02 February 2010

Between Heaven and Hell: Life in Rio 2016


Rio de Janeiro is without doubt the most beautiful and most dangerous city to host the Olympics. Picture the beautiful people on the stunning beaches of Copacabana, framed by the green Pão do Açúcar rising out of the water and the Sambadrome filled with dancers during Carnival. Contrast those images with stereotypical imaginaries of the poverty of favelas—informal housing areas or “slums.” Made infamous by films like City of God and Elite Squad, favelas are perceived as urban warzones of drug lords and corrupt police.

In the popular imagination, heaven and hell have never been geographically closer. When Rio hosts the 2014 World Cup final and 2016 Olympics, it will be easy to forget it is a city of over 6 million, where, as in most places, people go about living their lives. Both imaginaries of Rio obscure how its inhabitants will experience these sporting events.

Already the words “development” and “security” are defining how the Olympics will affect the residents of Rio's favelas. Elsewhere globally, security and development have been linked to perpetuate inequality; from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the occupation of Palestine to the ongoing response to the earthquake in Haiti.

Rio's Olympic Games do not simply represent the “circus” to the “bread” of Bolsa Família—a state funded family-based conditional cash transfer to the poor in Brazil. To be critical of the Olympic process, one has to recognize the problem is not the popular excitement of sport, which can have many different meanings, but rather the processes of privatization that have come to define events like the Olympics.

During the neoliberal period of tax-cuts, privatization, and downloading of services, a model for urban “development” through massive sporting events emerged from the Global North. The 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, 2000 Sydney Games, and the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester City are often cited as successful examples of this model. The logic is that the international attention will drive investment for “public”-private partnerships—though that often means the public partially covering the costs for private benefit.

Underdeveloped (cheap) and de-industrialized areas of a city are selected as event sites for transformation, while more iconic areas receive corporate face-lifts. Infrastructure, such as transit, is often also improved. Sound familiar? Think Toronto's proposed waterfront redevelopment as part of its failed 2008 Olympic bid, which without the Olympics continues to languish.

In an era when public planning and public financing are impossible without “unpopular” tax increases, sporting events supposedly bring what people want: new subways, more housing, better parks, and a reinvigorated urban economy.

As Vancouverites are probably now asking with the approach of the 2010 Olympics, couldn't the city have built the infrastructure without privatizing public spaces, spending public money on private development, while actually focusing on the issues of marginalized communities? The Olympics in Rio will likely magnify the problems of development for private benefit because of the violent dynamic of “securitization” used around the world to maintain inequality.

In a 2007 article, Uruguayan social critic Raúl Zibechi provocatively linked the strategies of urban containment developed by the US military to control Baghdad, the actions of Brazilian peacekeepers in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, and the securitization of slums around the world. In such cases, governments and corporations label the poorest urban populations as a violent security threat, which coincidentally prevents economic development or aid delivery.

Unlike the Palestinians in the Gaza strip, who are completely contained and isolated, in many cases informally housed poor populations are vitally important to the urban economy. Many urban poor have migrated to the city in search for work in the low-waged, informal service economy, providing exploitable and cheap labour.

As the economic dynamic of exploitation expands with the migration of the poor to the cities, the rapidly growing inequality of wealth creates an explosive situation. Through international news coverage we are familiar with images of Brazilian police and military launching spectacularly bloody raids into the informal urban neighbourhoods of Rio and São Paulo to combat heavily armed drug gangs.

The week after Rio won the Olympics, several of the city's favelas exploded in violence with gangs fighting police and the army. A Reuters headline from October 25 read, “Rio violence upsurge underlines Olympic challenge.”

Rio is a city of over 500 favelas. We are trained to think the people living in the favelas are violent and dangerous and need to be securitized before they can be brought “development” schemes—which rarely mean water, electricity, jobs, dignity, respect, and equality.

Through the eyes of “security” we see the social processes of exploitation and exclusion as a problem of unruly and violent people first, poverty second, and rarely if ever as the true inequality that securitization perpetuates. “Development” and the Olympics are generally already on dubious foundations of privatization and public debt for private gain.

When our Olympics are protected from Rio's marginalized by the police, soldiers, and private mercenaries, will the coercive force also be used to further marginalize Rio's poor? When security and development collude to create the 2016 Olympic Games, what will be the legacy for the people of Rio de Janeiro?

Originally published in The Leveller volume 2 issue 4.

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