Next month the world’s attention will focus again on Rio de Janeiro, when the Brazilian city hosts the Olympic Games. Following the staging of the 2014 soccer World Cup, the games will be the second major sporting event to come to the country’s dilapidated former capital, part of the Brazilian government’s strategy to have these global events help drive desperately needed urban renewal.
On television they will look spectacular. With its dramatic mountains, lush rainforest and golden beaches, Rio is arguably the world’s most stunningly situated metropolis.
Visitors are also likely to have a good time. This is a famous party town, the spiritual home of carnival.
But what is much more difficult to predict is whether the games and the urban transformation taking place in order to be ready for them will be of any lasting benefit to Rio’s six million inhabitants once the athletes have packed up and gone.
It was to try to be in a position to answer this question that motivated the Brazilian journalist Juliana Barbassa to move back to the city she was born in after it had been named the host for 2016. Dancing with the Devil in the City of God, her first book, is a troubling read.
Barbassa returned home, after 21 years abroad, at a time of mounting euphoria in Brazil, as the optimism of the Lula years – the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, between 2003 and 2011 – reached a crescendo. As well as seeking to understand the transformation under way in her native city she wanted to use Rio to gauge whether Brazil was finally leaving behind the poverty, corruption, inflation and crime she remembered from her childhood.
Personal investigation
Her investigation is clearly a personal one. Her own re-encountering of home forms the book’s narrative thread. As well as the strangers whose lives she writes about, her passionate interest in Rio’s future seems to be rooted in concern for her family who live there.
But Barbassa’s nomadic upbringing as the child of a peripatetic oil executive has also instilled if not detachment then a healthy amount of perspective. Having lived in places as far flung as Basra, Malta and San Francisco, she most definitely does not suffer from the provincialism that afflicts too many of Rio’s biographers, who, seduced by its obvious charms, automatically adopt a defensive posture when anyone wonders if the Marvellous City might actually not be all that marvellous after all.
Barbassa is principally concerned with who are the winners and losers as the city attempts a dramatic transformation. She examines its wars between drug gangs and the police determined to retake the city’s slums from their control, and she visits prostitutes and transvestites to understand the impact of the policy of social cleansing ahead of the games.
These are well-worn themes when dealing with Rio; the book’s most insightful chapter is a wonderful piece of reportage that starts with a hunt for alligators in the swamps of the fast-developing western zone of the city where the Olympic village is being built.
It becomes a tale at their expense of the shenanigans involving politicians and builders and the course that will welcome golf back to the games after a 112-year break. As the biologist accompanying Barbassa explains it: “The reality is f**k the animals, f**k biodiversity, f**k the laws and long live construction.”
Slum clearance
Barbassa also shows how the claim of getting ready for the Olympics has allowed the city fathers to reactivate the long-discredited policy of slum clearance in which favela residents are removed from their homes, to be dumped far from jobs and services, while their old neighbourhoods are redeveloped into blocks of luxury condominiums.
Rather than be used as a chance to transform the city for all its citizens, this book convincingly argues, the Olympics have only acted as cover for the continuation of Brazil’s centuries-long war against its own poor under the guise of getting ready to host a sporting event. The World Cup and Olympics were always offering false promises of a better city. As Barbassa writes: “Massive sporting events have short-term objectives and tight deadlines that do not mesh well with long-term city planning goals.”
The book ends with the euphoria of the Lula years having given way to the economic incompetence and political scandal of Dilma Rousseff’s presidency.
The games will take place with Brazil in the grip of recession. As she surveys the city she returned home to, Barbassa sadly concludes that “Rio embodied this sense that Brazil’s moment might be passing before it arrived”.
It is a sad fact that Brazilian society has a long record of failing to deliver on its potential. In focusing on Rio as it prepares for the Olympics, this book provides the outsider with an excellent snapshot of why that is.
Tom Hennigan is The Irish Times’s correspondent for South America
