The morning after Carnaval this year,
garbagemen in orange pennies walked the foggy beaches, sweeping together
mountains of trash along Rio de Janeiro's famous coastal promenades. As they
cleaned up from Brazil's annual mass party
they sang in unison, while hung over passersby trudged through sand and shared
with them wry smiles: "Packed airport, stopped traffic, chaos all over, ai ai,
ai, ai ai ai / People on all sides, all hotels full, metro choked, ai ai ai, ai
ai ai / Imagine during the Cup!" They had their work cut out for them: The
majority of Rio's garbagemen had gone on strike during the celebration.
But just hours later, the scene on the freshly cleaned
Ipanema Beach returned to the product Brazil sells best: no-worries happiness.
Sweaty Brazilians in skimpy bathing suits gathered their beach chairs into
semicircles facing the blue-green waves as they filled each others' cups with
beer, laughing loudly about their Carnaval shenanigans as smiling vendors hawked
fruit salad and traveling musicians kept everyone tapping their sandy toes to
samba's catchy rhythms.
But if the piles of garbage seemed high after Carnaval,
imagine during the World Cup. Hosting the world's biggest sporting event, which
begins on June 12 and runs for a month, was supposed to be an opportunity for
Brazil to showcase its organization, development, and competence. But with corruption
rife, infrastructure crumbling, and constant street crime in the country, most Brazilians sense that this
opportunity offers more bad than good. They await the Cup's arrival the way
high school students might await a test they haven't studied for.
Nothing encapsulates this sense of impending doom like the
phrase imagina na Copa, "imagine
during the Cup." The three words first came to prominence through the popular song of
the same name released last year by
the superstar country duo Fernando e Sorocaba. The phrase is chanted throughout
Brazil, echoing out from street protests and during a recent bus strike in São
Paulo, and is now trending on social media as #imaginanacopa. The
concept captures both the disbelief of Brazilians that the organization of the
Cup will run smoothly as well as their dread of what impact the mega-event will
have on day-to-day life in the 12 host cities.
While in former host countries Germany and South Africa the
local mood was celebratory upon the opening of the World Cup, here Brazilians are preparing for lockdown before
soccer fans invade their country and Cup-related festivities crowd their
streets. Those with the means to do so are fleeing the country ahead of the kickoff.
Airlines have offered discounted "escape" fares over the past month for those
desperate to get out. Rafael Pereira, a lawyer from the southern city of Porto
Alegre, which will be hosting five of the 64 matches, said he saw no other
option. "I'm not going to stick around to watch this disaster unfold. I love
soccer as much as any Brazilian, but no way; I'm out of here. I'll be surfing
in Peru."
But with a 2012 average monthly income of $850, according to
a report released last week by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics (IBGE), most Brazilians can't afford to leave the country for a
month. Instead, they say they will just lay low. "We're stocking up on
everything," Yessica Souza Guimarães, a 28-year-old administrative assistant
and mother of two, explained as she leaned over one of three shopping carts
full of food at a grocery store in São Paulo. "I don't plan to leave the house
until it's all over."
Beyond the traffic and inconveniences the World Cup will
bring to daily life, some fear it will bring something even worse. In the back of Sat's, a popular
chicken joint in Rio's Copacabana neighborhood, the tone of a rowdy Saturday
night darkened as the topic turned to the Cup. The bar owner, Sérgio Rabello,
spoke with a burning intensity.
"Look at crime in our country. Our city is out of control.
The police are underpaid and abusive. And now a bunch of gringos will be
showing up rowdy and drunk. There's no way this mixture will go well. This cup
is going to be like a bomba going
off. People are going to die."
His fears are not unfounded. Rio is in the midst of a crime
wave on the dawn of the World Cup. Homicide numbers are increasing in Rio state,
with 1,459
people killed just since January, a number that nearly matches the
high-water mark level of 2008, the year Rio's favela "pacification" program
began, with its aggressive police sweeps through the city's roughest areas. The
attempt to stamp out crime in the favelas may have even driven up street crime
in other neighborhoods; street robberies and vehicle theft numbers jumped
this year as well. Even the police are under fire: Police mortalities are up 40
percent from last year, driving some police to walk off the job, demanding
higher pay.
In an attempt to avoid the perfect storm of police strikes
and street protests during the World Cup, the government acceded to the threat
of strikes by offering a 15.8 percent pay raise to federal police agents and calling
an additional 5,300 federal troops from the military into Rio. Whether the
additional cash and manpower will make an impact in preventing crime from
marring the experience of the 900,000 visitors expected to descend upon the
city remains to be seen.
And instability goes beyond crime, too. Major cities all
across Brazil came to a halt last June with mass street protests set off by a
five-cent hike in bus fares. The
protests occurred during the Confederations Cup -- a sort of World Cup test run
-- leaving the government shaken on the issue of domestic security during
international events. The bus and police strikes over the past month underline
the fragility of a functioning Brazilian state.
Imagining the Cup is an exercise in envisioning everyday
inconveniences, but at a greater level, Brazilians worry about the longer-term consequences
of an $11.5 billion event in a country plagued by corruption. In reality, the
event is likely to cost closer
to $13 billion; the $11.5 billion price tag for federal, state, and host-city
preparations was last updated in September of last year, and many of the works
included in the preparations are still unfinished. A recent Pew
poll found that 61 percent of Brazilians "say hosting the World
Cup is a bad thing for Brazil because it takes money away from schools, health
care, and other public services." And while one-third of respondents believe
the tournament will create more jobs and help the economy, that hope is
tempered by an overwhelmingly negative perception of how President Dilma Rousseff
is handling corruption. For Brazilians, part of the World Cup package is not
just a suspicion of corruption but a virtual guarantee.
In 2013, Brazil ranked 72nd out of 175 countries on
the Corruption Perception Index compiled by Transparency International, a
precipitous drop from its 43rd-place ranking the year before. The ranking for
2014, many believe, is almost guaranteed to be worse. Further, a new
anti-corruption law is so rife with loopholes that
many observers believe it may, perversely, increase corruption.
In 2007, when Brazil first won its bid to host the 2014
World Cup, the excitement was palpable, from the parties in the Amazon basin to
the fireworks over the Christ statue in Rio. Famously soccer-crazed, Brazil is
used to being near the center of attention every four years: The national team
has won the famous golden trophy five times and been in the finals another two
times. Brazilians collectively mourned the
loss in the finals the last time Brazil hosted the event, in 1950, adding
to the urgency for a thumping victory this time around. But for once, this time
Brazilians are not so much worried about what happens on the field as they are
about what happens off it.
Away from the glare of the stadium lights, many Brazilians are
afraid of how their country will be perceived with all eyes on them. The recent Pew poll found that 75
percent of Brazilians think their country should be more respected abroad than
it currently is. But they are evenly divided about whether the World Cup will
help Brazil's image.
Many fear that the world will view them as just another Third
World country, not ready for primetime.
A series of structural failures during the stadium
constructions, including the deaths of eight construction workers, have frayed
the nerves of Brazilians. As she watched the news of the collapse of part of a
stadium in São Paulo, Tânia Maria Martins, an environmental activist in the
northern state of Piauí, said, "God help us if this happens when people are in
the stadium during the Cup. What a shame it would be." Fernando Morimoto, a
businessman in São Paulo, complained as he waited in line for a taxi at the São
Paulo airport about how the electricity had gone out at the airport in Rio,
leaving him stranded there for eight hours. "What do you think the gringos will
think of us when they can't even use the airport because the electricity fails?
Do you think they'll be impressed?"
Some Brazilians don't need to even ask these rhetorical
questions. "We're not afraid of embarrassing ourselves because we know we will,"
says Thiago Baranda, a public servant from Manaus.
Infrastructure remains a major challenge for Brazil. In the
12 host cities, the construction of new stadiums draws a stark contrast against
the crumbling infrastructure that cries out for attention. But as with so many
public works in Brazil, many of the stadiums are still being finished just days
before the start of the Cup, and other facilities, such as Curitiba's media
center or Fortaleza' s airport terminal, have been all
but abandoned midstream.
In preparation for the Cup and for the Olympics in Rio de
Janeiro in 2016, the government promised to organize its visitor reception
infrastructure. But these efforts often seem to only exacerbate the problem. Waits
for taxis at train stations and airports can be hours long, thanks in part to
the "streamlined" system of check-in kiosks and taxi stands introduced ahead of
the World Cup. And for tourists hoping to stadium-hop during the tournament,
beware: Last-minute domestic flights are often prohibitively expensive, and robberies
on buses are commonplace. In many
places, the interstate freeway system is a broken patchwork of cement where
driving the speed limit is a wild, swerving ride taken at the rider's own peril,
and scores of Brazilians die in accidents each holiday weekend.
Preparations for the Cup were packaged into election
promises during the last presidential election. Now many of those promises have
been revealed to be unmet. For example, in 2010 a $300 million fund was set
aside to bolster national park infrastructure in anticipation of the event
under a project called "Cup
Parks." It recently came to light, however, that only 0.15
percent of those funds were distributed.
On June 1, in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, a party
was held to celebrate the inauguration
of a bullet train connecting the two cities.* The party
was tongue-in-cheek, of course: Construction on the project has yet to begin. During
the recent Easter holiday, the 270-mile trip between the two cities on the
potholed two-lane road took 12 hours. Millions of fans will be making this
journey over the coming weeks. Brazilians would likely recommend imagining being somewhere else.
But "Imagine During the Cup" is not the only slogan
Brazilians are using to communicate their dread about the imminent train wreck
of the World Cup. Other sayings are scrawled across walls in every city across
the country, with more appearing every day. The pedestrian crossings in Rio are
now stamped with "FIFA Go Home." In the historical center of Salvador, a
coastal northeastern city, "Copa Para Quem?" ("The Cup for Whom?") scars the
brightly colored colonial buildings. And in early June, angry, underpaid teachers
gathered outside Rio's courthouse, shouting, "Não Vai Ter Copa!" ("There will
be no Cup!").
But while these other slogans often tend toward the
political, there is something pure about the "Imagine During the Cup." It is
not a demand. It is not a rhetorical question. Instead it speaks simply to the
nationwide dread that cuts across all segments of society. It is Brazilians
united as one, as equals, shaking their heads, looking each other in the eye,
and muttering under their breath, "We're totally screwed."
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