As the World Cup kicks off in Brazil, Douglas Foster considers how the protest movement that emerged in the year leading up to the games has influenced the country’s politics:
[T]he mass anti-government protests that erupted in Brazil last year have stung the nation’s leaders and stunned FIFA officials. The World Cup is getting underway at a time when the country’s long economic boom has given way to a skid, fueling demonstrations against government corruption and shoddy public services. Protest organizers have managed to shift the country’s political discourse, while demanding that the $11 billion-plus budgeted for the games be spent instead on the nation’s highly stressed schools, infrastructure, and health-care systems. In a country where a majority of the populace now opposes the government’s decision to host the competition, a chant has emerged among demonstrators: “There will be no World Cup!” There will be, of course, but Brazilian politics may emerge from it transformed.
Luke O’Brien blames FIFA for much of the World Cup-related repression that Brazilians have come to resent:
FIFA is essentially its own nation-state, one untethered to any particular jurisdiction but powerful enough to impose its governing architecture on actual countries. In South Africa, FIFA demanded that the parliament pass legislation to ensure that nettlesome things like labor regulations didn’t interfere with business. In Brazil, FIFA made the host country ignore its own law prohibiting alcohol sales in stadiums (to prevent rowdies from getting too sauced) so World Cup sponsor Budweiser can push its suds.
Stadium exclusion zones, another tactic from the South Africa playbook, surround the venues. Inside them, only FIFA-approved products can be sold. Dissent is smothered by Big Macs and Adidas apparel. Free speech, also restricted, could be met with something more menacing, especially given the way World Cup protestors in Brazil have been treated so far, which is with rubber bullets and tear gas. When I went down to the famous Maracanã stadium in Rio a week before the first game, I found dozens of body-armor-wearing, black-clad special police waiting to pound the dirt out of any favela punk who dared take a run at the outer perimeter.
Travis Waldron laments that the World Cup “has become so ruinous that it borders on ruining itself”:
The thing is, it doesn’t have to be this way. None of the problems the World Cup has created, made worse, or highlighted in Brazil are necessary to hosting this tournament. None of the problems it has or will create in Russia, Qatar, or future hosts are either. We don’t need 12 shiny new stadiums that only remind us how hard we’re not working to improve the not-so-shiny schools and hospitals and favelas around it. We don’t have to perpetuate corruption, to abuse workers, to relocate families, to hand out special tax breaks, to pretend that these events drive massive economic growth when they don’t.
Drop a ball between two national teams in an adequately safe stadium and let them play, and the part of the World Cup that is fun will still exist.
Part of what has driven the protests is the amount of money Brasilia has spent on the Cup. But Diego von Vacano and Thiago Silva run the numbers and find that it wasn’t really that much, at least when compared to what the government puts into its social welfare programs:
Total investments in the 2014 FIFA World Cup by the Brazilian government amounts to $11.2 billion. According to official data, these investments were provided by federal, state and municipal governments, as well as private entities. Also, according to public official information, the Brazilian federal government spent $1.76 billion specifically on the construction of stadiums. Now let’s look at social program expenditures in the same period. Between 2010 (the year that the investments on the World Cup and for the construction of stadia began) and the beginning of 2014, the Brazilian federal government invested $363 billion in health and education (the two social sectors that receive the greatest amount of investment by the government).
So, comparing expenditures on the World Cup and investments by the federal government on health and education, we can see that the former represents only 3 percent of the total of the latter two expenditures (the total of all forms social spending is $385.4 billion). Protestors claim that the government is spending too much on stadiums while neglecting health and education. Perhaps, but stadiums are only about 0.5 percent of the total amount invested in these two social sectors in the past four years.
Jon Lee Anderson decries the international criticism of Brazil that has come along with the games as opportunistic and unfair:
It is excruciating to watch this full-glare inquisition. It feels unseemly. Brazil is a big, uneven, still-developing country that, paradoxically, most of us love from afar and romanticize unequivocally most of the time (aaah, Ipanema, Rio, Ronaldinho, Gisele Bündchen, samba!, and so forth). …
This is not Putin’s Russia, where a megalomaniac gangster who has hijacked a state has spent fifty billion dollars for the purposes of self-aggrandizement. This is Brazil, the country everyone celebrated when it won the right to host this World Cup, and the next Olympics, too. This is the Brazil of the great beloved Pelé, and he was there, ecstatically hugging Lula, the bearded, wily left-winger who was President when Brazil was announced as the 2016 site. There were no serious questions, as there have been since Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup, about whether Brazil had bought its bid with bribes to sports officials. Brazil and fútbol are synonymous. When Brazil won, it seemed right to everyone, and it still should.
Previous Dish on Brazil’s World Cup preparations and protests here, here, here, here, here, and here.
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