#dontcome

dear fellow gringos:

i really should have written this months ago, but i never quite got around to it.  the closest i got was posting a bunch of relevant articles on facebook, and they never got more than 3 or 4 likes, which sort of made me think that the whole exercise was a bust. but now it’s may, and brasil’s back in the international news cycle in a big way, and here i am in rio, so i’m dusting off this old blog to see what it can do.

here’s what i should have said more loudly and forcefully a while back:  the world cup that you keep hearing more and more about, the one brasil is going to host in just about four weeks, is a total human rights travesty that has done irreparable harm to hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country.  there are longer explanations (this is a great place to start if you can understand portuguese), but here are some basic facts:

- at least 250,000 people have been removed from their homes by force and coercion.   

- police containment and “pacification” programs, especially in rio’s favelas have resulted in hundreds of deaths and disappearances.  these programs are directly linked to the tourist and construction industries, as a way to make visitors and investors feel safer.   

- billions of dollars in public money have been spent on building and improving stadiums, while hospitals and schools are literally crumbling (dozens of workers have also died in unsafe working conditions while building and improving those stadiums). 

- the right to free speech is under attack:  protestors have been subjected to police brutality and mass arrest over and over for the past 12 months, and anti-protest legislation during the world cup period has attracted a campaign by amnesty international. 

in spite of legal restraints and violent cops, the protests here keep going , and in recent weeks they’ve been getting a lot bigger.  one of the key chants that’s brought people together in the streets for the past year has been não vai ter copa – there will be no world cup.

so what can you do to help?  it’s pretty simple:  don’t come.  tell your friends not to come.  and do what you can to ignore it:  try not to buy fifa-sanctioned products and all that jazz.  and if you have to watch it on tv, please be at least root for argentina (rio's mayor, eduardo paes, told the guardian that he'll kill himself if argentina beats brasil in the final).

if you have friends who are planning on coming to the world cup, please put them in touch with me (gringoquefala@gmail.com) , and i’ll try to talk them out of it.  and if you cancel your world cup trip and come to brasil some other time, i will personally give you a walking tour of world cup-related human rights violations in rio.  if that doesn’t sound like enough fun, we can finish it up by holding hands on the beach and talking about unbroken cycles of violence.  i’ll even mix you a caipirinha and sing you protest songs from the dictatorship.

having said that, i’ve also noticed that articles about how dangerous brasil is tend to circulate more and get out more quickly than articles about human rights violations.  it seems to be more effective to say that black teenagers from the favelas are going to rob you than to point out that unarmed black teenagers in the favelas are getting killed off in droves to make you feel safer.  so if my human rights bullet points and my offer of a tour don’t do it for you, maybe it’s worth saying that if i see tourists getting mugged during the world cup, i will hide my cell phone and head in the other direction.  (it’s nothing personal, but you’d have to take the unbroken cycles of violence tour to get the full explanation).

here in rio, bus drivers, public school teachers, university staff and faculty, and cops have all either gone on strike or are planning work stoppages in the coming weeks.  these movements definitely aren’t united in their demands or their visions, and the world cup isn’t necessarily at the forefront of their actions, but it’s a backdrop that’s necessary to understand daily life hereabouts.  in other words, people here are pissed, and the hyper-expensive stadium reforms, stalled traffic, and increase in violent crime (committed both by the police and by individuals) aren’t helping.  brasil in general and rio specifically are beautiful, fascinating places that are absolutely worth visiting, but the world cup is absolutely the wrong time.  please don’t come.