Favelas, Rio’s guilty conscience
In anticipation of playing host to both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, Brazil has rolled out a “Favela Pacification Program” in Rio de Janeiro in a desperate attempt to curb rampant violence in its sprawling, gang-controlled hillside slums. When President Obama visited Rio in March, he made a point of stopping by and celebrating one of the slums under police control, called Cidade de Deus (or “City of God”). There he kicked around a soccer ball with neighborhood kids, albeit in a walled school compound with tight security.
The pacification program has its advocates and its critics, and it remains to be seen what kind of effect it will have on Rio’s favela-dwellers in these years leading up to the two big sporting events, and even more crucially, in the years following. ESPN's Wright Thompson has a really well-written piece for "Outside The Lines" on the complicated impact on the favelas even now. It’s lengthy but worth every word. Here’s a blurb:
The favelas, Rio's guilty conscience, almost a thousand of them, overlook paradise but never, ever partake. Dense, urban slums with wretched educational opportunities, no social services, no police protection, they exist outside civilized society. Residents who live in the city don't go up the hill. It's possible to live a middle-class life without the violence of the slums affecting one's daily existence. But the violence is always there. In 2010, there were 4,798 murders in Rio. That's about a fourth the number of murders annually in the entire United States. (The U.S. population is about 300 million people. Rio has 6 million.) Favelas are desperate places, and they've been ignored since the first one popped up in 1897. Only now, some of them are close to venues for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games.
Rio has less than three years to fix a crisis a century in the making.
The clock is ticking.
Read the whole thing here.
What’s on the line in Brazil?
It was a big win for Latin America when Brazil got the nod to host both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, for reasons including pride and economics. But there’s cause for concern. The Brazilian Audit Court, which tracks how its government spends funds, cites “widespread problems in most of the 12 host cities,� according to USA Today. Airport infrastructure, bidding delays, and stadium construction are among the woes. Pelé, the retired soccer star and national hero, warns that Brazil runs the risk of embarrassment if things don’t improve. But there’s another concern that could put Brazil’s reputation on the line:
In Rio, authorities are facing accusations they are violating citizens' human rights by forcing slum dwellers to move to make way for the construction of a transit system. Residents of three shantytowns recently filed a complaint with the Organization of American States, saying that the city is arbitrarily relocating them. Eventual pressure by the international body could lead to project changes and delays.
It would be great if Brazil can get its act together so the games can go on as planned, but it would be a step backwards if it did so at the expense of its own people.
[Photo credit: Daily Mail]
A lover’s quarrel with the beautiful game
“When good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.� - Eduardo Galeano
There are few phenomena on this planet that truly transcend culture the way soccer does. Few phenomena so universally divide people either, of course. But for this one month every four years, literally billions of people will be glued to televisions in living rooms and bars and shop windows at all hours of the day, finding ways to skip work, losing their voices cheering on the teams that bear their flag - or perhaps even just the teams they’ve picked to win their brackets.
This year they say that one in two people in the world - 3,413,350,000 of the 6,826,700,000 of us - will watch at least part of the Cup. Here in the United States, where we’ve been a bit slow to catch the fever, ABC/ESPN paid $100 million for the English language broadcasting rights for this year and 2014. Univision, meanwhile, paid more than three times that amount to broadcast in Spanish here.
A couple of years ago I read a book by Jonathan Safran Foer called How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. I thought it would be an impossible soccer book to top, but I just finished Soccer in Sun and Shadow by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, and I must say it comes quite close.
I originally understood the title to refer, in a culturally critical way, to the different sections of the stadium - the cheap seats in the blazing sun, the luxury boxes in the shade - and the way in which soccer, such a unifying force, still finds ways to perpetuate the socioeconomic divide that so permeates Latin America. But Galeano, who writes elsewhere about that sort of thing extensively, seems to be aiming at something different here.
The book, made up of mostly one-page essays, features Galeano’s reflections on a number of general themes (like “the idol� and “the goalkeeper� and “the fan�), but is mostly a chronology of the sport, and particularly of the World Cup. For each Cup he paints the picture of what’s going on in the wider world - dictators rising and falling, wars beginning and ending, and of course, each time “well-informed sources in Miami� were announcing “the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.� Through the thematic reflections and chronology, Galeano celebrates the bright spots of the world’s game, but doesn’t shy away from its blemishes. And that is what he means by “soccer in sun and shadow.�
He reserves some of his harshest criticism for the commercialization of soccer - turning sport into industry, taking on the values of efficiency and effectiveness, at the expense of creativity and passion and beauty.
So this year I watch the games with his ideas swirling around in my head and occasionally leaking out into conversation. But I’m conflicted. Because one of the factors leading up to the Cup that most filled me with anticipation for the celebration of all that is best with the sport - precisely that passion and beauty and yes, creativity - was a three-minute Nike commercial that is unlike anything I have ever seen before.
What would Eduardo Galeano think of it, I wonder? Would he see in it a bit of a recapturing of the bright spots, or merely just a further demonstration of the shadows? Maybe a bit of both.
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