“the party in the stadium isn’t worth the tears in the favela:” world cup protests, day 12

on monday, the favela came down the hill.  this is both immediately newsworthy and not at all new: the idea of favela residents leaving their communities (many of which are located on hillsides) and heading down to the city streets en masse to engage or defy the middle-class norms of life in the “asphalt” has been generating headlines and clichés in rio de janeiro for at least a century.  it’s been used to describe everything from the spread of samba’s popularity in the 1920s and 30s to shows of force by drug cartels in the early 2000s to the daily commutes of the maids, office workers, and the growing numbers of teachers, lawyers, and doctors who live in the favelas.  it’s also pretty much the de rigueur image associated with favela-related protests, which more often than not address the state-sanctioned violence that’s been disproportionately directed at favela residents for at least the past century (usually through police or army actions, although historically there have been several of instances of arson and other semi-official strategies to displace or “tame” favela residents).

pictures of favela kids killed by police violence.  photo by gas pa hampton

monday’s march was no exception: as we walked along the beach at copacabana, heading from chapeu mangueira to pavão/pavãozinho and cantagalo (all “pacified” favelas), one of the main chants was “ih, fudeu!  a favela desceu” (very roughly, “oooh, you’re fucked!  the favela came down!”)  the chant both mocks and plays into the common fear of favelas as lawless, violent places eternally on the verge of descending to upend the rest of the city, shutting down businesses and enforcing a reign of terror through small armies of coked-up adolescents with machine guns.  in this case, though, the “hills” came down to the “asphalt” with giant banners and photos of some of the hundreds of favela residents killed or disappeared by rio’s police in recent years.  (if you imagine that rio’s cops don’t enforce their own reign of terror – especially in the city’s favelas – you haven’t lived here long enough to get questioned and searched at gunpoint by a coked-up post-adolescent with an ar-15 and a uniform).

the march, called “a festa nos estádios não vale as lágrimas na favela” (the party in the stadium isn’t worth the tears in the favela), was sponsored by a coalition of social movements from favelas throughout the city.  it began monday morning in chapeu mangueira with hip-hop, poetry, and capoeira presentations before heading down to copacabana, where tens of thousands of soccer fans in face paint and green-and-yellow shirts (both locals and tourists trying to soak up brazil’s world cup vibe) were waiting for the start of brazil’s final preliminary game against cameroon, and where a massive, mostly foreign, press corps was waiting to capture anything out of the ordinary.

it wasn’t an especially big march, but there were more people there than at recent protests (around 300 when i reached it near the beginning of the beach, and over 500 after another activist coalition joined us about halfway through), and the glut of tourists and photographers with press credentials helped keep the police fairly benign. we were surrounded by cordons of riot cops that grew as we made our way down the beach, and an imposing line of them blocked our initial approach toward the entrance of pavão/pavãozinho, but they didn’t let off any tear gas or stun grenades, even when the march changed course to reach pavão/pavãozinho down a series of side streets.  the protest finished without the ass kicking that’s become customary, although cops did rough up and arrest "spiderman", a well-known local activist, apparently for carrying an unfurled banner on a public sidewalk after the protest ended. 

controlling and “taming” favelas has long been the holy grail of governance in rio de janeiro.  in part, that’s because of what a major force favelas are in the city: somewhere between 15 – 30% of the population lives in them, depending in largely on what any given researcher considers to a favela to be.  the most recent initiative to bring favelas in line has been “pacification,” which is a pretty major misnomer for armed occupations by police and army forces.  i’m not much for statistics, but a local paper showed that the number of favela residents killed and disappeared by police – which has always been outrageously high – has increased in “pacified” favelas.  the cases of amarildo de souza and cláudia ferreira silva, which i’ve mentioned before on this blog, are recent examples of police killings that have gotten the most media attention for their sheer heinousness.  two weeks ago, cops kidnapped a teenager and killed him execution-style after picking him and a friend up for an alleged robbery (the friend, who they shot in his legs and back, played dead and later managed to escape).  

missing amarildo at the world cup

the current regime of pacification and the violence associated with it is specifically intended to make the city tourist-friendly enough to host megaevents like the olympics and the world cup.  that’s not to say, though, that if the world cup were to miraculously leave us alone tomorrow, the favelas would return to being peaceful urban utopias.  they never have been, and the very real link between recent police killings and the world cup shouldn’t overshadow the fact that these communities have always suffered the brunt of the city’s officially-approved repression and brutality. the contrast between the party in the stadium and the tears in the favela is not just a question of emotional opposites; it’s also a question of time and permanence.  this stupid cup will end on july 13 – exactly 365 days after amarildo was disappeared – but the favelas’ tears will undoubtedly continue.  in coming months, the powers that be will start to steamroll into preparation for the olympics, and local real estate developers who are also major political contributors are already eyeing beachfront favelas as prime targets for the next big deals.  (david beckham recently bought a mansion for 1 million reais – a little under us $500,000 – in vidigal, on the other side of the hill from the where amarildo was disappeared, and currently under the command of the same “pacifying” police unit).

i’m not at all an expert on favelas or on the daily experiences of people who live there:  at most, i’ve visited friends’ houses, or gone to concerts or dance parties or protests.  i’ve seen firsthand a few of the changes that have led up to the world cup, like the large-scale destruction of houses in providência and manguinhos, but i’ve missed the worst, like the massacre in maré on june 24, 2013.  still, i’ve been in rio long enough and seen enough to know that, although the world cup is by no means the sole cause of violence or excuse for police violence in the favelas, both fifa’s demands and local government’s desire for a city prepared to host the cup has undoubtedly led to a significant increase in the violence to which favela residents are so frequently subjected.  monday’s protest highlighted their resilience, and their resolution to speak out and to stand for themselves in a city where the fleeting presence of the international press keeps them much safer than the presence of the local police ever has.

photo by gizele martins

this is not what democracy looks like: world cup protests, day 6

five close friends of mine were arrested at a protest on tuesday night in downtown rio, apparently becomes they were wearing facepaint and carrying empty paint cans to use as percussion instruments.  they were in the streets with the latest installment of an ongoing performance/protest that many of us have been working on for the past three years.  they had already been frisked twice at police checkpoints on their way to the protest, and cleared to go ahead both times, but within ten minutes of arriving outside candelária church, they were surrounded by a squad of riot cops, marched away from the protest, jammed together into the backseat of a sedan, and driven to a police station in the north zone, thirty minutes further up the highway (despite the plethora of police stations around rio’s downtown).  they weren’t charged with anything, but they were photographed for a registry of “people directly or indirectly involved in protests”and questioned without being allowed to speak to a lawyer present (in obvious violation of their basic rights).  more to the point, they were taken off the street for the night (they were released after about 3 hours), and warned ominously that there would be trouble if they were picked up again at any protests in the future.

confiscated cans at tuesday's protest.  photo by comitê popular rio copa e olimpiadas.

being slathered in paint and banging cans are not usually arrestable offenses in rio de janeiro, especially on empty downtown streets. actually, being slathered in paint and making too much noise seem to be hallmarks of the soccer fan experience, especially at world cup.  my friends were arrested at a march that had at most 50 other protestors and at least 200 cops, about 3.5 miles away from maracaña stadium.  during the abbreviated protest, no property was damaged, no businesses were disrupted (nothing was open downtown), and the only people on the street were drink vendors and a few facepainted, air horn-honking fans watching the game at kiosks and pushcarts.  still, cops managed to arrest at least 15 of the protestors, including all of the passengers who boarded a bus through the back door after cops insisted that the driver open it.

the cops’ conduct was arrogant, authoritarian, and also just plain stupid:  if they had just let the protestors march, entirely surrounded by several columns of police, the mainstream media would have ignored the protest or laughed it off, and everyone would have been able to go home sooner.  but individually and as an organization, the police here want to crush any and all dissidence.  in this sense, the arbitrary arrests go with the gun-waving and warning shots we saw on sunday night near maracanã:  they’re meant to scare protestors off of the street.  and it seems to be working (although it’s worth pointing out that calling a protest for downtown an hour after the brasilian team’s game began was a major scheduling fuck up).

i’ve written about police brutality before on this blog, and true to form, there were plenty of other police actions throughout brasil in recent days that completely overshadow the arbitrariness of my friends’ and other protestors’ arrests. in cidade de deus, a “pacified” favela, cops shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old on sunday (officially he was killed in a shoot out, and no responsibility has been assigned yet, but this usually signals police culpability).  this happened again in manguinhos, another "pacified" favela, on wednesday night, this time with a 25-year-old victim.  meanwhile, in recife, in northeastern brasil, military police wounded dozens of young people occupying land at the center of a development debate.

 

comparatively, my friends had it easy:  five costumed performers getting picked up by cops is not nearly as worrying as young people getting killed, and watching high armored robocops squint carefully into paint cans in a desperate effort to invent some sort of criminal intent was at least as funny as it was infuriating.  our network of friends operated quickly enough so that there public interest lawyers waiting for them by the time they got to the police station, and 10 more of us – mostly in costume, or covered with tattoos, or both – came to support them, pass around snacks, and wait for their release.  a combination of all this attention, the fact that all of my friends are college graduates, and the flimsy logic that riot cops gave the station police to justify the arrest (that my friends’ facepaint and the single bandana among them qualified as hiding their identities, and that the paint cans they were drumming on were actually intended as projectiles) meant that the police went easy on them:  apart from the illegal interrogation, the illegal photo registry (which is apparently part of an international database), and a constant stream of harassing and provocative questions, they came and went without major problems. but the fact that the rights to free expression and free assembly, both guaranteed by brasil’s constitution, are being actively and meticulously undermined in the hopes that everyone will shut up and get back to watching the games isn’t just annoying and intimidating from where we stand:  like so much about this world cup, it ought to be alarming to anyone who cares about basic human rights.

being censored is obviously not the same as being tortured or killed, but suppression and violence go hand in hand:  both are vital to creating an atmosphere of obedience based on fear.  and policing based on personal tastes, criminalizing anything that looks wrong, is a guarantee for continued brutality in the future.  the cops who decide that costumes and paint can drums don’t belong on an empty street are relying on the same sort of logic that justifies killing young people of color in favelas.  it’s all uniformed vigilantism based on appearance, and in rio de janeiro - and throughout brasil - it seems to be getting worse.

i got news of my friends’ arrest on tuesday as i was arriving at the protest, and i stopped on a street corner to trade phone numbers with mutual friends in order to get more of us to the police station as quickly as possible. as soon as i’d said hello, a middle-aged guy with big arms and a yellow-and-green t-shirt approached me, yelling for me to move on before he beat the shit out of me.  i explained that i was on a public sidewalk, and he yelled back that he didn’t like me, that my friends and i deserved to die, and that i should get the fuck away.  (i assume this had to do with my fabulous protest outfit, which involved glitter and a raggedy red dress).  30 cops approached us, sensing a possible fight, but they weren’t about to keep the peace; they only came to shout at me and egg him on.  i got the fuck away.  (at sunday night’s protests, cops stood by calmly while local bar patrons in the vila isabel neighborhood beat two protestors bloody).

so:  i’m sorry to sound like a broken record, but as i’ve been writing for a while, this world cup is a travesty for human rights.  as you watch the games, some of us in brasil are being silenced in the name of order and good sportsmanship, and others are being beaten up or killed in the name of progress, “pacification,” and public safety.  as we welcome the world to celebrate, those who don’t fit into the idea of what a “country without poverty” (part of the federal government’s official motto) is supposed to look like are being subject to policing that recalls the military dictatorship of the 60s and 70s.  this may be what a world cup demands, but it’s not what democracy looks like.

photo by comitê popular rio copa e olimpiadas.

whose public security? world cup protests, day 4

you may have heard that cops in rio are using live ammo at protests now.  there are a few cases of uniformed military police firing warning shots at protestors on sunday night during the official opening of maracanã stadium, as well as footage of an off-duty civil police officer aiming at protestors.  police also dropped tear gas canisters from helicopters, and several protestors mentioned that the gas felt stronger than during previous protests (possibly a switch to military-grade stuff, which also happened in seattle in 1999). 

throughout brasil, the cops are cracking down:  in são paulo, on the first day of the cup, a schoolteacher who was hit twice with rubber bullets was pepper-sprayed in the face while he was already immobilized and in a chokehold, and in belo horizonte, a member of the midia ninja collective was arrested and tortured by cops, who also threatened to kill him and his colleagues.

there weren’t that many of us at the protest in rio on sunday night: i would say 300, friends say 400, the mainstream media here says 150, and you can choose your own source.  but it felt especially energized, and not only because everyone was on edge even before the cops started pulling out the guns.  maracanã has become a major symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with world cup preparations and rio’s “reurbanization” in general: it’s a public stadium that was rebuilt at a cost of R$1.6 billion (about US $600 million) before being sold at bargain basement rates to a group of private construction firms. indigenous folks living in the defunct museum right next to the stadium – land that has been deeded to indigenous people since the nineteenth century – were evicted twice over the course of a year to make way for more parking spaces.  and in the midst of these preparations, ticket prices have skyrocketed, leaving most local fans to afford tickets to games, a factor that’s not physically violent but still deeply felt hereabouts.

from the time we gathered on sunday afternoon at praça saens pena, about a mile away from maracanã, it was clear that with 300 (or 400 or 150) people, we weren’t even going to reach the stadium, let alone affect the game in any way. but it was also clear to everyone at the protest – and plenty of other people who weren’t on the street with us – that maracanã couldn’t debut as though everyone had just given in and accepted the inevitability of the world cup.  the first game in rio couldn’t just be business as usual.

  

this goes against pretty much everything written in most mainstream media sources (at least in english and portuguese) since the cup began.  even the guardian, which has been good at covering protests and public debate in brasil in the past year, ran an article contrasting protest to public security, as though protestors have been a principle cause of violence in the build-up to the cup, as though protests have disrupted what would otherwise be a happy party in a more-or-less calm city.

the problem with that, of course, is that “business as usual” in rio has been defined by truculent policing and other forms of officially sanctioned violence since long before the protests started getting really big last june. and although rubber bullets and “civilian-grade” tear gas seem to be giving way to live bullets and military-grade stuff at the protests, all of that is still a walk in the park compared to what policing looks like in the favelas and outside of the public eye. 

downtown protest compared to favelas.  cartoon by carlos latuff, 2013

as protests were picking up steam throughout the city last year, a group of cops descended on maré, a complex of favelas, and indiscriminately killed 11 people, some with bullets and others with bayonets.  and this march, cops shot cláudia ferreira silva, a hospital custodian and mother of four who lived in the morro da congonha favela, and then dragged her to death after she fell out of the trunk of the police car.  i’ve already mentioned the disappearance and torture of amarildo silva.  my point is that, like school shootings in the us, these are not isolated incidents:  they represent a widespread “kill ’em all, let god sort ’em out” attitude in local policing that the world cup has both encouraged and provoked.

just to be clear, my own brushes with violence are incredibly minimal by local standards.  i may sometimes be a witness to all of this stuff, but i’m never really the subject of it.  the closest i come is the occasional gassing when shit really gets out of hand during protests, but i never bear the brunt of it, and i tend not to be a target. a friend joked on sunday that i have an invisibility cloak:  between my white skin, the colorful clothes i was wearing, and a hundred other factors, i could basically walk right past cops if i was by myself and keeping calm.  it worked twice that night, when i passed dozens of riot cops milling around back streets as i headed away from the helicopters, the clouds of gas, and who knows what else around maracanã.  i fit into a vision of public security that considers protestors to be a major threat, and considers favela residents, indigenous people, and people of color in general to be an even bigger one.  it’s a vision that depends on a whole lot of live ammunition and an ever-present threat to use even more of it.

protests and protestors are not the main problem with the world cup;  intimidation, displacement, and violence are.   and i’m sorry to say that if you’re hosting world cup parties and posting about the game on facebook, i think you’re part of the problem.  i’m not going to delete you or stop being friends with you in real life or even look at you funny, but you’re buying into a very well-produced spectacle, a spectacle that maintains itself locally through a belligerent cop culture that spent sunday night aiming guns at my friends.  this is not a good time to pretend that everything's ok and that the show must go on.

of course the world cup didn’t introduce this vision of "public security” to rio:  it’s been going on for a long time, and it will continue long past this particular megaevent and the long slog toward the next one (the 2016 olympics).  and of course it’s not just rio:  security and “public safety” throughout brasil, latin america, the us, and most of the rest of the world has come to mean making spaces safe and comfortable for a primarily white middle and upper class with the resources to generate enough money to keep the public safety machine running. in rio – and pretty much everywhere else – “reurbanizing,” “pacifying,” and generally making the city ready for the world cup, the olympics, and the future installation of mega-businesses or mega-events, has meant that the city’s most vulnerable residents have become targets of an official violence that keeps spreading and amplifying.  what we saw on sunday is only a small taste of that violence, but it highlights something we’ve known for a long time:  that even questioning this paradigm of “public safety” and order is an act that will continue to be met with increasingly violent intimidation and repression.  and as long as that’s what it takes to keep “business as usual” going, we’ll be out in the street.

- using pepper spray against an immobilized man
- injuring foreign journalists with bomb shrapnel
- if the military police aren't afraid to act this way when the whole world is watching,
- imagine what it must be like when no one sees.  (pirikart)

what do we have to celebrate? inside the world cup protests, day 1

the first thing i want you to know is that, at least in rio, yesterday’s protests started out beautifully.  in the morning, about 2000 of us met up at candelária church before taking over rio branco, the main downtown commercial drag, and marching to lapa, a little more than a mile away.  (foreign news reports i’ve seen said there were about 500 protestors, which means gringo journalists are relying on official police numbers, otherwise known as “total bullshit”).  a few hours later, there were another 800-ish of us in copacabana, walking the length of the beach, next to the giant screen showing the opening game and the theoretically-open-to-the-public-but-actually-mostly-closed-and-very-heavily-guarded “fifa fan fest.”

poor batman, a local protest icon, is crucified on one of the missing beams that "disappeared" during rio's major construction projects last year. image by carnavandalirização

it was sunny and the chants were loud.  people danced, and at each of the parades, there was music from a couple of different percussion groups.  maybe it’s just my leftist romanticism talking, but the marches was noisy and vibrant and colorful, and it seemed like people who actually give a shit were coming together, not just assembling; it felt like, however briefly, a kind of community was being built.  there were communists, anarchists, hipsters, homeless people, high school students, and striking teachers coming together.  and we weren’t together only out of shared frustration at the increasingly impossible cost of living in rio, or outrage at violent cops on the streets and in the favelas, or despair at a city that kowtows to megaevents and business interests while shooing away its most vulnerable residents or using them as collateral. we were out in the street because we share a commitment to do something about it.

i know this all sounds idealistic and naive, and i’m definitely guilty as charged.  since last june, experience has reminded everyone in rio that it’s much easier to bring people together for a protest march than it is to figure out how to take that energy forward.  it’s easy for a diverse coalition to fracture along ideological lines. on that note, the second thing i want you to know about yesterday’s protests is that it’s easy for the hundreds of riot cops who followed us at both marches to fracture this diverse coalition physically using tear gas, pepper spray, and nightsticks.  at the first march, it happened almost as soon as we’d made it to the central plaza in lapa.  at the second, it took longer:  there were tens of thousands of loyal soccer fans packed along the beach, and it would have made for pretty bad press to tear gas them along with the black bloc kids.  both times, i was too far away to see exactly what happened and how it started, but past protest experience and yesterday’s video footage makes it pretty clear who got violent and how (spoiler:  it was pretty much entirely the cops.  also, if you don't understand portuguese, the commentators are pretty transparently reactionary).  things got especially nasty in são paulo, where a journalist for cnn broke her arm after apparently being hit with a stun grenade.  protestors don’t have those. unfortunately, taking a cold, hard, cynical look at the situation, the cnn producer’s broken arm might wind up helping local protest movements if it generates enough negative coverage to force someone in power to warn the cops off being quite so belligerent.

but stepping away from my cynicism and back to my naive idealism, the momentum that i sensed waning at protests a couple of weeks ago feels like it’s back in a big way.   in addition to being inspiring, yesterday was also a lot of fun.  in spite of – or in opposition to - the jeering muscleheads in soccer jerseys, the robocops and their tear gas, or even the glass that a woman in a fancy copacabana restaurant apparently threw at protestors, there were plenty of moments yesterday that felt like a street party.  it’s such an enormous cliché to compare public gatherings in brasil to carnaval that it’s become a cliché just to mention what a cliché it is.  (there must be some german word that describes this phenomenon).  yesterday really didn’t feel like carnaval:  there were some costumes and some music, but there were also way too many cops, and besides, we were all much too sober.  but as fifa, along with the state and city governments, mandate more and more what can and can’t happen in the public space, it felt good to share our own exercise in community without corporate sponsors or even an official color scheme.  and it felt really good to have fun while we did it.

as we were walking along the beach front at copacabana, folks at the front of the march saw the brasilian team score the first goal of the world cup against itself, giving croatia a brief 1-0 lead.  most of us aren’t planning on watching the cup, but we couldn’t help cheering and chanting “croatia!  croatia!”  the own goal felt like a perfectly good metaphor for all of the preparations that have put fifa’s financial benefit ahead of the wellbeing of so many people here. of course, pissed-off local fans immediately attacked a couple of protestors who were cheering the loudest.  it makes perfect sense:  this world cup has been built on a foundation of violence, and the local goons were just defending it the same way the police do, wearing green-and-yellow uniforms instead of black-and-grey cop gear, and using their fists instead of tear gas and clubs.

the cup that we said wouldn’t happen has begun, and it will be with us for another 30 days.  the cops and their hooligan counterparts will presumably be with us for much longer. it’s still very unclear where the protests will go from here:  where they’ll be, who will be there, and what other forms they might take.  my hope is that this cup won’t be business as usual, and that the repression that has made and continues to make it possible will become harder for everyone – especially fans and the media – to ignore, or to defend with trite, simplistic explanations. i’ll be out in the street, hoping to help keep things stay loud, colorful, and critical.  in the midst of fifa’s aggressively omnipresent party, those of us trying to stay resilient and keep standing against it deserve a celebration of our own.

the party in the stadium is not worth the favela's tears

protest song dance party, part 2

this one isn't specifically world cup related; in fact, it's fifty years old (though this particular recording is from 1970), and it was an important protest song during the dictatorship in brasil.  people still sing it all the time in the streets and in social gatherings, and its subject matter is still very current:  police violence and forced evictions in poor communities (in rio, a "hill" almost always refers to a favela) may have gotten more somewhat more sophisticated, but they haven't changed much since 1964.  the song is by zé keti and was originally part of opinião, a groundbreaking political theatre piece.  translation after the link.

also, speaking of authoritarianism, the big news today is that the civil police have issued warrants to question several prominent local activists in rio for "information crimes" (there's an article here, but it's in portuguese and from a fairly reactionary - albeit mainstream - local paper).  it's unclear at this point whether they're being held in "protective" custody and whether they'll be out on the streets for the pre-kickoff protests tomorrow.

you can arrest me

you can beat me

you can even starve me

i won't change my opinion:

i won't leave the hill

if there's no water, i'll make a well

if there's no water, i'll buy a bone

to put in my soup - i'll make it work

say what you want about me,

here, i don't pay rent.

and if i die tomorrow, sir,

i'm already close to heaven.

anti-world cup dance party

if you've been looking for a good world cup-related/anti-fifa protest song, look no further:  here's a copa mata (the cup kills) by anarco funk, with video by tata zapata.

anarco funk is a rio-based anarchist collective dedicated to local-style funk music (which the american mainstream media rediscovers every 3 or 4 years, most recently in a harmless but factually shaky piece in last week's nyt sunday magazine).

my loose translation of the lyrics is below the video. you can find more of anarco funk's music here. tata zapata, a videomaker from medellín, colombia, has more videos here.  i'll post more protest songs later (though probably not with full translations...)

there will be no cup!  there will be no cup!

the world cup, here in brasil

dominates the ball at rifle point

a war machine “pacifies” the favela

killing black people and poor people, suffocating them

expel the indians, they’re robbing their lands

build the stadium where capital prospers

increase profits while misery grows:

we declare war against the fascist cup!

the cup kills...

they demolished my house, now they want to take my life

this murderous cup, this murderous cup

exterminating poor folks to make the city cleaner

this murderous cup, this murderous cup

gentrify, exterminate, sanitize, genocide...

in the cup’s ballgame, in the cup’s ballgame

the cup entangled you.

entangled in a fascist, competitive system

pitting the poor against the poor, so the rich will be the winners

in the cup’s ballgame, you’re the loser.

crack arrived and dominated

crack arrived and dominated

crack arrived and created addicts

crack arrived and took hold

crack arrived and sanitized

crack arrived and exterminated

crack arrived and dominated

crack arrived, crack arrived, crack arrived

and scored a goal...

(fyi: crack only arrived in rio in the past decade or so.  its effects have been especially devastating in communities which have also been subject to major police violence.  it's also a pun on "crack" in the sense of star soccer player).

why not to watch

a few blocks from my house, a graffiti mural shows sérgio cabral jr, the former governor of rio de janeiro state, bulldozing houses in order to clear the path for a soccer field.  in big letters over his head, there’s a caption: “how many evictions does it take to make a world cup?”

by now, you’ve probably seen the brilliant john oliver video where he takes apart fifa for the shady, fraudulent, power-hungry cabal that it is.  he briefly talks about the way that government here has capitulated to all of fifa’s demands, which has effected public safety in much more violent and direct ways than the beer sales that he mentions.  he also closes by admitting that he’s a huge soccer fan, and that even knowing how unabashedly awful fifa is, he’ll still be watching the cup.

it’s tuesday morning here, and the opening game is scheduled to start in são paulo in a little more than 48 hours. the big question nationally is just how much of a shitshow são paulo will be on thursday:  workers have been on strike for a couple of weeks already, and the powers that be are getting increasingly desperate to try and figure out a way to make everything run smoothly.  in rio, facebook events for protests keep popping up and the security apparatus gets increasingly heavily armed and bizarre (and this is a city where we’re used to seeing ordinary patrol cops with ar-15s). last night, a group of indigenous folks held a dancing protest surrounded by dozens of riot cops outside a colonial era building that they were expelled from twice over the past year and a half in order to clear space for game-day parking.

in the midst of all the tension, though, there’s also a stubborn little question that keeps popping up:  what’s a politically conscientious diehard soccer fan to do?  plenty of the people who have been in the streets for most of the past year chanting that there won’t be a world cup have never missed a game before.  they don’t want to the protests to die out, but they also would love to be able to take a few couple off from thinking about all the repression and social engineering that have gone into making this thing happen, and just focus on soccer.

last week, a very visible, diverse, and well-respected local coalition of activists gave a two-part “protest party” that began with the public launch of a major study of world cup-related forced evictions and police brutality, and then switched gears – a better word might be “devolved” – into watching the final friendly match between brasil and serbia on a giant screen. organizers explained that it was a pirated broadcast, so fifa wouldn’t be making any money off of it, and that they wanted to protest the structures of power behind the world cup, and not the games themselves.  still, a lot of us were (and continue to be) appalled:  as the graffiti in my neighborhood points out, the world cup can’t happen without thousands of houses being bulldozed before any teams take the field.  also, the idea that we can put aside protests to come together for the beautiful game plays directly into fifa’s hands and the idea of a transcendent world cup somehow untouched by all the dirty work that makes it happen.  watching the games, especially in public, is an insult to the over 250,000 people throughout brasil who have been displaced to make the world cup happen, and a desecration of the memory of the countless people (mostly favela residents of color, like amarildo and dg) who have been killed or disappeared in the military police’s twisted – and officially sanctioned – vision of how to implement public safety.

i’m not much of a soccer fan, but i understand something about the allure of the world cup.  i landed in rio for the first time on june 30, 2002, about 15 minutes before brasil scored the first of three goals against germany to win the world cup final.  by the time i had gathered my bags, duty free store salespeople and customs agents had formed a conga line and were scream-chanting euphorically.  the party lasted for days, and seemed to me to blur all social divisions:  my first vision of brasil was of a country where the beautiful game brought everyone together and out into the streets.

twelve years later, though, i’ve had the opportunity to see people come together in the streets for a lot of other reasons.  most recently, even as protests have become pretty sparsely attended, i’ve been struck by people’s courage and resilience in questioning a status quo that pours billions in refurbishing public stadiums (that are then sold at bargain prices to coalitions of major real estate developers) while refusing to make the necessary investments in public hospitals, or to pay public school teachers a living wage.  the pro-cup faction in brasil has been arguing that world cup investments are only a small fraction of public spending compared to areas like education and public health.  this strikes me as an egregiously stupid argument:  if you break into my house to steal my several boxes of books, i’m not going to brush it off just because you left my computer behind.  in any event, reducing the world cup to a question of spending overlooks all of the official violence (see above) that fifa expects, and that public authorities here have been only too happy to implement.

the world cup is essentially one big, celebratory, multicolored mugging.  it’s impossible to separate the manicured soccer fields from all of the bulldozers that toppled the houses around them, or from the hospitals down the street that don’t have essential machinery or even enough beds.  i’m not planning on watching any of the cup, but i also know that we all do things that we’re not exactly proud of when we’re alone.  the world cup is sort of like bad porn:  if you're going to tune in, fine, but don't throw a party to advertise the fact that you're watching it.  there are more important things going on in the streets, and fifa doesn’t deserve to win.

you choose whether there will be a cup, and which side you play for.

not with a bang, but a whimper

as you’ve probably heard, the huge protests here last june and july were a pretty big deal.  at the time, it felt like history was being made, like rio and brasil had reached a new critical turning point and a new vision of the future.  the fact that, almost from the beginning, hundreds of thousands of people coalesced around the chant não vai ter copa (there will be no world cup) was a pretty major shift in a country where football and patriotism have been closely and insidiously linked since long before the 1970 world cup, which brasil won after almost exactly a year and a half of full-out martial law.

in contrast, the protest i went to on tuesday in support of striking public school teachers and against the world cup was pretty disheartening.  there were at most 300 protesters on the street, and the riot cops easily outnumbered everybody else, showing off all sorts of new formations to cut off exits, box people in, and generally underline the fact that they were ready to kick ass at a moment’s notice.  it was a world cup-ready choreography of repression, much more smoothly executed and more intimidating than the violent but disorganized club swingin’, tear gas firin’ riot squads of protests past.

the world cup is right around the corner, and a lot of us assumed that people would be a lot more mobilized by now.  there are plenty of reasons that they’re not, of course.  some of it is fear, or protest fatigue: we’ve all been tear-gassed and clubbed enough in the past several months that most of us bolt at the first sign of a crackdown, and many of us just don’t feel like going into the streets in the first place.  there are also increasingly bitter and probably inevitable rifts between different protest movements, political parties, and individuals that make it harder for people to come together.  meanwhile, the skyrocketing price of living in rio means that a lot of people have left town in the past 12 months, and plenty of others are too focused on making ends meet, or on making dinner, or preparing for work the next day, to schlep out. 

goya by alex frechette

that said, i don’t think people are staying away because they’ve made peace with the world cup, with fifa, the local government, or the riot cops.  in spite of naysayers who have said that everyone will eventually stop worrying and learn to love the cup, the usual signs of collective effervescence just aren’t there.  the streets seem as eerily quiet during weekend nights as they do during protests; the security fences, tents, and even the decorations around maracanã stadium look a lot more forbidding than celebratory; and the ticker tape flags and painted sidewalks that neighborhood associations usually throw together to get everyone in the mood are pretty sparse and halfhearted.  people may have given up protesting the cup, but the city as a whole doesn’t seem to be looking forward to it.

these doldrums are a bit of a shock to the system.  living in rio is supposed to be exciting, and the past several years have delivered:  it’s felt like standing on the brink of history as weird-ass 21^st century capitalism runs its course.  since about 2010, when “reurbanization projects” were busting out all over just as the national armed forces invaded alemão (a complex of favelas) and supposedly dealt all drug trafficking a major defeat through some sort of militaristic magical thinking, rio has been the crystallization of a weird alliance between neoliberal wet dreams of a sanitized, gentrified city and a new left-ish vision of progress.  “public- private partnerships” were the wave of the future, and they seemed to be transforming rio at light speed.  the government paid construction companies to build houses way out on the periphery for some of the 30,000 people forcibly removed from their homes, while real estate magnates like eike batista shelled out millions so that the military police could buy guns to “pacify” the most newsworthy favelas, which in turn allowed the government to forcibly remove more poor people from their homes. (the poor folks who continue to be killed, tortured, or disappeared in the process are treated as collateral damage at most).

and at least until the protest movement started gathering steam last year, most people here seemed to accept – or else celebrate – the handholding between government and business interests as the natural course of things.  i’ve been researching, writing, and making performances about gentrification and the violence of social engineering in rio for the past four years, and while i saw plenty of people grumbling about exorbitant prices, ill-conceived construction projects, or (occasionally) police brutality, only a handful of them ever went out into the street.  bus prices shot up 10% with no warning on new year’s day in 2012, but fewer than 200 people showed up to any of the protests in the following weeks.  suddenly, when prices went up again last june, there were two million of us.  there’s certainly been a slow decline from that peak to the scattershot protest i went to on tuesday, but it’s hard to understand where all of that pissed-off momentum has gone.

my vision is admittedly very rio-centric. protest movements have been growing recently in são paulo, recife, and belo horizonte, and friends tell me that the major resistance to the world cup will come from one of these cities (or possibly brasília).  if that’s the case, i assume that rio will follow suit soon afterwards out of a widespread local compulsion to be the center of attention, if nothing else.

the other night, as i was biking through tijuca – a traditional bastion of middle class conservatism, rio-style – i saw teams of dozens of uniformed cable company employees on conde de bonfim, the main drag, hanging decorative tassels and painting the asphalt green and yellow.  in a mostly bare neighborhood that should be decked out by now, it struck me as an especially desperate public-private partnership, a last-minute bid for perkiness to drive out world cup-related ennui.

lula, the former president of brasil and sometime champion of the international left (whatever that may be), loved to punctuate his speeches by pointing out that history was being made.  “never before in the history of this country” was the major catchphrase of his administration, and it’s still the set up to a thousand punchlines.  this stands in stark contrast to the national truism that “everything will finish in pizza;” in other words, everything will revert to the same jumble it’s always been, with the same winners and losers.  as you’ve probably heard by now, brasil already hosted the world cup in 1950, and its loss to uruguay in the final has long been considered a national tragedy, a moment of upheaval equal to president getúlio vargas’ suicide in 1954, or the military coup ten years after that.  it’s hard to tell at this point what about this world cup (and all the discontent surrounding it) will be groundbreaking history and what will fizzle out into pizza, or whether the fizzling out will be the groundbreaking history in and of itself.

quando eu me chamo de gringo

(ligeiramente inspirado nesse artigo bastante ignorante publicado em fevereiro pela bbc brasil)

alguns meses atrás, conheci um outro cara do primeiro mundo em uma combinação de bloco e manifestação na maré, logo no início da invasão militar do complexo.  o cara parecia ser legal, e por causa do lugar em que a gente se conheceu, imaginei que ele teria uma conscientização básica sobre o que estava acontecendo ao seu redor.

mas quando eu me identifiquei como gringo, ele me olhou meio estremecendo, de uma maneira que eu já tinha visto.  falando em português decente (apesar de carregar um certo chororô), começou a explicar que não lidava bem com aquela palavra, pois, para ele, a palavra gringo era uma ofensa que o reduziu a um símbolo em vez de um indivíduo, sem considerar a sua personalidade, seus valores ou suas ações.

confesso que a primeira vez que vim para o brasil, depois de meu segundo ano de faculdade, esse parada de gringo também me incomodou.  não queria ser definido por uma palavra que me sempre me separaria das pessoas ao meu redor. depois de finalmente conseguir sair do colégio, não queria assumir um rótulo que implicava não apenas um olhar permanentemente de fora, mas também muito desastrado, uma incapacidade desajeitada e sem noção de entender as piadas contadas em cadencias locais, ou de seguir os passos dados nas pistas de dança e nas calçadas da cidade.  queria ser visto para quem sou, não como caricatura. 

isso foi em 2002, quando a invasão do iraq já estava dada como inevitável pelo governo estadunidense. depois de descobrir minha nacionalidade, todos sempre me perguntavam se eu tinha votado em bush.  as primeiras vezes, fiquei meio bolado: eu vim para o brasil como estagiário de um grupo de teatro comprometido com direitos humanos, e estava fazendo trabalho voluntário em algumas favelas e ficando cada vez mais apaixonado por lula.  além do mais, me criei em cambridge, famoso reduto da esquerda intelectual estadunidense; como é que podiam pensar que eu votaria em bush?

nem lembro se alguém me explicou ou se eu mesmo me toquei que fizeram essa pergunta comigo justamente para descobrir quem realmente sou, para ir além da imagem do poder estadunidense eternamente belicoso que tem sido muito mais que apenas uma caricatura no brasil, na américa latina e na maioria do planeta, e que naquele exato momento estava voltando com toda força.

quando eu me chamo de gringo, mostro que sei disso, e que estou capaz de levar essa história a sério.  é um passo pequeno, mas mostra que eu sei que, mesmo que não seja a minha culpa pessoal que uma das principais imagens que se tem dos estados unidos é da violência automática, também não é culpa de quem se criou por aqui guardar essa imagem.  mesmo tendo sido criado aprendendo sobre victor jara e xs desaparecidxs latino-americanxs através de álbuns de cantores politizadxs como arlo guthrie e holly near, também fui criado com um passaporte estadunidense, aproveitando todas as oportunidades que o primeiro mundo me ofereceu.  a palavra gringo carregue um pouco deste peso histórico e destas expectativas, e é justamente por causa deste peso que a palavra também carregue uma possibilidade de desafio àquela história.

tem um outro ponto, talvez menos dramático mas também importante:  a palavra gringo é de uso comum no português brasileiro, e realmente não sinto que seja tarefa minha ensinar os brasileiros a falarem sua língua mãe.  aprender navegar nessa língua e continuar a tentar melhorar, de aprender como me expressar e como ser eu mesmo falando português é um processo crucial e contínuo.  ser um gringo que fala é tanto conseguir me virar em português quanto falar a verdade sobre abusos de poder.  (além disso, a palavra gringo em português não tem o mesmo peso que em espanhol...até entendo porque os demais latinos no brasil podem não se dar bem com a palavra, mas não tem a ver com meu caso).

quando me chamo de gringo, não é no intuito de pedir desculpas para o passado, ou até para atrocidades atuais, mas para mostrar que entendo que existe uma longa e violenta história que tem criado um vão entre eu e as pessoas com quem eu moro, trabalho, estudo e crio diariamente. me chamo de gringo para mostrar que estou aprendendo e escutando, fazendo o possível para aproximar as nossas experiências.  me chamo de gringo porque reconheço que sou implicado em muitas estruturas que tem muito mais tempo de vida e impactos maiores e mais materiais que eu já tinha; entendo porque me perguntam se eu votei em bush (ou obama), ou o que eu penso sobre ai-5, ou pinochet, ou a guerra de drones (tem uma palavra melhor em português?);  também entendo porque, muito de vez em quando, alguém pode não me ver para além desses fatos, mesmo depois de eu os repudiar.  tem a ver com velhos ciclos de violência:  em qualquer interação,  tem muito mais acontecendo de que apenas meus sentimentos delicados primeiro-mundistas, ou minha empatia primeiro-mundista ou até minhas ações bem intencionadas.  se eu realmente quero ser visto como um indivíduo aqui, o primeiro passo é reconhecer tudo que aconteceu e continua acontecendo para tirar a individualidade das pessoas que me cercam, e que, querendo ou não, tende a ser ligado a muitos gringos.