Brazil wakes up to a World Cup hangover – and another party to plan

RIO DE JANEIRO – “It’s been fun, but I’m glad it’s over.”

On hearing the follow-up question, Marco, a waiter at one of the many restaurants on Copacabana’s waterfront Avenida Atlântica, rolls his eyes. “The Olympic Games? I don’t even want to think about that yet.”

Marco was fairly typical of Rio residents in the immediate aftermath of the World Cup on Monday morning, as the cleanup began. The street cleaners were out in force in Copacabana, hosing away the evidence of the night before, as small groups of dazed Argentina fans, some of the estimated 70,000 to 100,000 who crowded into Rio for the final, moved among them, trying not to read the suitably Germanic schadenfreude of the Brazilian newspaper headlines on the newsstands. 

As they roamed aimlessly, groups of Brazilian workers busied themselves among them — dismantling the giant stage housing the FIFA fan fest that had shown Argentina’s defeat on a big screen the evening before.

Brazilians like Marco seemed mostly relieved that after a preparation period that had included mass protests at last year’s Confederations Cup, a barely completed race against time to build the promised infrastructure, an emotional roller coaster on the field as Brazil went from potential champions to humiliated bystanders … the World Cup was over and had been hailed a success. 

Unfortunately for Brazilians, the hangover from this party must give way quickly to the realization that an even bigger party has to be thrown in just two years, as the Olympic Games arrives at multiple sites in Rio. The city faces a race to complete preparations far more challenging than even its fraught countdown to the World Cup. 

With every ounce of domestic political capital seemingly exhausted after staging a $13 billion mega-event (including the $4 billion FIFA made tax-free from the tournament) in a country desperate for investment in health and education, President Dilma Rousseff now has to deliver an Olympic Games under the auspices of the even more autocratic International Olympic Committee (IOC). The political opponents and workers’ coalitions who chafed at the indulgence of FIFA will be even less impressed by their Olympic equivalents.

Not that much has been heard from the opposition in recent days, with activists claiming that the embarrassment of the first day of the World Cup, where TV coverage of demonstrations, along with Rousseff being roundly booed at the opening game (albeit by a different, well-heeled constituency of ticket-buying Brazilians), had resulted in increased police and military crackdowns and routine intimidation of those who attempted to protest, for the rest of the month. Yet despite the fact that Rousseff avoided the remainder of the World Cup until the final, where she was vehemently booed again, FIFA persisted with the line that the protests had turned into parties, backed up by multiple images of fan fests and their cheerful face-painted occupants. 

For those involved with attempts at activism, statements such as FIFA president Sepp Blatter airily asking, “Where is all this social unrest?” at a meeting in Rio, as armed police and soldiers surrounded the venue he was speaking in, was not just an example of disingenuous arrogance, but part of a dangerous precedent.

The favelas in particular have been a site of contention. In one protest saw demonstrators from a favela carried a banner through Copacabana, along the street that houses FIFA’s HQ for the Cup, the aptly named Copacabana Palace. The banner read “A festa nos estádios não vale as lágrimas nas favelas” (“the party in the stadiums is not worth the tears in the favelas”). With FIFA making widespread demands regarding perceived dangers from the populations of the favelas before the tournament, controversial police pacification units, UPP, were “installed” in 34 favela locations. Ostensibly they are there to prevent drug trafficking and violence, but many residents see them as occupying forces that have wantonly killed residents. Authorities also pre-emptively arrested activists before the World Cup, and prosecuted others under laws originally intended to target gang activity.

In real terms, the next challenge, the Olympic Games, is already upon Rio. An IOC delegation visited the city earlier in the year and left unimpressed — describing the necessary infrastructure for the games as only 10 percent complete, and bemoaning the lack of coordination between the city and the state and federal governments. IOC vice president John Coates described the problems in Rio as, “the worst I have ever experienced”. At a similar stage Athens 2004 was 40 percent complete, and London 60 percent complete.

The national government might at least console itself that the Olympics will not bring the nationwide strain of multiple host cities, with their competing political claims and lobbying, and the attendant legacy of incomplete airport terminals and white elephant stadiums in Manaus and Natal, that the FIFA World Cup is leaving behind. Those phenomena remain as part of Rousseff’s own problematic legacy heading into the Games.

In fairness, given the long-term planning that shapes these mega-events, Rousseff is partly playing the hand she has been dealt, though she is now fully enmeshed in a risky ongoing Brazilian strategy of using the World Cup and Olympics as stages to build global political capital and boost foreign investment into Brazil. 

It is a strategy familiar to fellow members of the BRICS group of emerging nations, who are in Brazil for a summit. President Jacob Zuma of South Africa (which hosted the 2010 World Cup) and President Vladimir Putin of Russia (which will host the 2018 edition), were present at the World Cup final to witness the spectacle laid on by Brazil, but also the personal backlash endured by Rousseff in the pursuit of what might be called a “bread from circuses” policy. 

It’s a perilous course, not just because of the eye-watering upfront costs, questionable infrastructure legacies and diversion of funds from other much-needed social investment that comes with these events, but because of the clash between a projected version of Brazil as a theater for global fantasies to be played out on, and the lived reality of many of its citizens. 

For the government, it seems that the lesson learned from last year’s million-person bus fare protests, which were catapulted onto the world stage by their proximity to the Confederations Cup, had nothing to do with addressing the root cause of the protests and everything to do with ensuring similar heckling would not interrupt the theater of Neymar, Messi et al in 2014.

That dissent is still there, of course, and will only get louder as the party mode of the World Cup recedes into the cleanup that is also a buildup for the Olympics. 

But for this week at least, the mood remains broadly positive, in most places on the tourist front line anyway:

“It’s been a good World Cup — the last one in South America for a long time, I think,” says Eduardo, a cab driver in the city. “Too much difficulty for FIFA, in Africa and here. But I think the Brazilian people are happy to show they are good hosts. And yes, Brazil lost, but Argentina did not win. It was a success, and the protesters do not speak for everybody.” 

At the prospect of another major event in Rio in two years, Eduardo is a little more circumspect: “It’s Brazil, so plans are made and plans change. But it’s a lot.” 

He shrugs, then adds: “It’s a good city. The high prices right now are just for the World Cup. And they are for everybody — you, me, Brazilians, Americans. Afterwards they will go back to normal … and then for the Olympics back up again.”