Rio Gets Ready For Slum Clearance

Fair Play for the favelas?

German weekly Die Zeit reports from Rio de Janeiro on the likely measures the city will take to clean up its favelas – the slum areas notorious for poverty, drugs and gang warfare – ahead of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics.  

Ricardo Teixeira, FIFA Executive Committee member, head of the Brazilian Football Association, and a man accused last month by the BBC’s Panorama of taking bribes during the 1990s while awarding TV contracts for the rights to the World Cup, promises that the “necessary normality will rule” by the time of the 2013 Confederations Cup, and the competition itself the following year.

How will the government bring about this necessary normality? “Pacification measures,” reports Die Zeit, and quotes a frank local tourist guide, Sergio Castro, as outlining the coming crackdown:

“The drug bosses get an ultimatum. If you don’t leave the favelas, then the special units will be sent in to mop up. We have to try to win this war. We have to meet the drug bosses on all levels and above all give poor people a new perspective. Then we’ll have the best World Cup and the best Olympics of all time.” Die Zeit, however, points out that during such clean-up operations “there are almost always deaths, and almost always innocent victims caught in the cross-fire. Human rights’ advocates are horrified, but not the majority of Brazilians.”

A second tourist guide, Leandro Weissmann, offers an alternative view, labelling the award of the two sporting events to Brazil as “a mistake”, despite the potential for him to earn money from the extra visitors. “We simple people will get nothing from the World Cup and the Olympics," said Weissmann, "because the organising committee is looking  for thousands of volunteers to do the work for nothing. There won’t be much left over.” He says the city won’t be able to cope with the scale of the events. “We already have massive traffic jams and way too few hotel rooms.”

Though we can sleep more easily in the knowledge that FIFA Executive Committee members have no doubt already booked well ahead of the rush.