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.