernambuco, as president in 2003 that truly kick-started the region’s transformation. Social support systems such as Bolsa Familia and increases to the minimum wage, together with a number of major infrastructure works included in the PAC (Program of Accelerated Growth) and increased private investment, led to greater prosperity in the region.

Now, while the same social problems remain (a report by the UN Drugs and Crime office earlier this year put six nordestino cities among the 20 most violent urban areas in the world, the nordeste continues to enjoy economic growth that outstrips the rest of the country– in the first five months of 2014, for example, the economy in the region grew by 4%, in contrast to Brazil’s sickly 0.6% growth rate, according to the Brazilian central bank. 

At the same time the area maintains a fiercely independent sense of pride. Never was that better seen than at the funeral of the former governor of Pernambuco, Eduardo Campos, last month, when 160,000 people flooded onto the streets of Recife in mourning. Campos was hugely popular in his home state but overlooked elsewhere, reaching only 8% nationally in the presidential election polls before his death. There had been equal, though not quite so public, lamenting over the death of the great Paraibano playwright and author Ariano Suassuna in July, while a torch still burns in Recife for Chico Science, leader of the band Nação Zumbi and founder of the mangue beat movement, which mixed rock, hip-hop and maracatu, who died in a car crash in Olinda in 1997, aged just 31.

Regional pride is also on vivid display at the nordeste’s massive carnaval celebrations, where Recife, its sister city Olinda, and Salvador, throb to the rhythm of maracatu, frevo and axé, respectively. “I came back to Recife,” goes one carnaval anthem by Alceu Valenca, “it was homesickness that dragged me by the arm.” And the same passion is reflected in the popular support enjoyed by many of the region’s soccer teams, who, due to financial disparity struggle to compete against clubs from the south and south east of Brazil, but still manage to pull in massive crowds – last year two teams, Santa Cruz (Recife) and Sampaio Corrêa (São Luis) were among the top 10 best supported clubs in the country – while playing in Serie C.

“To be Baiano (a native of Bahia) is a state of mind,” wrote the great writer Jorge Amado, one of the state’s most famous sons. In truth though, he could have been talking about anywhere in the nordeste –perhaps Brazil’s most unique, and bewitching, region.

James Young lived in Recife for years and now resides in Belo Horizonte. Follow him on Twitter.

If Brazil is such a macho, backwards country, how has it managed to put on a major presidential race between two progressive women*, with barely a sexist protest in the national media? It may take decades before something like that could happen in the United States.

By Anna Jean Kaiser

On the heels of Chile’s Presidential election last year, Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff’s battle in Brazil is the only other presidential election I can find where the two principal candidates are women. This milestone for gender equality seems to comes from an unlikely place, as Brazil and Latin America are infamously “machista” and sexist. But Dilma’s gender barely made ripples when she was first elected in 2010, and the topic has gone practically unmentioned as Marina and Dilma go at each other a month before the first round of this year’s elections.

Putting the candidates’ politics and criticisms aside, it’s a huge feat for women in politics that Marina and Dilma are facing off to be the president of the world’s fifth largest country. This is something I don’t see happening in my country, the U.S., for decades, if not centuries.

The paradox is that I, like many others, generally regard the United States as more progressive on women’s rights than Brazil. In the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Report” which measures gender equality based on economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment in 135 countries, the United States was ranked 22 and Brazil is ranked 62.

In 2011, Newsweek/The Daily Beast published a study on the best and worst places for women among 165 countries, and the US was ranked 8th and Brazil was ranked 84.

Sexism in Brazil exists in all forms, from domestic violence and rape, to objectifying women’s bodies and inequality in the workforce. It exists in everyday language, from cat-calls on the street to the popular expressions like “da para casar” which means “you’ll do to marry,” which is used to compliment a young woman’s cooking.

Yet despite these realities, two women are running to be the head of state of the world’s seventh largest economy, and there’s a refreshing lack of sexist questions like the ones we see when women run for president of the United States, such as, “will she be too emotional to govern a country?”

What explains this discrepancy?

Furthermore, if you take a look at the backgrounds of these two women – though completely different – both reflect a progressive electorate. Marina Silva is a mixed-race woman from the rural Amazon, the daughter of poor rubber tappers. She used to work as a housemaid and was illiterate until she was 16. She’s now made a name for herself as a fierce environmentalist and politician. Dilma Rousseff joined a radical left-wing guerrilla movement when she was a young adult during Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship. In 1970, the regime arrested and tortured her for two years.

Meanwhile in the U.S.A., the thought of electing a woman like Hillary Clinton – who, by the way, fits the exact narrow profile of the majority of U.S. presidents in almost every way except her gender (i.e. she is white, has an elite education and experience in the Senate and White House) – raises a sexist and misogynistic media uproar.

Despite a few questions raised about Dilma early in first her presidential bid, she was never subject to the same misogyny as Hillary Clinton was and still is. Perhaps the fact that Dilma was the hand-picked successor of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (the most popular president in Brazilian history) helped her bypass some sexist hurdles. Lula himself, though, recently admitted he thought Dilma has suffered from sexism while in office.

While Hillary spoke in New Hampshire, a heckler began chanting, “iron my shirt,” and held up a sign with the same message. She was constantly referred to as being “bitchy,” “shrill” “emotional” and “hysterical” by commentators and media outlets, who also paid meticulous attention to her looks and how well she was aging. The analogue that comes to mind in the case of Dilma is that she is constantly referred to as “mandona,” which you might loosely translate as “bossy.” Many have asked, would a male president be criticized for being “tough” and giving orders?

Sexism exists in many different forms across the world – in almost every country – but where I come from, this Marina-Dilma race looks quite progressive.

Follow Anna Jean Kaiser on Twitter. Above, a photo from a recent debate.

[*Editor’s note – Of course, the Dilma camp contests that Marina is “progressive” while Marina insists that Dilma is not. By global feminist standards, it may to difficult to consider either ‘progressive’ objectively, as both oppose legal abortions and gay marriage. However, they are most certainly progressive in the relative sense, in that they both claim to be progressive (no one here is a declared conservative) and are to the left of Brazil’s political center. Also, an earlier version of this article failed to adequately discuss the importance of Chile 2013]

Brazil’s brutal inequality is so ubiquitous that those who live here simply stop noticing it. An unexpected message from abroad serves as a reminder of the topic that is so rarely discussed here, in society, the media, or the current election.

I’ve been living in Brazil for over four years now, which has been incredible in almost every way, including the ways in which I’ve adapted to the local culture. But there’s the bits I don’t like, too. More than anything else, I hate the way I’ve become desensitized to shocking, brutal, and stultifying levels of inequality. I’ve become accustomed to it, as if it were or ever should be normal.

[para ler o texto em Português, clique aqui]

This, most foreigners in Brazil learn quickly enough, is actually one of the required characteristics of being authentically “Brazilian.” True locals understand that extreme inequality is just a fact of life here, and it is bad taste to bring it up or transgress established class boundaries, so much so that an extreme preoccupation with the topic, or wanting to get to know Brazil outside elite circles, are sometimes considered “gringo” things to do. The more I find myself  becoming “local” in this sense (and in this sense only), the more uncomfortable I become.

Recently, a flash of realization came, as they almost never do, via a WhatsApp message, sent to my cell phone from a Brazilian friend visiting my home country for the first time.

From New York:

“Wow, I’m really impressed with the social equality here. Congratulations.”

And then: “Blacks are part of society. They aren’t excluded like they are in Brazil.”

For all intents and metaphorical purposes, these messages caused my head to explode.

I was born and raised in the United States, a country which has many, many, very obvious problems – probably more than Brazil – which are mostly irrelevant here. Apart from our famous propensity to bomb countries, killing hundreds of thousands for no discernible positive outcome, social injustice has always been a major problem of ours. We have one of the worst inequality levels among the world’s developed countries, and it’s clear to me we have a fairly serious race problem, especially when it comes to treatment of our black citizens.

Moreover, on the equality issue, our problem is getting worse, so much so that Obama spoke recently of the need to combat “dangerous and growing inequality.” 

Maybe not every Brazilian would immediately see things they way my friend did when arriving in the US or Europe. But the fact that a resident of Brazil can feel that New York, of all places, is a beacon of social harmony was a shocking reminder of how deep and problematic Brazil’s inequality is.

But of course it shouldn’t have been shocking. When I arrived here, I was constantly taken aback by elements of a culture that often seemed from another time. Two separate doors for apartments (one for the family, one for the help). Upper middle class youth who had never washed their own clothes or bathroom (let alone held down a job before graduating university), and who could casually drop classist or racist remarks – of the kind that would get you permanently expelled from polite society many places elsewhere – as if it were nothing.

But much of this had become normal for me, as I imagine it had long ago for most Brazilians.

Of course, it’s easy enough for me to deal with this violent prejudice, as a white man who arrived from the US and Europe, locations that much of São Paulo’s upper middle class look up to, but where they themselves, ironically, may be considered crude, reactionary, or racist, and with very bad taste.

You could argue, sometimes correctly, that people like me benefit from this prejudice at times, even if we would rather not. But for the Brazilian friends and colleagues who were unlucky enough to be born with African or indigenous features, or to working-class parents, it’s common to be shouted down when they complain of this class system, as if they were either dangerous Bolsheviks or lazy, self-interested quota jumpers.

It is absolutely true that Brazil is one of the few countries in the world to have improved income inequality in the last decade. But, in the pursuit of both social justice and increasing economic productivity, the country still has a very long way to go. If you look at how the election is unfolding, however, you would think that what the country needs is mostly some technocratic fixes, or a candidate who is less tarred by corruption allegations than the others. If you look at the media, you would think that the social advances made since 2003 were already revolutionary and frightening enough, or that there wasn’t much to talk about. Of course, if you pick up any major newspaper here, you may come to the conclusion that they are written by the white upper middle class for the white upper middle class, because they are.

Around the ‘rolezinhos‘ which took place early this year, there was a debate as to whether Brazil is an ‘apartheid‘ society. I think that’s the wrong word, as there is no state sanction for the divisions. Another friend suggested we may have a “caste” system, which I think is closer to being accurate.  It is at least accurate insofar that the following statement is accurate: For a daughter or son of the ‘middle class,’ the idea of showing up at Sunday family lunch and introducing a member of the working class as boyfriend or girlfriend is basically unheard of. Indeed, I’ve met people from both classes who admit they’ve never had a real, substantive conversation with a member of the other class.

But why don’t we talk about this? Because it’s too obvious.

Follow @Vinncent

The Cup went well enough that we finally got to focus on the soccer for a few weeks. Now, it’s back to the real problems.

Vincent Bevins
Rio de Janeiro

Since early May, and really, since June 2013, we’ve seen the meaning of the World Cup shift radically, many times. Before it all started, the questions were “Is this going to happen?” and, “Will Brazil hate their own World Cup?” We thought it would probably be fine, but many thought otherwise.

Then it started, and the mood in the country was “Wow, this is going pretty well.” By week two, it was time for the World Cup optimists and government supporters to declare victory, as well as to say “I told you so.” But in the last two weeks of the tournament, another shift took place, to a theme which never should have been surprising.

Lo and behold, this was actually a soccer tournament. After the Brazil-Chile game, few were talking about organization, or protests, or the effect on the election (except for die-hard partisans with blogs/Twitter accounts). People have been talking about the games – Brazil snuck by Colombia, and then was massacred by Germany. Costa Rica almost made it past the Netherlands, who were eliminated in an unimpressive semi by Argentina. How did Germany get to be the best? How does Brazil need to change its training to be more like them? These have been the issues. Soccer issues – finally.

To mix sporting metaphors, the World Cup should have been a slam drunk for Brazil. It should have been incredibly easy to prepare 8 venues well in advance of the June start date, and then simply to allow the interaction between foreigners and Brazilians to flourish in the streets and the magic to take place on the pitch. It’s a lovely country, and it’s a lovely tournament. There was no need to complicate things.

But it seems the government promised too much, both to its population and the all-important companies who pay for political campaigns here, and then seek profits from large construction projects. A World Cup, as it turns out, is not that complicated of an event. But Brazil’s government choose to pretend that an entirely new country would be delivered to its common people in time for kickoff. That backfired badly.

As it happened, the World Cup was a success. The fact that we could stop talking about logistical breakdown or mass protests is evidence of that. But it was only a success after exposing some of Brazil’s deep social problems, and damaging Brazil’s reputation a bit, at least for a while.

It will be two years before sports is the main focus again, when the 2016 Olympics start. In the meantime, it’s back to the real issues, a a bruising election and the bruising that Brazil’s military police seem to eager to hand out to anyone who gets in their way. If you haven’t seen it, check out the video of a cop brutally assaulting a Canadian documentary filmmaker at a protest Sunday.

The soccer is over. That was a kick to the face, not to a football. Back to the real problems.

U.S.-Brazil relations are still strained due to allegations of high-level NSA spying and corporate espionage. In the unlikely event that the US team makes a strong showing at the World Cup this year, how would Brazilians respond? Any chances of success hinge on today’s game against Portugal.

Nathan Walters
Rio de Janeiro

I am always surprised when I ask Brazilians which team will win the World Cup, and the answer is not a quick and emphatic “Brazil, of course.” Most weigh the possible outcomes: the usual suspects Holland and Germany can’t be ruled out (just a few days ago Spain was also on the list); Belgium could do something amazing. I always find this strange because whenever anyone asks for my forecast I invariably say “The United States, of course.”

The response is usually greeted with laughter (sometime more than is really called for), and then a short explanation of why this is not possible.

Granted, even the (German) U.S. men’s team coach Jurgen Klinsmann [pictured above] doesn’t think his team can win the Cup. Though this may seem un-American considering US fascination with highly improbable situations, especially when it comes to sports, Klinsmann is probably right.

The team landed in the “Group of Deadliest Deathly Death,” and even if it manages to advance to the final 16, the level of play will only prove more challenging. No problem. U.S. teams are known for miracles, such as the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team’s Miracle on Ice, and Brazil is a country where miracles are known to happen. The Brazilian economic Miracle of the 1970s is still fresh in the minds of many Brazilians.

So the setting could even be perfect for a legendary upset by the U.S. squad that would most certainly go down in history as the “Miracle at Maracanã” or “Only a Dream in Rio” (with James Taylor intro music opening every ESPN segment analyzing the victory).

After the U.S. men’s team hard-fought Monday night 2-1 win over nemesis Ghana, I found myself thinking more about what a U.S. miracle victory in Brazil might mean for the relations between the two countries.

The U.S. and Brazil have enjoyed a long, stable relationship and the citizens of both countries seem to have traditionally had a high level of interest, if not admiration, for each other. But the relationship has also been riddled by conflict, and recent spying allegations have laid bare some unsettling activities that have helped push the suspicions to a new high and State relations to a new low.

Brazilians have been notoriously fond recently of saying the World Cup is ‘fixed,’ though without any evidence. Some say an easy penalty awarded to Brazil in the opening fueled these suspicions.

If the U.S. were to, say, miraculously win the championship, the victory may not be attributed to skill or even divine intervention but the NSA or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the well-known international agency of what is sometimes considered the US “Empire” in Latin America.

Snowden in limbo

Unsurprisingly, considering his previous residency in Hawaii, former NSA contractor/ spy is fearful of another Moscow winter and has made clear his desire to obtain asylum in Brazil. The move would put him closer to Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, and who knows what type of eye-opening revelations could result from the two being neighbors or even roommates (if that is not fodder for a sitcom, I don’t know what is).

Snowden says he is seeking refugee status in Brazil, but so far only a handful of Brazilian politicians have spoken in favor of granting the request. Is it too ridiculous to think a strong US appearance in the World Cup could affect this, for better or worse?

Trade secrets

Last week, Didier Deschamps, the coach of France’s national team, told reporters that a drone had flew over his team’s practice. Soccer espionage? If it was a drone it probably had to be the U.S., or Amazon, or the BBC gathering footage for its World Cup film.

The U.S. is still handling the fallout from accusations of NSA spying on Brazil’s state-controlled energy giant Petrobras and Rousseff.

The revelations, based on documents disclosed by Snowden, rattled U.S.-Brazil relations, prompting Rousseff to cancel her official October 2013 visit to Washington, D.C. Joe Biden made the to Brazil last week to watch the U.S-Ghana match and took the opportunity to pay a visit to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Is was a small step to repair strained relations, one that could be quickly forgotten with a U.S. Cup victory (unless president Obama makes the trips for the final).

Perhaps significantly, Brazil’s Presidential office made no official announcement about the results of the Rousseff-Biden visit.

If the US wants any more attention during this World Cup, however, they’ll have to beat Portugal today.

Drug crime has returned to some of the favelas taken over by Rio’s police in recent years, putting the ‘pacification’ program under further scrutiny. Escalating violence and accusations of human rights abuses indicate police forces may be losing control. One resident group questions the wisdom of trying to resolve the problem with more military force.

By Anna Jean Kaiser

Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Penha, favelas in northern Rio, have recently seen a wave of shootings, four police fatalities in 30 days, and accusations of human rights abuses commited by police. Rocinha and Manguinhos, two other favelas supposedly conquered and ‘pacified’ by Rio security forces since the push started in 2009, have seen armed attacks on police stations.

In the wake of what seems to be a loss of control, Rio Governor Sergio Cabral has called upon the federal armed forces to intervene and act alongside UPP and state military police.

For five years now, foreign and domestic observers have largely praised the pacification program. But recently, it’s become clear how difficult the long-term situation will be.

The state and the residents seem to agree: combating crime in the community is arduous and the current solution is not working. But the state’s solution, that of sending in more armed forces, seems problematic for some residents, who are asking for dialogue, more participation in society, and above all, positive steps toward social justice.

In light of the escalating conflicts in Complexo do Alemão, an activist group known as “Ocupa Alemão” (Occupy Alemão) released a manifesto. Its opening line reads:

“For decades the State has not recognized the favela as an integral part of the city, denying favela residents their basic rights. Today, after three years of public security occupation in Complexo do Alemão, we see that the path to the guarantee of our civil rights is still long, as the branch of the state that most enters the favela is the armed branch.”

As the Manifesto made its way around the social networks, the state sent in the Battalion of Special Operations (BOPE) and then announced the anticipated arrival of the military.

“The current strategy of the government is centered around military force being the solution for the favela,” Thainã de Medeiros from the Ocupa Alemão movement told ‘From Brazil,’ “We do not believe that this is a good solution for either side, neither for the residents nor for the military forces… The current strategy costs lives on all sides.”

Alemão residents are caught in the middle. The very large majority of residents are working class families with no links to crime, and the effects of human rights abuses and high levels of violence are traumatizing.

After UPP officer Rodrigo de Souza Paes Leme was fatally shot in Alemão, police arrested two minors, Kleyton da Rocha Afonso and Hallam Marcilio Gonçalves, for their alleged involvement with drug trafficking and the officer’s death. Family and friends of the teenagers claimed the allegations were unjust – they had no criminal records and no proven links to drug trafficking. A peaceful protest against their incarceration turned violent, police throwing tear gas and shooting.

Some favela residents go so far as to say that life has deteriorated.

“The residents are living worse than they were before,” said Roberto Borges, the president of the Alemão Resident’s Association to Agência Brasil, “The UPP alone will not solve a public problem that has existed for decades.”

But the state continues to turn to more troops and Secretary Beltrame insists that the program is not at risk, though he does admit that there are serious problems in both Alemão and Rocinha  – noting that the situation is “very far from ideal.”

“Rio de Janeiro lived with this for 30 years and never did anything. There is no guarantee to remove all weapons from everywhere, because for 30 years the state has not done its job and society tolerated it,” he said in defense of the program.

Anna Jean Kaiser is editorial assistant in Brazil for The Guardian and freelance correspondent for outlets such as USA Today.

A gruesome video recently released is only one example of a penitentiary system often dominated by medieval conditions and shocking violence, Dom Phillips reports, and quasi-feudal political arrangements in the state of Maranhão have done little to improve the system there.

By Dom Phillips

It cannot have been an easy decision for this newspaper to publish a gruesome cell-phone video in which Brazilian prisoners paraded the decapitated bodies of three gang rivals.

But the video put both the crisis at the Pedrinhas prison on the outskirts of São Luís, and the government of Maranhão state where the prison is situated, under the spotlight.

The video is extremely graphic and should be watched with extreme caution.

It was one of a series of revelations spilling out of the Pedrinhas prison, where 60 prisoners were murdered in 2013, and another two have already been killed this year. Two gangs battle for control of the prison.

The release of the video was heavily criticised by the Maranhão state government, but the shock tactic worked. The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights demanded an investigation.

“We regret having to once again express concern at the dire state of prisons in Brazil and urge the authorities to take immediate action to restore order in Pedrinhas prison and other prisons throughout the country,” the UN said in a statement.

Brazil’s National Council of Justice, the CNJ, reported December 23 that a visit by Judge Douglas de Melo Martins had found that intimate visits from wives and girlfriends were taking place in communal cells. Partners and relatives of prisoners were being sexually abused by gang members during visits in order to keep their relatives alive, Martins said.

Groups of 250-300 slept together. Individual cells no longer functioned because bars had been removed, and Judge Martins said he was advised not to enter some areas of the prison because it would not be safe as gang leaders had not given permission.

In short, Pedrinhas prison was no longer under the control of the Maranhão state government.

The crisis is not new – 13 were killed in a rebellion at the prison in October last year, at which point the state declared a ‘Situation of Emergency’ and brought in the National Force – a police shock troop.

In early December another four died in another rebellion, during which the three decapitations took place. Another 18 had died in a rebellion in 2010.

Police entered and took control of the prison on December 27. Days later, there was a wave of what the authorities said were retaliatory attacks, and four buses were set on fire, burning six-year-old Ana Clara Sousa to death. Brazil’s Justice Minister José Cardozo was sent to Maranhão amid talk of federal intervention.

Cardozo met with governor Roseana Sarney, who is currently in her fourth term. Roseana is the daughter of Brazil’s former president, senate president and senator for nearby Amapá José Sarney, whose family has exercised a powerful political influence in Maranhão since he first became governor in 1966.

José Sarney is seen in Brazil as an old-style ‘colonel’ – one of a dying breed of rich and powerful landowner politicians who for centuries ruled big chunks of Brazil like their own personal fiefdoms. Roseana is seen has having carried on the family tradition.

As this Folha story reported, as the prison crisis heated up, Roseana’s administration opened a tender to feed her and her family for this year, at a cost of Real 1 million ($425,000) to the state. On the list: 80 kilos of fresh lobster, one and a half tons of prawns, and eight flavours of ice cream.

When José Sarney became governor of Maranhão in 1966 he promised to fight poverty and violence. 48 years later, the state is still the second poorest in Brazil, the government lost control of a prison despite repeated warnings, and the São Luís murder rate grew 460% from 2000-2013, according to this Estado de S.Paulo story.

Vote buying is common in the state “which has been run as a fiefdom by a handful of privileged families for as long as anyone can remember”, the Guardian said.

Both father and daughter Sarney have survived sleaze scandals. In 2008, a series of secret Senate decisions called the ‘secret acts’ rocked the senate under Sarney, then senate president, but he survived. In August last year, Brazil’s prosecutor general requested Roseana be removed from their jobs in an ongoing case related to her election in 2010http://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/.

Roseana’s government attacked Judge Martins and his report for “untruths.”

It said that there had been no complaints of rape of prisoners’ partners or relatives. A video attached to the Martins report in which a man has his leg skinned had in fact been circulating on the internet for over two years, it said, which cast doubt over the whole report’s credibility.

Judge Martins had been advised not to enter parts of the prison because it was Christmas and he could embarrass family members, not because gang leaders had forbidden him too, the government said. Martins had, the Maranhão government claimed, only taken his “untruths” public to “aggravate further the situation in the prison units of the state in a clear attempt to discredit measures that had already been determined by the government”. No official reports of sexual abuse had been made.

This is how Roseana Sarney and her father deal with criticism – anything negative said about them is an attack on the state, not on those who run it. But they are right about one thing: the prison crisis does not just affect Maranhão, but the whole country. There are 563,700 people in prison in Brazil, but capacity for just 363,500. Conditions are frequently medieval: overcrowding, prison rebellions, murders, and gang control – these are national problems. Maranhão is just that bit worse.

On January 2, another prisoner was found dead in Pedrinhas, the state said. Josivaldo Pinheiro Lindoso, 35, was found with signs of strangulation. He had only just been recaptured after escaping from prison in 2012, while serving a six year stretch.

Lindoso had been allowed home for Christmas and never went back. Like intimate visits, holiday trips home are another surreal reality of the Brazilian prison system. Criminals frequently fail to return. Knowing what horrors might await them at jail like Pedrinhas, this is hardly a surprise.

In São Paulo, taking to the streets involves far more than protests, riots and demonstrations. It’s also about taking back space from the concrete jungle for parties, festivals, public parks and shopping-mall meetups – ‘rolezinhos.’ The poster in the photo above by Claire Rigby reads “More love, please.” 

By Claire Rigby

2013 may be remembered as the year Brazil took to the streets. Or depending on what’s around the corner, it may be remembered as a mere precursor to what came next. But whatever 2014 has up its sleeve, in São Paulo a tendency to take to the streets en masse, invading public spaces and investing them with life and colour, runs deeper and wider than last June’s headline-grabbing protests.

The push for a more humane city – more street life, more music and more space for human interaction – takes in creative types infiltrating music and art onto the streets of the centro, and campaigners for a new downtown park. It includes the bike shop renting private land to create a mini public square, and the working-class kids turning up in their hundreds at the mall, in Facebook-driven public actions known as ‘rolezinhos‘. And though less overtly politicized so far than the UK’s 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement, which evolved from staging euphoric anti-car parties in the streets to embrace anti-capitalism, the struggle to take possession of the city’s public spaces is becoming more interesting by the week.

Lord knows, São Paulo’s unforgiving urban landscape needs the human touch more than most. In depressing contrast with the warmth and courtesy you encounter every day here from its inhabitants, across large swathes of the city, the bleakly over-developed built environment presents a blunt, blank face to the world, all walls, railings and asphalt. At the heart of South America’s largest metropolis, on the edge of the Tropic of Capricorn, sun and rain ricochet off concrete and more concrete, pedestrians take their lives in their hands crossing the street, and the obsession with ‘verticalization’ that began in the 1950s seems to never run out of steam, with new towerblocks rising endlessly, citywide (see Corruption – it’s the private sector). 

On the Rua Augusta, a long street that runs from Jardins over Avenida Paulista and down into Centro, the demolition of low-level buildings in favour of huge apartment blocks is still in full swing – as is a campaign to save one large, tree-lined plot of land from its fate as the proposed site of a pair of yet more tower blocks. Driven by an eclectic bunch of protest veterans, ‘occupy Centro’ activists and more conservative local residents, the movement to create a new public park, Parque Augusta, on the rare remaining scrap of green held a series of vigils outside the proposed park’s padlocked gates over Christmas and into the new year, including a Domingo no Parque SÓQÑ (‘Sunday in the Park [Not]’) event on 5 January), held in the street outside the locked gates under the slogan ‘The street is a park too!’.

Meanwhile in Vila Madalena, where public spaces and greenery are also in short supply, at the bar/café/gallery/bike shop Tag and Juice, owners Billy Castilho and Pablo Gallardo have seized the chance to rent a vacant lot opposite their shop, to use it as a mini-park. The lot, open whenever Tag and Juice is open, has hosted art exhibitions, mini food fests and live music, providing shade from a tree and grass to sit down on, just round the corner from Beco do Batman, the epicentre of SP’s street art scene, where a long winding alley is plastered with work by some of the city’s finest urban artists.

Party people

On the cool cutting edge of the movement to infiltrate more fun into SP’s streets are clubnights like the pioneering Voodoohop, created in 2009 by the German DJ Thomas Haferlach. Voodoohop has thrown colourful, unpretentious parties and happenings all over Centro, in the streets and in some of its most interesting spaces: at Trackers, a many-roomed, no-frills petri-dish for new clubnights; on the top floor of the residential Edifício Planalto, towering over Centro’s western margins; and on the Minhocão, a godforsaken flyover that snakes through São Paulo at 3rd-floor height. The highway is closed evenings and Sundays, when it becomes a de facto, no-frills High Line park frequented by strolling families, joggers and cyclists, snogging couples and, on the central reservation, the odd groups of friends sharing a discreet sundown spliff.

Métanol, a clubnight collective headed by DJ Akin Deckard, has also graced the city with its fresh, feel-good Métanol na Rua parties, spilling into the roads in Vila Madalena and beyond, spinning its sunny Saturday afternoon vibes on into the night. And in a similar vein, Selvagem, voted 2013’s best party by the jury of Guia, Folha’s weekly listings supplement, held a series of indoor-outdoor Sunday afternoon events last year at Paribar, a bar/restaurant set at the edge of a tucked-away square in Centro.

It’s no coincidence that so much interest should be focused on Centro. There’s a widespread sense of affection for the region, left to rack and ruin for many years but also blessed with some of the best architecture in the city. Far from the social and cultural wasteland imagined by some of SP’s elite, and despite its problems, which include a simmering crack epidemic, downtown SP is packed with heart and soul, and busy with street life – around the crowded 25 de Março shopping region, all over República and up the hill into Bixiga, where people sit out on their doorsteps and linger in botecos on hot summer nights.

São Paulo’s real urban deserts, arguably, are in its affluent western neighbourhoods: in places like Itaim Bibi and Jardins, and in Brooklin and Berrini, where luxury apartment blocks loom coldly behind railings, and large houses shelter behind blank, impenetrable walls. You can walk for many blocks in parts of these neighbourhoods and never see a soul – just gates sliding open briefly to discharge powerful, glossy cars.

Roll on

In the city’s huge, poor periphery, in contrast, where a different kind of architectural chaos prevails, there’s no shortage of human warmth and interaction at street level. But in an equal and opposite reaction to the move to colonize the streets downtown, in the run-up to Christmas, a different kind of movement was born, taking the search for places to gather in a new direction: the rolezinho. Roughly translatable as ‘little excursions’ or outings, rolezinhos are offline meetups organized on Facebook. In December, a series of them brought flocks of teenagers together inside shopping malls around the city’s vast suburbs.

The appearance of fun-seeking crowds of working-class teens, many from neighbouring favelas, struck panic into shopping centre management, some of their customers, and into military police called to the various scenes, who appear to have criminalized the youngsters at a glance, making arrests at each of December’s rolezinhos despite no crimes having been reported. ‘If this had been a large crowd of white, middle-class kids, as has happened a number of times, would this have been called a flash mob?’ asked the anthropologist Alexandre Barbosa Pereira, who specializes in the culture of SP’s periphery, interviewed as part of a wide-ranging article by Eliane Brum at El País’s Portuguese-language site. 

Brum writes that a number of rolezinhos planned for January have been cancelled: ‘Their organizers, young people who work as office boys and assistants, are afraid to lose their jobs by getting arrested for being where they are not meant to be – an unwritten law, but one that’s always followed in Brazil.’ As if to prove it, no fewer than 23 people were detained for questioning after a rolezinho at Shopping Internacional de Guarulhos on 14 December – but with no actual crimes reported, all 23 were later released without charge.

Rolezinho participants claim a variety of reasons for having turned up – mainly that they are out to have fun, flirt and meet other youngsters at the shopping centre – standard behaviour for teenagers worldwide, as well as legitimate claims that the facts of the rolezinhos so far bear out. See this YouTube video from a rolezinho held at Shopping Metrô Itaquera on 7 December, where chattering pre-teens and teenagers are seen milling about aimlessly, at one point fleeing excitedly from a handful of police officers walking through the mall. Then check out the almost unanimous comments below it: ‘favelados’, ‘raça nojenta’, ‘bando de vagabundos sem pai e mãe’, ‘gente feia e mal vestidos’ (‘favela-dwellers’, ‘disgusting race’, ‘motherless fatherless layabouts’, ‘ugly, badly dressed people’).

The latest rolezinho, which gathered 400 youngsters together at Shopping Tucuruvi last Saturday (4 January), ended with panicked shopkeepers calling the police to eject the 400 kids, and the mall closing down three hours early, with no arrests or reports of any trouble having been caused.

Perfect storms

Meanwhile back in Centro, the campaign around the creation of Parque Augusta rolls on. The Prefeitura (City Hall) announced its approval of the new park’s creation just before Christmas, but with its gates still padlocked, the parks’ champions are still working to secure the land as a public space.

The current sporadic occupations of the street outside the park, in front of the locked gates, might not quite amount to a Taksim Square moment for São Paulo; and a series of ruined shopping-mall tweetups don’t necessarily amount to much more than the discrimination faced every day elsewhere by the same kids, whose faces, posture, accents, clothes don’t pass muster in their very own city.

But as Taksim Square itself showed – and as seen in São Paulo in June 2013’s perfect storm, when a series of small demos over bus-fare rises spiraled to epic proportions, fuelled by a brutal crackdown on demonstrators by police, leaving a small, smouldering long tail of unrest in Rio, São Paulo and beyond – when things kick off, the trigger can come from the most unexpected of places.

Corruption isn’t mostly about politicians. In its present form, it means that powerful companies dominate Brazil. Above, what corruption looks like.

In Brazil, one simple image of corruption is often dominant:  some politician, usually an overweight middle-aged man, grabs money from the public coffers, stuffs it into a big sack, and takes off to spend it in Miami or some tacky São Paulo nightclub. The politician gets rich, and the taxpayer gets poorer.

But this is an overwhelmingly one-sided view of what corruption is, as an excellent column from Kenneth Maxwell points out, and neglects the larger role that hugely profitable companies play in the schemes in order to screw over the Brazilian people.

[Este texto foi traduzido em Novembro de 2014. Para ler em Português, clique aqui.]

Corruption in its concrete form these days involves actors in the private sector, “free market” players, paying off public officials to avoid regulation, taxes, or get away with exploiting consumers, workers, and the public. These corporations are getting more out of it than the politicians, or they wouldn’t be doing it.

The recent spate of scandals to emerge – much bigger than the “mensalão” case dominating the country’s media for a decade – confirms this model of corruption. The R$500m “ISS Mafia” scandal allegedly involved public officials delivering favors in return for big payouts from construction companies and banks. The “Trensalão” involved foreign companies forming a cartel in a bid to provide horrid public transportation in São Paulo. And if we find out, as expected, that this World Cup was riddled with corruption, it will have been construction companies paying off politicians, who then allowed the corporations to get rich, trample on health and safety guidelines, perhaps leading to deaths, and maybe – just maybe – embarrass the country as they drag  their feet on stadium deadlines.

The simple rules of the market are proof that the private sector gets more out of this than the fat-cat politicians. Since these companies are maximizing profits, they wouldn’t be paying the bribes if they didn’t get more in return. The politician is the tool, or the part of the state dominated by economic power, and the company is the real winner.

Though slightly more complicated than a comic-book villain politician raiding the public purse, this is how corruption really affects our daily lives. If you want to see evidence of corruption in São Paulo, you can take a look at Paulo Maluf‘s bank accounts, sure. Or you can just walk around the city, and take in what it feels like to be in an urban environment where every square inch of public space was sold off to build a high-rise apartment building, where public transportation is an insult, and where you constantly are invited into one more godawful shopping mall.

This is not because some politician got rich. It’s because some corporation got to walk all over the city in exchange for a payout.

Or check your phone bill and your bank statement, and see how much you got screwed this time. Try calling them up, and see how eager they are to help. In this case, we have no evidence of direct ‘corruption’, but they do break all kinds of laws, and get away with it.

Of course, in “advanced” democracies like the United States, the “corruption” of the state works through legal channels. Corporations give untold sums to political campaigns, and the rest of us are left wondering afterwards if perhaps that will influence the way we are governed. But at the very least, this process is relatively transparent.

In Brazil, there is an ideological consequence to the over-simplified view of corruption, and it serves to reinforce a view that has been common amongst certain policymakers and undergraduate economics students since the 1980s. That is: that the state is bad, it always messes up or steals, and we need to get rid of it wherever possible. But looking at corruption in its real form could lead to something closer to the opposite conclusion. The government we vote for and pay taxes to can easily be dominated by private companies, who then go on to dominate us. We need the government to be strong, reliable, and responsive,  so they can hold the companies back.

The world expected Brazil’s state oil industry to oversee a boom driven by offshore reserves. But Petrobras is stuck between a rock and a hard place, as the government has needed to use the company to combat the eternal threat of inflation, grinding relations with the investors the industry needs.

By Dom Phillips

Graça Foster, CEO of Brazil’s state controlled oil giant Petrobras, was in this newspaper yesterday, doing some fire fighting. The reason was the fallout from the price rises Brazil announced just over a week ago – 4% for gasoline and 8% for diesel. This might not seem like a such a big deal, apart from the cost to Brazilian motorists, but it was front page news in Brazil.

This was not just a price rise. It is part of a political and economic battle that goes to the heart of how Brazil is run. And the analysts and observers who make their livings telling their clients what this sort of thing means were not very impressed.

Here’s why. Brazil used to export oil, but it doesn’t any more because it hasn’t got enough for itself. One reason is that a lot of cars keep being sold, in part because of credit people can get to buy them, in part because the government historically bet on cars rather than trains – there are hardly any here – and in part because the government has sometimes zeroed sales tax on cars to stimulate the economy.

Brazil doesn’t have enough gasoline and diesel to go round – so it has to import it. This process is controlled by Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company. But the government, which effectively controls Petrobras, makes the company keep prices low to keep inflation down. As a result Petrobras has been hemorrhaging cash by subsidising gas and diesel for the local population. Petrobras shareholders have gotten itchy.

Brazil is still traumatised by the hyperinflation it went through in the 1980s and early 1990s and ever since the financial system stabilised under presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva, the spectre of inflation’s return has haunted the country. Inflation is deeply unpopular in Brazil, especially amongst the poor, and has been hovering around the maximum the government says it can tolerate for some time. The government has been forced to take some very difficult measures to stop it going up any further. And the strategy Brazil has used with Petrobras has cast a shadow over what looked like a very promising oil boom just a few years ago.

The company has $237.7 billion of investments in its 2013-2017 business plan – much of will go to equipment to exploit the ultra deep water, ‘pre-sal’ or ‘sub-salt’ reserves that Brazil has off its Atlantic Coast. Another big chunk of it is going to refineries that it is building because it can’t actually refine enough gasoline and diesel. Petrobras is stuck between a rock and a hard place – losing money hand over fist, but unable to put the prices up more than once or twice a year when the government says it can.

The narrative played out like this. In October, Petrobras said it was going to adopt a new system in which domestic prices would automatically readjust to international prices. The market liked this and Petrobras shares went up. Petrobras had a board of directors meeting to decide all of this marked for November 22. Then everything changed.

We don’t actually know what happened, but according to Brazilian media and newspapers like this one and business daily Valor, generally quoting anonymous sources, the government did not like the Petrobras plan one bit. Automatic fuel price rises could impact badly on inflation – and that could impact badly on a government up for re-election next year.

The Petrobras board meeting was postponed for a week. Then after the meeting happened, on November 29, the company announced the price rises and said had introduced a new pricing mechanism, but that it wasn’t going to tell anybody what that mechanism was.

This looked like there was no new policy at all and that price rises would continue happening as and when the government decided – just as they had been. Shares fell. Analysts were very critical. At the Itaú BBA bank analysts said the difference between international and domestic prices remained at 22% for diesel and 17% for gasoline and that Petrobras would lose Real 6 billion ($2.57 billion) on imports in 2013.

It had been painted as a battle between Finance Minister Guido Mantega fighting an anti-inflation platform on one hand, and Petrobras CEO Graça Foster on the other, trying to stop her company’s losses with imports. The thinking is: Mantega won, Foster lost. Although Foster denied anything of the sort in her interview – insisting the relationship remained positive.

Whatever the personal relationships involved, this had been a financial, political and philosophical battle at the heart of Brazil. Capitalists say that Petrobras should try and make as much money as possible for its shareholders. Statists say it should do what will benefit Brazil. Cynics say the government uses it as a tool to benefit politicians. All of them have a point.

Foster, smiling in her interview photograph, said the drop in share price had been awful but overall, she insisted everything was fine. There might be price rises in 2014, she said. And she had no plans to quit. “The days are extremely long,” she said. “You have every kind of problem and every kind of good news.”

The famous friendship between Petrobras CEO Graça Foster and President Dilma Rousseff had not worked in Foster’s favour. But inflation might not go up as much as was feared. Brazil still does not have many trains but it does have plenty of traffic jams. Rousseff leads the polls to win next years election. And the Petrobras Downstream department – that’s the one that deals with refining and imports – keeps losing money.

In the wake of the tragedy at the stadium to host the opening match in 2014 (pictured above), Mauricio Savarese speculates on the political logic behind the selection of the 12 host cities.

By Mauricio Savarese

“Who are the most powerful governors and mayors in Brazil?”

Back in 2008, that was a strange question to ask someone involved in choosing the 2014 World Cup host cities. But I did. So off the record, one of those guys pored over the map for the presidential elections, friends that former President Lula had to please and opposition members that couldn’t be ignored. He said nothing about projects, common sense or legacy.

I thought he was just a tactless political analyst. But in the end he got it all right when the venues were announced in 2009.

To understand delays, missed deadlines and excessive spending it is important to know how the 12 host cities were chosen. After all, Brazil could have had a tournament with only eight stadia. It could also have made the arenas smaller in cities where local professional football is just a fantasy – as is the case in Brasilia, Manaus and Cuiaba. And if the issue really was bringing more tourists into great cities practically unknown abroad, then Belem, Florianopolis and Goiania would be in.

The most controversial case is that of Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. It sits in a place with little infrastructure, tradition in the sport or touristic appeal. It seems the most bizarre choice of them all. Its stadium almost certainly won’t be finished by the end of the year. But it was one of the first to be counted in. The main reason: former governor and soybeans magnate Blairo Maggi was a key ally for the ruling Worker’s Party (PT) to keep. He is a great fundraiser and a calming presence in his party.

The Amazon was the excuse for selecting Manaus. But it wasn’t that easy: Belem was a bitter rival and it is the capital of a state governed then by another PT politician, Ana Julia Carepa. But former governor Eduardo Braga (Amazonas state) was a rising star in the government coalition. Everyone knew that he is a potential leader of the Senate and that he controlls votes in the North. Carepa was going the opposite way – bound for defeat in 2010. Manaus won, Carepa lost.

Fortaleza, one of the most violent cities in Brazil, is getting an astonishing six World Cup matches mainly because governor Cid Gomes is a close ally to both Lula and President Dilma Rousseff. He is such a key figure in the highly populated Northeast region that he is now eagerly attacking former party colleague and presidential hopeful Eduardo Campos so he can help Rousseff keep her job at the 2014 elections – to be held shortly after the World Cup.

Curitiba’s bid was supported by two strong elements: the support of former governor Roberto Requiao, who is now a maverick at the Senate, and the difficulties PT has in Santa Catarina, the state where beautiful and football crazy Florianopolis is located. Natal’s case was a little different: governor Rosalba Ciarlini was an important interlocutor within the opposition and runs a state that has given ministers, a speaker of the House and key congressmen to Rousseff’s administration.

Brasilia’s Mane Garrincha stadium was more of a case of political megalomania. Before he became the first Brazilian governor to be jailed during his term, the opposition’s Jose Roberto Arruda decided he would try to win the right to hold the opener from Sao Paulo. To do that, he would have to build a venue for about 70,000 people in a city where you don’t get that many people even if you add together all the attendants at all of the local league’s fixtures. Later, the PT’s Agnelo Queiroz insisted.

The troubled Arena Corinthians was also a political pick, although that had more to do with Lula’s passion for his club than party politics. At first, the opener would be at São Paulo FC’s Morumbi stadium. A completely new one only made it into the plans after a Corinthians chairman scrapped a deal on broadcasting rights and signed a deal that pleased the former head of the Brazilian FA, disgraced Ricardo Teixeira.

Sao Paulo’s new arena was also suitable to deflate Belo Horizonte’s bid for the opener – a late, but credible competitor because of former governor Aecio Neves’ support. Neves is set to be the main contender against Rousseff in 2014, although polls now say the incumbent is likely to remain in power.

Rio, Salvador, Recife and Porto Alegre were all natural candidates to host World Cup matches, regardless of their possible political benefits.

It could have been worse. One of the closest allies to Presidents Lula and Rousseff is the Viana clan, running the distant state of Acre on the behalf of PT since time immemorial. Their capital, Rio Branco, is a tiny city of about 300,000 inhabitants in the middle of the jungle. That analyst I talked to a few years ago said then the place actually had a chance. Most Brazilians laughed pretty hard at that possibility. But the run up to 2014 shows a little love can always make stadiums happen.

Mauricio Savarese is a Brazilian journalist, originally from Ipiranga, in São Paulo’s zona sul, and is the author of the blog, “A Brazilian operating in this area.” He was formerly a reporter in Brasília for UOL and is active on Twitter.

Above, a young member of Brazil’s Terena indigenous tribe poses with a toy gun he has fashioned out of palm tree leaves on the disputed land where he lives with his family. A few days before, a member of the tribe was shot and killed during a police operation to remove them from the land they say is rightfully theirs. Pressed by a local investigator as to whom the gun is for, the young Terena boy says “The police. For when they come back.”

Earlier this year I spent some time with members of the Terena and Guarani-Kaiowá tribes in the Western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where often violent clashes over land between indigenous groups, farmers, and armed pistoleiros are common. Photos below, click to enlarge.

After the death of Oziel Gabriel, the Terena tribe performed the bate-pau, or stick-beating, dance and musical ceremony, used traditionally to soothe the tensions of violence or war. A video of the beginning of the dance, which took place on land still contested by the tribe, local authorities and landowners, is here.

Laucir Marques was also shot during the police operation, and said he was left untreated for days at the hospital afterwards, because he was viewed by staff there as a rebellious Indian. Having spent time talking to both white and indigenous Brazilians near these conflict zones, this interpretation was not surprising to me, nor was it surprising to the local federal investigator. His video deposition describing the morning of the police operation is here.

A Terena tribe member in front of banana trees he has planted and cultivated on occupied land in Sidrolândia.

Further south in Mato Grosso do Sul, near to the city of Dourados, Guarani-Kaiowá member Getulio Juca Ava Potyvra, 60, stands in front of the village’s traditional “big house,” as it is referred to in Portuguese. Inside later with his wife, Alda Silva Kunha Tupa Rendyi, they show videos of old news clips about pistoleiro invasions and recall the many friends and relatives that have died in battles for land over the years.

Also near Dourados, Guarani-Kaiowá member Damiana Cavanha, 74, has lived here in this makeshift settlement alongside the highway for over 14 years. After being expelled from what she considers her rightful land, she has simply set up here, as close as legally possible to the farm, until she is allowed to return. The combination of shockingly high suicide rates and the chance of being hit by speeding cars mean the mortality rate of the Guarani-Kaiowá is far above the national average in Brazil.

On the contested land in Sidrolândia, Terena tribesmembers make their way home after the bate-pau ceremony. It’s easy to see why this land is so beloved.

Across Brazil, there are over 800,000 officially recognized indigenous peoples, and their way of life can take on radically different forms. There are still ‘undiscovered’ tribes in the Amazon who know little about the existence of ‘Brazil’ at all. And there are those, such as in the tribe pictured here, with post-graduate degrees and Facebook accounts, but that also may speak Terena at home.

Few things infuriate Terena chiefs more than the accusation, common around here, that they don’t “really live like Indians” anymore, and therefore don’t deserve special land demarcations. Their response (paraphrased from several interviews) is that it is racist, and absurd, to claim that everyone else in Brazil gets to adopt new technology and evolve but yet they must remain living in some “natural” state that exists in the European imagination. They aren’t just static parts of the landscape – they have history, just like white (or black) Brazilians. If Brazilians of Portuguese or Italian heritage develop a different way of life or manner of speech from their ancestors, no one would assume that means it’s OK for someone to come and steal their property from them. So why should it for native Brazilians?

The full story for which I took this trip is available here, for background.

 During the bate-pau ceremony- “Indian warrior”

All photos Vincent Bevins

From sensuality, samba and football to racism, violence and marginalization, Brazil’s struggles around its self image move onto the world stage, as a select group of Brazilian authors takes on the themes dominating Brazil’s crucial international image.

By Claire Rigby

With the 2014 World Cup just around the corner, practical preparations for welcoming the expected hordes of visitors to Brazil are now kicking off in earnest, with guide books, programmes and brochures being commissioned left, right and centre here in São Paulo. As the country prepares to come under sustained international scrutiny, including from close up, the way it is presented, and the way it presents itself have never seemed of greater importance.

Soul-searching questions about where Brazil is headed and where it has come from are matters of constant debate here, not least as a result of the explosive, insurrectionary month of June. But last week, in a precursor to what may lie in store in 2014, those debates also took to the international stage, at the 65th Frankfurt book fair, to be aired painfully, publicly – and, perhaps, cathartically.

Brazil was this year’s guest of honour at the book fair, in a starring role sponsored by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and National Library Foundation. The project, which had suffered countless alterations and delays in the period between the announcement of Brazil’s role in 2010 and the fair itself – not least due to the three Ministers for Culture the country has gone through in those three years – brought 150 Brazilian publishing houses and no less than 70 authors to Germany, plus a selection of musicians, artists and a special, Brazil-themed pavilion.

Aesthetically challenged

Ana Maria Machado, a children’s writer and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, used her opening ceremony speech to call for wider understanding of Brazil, reaching beyond stereotypes based on physical manifestations of culture that revolve around the body: Brazil as more than just a pretty face. “That body’s intellect is usually forgotten,” said Machado, “in favour of a celebration of our dances and our music; of football, capoeira and other sports; of sensuality and bronzed skin on display on our beaches; of Carnival and of caipirinha.”

While scores of the world’s less aesthetically gifted countries can only dream of having problems like these, Machado’s comment nevertheless encapsulates some of the motifs that are often internalised and presented to the outside world by Brazil, as being Brazil. It also finds echoes in other complaints about simplistic conceptions of the country, including in the ways it is represented visually, in photography.

But in the case of Frankfurt, Machado’s wish for a deepened, more complex and intellectual consideration of Brazil’s nature had come true. “Brazil has revealed itself to be an anguished country,” said Juergen Boos, the book fair’s president during its closing ceremony on 13 October, “but one that keeps moving forward.”

Much ado 

The controversies began in the run-up to the event, when the world-famous Brazilian author Paulo Coelho objected to the list of 70 Brazilian authors invited to Frankfurt. Withdrawing from his planned appearance at the book fair in protest, Coelho gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Welt, suggesting that the selection might be tainted by nepotism, featuring writers who were presumably “friends of friends of friends”. Coelho, the Jack Vettriano of Brazilian literature, who sells millions of copies of his books but is looked on with scorn by the Brazilian literary establishment, complained that he had only heard of 20 of the 70 authors, and questioned whether they were all professional writers.

In contrast with Brazil’s previous appearance as the book fair’s guest of honour, in 1994, when the country presented mainly canonical authors like Jorge Amado and Machado de Assis, the Brazilian contingent sent to Germany this year comprised a youngish, São Paulo-heavy cohort, many of whose works have been published in recent anthologies like Granta’s The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, and in a new anthology, Other Carnivals: New Stories from Brazil, launched at this month’s first Flipside festival – a UK mini-version of the Flip literary festival held each year in Paraty.

Coelho also commented on the fact that the list of authors only included one indigenous author, Daniel Munduruku, and one black writer: Paulo Lins, author of the 1997 book Cidade de Deus [City of God], which became the award-winning, hard-hitting favela-set film of the same name. At the end of the fair, in his closing-ceremony speech, Lins said,“Brazil is a racist country, like the majority of the countries in Europe. There was no racism in the list of authors who were invited.” Speaking to the Brazilian website G1 afterwards, Lins said the list was racist only to the extent that it reflected the prejudice that exists within Brazil, “because there are very few black writers in the publishing market.”

Straight talk

But trumping them all, an opening-ceremony speech  by the author Luiz Ruffato tackled some of the country’s most painful problems head on, and mercilessly. Pouring petrol on the football-samba-Carnival paradigm, setting it alight and booting it into an audience that included Brazil’s discomforted Vice-President, Michel Temer, and Minister for Culture Marta Suplicy, Ruffato reeled off a series of statistics illustrating Brazil’s savage social inequalities, citing high levels of homophobia, domestic violence, illiteracy and institutionalized racism, in which “housing, education, health, culture and leisure are not the rights of everyone, but the privileges of some.”

Speaking at length of the violence, marginalization and discrimination that mar Brazil, Ruffato said, “We were born under the aegis of a genocide. Of the 4 million Indians who existed in 1500, there are just 900,000 left now, many of whom live in miserable conditions in settlements by the side of highways or in large city favelas.” He referred scathingly to Brazil’s euphemistic self-image as “a racial democracy”: “If our population is mestiço [mixed race], it’s due to European men mating with indigenous or African women. In other words, assimilation came about as a result of the rape of native and black women by white colonizers.”

Presenting himself as “the son of an illiterate laundress and of a semi-literate seller of popcorn,”Ruffato introduced the idea of literature as a force for change. “I myself a popcorn vendor, a cashier in a bar, a shop assistant, a textiles worker, a metal worker, the manager of a diner, had my destiny modified by contact, however fortuitous, with books. … If the reading of a book can change the course of somebody’s life, then society being made up of people, literature can change society.”

Read on

And it can, without a shadow of a doubt, also change the way a society is seen, for better, for worse – or for sheer complexity and depth. Ruffato, the author of a five-volume series fictionalizing the story of the Brazilian working class, from its rural beginnings to the start of the 21st century, is one of ten authors whose work, it was announced last week by Amazon, will soon be published in English on its AmazonCrossing imprint.

Ruffato’s first novel, Eles Eram Muito Cavalos (There Were Many Horses), is one of five full-length works slated to be published (the others are by Eliane Brum, Sérgio Rodrigues, Josy Stoque and Cristovão Tezza) following the Kindle-only publication of short story collections by five other Brazilian authors. Ruffato’s novel takes the form of 69 fragments – moments that all take place on one day in São Paulo, from the points of view of their many protagonists – and his emergence into the sights of a wider audience raises the prospect of new, explosive slants on Brazil, and of new opportunities for interested readers to dive in and learn to understand Brazil, warts and all, as the complex, horrifying, delightful, fascinating place it is.

By Dom Phillips

Brazilian presidential hopeful Marina Silva took everybody by surprise Saturday when she joined forces with Eduardo Campos of the PSB party. The two will team up to fight the 2014 presidential election, with Silva most likely campaigning as Campos’s vice-president. Now the race suddenly looks interesting.

Joining an existing party was the only way Silva could stay in the race, after Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Court denied her attempt to found her own party, the Sustainability Network (Rede Sustentabiledade) last week – see Friday’s blog on this.

Silva spent Friday night locked in meetings, local media said. Once the partnership with Campos was announced, its political advantages were immediately obvious.

Silva is an environmentalist, evangelical and political outsider who came third in the 2010 election and is currently running second in the polls. She is also seen by many as the candidate most likely to capitalise on the frustrations expressed by the hundreds of thousands of Brazilians who took to the streets to protest a range of issues, including the political system itself, in June.

But she has a weak point: the economy, which is not her specialty. And as Brazil’s economy has been barely growing for a couple of years, it’s also President Dilma Rousseff’s Achilles heel. This is perhaps Campos’s strong point: he graduated in economics and as the governor of Pernambuco state in North East Brazil is seen as both business-friendly and as having done a good job in a state that grew more than the rest of Brazil last year – 2.3% compared to Brazil-wide GDP growth of just 0.9%.

He has the administrative experience she lacks and his PSB (Partido Socialista Brasileira, Brazilian Socialist Party) is, like him, more popular in the North East. Both Campos and Silva served as ministers under former president Lula (Silva was Environment, Campos Science and Technology). Both want to break the political deadlock that has seen Brazil ruled by either the ruling PT, Workers Party or Partido dos Trabalhadores, of President Dilma Rousseff (2003-present), or the PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, Brazilian Social Democracy Party), under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 1995-2003), for 18 years.

Now, where recent poll figures were giving Rousseff a possible first-round win, suddenly a second election round looks likely. Worse, for Rousseff, the PT and the PSDB, the intriguing combination of Campos, a governor with administrative experience, and Silva, a populist outsider, means a potential third political force.

The latest poll gave President Rousseff 38% of intentions to vote, Marina Silva 16%, the PSDB’s probable candidate Aécio Neves 11% and Eduardo Campos 4%. Campaigning proper has yet to begin.

By Dom Phillips

Last night, in a tense, high-profile ruling, Brazil’s electoral court decided that a new party set up by Marina Silva, a popular opposition politician, could not fight in next year’s presidential elections.

Silva’s party, the Rede Sustentabilidade, or Sustainability Network, had not registered enough members at election notary offices throughout Brazil by deadlines. This Folha piece, in English, has more detail.

Given that Marina Silva came third in the last election with nearly 20% of the vote, currently polls at 16% of potential votes compared to President Dilma Rousseff’s 38%, and is widely regarded as the main politician who could benefit from the outpouring of frustration that sent millions of Brazilians onto the streets in June, this has further exposed the weakness of Brazil’s party system.

Marina Silva can still join one of the many existing parties – and thus fight the election – and we’ll find out tomorrow if she does.

Last time Silva was a Green Party candidate. She is an environmentalist, and evangelical Christian, from a poor Amazon upbringing, who only learned to read and write at 16. Her new party needed to present 492,000 signatures which had been registered at electoral notaries all over Brazil. Rede was around 50,000 signatures short, but claimed that electoral notaries had rejected around 100,000 signatures without sufficient explanation.

The party wanted the court to take these into consideration – but the court said it had to follow the law. The same court has just allowed the creation of two other new parties who did have enough signatures registered, despite accusations that both parties falsified signatures.  Their creation takes the number of parties in Brazil to a dizzying 32.

This blog piece by Fernando Rodrigues for Folha’s sister news site UOL on September 19 reported accusations that new party Solidarity had falsified signatures – even the signature of the boss of an electoral notary office in Várzea Paulista. Superior Electoral Court judge Luciana Lóssio raised allegations regarding suspicions over signatures presented by the 32nd party approved, PROS (Partido Republicano da Ordem Social – The Republican Party of Social Order). An electoral notary office in Belo Horizonte had counted signatures twice, Folha reported.

PROS is likely to support the government, Brazilian media says. It is also linked to evangelical churches.

Brazil has an important evangelical vote, which caused Dilma problems in the last election when she was accused by both Catholics and evangelicals of being pro-abortion and had to come out publicly against it. This story has some of the contradictory positions Rousseff has taken on the issue (basically, from pro to anti).

A new, evangelical-friendly party which potentially supports the government is much less of a challenge to Rousseff than Rede, an anti-government environmentalist party led by a popular evangelical, would have been. Each party also gets set an allocation of television time for campaigning, depending on how many seats it has in Congress. PROS could use its TV time to support Dilma’s campaign.

Brazil is effectively ruled by an unwieldy coalition, controlled by Rousseff’s ruling PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party, and based on mutual-interest deals.

As a detailed, well-researched special report on Brazil just published by the Economist magazine observes: “The relationship between the executive and legislative branches is openly mercenary, with the president trading pork-barrel spending for support from her huge, ideologically incoherent coalition.”

With the demise of Rede, a small window for possible real change may have closed:  Silva is an idealist who quit her job as Lula’s environment minister in protest at what she saw as its lack of support for her, but she might just be the only politician with the stomach to contemplate the urgent structural and political reform Brazil so desperately needs. That is what she says, at least.

She has been a political outsider since leaving government and enjoys support among the many Brazilians who regard all politicians with deep cynicism. Understandably so, given the endemic graft and unwillingness to change that characterises Congress. But she is not seen as business-friendly nor particularly qualified to deal with Brazil’s complex and unwieldy economy, currently stumbling.

Political alienation, particularly among the youth, is growing. This story in business daily Valor explored how few of the youth involved in mass demonstrations in June have joined any political party, and how many have no plans to do so.

Come next year’s World Cup, we can expect more protestors and riot police on the streets. But Brazilian politicians are trying to hold back the tide. As the Economist noted, the size of Brazil’s middle class today and the depth of frustration it feels on a range of issues, means that sooner or later, something will have to change.

What’s going on with the Brazilian currency? Like many ’emerging market’ countries around the world, Brazil has recently been unpleasantly reminded just how linked its fortune is to the decisions of the United States, and the Federal Reserve. The real has been all over the place since 2008, making things quite difficult here, and that has relatively little to do with what Brazilian politicians have done.

Take a look at the chart above to get an idea what a headache running a developing country has been since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the US Federal Reserve, which controls the global supply of dollars, began talk of ‘tapering’ earlier this year. ‘Tapering’ is Federal Reserve-speak for going back to the way the US Central Bank used to do things before 2008, which in practice means much less cheap money floating around the globe, since the Fed will slow down its direct asset purchase program (background here). The process of tapering is the first step towards stopping the Fed pumping extra money into the US economy, and (probably) the first step towards raising interest rates.

Just the possibility that the tapering might happen crushed the Brazilian real down to 2.45 against the dollar, from a high of 1.55 just two years ago. How can you create economic policy in a country in which the cost of both your exports and imports swings so violently, and how do you explain to your citizens that yesterday they could traipse around Argentina (and Miami and New York) buying everything, but now, really won’t be able to afford that trip to Europe (or even to Paraguay)?

Since 2008, Brazil’s currency became much too strong for its own good, and then also lost value much too quickly. As if Brazil needed further proof of how dominant the influence of the Fed is here, when we got wind that the ‘tapering’ wasn’t actually going to happen as soon as had been thought, the real jumped back up to 2.2. Maybe it will stay around there. Some credibly think it will have to hit 2.65. We don’t know.

Brazil’s government has made some very real economic mistakes in the last few years. But the pseudo-tapering debacle has reinforced the uncomfortable fact that at least in terms of the currency, Brazil has been on a roller-coaster since 2008. And except for small interventions, it is not President Rousseff or Finance Minister Guido Mantega doing the driving. The real protagonists here are huge flows of international capital, swooshing around the world, guided by the noises coming from the central bank of the United States.

Recent history

But of course banks aren’t required to invest in the US, and many quickly caught on that they could make a killing getting free money in the US, and then investing in growing emerging market countries where they could earn easy returns. This was especially true in Brazil, where interest rates have long been punishingly high for borrowers and a free meal ticket for investors. Brazil was also riding high on a decade-long Chinese commodity boom, and the government had a card up its sleeve to pump up the economy further in response to the crisis (basically, pump credit into the economy so that new middle class Brazilians could buy consumer items and pay the super-high interest rates), and so dollars poured into the economy.

By 2010 the economy was growing by 7.5% annually and was a darling of international investors (and those of us in the international economic press), and by 2011 the currency hit a high of 1.55 reais to the dollar. This meant it was extremely, extremely overvalued and virtually guaranteed to kill off Brazilian manufacturers that now found their goods too expensive to sell abroad – Mantega had railed against the US dumping so many dollars into his country and started the largely ineffective ‘currency war’ as a response in 2010. Nevertheless, the super-strong real generated a lot of positive press and confidence here in Brazil. Travelers felt rich. The Brazilian stock exchange had some spectacular years ‘in dollar terms.’ Brazil’s economy got larger than the UK’s. Eike Batista got far too rich as excited and cash-flush foreigners bet on his slightly exaggerated dream.

Since then, the realities of the Brazilian economy (not actually so dynamic outside of agricultural exports and credit growth) combined with some major mistakes in the Dilma administration (which of course got much more attention than they would have had they happened during the upswing) and growth inevitably slowed back to previously normal levels, and then almost ground to a halt last year. In the background, the US began to feel confident in its own recovery, and it became increasingly clear that a whole bunch of shale gas in the ground could power an energy boom.

Despite the solid long-term foundations of the Brazilian economy, the chaos in Brazil’s currency in the last few months has been about the Fed switching its strategy back to normal. The money river is drying up and the money went pouring back the other way, to the US. Or at least ‘markets’ remembered that they will. The peaks in dollar strength in that chart correspond exactly to those two points.

Much to the chagrin of everyone down here, we’ve been reminded that Brazil’s place in the global economic system is often more important than the national headlines we’ve been chasing. Even worse, they’ve realized it’s all about Uncle Sam all over again.

What can be done

Many thought Rousseff and Mantega were making excuses and picking fights by decrying the inflow of dollars into Brazil after 2008. They were, a little. But they were also right that Brazil was suffering due to the flood of foreign capital, and Brazil is now suffering at the way things have changed directions so rapidly.

Unfortunately, given the state of the international economic and monetary system, there’s little emerging market countries can easily do to avoid huge swings in the value of their currencies. The dollar is the international reserve currency, and the vast majority of Brazil’s trade is conducted in dollars, too. Some hope for a world in which neither of these things is true, and the US stops dominating global monetary conditions, but that is a long way off. In the mean time, one can only watch the Fed, or take comfort that the US may not be able to dominate forever if it keeps shutting down its own government.

Dom Phillips reports from inside Brazil’s most recent protests in Rio and talks to a ‘Black Bloc’ style protester, whose clashes with police have increasingly dominated coverage of the demonstrations and may even be scaring other protesters away. All photos Dom Phillips

By Dom Phillips

There were seven protests planned in Rio de Janeiro on Saturday – Brazilian Independence Day, which had been billed nationwide as a day of mass protest. Not one pulled more than, at most, a couple of thousand people. Sociologists and academics have been saying this week that the violence has scared off the big crowds seen in June, and that protest groups have splintered. What happened in Rio, especially given the heavy police repression that followed a huge demonstration June 20 here, would seem to bear that out.

I wasn’t on Presidente Vargas Avenue in the morning when a small group invaded the Independence Day military parade and police set of tear gas. TV Globo replayed scenes of the invasion repeatedly, along with images of people they described as ‘anarchists’ burning Brazilian and American flags at the Zumbi Monument in Central Rio.

On Saturday afternoon I was in Cinelândia, central Rio, where the steps of the city council chamber have become an impromptu protest camp over the last weeks, and passing office workers step gingerly around protestors’ tents.

A few hundred protestors were milling around, but the only sign of the demonstration due to begin at 2pm was a handful of animal rights activists, one of whom was dressed as a pink rabbit. The next big event was 5pm near Guanabara Palace, seat of state governor Sérgio Cabral’s palace.

I reached the demonstration where a couple of thousand people were gathered at the exact moment the police started firing tear gas and stun grenades. There was a panic as hundreds of people started running back down the Rua das Laranjeiras towards the Lago do Machado square.

The air was thick with gas. I’ve been tear gassed by Rio police half a dozen times at demonstrations in public places, and this was the strongest I have felt it. People reacted as they usually do: they get angry, they cry (that’s why it’s called tear gas, it stings and makes the eyes water), they scream that the police are cowards.

And some of them, usually young men, usually wearing masks, start breaking things. This time it was the glass window of a bank foyer, where the cash machines are, a bus stop, a street light. As the crowds reached Lago do Machado, some of the masked young men began mingling with the traffic, stopping cars, lighting a fire in the street.

A crowd of onlookers stood on the steps of a nearby church – some hurried off nervously, others filmed on their cell-phones. Some of the protesters began trashing the glass frames on a bus shelter that cover up advertising billboards. For ten minutes or so, as the police made their way down, there was a little pocket of anarchy on that street corner.

It did not last. Rarely do protesters actually engage in combat with police – instead they throw stones from a distance, and light fires from rubbish. The police concentrate on shows of strength – in this case, a squad of them drove around on motorbikes, others rode black police jeeps, wearing their Robocop riot gear: helmets, shields, protective rubber pads and breastplates.

The ‘anarchists’ have their uniform too: masks, black T-shirts wrapped over their heads, hooded tops, black jeans, heavy metal and punk T-shirts. Everybody calls them Black Bloc and say they are inspired by the international protest tactics of the same name.

One black-clad youth holding a crash helmet asked me if I thought trashing banks and bus-stops was valid. “It is not vandalism,” he told me. He did not want to give his name. I got out my tape recorder.

“The financial institutions abuse the rights they have to charge us. The biggest enemy of Brazilians is the banks,” he said. “Every decision the government takes is looking at banks’ profits.” Then he ducked off as riot police in helmets began firing more tear gas in our direction.

Later in Cinelândia, surrounded by cameras, another group of ‘anarchist’ youth dressed in black shouted amongst themselves as they tried to decide what to do. A hundred or so headed off towards Lapa – a popular nightlife area, stopping by a skip to pick up staves of wood as they went, which they waved triumphantly in the air while chanting. A squad of riot police hurried after them.

The scene became increasingly surreal when a woman waving a flag took it on herself to lead the riot police procession, as if it was a carnival parade, while shouting, apropos of nothing: “Save Pope Francis!” Everybody did their best to ignore her: she did not fit into the script that both sides were acting out, in a protest novela that seems to have lost the plot.

Have increasing levels of violence put Brazilians off protests? This is the question being asked this week in the Brazilian media, in posts like this from UOL, in which Michel Zaidan Filho, sociologist and professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, said: “Now there has been a radicalization, and many people did not go because of the criminality of the protests. The majority don’t want to face police, bombs.”

Handheld, improvised ‘NINJA’ journalism has changed the way Brazil watches the protests unfold. But recently, the group itself has become the story, as the little-understood collective they sprung from has come under digital scrutiny from all sides. Photo: Mídia NINJA

By Claire Rigby

Last week, Folha de S.Paulo’s Los Angeles correspondent Fernanda Ezabella breezed into town with a new toy: a Google Glass headset. She wore it to cover Wednesday night’s protests, filming the action on the street while Folha’s drone flew overhead, using a smartphone to transmit the protest from the sky. It was the first time Glass had been used in conjunction with a drone to create a live report. But Ezabella’s isn’t the only journalism story making waves in the Brazilian press right now.

If you’ve taken even a passing interest in the protests that gripped Brazil in June, and are still simmering in cities across the country, chances are you’ve seen some of the prolific output of the Mídia NINJA journalism collective. The young video and photography hacktivists, who roam the streets with little more than smartphones, cameras and maybe a laptop, have been chronicling Brazil’s spasms of unrest day after day and night after night, capturing and publishing images of protests, riots and arrests, and streaming hours of footage from assemblies, marches, occupied encampments, meetings and debates on their Facebook page, and on their e-TV channel, #PosTV. Active since well before Brazil’s June protests, they follow in the steps of alt. media collectives like Indymedia, which at its zenith a decade ago massed an international network of activist reporters to cover global protests and social movements, starting with 1999’s Battle of Seattle. Mídia NINJA also uses accessible technology to create low-cost, high-impact material, but unlike Indymedia, its focus so far has been purely on generating images, with a curious lack of written reportage or coverage.

NINJA initially won grudging admiration even from Brazilians unsupportive of the recent wave of protests, not least because of the quality and impact of its photos. But over the last couple of weeks the grungy collective – ‘NINJA’ stands for Narrativas Independentes, Jornalismo e Ação’ (Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action) – has found itself becoming the story, as well as covering it. The subject of TV reports, a stream of articles in the mainstream press, and thousands of words’ worth of social media posts, Mídia NINJA’s success thrust it first into the spotlight, and then into the floodlit glare of national scrutiny, sparked by its self-proclaimed ‘umbilical’ connection with – and indeed, emergence out of – a controversial network of collectives called Foro do Eixo, whose name means ‘outside the [Rio–São Paulo] axis’.

Axis of internet

As interest in Mídia Ninja grew, its de facto leader, the 34-year-old journalist Bruno Torturra, gave a widely seen interview on the TV programme Roda Viva on 5 August alongside Pablo Capilé, the founder and leader of Fora do Eixo. It rocketed the twin collectives into the public eye in an instant – and then brought detractors streaming out of the woodwork, in what became a frenzy of criticism, in print and online, aimed mainly at Fora do Eixo, but tainting Mídia NINJA by association.

Fora do Eixo’s role as a producer of live gigs and festivals in towns and cities across Brazil – and its policy of not paying the majority of the musicians taking part, offering them ‘exposure’ instead – has won it a small army of enemies over the ten years it has been in existence. A string of denouncements of the collective and of Capilé in particular, which began in the days following the TV interview and then snowballed, have covered subjects ranging from its failure to pay bands to accusations of psychological control and slave-like working conditions for its members, who live and work together on Fora do Eixo projects, including Mídia NINJA, in twenty communal houses Brazil-wide.

Highly committed to the work and to collective living, Fora do Eixo housemates are unpaid except for access to a collective cashbox, and share bank accounts, living quarters, and even – in the kind of detail that has piqued Brazil’s interest in the story – communal clothes. There are even allegations that ‘flirty fishing‘ techniques are encouraged to draw new members into the group.

Despite the shared clothes and the collectivist spirit, what the group’s ideology is about, and what draws people into it in the first place, inducing them to give up work and studies to dedicate themselves full-time to its projects, is something of a mystery. But from the kinds of events I’ve seen Fora do Eixo members at, filming whether for #PosTV or as Mídia NINJA, it’s fair to say the group is left-wing, and interested in formenting and participating in social movements. If an article about Fora do Eixo by the journalist and music impresario Alê Youssef, published in Trip magazine in 2011, is to be given credit, the ideology, if there is one, is a kind of Generation Y, post-digital mishmash that sees concepts like class struggle as old hat. Youssef cites Cláudio Prado, a theorist and activist attached to Fora do Eixo, who claims that this is the ‘post-rancour’ generation, ‘unfettered by philosophical questions, but radically exploring digital culture in order to do what needs to be done’.

Published in the days following the Roda Viva interview, two chronically overlong accounts by disgruntled former Fora do Eixo collectivists (here and here) have gone viral on Facebook, detonating long threads that have in turn been shared and commented on by a lynch-happy online mob, apparently intent on tearing the collective, or hoping to watch it tear itself, to pieces. The testimonies and counter-testimonies (here, for example), have been the subject of mainstream media reports almost daily, and Friday even brought an unexpectedly one-sided attack in the form of an article in the Leftist weekly magazine Carta Capital, co-written by a former Fora do Eixo collaborator.

Carta Capital later published an interview with Pablo Capilé on its site, giving him the chance to respond to some of the accusations made by those interviewed in the article. Capilé also wrote detailed answers to a set of 70 questions about Fora do Eixo, put to him by the journalist André Forastieri and covering subjects from the collective’s accounts and its channels of public and private funding, to its relationship with other social movement players, and its practices on the live music circuit.

Eyes right

As for the political Right, the word ‘schadenfreude’ is barely sufficient to describe the reactions of those observing the controversy. This saga, like some of the debates currently taking place in feminism – debates of the no-holds-barred kind, which used to happen internally with a measure of trust and privacy, and now unfold under the scornful gaze of half the internet – has them rolling in the aisles.

In a series of four posts at Veja, a weekly news magazine and website with a tone somewhere between Readers’ Digest and the Daily Mail, the right-wing blogger and former Trotskyist Reinaldo Azevedo dissected Carta Capital’s Fora do Eixo exposé with lascivious glee; while Senator Aloysio Nunes, of the PSDB party, has called for an investigation into federal funds paid to Fora do Eixo for its many projects. The collective has become expert, over the 10 years since its founding in Cuiabá, Pablo Capilé’s home town, at capturing large amounts of Brazil’s ‘Incentive Law’ funding: ‘private sector funds … in which private companies fund ministry-approved cultural projects in lieu of paying a particular tax, whether federal, state, or municipal’.*

Fora do Eixo’s life and times are powerfully compelling, and will no doubt be fuel for many column inches, and many more megabytes of bandwidth, in the weeks and months to come. But Mídia NINJA’s close association with it – indeed, many of the Ninjas appear to be live-in members of Fora do Eixo – has done the fledgling media collective serious damage. And it’s a pity, because against a current backdrop of waves of mass sackings in the Brazilian media and the recent closures of a number of major newspaper supplements and magazine titles, with more feared to come, Mídia NINJA, stewarded by Bruno Torturra, has been posing questions that are of greater importance than those involved in the virtual lynching of Fora do Eixo, and by association Mídia NINJA, may have considered.

The controversy came just as Mídia NINJA was on the verge of launching its new website, and more importantly, of unveiling a set of innovative proposals for new, experimental, collaborative forms of independent news and journalism production, with new funding models to match. As Torturra explained in a 31 July email interview with André Forastieri, these could potentially include initial crowdfunding to set up a newsroom and low-cost monthly subscriptions for its upkeep; donations to pay for specific reports or fund particular areas of coverage – say transport, indigenous rights, or city hall; and a system of microdonations for ‘liking’ a text or image, with a monthly bill that readers would be free to pay in part or not at all, with any proceeds sent directly to the author in question.*

Mídia precária

It was before the June explosion of protests that Bruno Torturra first began proposing new models of collective journalism. He wrote a widely-shared post on his blog, Casca de Besouro, entitled O Ficaralho – a play on the word ‘passaralho’, which means mass sackings, replacing it with something like ‘it’s the ones left behind who are screwed’. Referring to the latest in a tsunami of lay-offs that has struck the media industry in Brazil, as abroad, Torturra wrote, ‘It used to be that the heartbroken were the ones who had lost their jobs, as if they’d been ejected from a party that would be going on without them. Today, the sadness is on the parts of those left behind … Last week, I saw the joy of friends who had all lost their jobs together, cheered by the sense of an open road before them. And I saw the tears and depression of those left in the newsroom, accumulating functions and doing the work of three people, repeating routines that appear to have no purpose but the pursuit of a precarious salary.’

In 2012 alone, more than 1,200 Brazilian journalists lost their jobs and already in 2013, the dreaded ‘passaralho’, whose name sounds like a flock of terrible, job-destroying birds (‘pássaros’), has swept over the offices of the newspapers Estado de S.Paulo, Folha de S. Paulo, Valor Econômico, smaller publications like Brasil Econômico and Caros Amigos, and over the mighty, multi-title magazine behemoth of Editora Abril. (Meanwhile, despite the supposedly moribund state of the media in Brazil, four unthinkably wealthy media moguls are still perched at the top of Forbes Brazil’s 15 richest billionaires list).

Presenting the case for a collective effort to rethink the market, in his ‘Ficaralho’ post, Torturra called on interested journalists to attend a meeting, intended to present a brand new project called ‘NINJA’ – ‘to explore the possibilities of coverage, discussion, repercussion, compensation and the radical freedom of expression that the network offers. Streaming, print, blogs, photos and public debates, without the spectre of profit and business growth as the primordial conditions for the work’.

The tipping point

The meeting was initially called for the 10th, then the 13th of June. But as the night of the 13th approached, the meeting was cancelled – the protests on the street in São Paulo were hitting critical mass, and indeed, they were reaching a tipping point. In fact, it was at almost exactly 8pm that night that all hell broke loose on the streets around Praça Roosevelt and Rua da Consolação, the result of a wildly disproportionate response from SP’s military police, who pelted protestors with tear gas, smoke bombs and rubber bullets. It was the night the Folha reporter Giuliana Vallone was shot in the face with a rubber bullet, and the night that the rage of those watching the coverage of the protests on TV and online, including via Mídia NINJA, reached boiling point. (I wrote about the scenes on the streets that night here on From Brazil: Fear and loathing in São Paulo.)

The planning meeting never took place, though the events of June gave life to an organic, dynamic, needs-must Mídia NINJA that created many of the powerful images in turn driving the ongoing protests. A handful of meetings have since been held and continue to take place, as Mídia NINJA struggles to find its feet. Many amongst those observing the damage to Fora do Eixo and its reputation, including some of those on the Right, are hoping Mídia NINJA will evolve its way out of the mess – older and wiser, and with the independence that comes from participation and discussion beyond Fora do Eixo. And with a fresh approach to news reporting that not only challenges journalists and the market to change, and fast, but also demands that readers, viewers and internet users do the same.

Interviewed on R7 News on Friday, Torturra alluded to the new models of news production and funding, tossing the ball into the reader’s court: ‘As consumers of mass media, readers aren’t being treated as participants, but as consumers of information that’s increasingly presented as product, commodity, “content”. We need to invert the logic of the passive reader and look at the way news is produced – the reader needs to become responsible for the production of information before it is produced. Thanks to the internet, readers are no longer passive spectators of reality – they can expose the media, pressurise it and monitor it. But with that comes a greater responsibility. New communicators’ – and here, he might well be talking about the internet lynch mobs prowling the web – ‘need to become more conscious about what they write and say.’

Follow Claire Rigby on Twitter

Photos and three taken, with permission, from the NINJA Tumblr page

* Currently, Mídia NINJA earns nothing for its coverage and indeed, refuses payment for the images it allows media outlets to publish, including those used in this post. Also, for the purpose of disclosure: I know Bruno Torturra slightly – we have friends in common and have spoken, briefly, about the events of the last few weeks.

* That succinct description of Brazil’s lei de incentivo funding is cited in ‘The Space, the Gear, and Two Big Cans of Beer’, a readable and engaging academic paper about Fora do Eixo written by Shannon Garland, an American Ph.D. student. Garland studied the collective over a long period of time as part of her research, looking into the way Fora do Eixo became a player on Brazil’s live music scene, and on its practices in that context. You can download it in English here, in Portuguese here, and read Garland’s interesting, insider contributions (in Portuguese) to the current debate at her blog, La Gringa Sudaca.

Things that seemed impossible less than a month ago are now happening every day here in Brazil. In a political Big Bang of swirling movements, causes and new protagonists, a new Brazilian universe is taking shape. Above, protestors in front of Congress, Brasília.

By Claire Rigby

Thousands of column inches have already been written on recent events in Brazil, and more are surely being written as I write these. Nobody could have predicted, on 3 June, the day of the first in the series of protests organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL, Movement for Free Public Transport), that events would take this turn, impelling a political and social Big Bang from which the fall-out is still spiraling, stars colliding and new bodies emerging in the Brazilian sky.

The protests and their aftermath have given rise to a cast of thousands and indeed, millions, in what is perhaps the most profound effect of the unrest: the sudden political protagonism of huge swathes of formerly passive citizens, on the street and on social networks – mainly Facebook. The site has come into its own brilliantly as a public–private forum for discussion and planning, for real-time reporting, and for registering protests, repression, meetings and assemblies in text, film, photos and audio.

Less than a month ago, as noted by Samantha Pearson in yesterday’s FT, two of the main slogans of the multi-sloganed protests, ‘The giant has awoken’ and ‘Vem pra rua‘ – ‘Come to the streets’ – were most famous as straplines for Johnnie Walker and Fiat TV ads, respectively. And even if, in the weeks preceding the slow-building explosion of people onto the streets to demonstrate, hundreds of images and texts were being shared here about the protests and repression in Taksim Square, Istanbul, there was nothing to suggest that Brazil might be next.

Less than a month ago, the Confederations Cup was already looming large, but the idea of there being protests associated with it was nowhere near the agenda. ‘Imagina na Copa‘ (meaning ‘if it’s this bad now, imagine what it will be like in the World Cup’), a catch-all phrase for structural problems large and small, was little more than a collective, anxious fretting over the World Cup, and the likelihood of Brazil’s infrastructure being ready for it. But it is now linked to protests and skirmishes outside the stadiums, and to discontent with what’s perceived as massive over-spending as well as bad planning for the Cup.

As I write this, in the streets of Fortaleza, North-East Brazil, where the Confederations Cup match between Italy and Spain is underway, a ‘sonic cannon’ crowd-control weapon has just been switched on for the first time by police, and protests have turned to tyre-burning on the parts of protestors, and tear-gassing and shooting on the part of the police. Witness this Storify of the days’ events in Fortaleza, which shows protesters with a FIFA GO HOME banner, police firing smoke bombs and teargas, and protesters scattering, their faces covered. One tweet by @KetyDC, whose feed is a tireless, compelling ticker-tape covering protests all over Brazil, reads ‘Palestine? No, Fortaleza. #ProtestoCE #VemPraRua #ChangeBrazil (AFP) ‘.

And in an example of the hundreds of causes spiraling off from or piggy-backing the protest movement and its original demand for a reduction in the cost of public transport, another image on the Storify shows a set of designer-sunglass-wearing, bermuda-shorted young men holding signs reading, ‘Political Reform Now!’ That call for political reform, not a issue in the original protests except, arguably, in the most peripheral way, has been in the mainstream political pipeline for some time now, and its revival has become one of the ways in which Brazil’s government – federal, state and municipal – is scrambling to accommodate (or be seen to accommodate) protestors’ perceived demands.

On 25 June, President Dilma Rousseff announced a five-point plan for change that included public consultation on political reforms. In vintage Brazilian style – the level of bureaucracy in Brazil, for even the simplest piece of business, is daunting – Dilma’s announcement contained half-a-dozen procedural steps to get to the matter at hand: a proposal for ‘a debate over the convening of a plebiscite to authorize the functioning of a constituent process to carry out the reform’.

The ‘debate’ on that lasted less than 24 hours, and Dilma, along with the rest of government, is now looking at simply calling a plebiscite on reform. (The political reform in question is twofold, covering the way elections should be funded [Dilma’s party, the PT, wants them to be publicly rather than privately funded], and whether the currently proportional voting system should be changed to voting on the basis of districts [the PT, a relatively small party, would prefer it to stay as it is].)

Who’s who

As for the sunglass-wearing protestors in the Storify, they’re an example of the multiplicity of actors now onstage all over Brazil, on the streets and online, making their voices heard. A battery of assemblies, meetings, demos and street battles is going off on all sides, in city centres and across their peripheries, in an atmosphere in which working out who is who has become almost comically difficult at times. On Tuesday night, I attended a public assembly about the democratization of the media, held underneath the looming hulk of the MASP museum on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. As a speaker was proposing ‘agrarian reform of the airwaves’, a march approached along the avenue, and drawing level, stopped. The two groups regarded each other with a mix of curiosity and suspicion for a few moments, trying to get the measure of one another.

‘Vem pra rua!’ called the marchers, unsure what kind of assembly they had stumbled upon. The assemblists regarded them silently, sizing up the placards, noticing the Brazilian flag around one pair of shoulders, wondering. Eventually, with an expression of solidarity, the speaker holding the microphone deftly sent them on their way, albeit a little uncertainly, and picked up where he’d left off.

The confusion is understandable: lots of things aren’t what they seem, and others seem not to be what they are. Some young men in Occupy-style Guy Fawkes masks turn out to be rightist agitators, hurling abuse at left-wing parties on 20 June, when a PT march was routed from Avenida Paulista. A photo of an unlikely burly, white-shirted and masked rioter who stood out from the crowd, piling in at São Paulo’s City Hall and smashing at the door, was suspected by protestors of being an infiltrator and a provocateur, but turned out to be an over-enthusiastic architecture student. A ‘General Strike’ event on Facebook, since removed, with at least 700,000 confirmed attendees, was found to have been called not by workers’ movements, but created by a single person: a man named Felipe Chamone, an amateur marksman who appeared photographed bearing a gun, triggering a counter-event on Facebook, ‘Denouncement of the General Strike event‘. Even more confusingly, a group of unions now apparently has called a general strike, for 11 July… 

‘Think hard,’ reads the page urging people not to join the General Strike event, ‘before you join any event related to the protests, even if your participation is only symbolic or virtual. Make yourself aware of who is responsible for the initiative, and whether it aligns with your convictions.’ Given that less than a month ago, out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have now taken part in the protests, many would have displayed little reaction to news of a protest other than a loud tut at the disruption to traffic, it’s to be hoped that the habit of critical thinking, developed during these first weeks of the movement, will persist.

For now, as various strains of conservatism scramble to contain, co-opt, appease and control what parts of the movement they can, the Movement for Free Public Transport (MPL), having met with Dilma this week (and having declared her to have a woeful lack of knowledge about transport), is moving onto its own real agenda. Hint: the clue’s in the group’s name, and in its slogan, ‘For a life without turnstiles’. Having achieved the 20¢ reduction in bus fares it took to the streets for at the start of June, the MPL is continuing to campaign for universal free public transport, a gateway right, its activists claim, without which many other rights – to hospital treatment, to education, to culture – are impossible for people to exercise.

Walk this way

In an open letter to Dilma in advance of its meeting with her this week, the MPL wrote about a range of other issues beyond transport, including the militarization of the police, the plight of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and the ongoing repression and criminalization of social movements. It might be a logical progression, too, for an overtly anti-car current to emerge in or around the MPL. There’s no apparent sign of it yet (though the MPL’s open letter refers to an eleven-times greater public investment in individual than in public transport).

But given a set of factors, in São Paulo at least, that include chronic traffic gridlock, a vocal cycling activist lobby, a horrifying death toll annually on the roads, and the sharp focus on transport nationwide, a serious critique of cars and car culture would be an interesting development, to say the least. Coming in the wake of growing demands and actions here in São Paulo for people to ‘occupy the streets’ together, in the form of festivals, demonstrations and other events, the wave of recent protests managed to sweep cars from the picture effortlessly, banishing them from the scene in a single stroke and filling the streets with throngs of people, walking in unison.

There’s even a ready-made slogan, crying out to be appropriated – it’s the punchline of that Johnnie Walker TV ad: Keep Walking, Brazil.

Follow @claire_rigby on Twitter