Editor’s note: The upcoming Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro is placing international attention on Brazil. In this first of three reports, Best Countries examines the country’s preparations for the Games.
RIO DE JANEIRO — In Brazil’s oldest favela of Providencia, Diego Deus lives with his wife and 6-month-old son. He can walk to work at the Museum of Modern Art, a gleaming new addition to the city’s port zone that has been redeveloped in advance of this summer’s Olympic Games.
Unemployment has been steadily climbing in Brazil, a country in its worst recession since the 1930s, but Deus is one of many Rio residents who has found work directly or indirectly as a result of the Games. Proud of his neighborhood, he resisted being moved when 200 people were evicted to renovate Providencia.
“They wanted to take my house out [to build a cable car], but I resisted,” Deus says. “I don’t see myself living anywhere else. It might seem strange to say it, but I feel safe here, I can go out and leave my door open. People look out for you.”
Providencia overlooks Praca Maua square, where giant letters spelling out Cidade Olimpica — Olympic City — have been planted and are part of a $2 billion rebuilding of the city’s port zone, activity that has attracted interest from the likes of Donald Trump, among other speculators, and includes the recent launch of a light-rail service.
The two settings, a rebuilt area of the city’s downtown and the forced gentrification of a favela — a poorer, informal community within a larger metropolis — reflect many of the problems confronting Rio and the country as preparations reach their final stages for the nation to put its best face forward for the Olympics.
Anxieties about whether stadiums and facilities will be ready in time for the Aug. 5 Opening Ceremonies have been eclipsed by a Zika health crisis, deep financial recession, worker deaths tied to construction of Olympics venues and political turmoil surrounding the suspension of the country’s president. Unpaid police and firefighters recently greeted tourists arriving at Rio’s international airport with a sign reading, “Welcome to hell.” Headlines worldwide scream of violence — the latest high-profile incident being a dismembered body discovered earlier just weeks ago on Copacabana beach next to the Olympics volleyball venue. Making news at home are cash-strapped public services including police and healthcare hard pushed to meet the demands of the population, let alone the half a million visitors expected for the games.
As the old specter of corruption now looms over the Olympic projects, there are doubts the Games will bring enough long-term benefits to Brazil’s population — even to those who have not lost their homes in the process.
Hopes for bringing communities together fall short
This year’s multiple crises confronting the country contrast to 2009, when Rio de Janeiro was awarded this year’s Olympic Games — the first time the Olympics was awarded to a South American nation. Optimism was bubbling as the country was set to host the two largest sporting events in the world in two years, beginning with the World Cup in 2014. The country’s economy was booming, thanks to high prices for commodity exports, and the nation was taking impressive steps to reduce poverty. With global confidence high in the BRICs nations — Brazil, Russia, India and China — the South American country appeared finally to be on a path toward achieving its potential.
“People will see a city that is doing what it takes to host the Games, with projects on time and in which the Games will mean a great legacy and will help integrate the city,” Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, told the BBC in 2012. Integration was a big concern. Brazil has long ranked high on inequality indices. Rio was known as the “cidade partida ,” the divided city, during the 1990s, in part for the huge differences between the lives of those who lived in its hillside favelas and those who lived more comfortably on the “asphalt” below.
READ: [Is Brazil No Longer the Country of the Future?]
Now there was an opportunity at last to paste over that image with the creation of the more alluring-sounding Olympic City. Integration would not just mean better transport provisions, taking the pressure off Rio’s traffic-clogged streets, but more mixing between the groups and a reduction in violence, which would bring peace to the favelas and ultimately open up commercial opportunities there.
There have been more than 22,000 evictions that City Hall reports since 2009, many to make way for Olympics-related infrastructure, including the Transolympica expressway. In Vila Autodromo next to the Olympic Park, about 25 remaining families have succeeded after a four-year struggle in getting Rio’s City Hall to agree to let them stay in newly built homes. The huge potential profits in real estate around the Olympics venues are cited by many favela residents as being the real reason for their move to the city’s outskirts.
“It was irrational in terms of planning,” says Orlando Santos Jr., arofessor in urban planning at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University. “Poor people have been pushed out to the peripheries of the city, but you need them as a workforce. More housing in the city would have saved a lot of money on transport.”
In Providencia, Deus is adamant about clinging to his idea of home, which he says is about more than a roof for his family to live under. It also is about how people live.
“When older people get evicted and moved elsewhere, some of the oral traditions get lost. There was a game called taco-na-lata the children used to play, but now the main children’s game is computers. You used to see pigs and cows in the community, but you don’t see that now. Tourists visit, but the prices are crazy,” he says.
Zika, corruption probes fuel worries
Meanwhile, five companies implicated in “Car Wash,” Brazil’s massive corruption investigation into alleged kickbacks at state oil firm Petrobras, are responsible for 90 percent of Olympics projects, including those in areas which will make big money on real estate afterwards. Federal investigators are looking into claims of corruption involving contracts, bids and services linked not only to legacy projects, which include the port area, but also Olympic venues in Barra de Tijuca and Deodoro.
Investigations also will explore what happened to the federal money set aside for cleaning Guanabara Bay, another Olympic promise which was never met. Those probes were announced after two cyclists died in April on a coastal cycling path built as part of the Olympics legacy, and revelations that 11 people died in construction of Games-related infrastructure, leading to questions about the quality and safety of the construction work. Even the light-rail service in the city center suffered a power failure in its first week of operation.
The lead-up to the Games has observers anxious about Paes’ vow to deliver completed Olympic facilities. The Olympic velodrome was recently finished after a change of contractor just two months before the Games. The metro line that will take spectators toward the main venues is set to open just four days before the Games begin, thanks in part to a hefty federal loan.
Meanwhile, the World Anti-Doping Agency suspended Rio’s drug-testing lab just a month before the Opening Ceremonies. Leonardo Picciani, Brazil’s sports minister, says he expects the lab to regain accreditation before the Games begin.
Perhaps the greatest clouds hanging over this year’s Olympics, however, is Brazil’s battle containing the Zika virus, and the ongoing political tumult affecting the presidency. Noting that the Games are taking place in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, when insect activity is reduced, health officials here say there is little to worry about contracting Zika from mosquitoes. In late May, however, 150 health workers, scientists and academics asked the World Health Organization to cancel or move the Games. The U.N. agency dismissed the call as unjustified.
“Postponing the Olympics because of Zika is not a convincing argument. But if countries were to boycott the Games because of the political coup, that would be a good position to take,” says Santos, the urban planning professor, in referring to the suspension of President Dilma Rousseff ahead of an impeachment trial on charges of allegedly illegally manipulating the budget. Interim president Michel Temer will likely take her seat at the Olympics Opening Ceremony, though Rousseff has been invited to attend.
READ: [The Good News in Brazil’s Two-Headed Crisis]
The impeachment process has so far been backed by Brazil’s Supreme Court, but it remains controversial. While thousands of Brazilians took to the streets for protests ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, protests related to the charges against Rousseff and other specific grievances such as unpaid wages are shouting out any complaints directly opposing the Games.
For political scientist Joao Feres of Rio de Janeiro’s State University, all of this tumult is more easily understood when recalling how young Brazil’s democracy is.
“Brazil’s democratic institutions were developing in a virtuous way, but it’s a short history from the ’80s until now,” he says. “I expect there will be more protests closer to the Olympics as unions, students and universities are eager to get to the streets.” It may be some time yet before the optimism of 2009 is back.
More from U.S. News
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Brazil: No Longer the Country of the Future?
Olympics Reflect Brazil’s Boom-Bust Cycle originally appeared on usnews.com
