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.”
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| 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.
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| the party in the stadium is not worth the favela's tears |
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