Olympics – Infinite Coincidence

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‘The system is fucked’. That is the conclusion reached at the end of the film that has become in the last few weeks Brazil’s most succesful production of all time. ‘Tropa da Elite 2’ is the sequel to a film which itself broke box office records in 2007. It is, in the words of the film’s director José Padilha, unusual for such a politically and socially engaged film to meet with such success.

The first film depicted a series of invasions of favelas by the incredibly brutal military police known as BOPE. It was based on real accounts from former BPE agents, and focussed on the attempts to ‘clean up’ the favelas in preparation for the visit of the Pope in 1997. Some people interpreted the film’s tortured protaganist, Captain Nascimento, as an action hero mercilessly blowing away the bandits, which was not precisely the intention of the film makers.

Any kind of gung-ho interpretation of the sequel is not possible. In the new film Captain Nascimento joins forces with a prominent human rights activist to challenge the growing power of the milícias, mafia gangs mostly made up of former (and often serving) police officers who dominate life in many of the favelas, charging extortionate rates for services such as electricity and gas supplies, cable TV and internet, and threatening, beating and murdering those who stand up to them. The film depicts the way in which they have taken over from the drug gangs that used to dominate crime in the favelas, and also highlights the levels of corruption which permit and sustain their activity, reaching up to the highest echelons in the political system: corrupt politicians in the Rio government and in Brasilia itself – hence the stark and bitter conclusion to the film.

After the recent successful operation by the military to expel the drug trafficking gangs from their strongholds in certain favelas, police officers moving into areas previously outside their control were accused by residents of acting ‘just like in the film’ – demanding favours and a share of the income of local businesses. However in recent weeks the focus in the media has not been on the militias themselves, but on the drug gangs.

The drug gangs appear to be on the wane, but the power of the militias is much more deeply entrenched. Through intimidation and bribery they manage to get their own representatives elected to the city council, in order to protect and promote their interests. As for where the proceeds from extortion go, the profits do not all go into the pockets of those further up the scale, but also subsidise the pitifully low salaries of the police, who because they earn only around $800US per month often moonlight as private security guards, either independently or with the mafias. The book of the film even goes as far as to say that in Rio, the problem of violent crime is the police.

In Brazil the police and the military are know as the ‘public security’ forces. However, according to Marcelo Freixo, there is no such thing as public security. He is well placed to judge; for the last number of years he has been a human rights activist fighting against police corruption in the city. It is on Freixo that the character in the film who tries to take on the mafia gangs is based. He has also just begun his second term as a representative on the city council, on behalf of the Socialism and Freedom Party, which split from the ruling Worker’s Party in 2002.

In that capacity has sought to uncover corruption, to expose links between the mafias, the police and politicians, and it was he who instituted a far-reaching public inquiry into these questions. The recommendations that the inquiry produced have still not been implemented. Although the character in the film has a different name, in the book of the film he appears under his own name, and so he has gained a significant profile as someone prepared to challenge power in its most dangerous form. The film and the book both show clearly the terrible dangers that anyone brave enough to stand up to the milícias faces.

It is significant that in the first ‘Tropa da Elite’ film the favela is being cleaned up to ensure security for the visit of an international VIP, the Pope. Ten years later the Pan American Games saw the then governor of Rio reportedly embarking on a campaign to ‘retake the favelas’. The games brought new stadiums and a great deal of investment to some of the wealthier parts of the city, but, in the words of a community activist in one of the favelas, delivered ‘nada para os moradores’ – nothing for the people who actually live in the poorer parts of the city.

More recently the Rio government has launched a campaign to install police posts in some of the areas they were previously afraid to enter. By and large this has been a success in the limited areas where it has been implemented, and the events of the last few weeks, with supposedly impregnable strongholds of the drug gangs invaded and occupied in a very short space of time, have taken everyone by surprise, not least the drug gangs themselves. But as the film shows and as activists such as Marcelo Freixo have tried to make clear, the corruption and violence which blight the lives of hundreds of thousands of people throughout Rio is not at this stage directed or controlled by the drug gangs, but by the militias, whose power is more deeply entrenched.

It is very clear what the impetus for this current campaign to retake certain favelas is about: it is in preparation for the coming of the football World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games two years later. As an increasing amount of people around the world are aware, there is a history of the poor being shunted out of town to make way for these mega-events, as we have seen recently in Beijing, where the residents were impolitely requested to stay inside their homes so as not to get in the way of the important foreign guests, and in South Africa, where a movement sprung up fuelled by outrage at the forced evictions of shack dwellers to enable corrupt land deals backed up by the full force of the state.

Remaking the city for such events is not just a cosmetic exercise – it forms part of a strategy to remake the host city more amenable for business interests and tourism. It is also a means of forcing up rents and land and property prices – poverty that can not be physically forced out of sight and out of mind will not be able to withstand the increase in the cost of living as speculators move in – which raises the question of where the poor are to live. In the 1960s and 1970s the answer to the ‘problem’ of the favela was to uproot and force entire communities away from the centre, to the far west of the city. It has been suggested – and evidence shows – that this is what the preparations for the upcoming events will bring about.

Rio is said to be the capital of informality. The favelas are held to be one of its charms, and the views from some of the those located close to the centre are some of the most iconic images of the city. In Rio, the spontaneity and chaos are very much selling points, and the city is sometimes idealised as a space of democracy: rodas de samba, carnival and the beach, spaces which everyone, rich and poor, shares. Reality often and clearly contradicts this picture; the other side of this unboundedness is social exclusion, the threat of violence and the reality of third-world levels of deprivation. Tourists now flock to favelas on organised tours to get a closer look at this curious mix of heaven and hell. But if these spaces of informality are to be formalised, for whose benefit will it be? For the people who live there, or for the rich visitors? And to whom will these spaces belong once the VIPS have left?

Mega-events such as the Olympics and the World Cup seek to submit all local control to commercial interests backed up by the legal and physical might of the state, and to channel and control all surrounding economic activity in such a way as to benefit certain formal interests which operate, as Andrew Jennings has ably demonstrated, in a world of backhanders and sweeteners. The reality behind the airbrushed images is one of extortion and bribery, both formal and informal. Given the obscene corruption of FIFA and the Olympic Committee, amply documented on this site, and given the recent history of the brutal displacements in Beijing and South Africa, it is clear that corruption in Brazil is about to move up to another level. Fortunately there are signs of a growing movement in Rio to begin to expose and challenge the attempt to remake the city in the interests of corrupt international cartels which are much more powerful, but in a way very similar, to the mafia gangs that seek to control and exploit Rio’s favelas. It is, after all, in the words of Captain Nascimento, no accident that favelas exist in the first place.

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The prospect of the failure of the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, with reports of unfinished facilities leading to athletes and even countries threatening to pull out, has led to an outpouring of racism in the British press. India was never fit to host the games, we read. It was a mistake to award such a prestigious event to a third-world country. Officials in India have also been keen to lambast their fellow citizens for their corruption and inefficiency, and a former sports minister publicly hoped the Games would collapse in disarray so India would not be tempted to bid for future events.

Such reports are now par for the course, perhaps even adding to the anticipation itself. Very similar things were written and said in relation to Athens, Portugal, Beijing and South Africa. But some of the commentary around Delhi has sought to look beyond this specific event to look at the whole genre of international sporting mega-events. In an excoriating article in the Guardian Simon Jenkins condemns the whole farrago and its real legacy of corruption and wastage. A separate report told us that holes dug all over Delhi to plant trees to beautify the city have led to an outbreak of Dengue fever. This is a telling image: attempts to makeover the urban environment to satisfy the overweaning demands of superpowerful sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA are never merely cosmetic, and they always leave scars which may never heal and are increasingly difficult to hide.

Cities spend vast amounts of money to obtain the privilege of hosting such events. In so doing they find themselves trying to satisfy garguntuan appetites. The comi-tragic claim by the British Government that the 2012 Olympic Games will be more sustainable or even an ‘austerity games’ conflicts dramatically with the growing bank of reports highlighting the corruption, overspending and displacements mega-events always occasion. The Brazilian Government also affirmed that the World Cup in 2014 will be an opportunity to showcase and develop parts of the deprived Northeast of the country which do not have such a high level of international recognition. Unfortunately what such optimistic statements fail to acknowledge is that no democratic or national authority makes the decisions about what gets built and where. The terrain of the games is entirely given over to the voracious whims of an international cartel of corrupt megelomaniacs, media executives and giant corporations. The journalist Andrew Jennings has documented the extent to which the histories of the IOC and FIFA show them to be two of the most corrupt institutions on the planet, with the key players and any developers able to scramble onboard pocketing unimaginable quantities of cash, while for very many people the price paid for three weeks of sport is the loss of homes and communities.

Employment is of course one of the most commonly proclaimed benefits of such events. If the prestige were not enough justification for the cost and disruption, the boost to employment and tourism will surely compensate. Here in London over the last few weeks, however, we have seen posters appear on the tube offering opportunities for volunteers to make 2012 happen (a scheme sponsored and coordinated by none other than McDonalds). The roles on offer (staffing the turnstiles and information booths) are of the kind that one might reasonably have assumed to be remunerated. As for the purported benefits of tourism, we now know that not to be the case.

The legacy of all this is supposed to be the acquisition of world-class facilities and infrastructure to attract and dazzle future generations of high-worth visitors. Mega-events have come to play a vital role in the boosting of cities, a central element in the (failed, but nevertheless ongoing) neoliberal model of transformation of the urban environment. The aim is to construct cities of prestige and glamour for the mega-elites, while the poor are increasingly shunted away out of town, hidden behind barriers of billboards advertising the wares and the might of Nike, McDonalds and Coca Cola. But of course what cities such as Delhi, Rio, Beijing and Cape Town, cities home to millions of working and struggling poor, need is not world-class elite infrastructure. There is no urgent requirement for more luxury hotels to accommodate the kind of people who jet around the planet engaged in high-level competition, whether athletes chasing medals or the ubiquitous business traveller seeking deals. In the case of Delhi there is a desperate need for sanitation, electricity, running water, proper public transport, schools and health facilities. London needs to house generations of working class people currently crammed into poor quality and overpriced rented accommodation, rather than sporting superstars. In every city in the world people could be gainfully employed in the provision of all such basic facilities. But instead the cheerleaders of neoliberal globalisation offer the urban poor the once-in-a-lifetime chance to participate in the construction and guarding of new colosseums, built over the ruins of their former homes, while dressed in a uniform generously provided by a fast food company.

After the very public horrors of Beijing 2008 and South Africa 2010, with another of the world’s most unequal societies, Brazil, set to suffer two mega-events in two years, there is now a growing movement against the way in which sporting events are used as a tool to transform and sell off our cities for commercial gain. The left and radical activists everywhere need to engage with these campaigns, wherever attempts are made to sacrifice the urban environment to the lions of international neoliberal capital. No more colosseums!

Tag: Olympics

Rio: Crime, Corruption and Mega-events

No More Colosseums!