One year after Rio

[airiefairie]

A sad picture indeed. Desolate, crumbling buildings, gargantuan financial losses, and exponential growth of crime. These are just some of the characteristics of Rio de Janeiro, just one year after the Rio Olympics.

Last month, the Brazilian government placed 8,500 soldiers on the streets of the city to curb the endless shoot-outs and armed robberies perpetrated by the various street gangs. Control over public security has been almost completely lost in Rio, speaker of parliament Rodrigo Maya recently admitted.

This statement told the whole story about the utter failure in pacifying the drug wars in Rio, which was supposed to happen way before last year's Olympics. Instead, the number of casualties after police raids has doubled for the last four years. People from the many favelas, the poor ghettos, say there is hardly a day when they haven't heard gun shots in the neighbourhood.

All of this is happening at the background of the crumbling first-class sports facilities. After the Games, many of them were supposed to be freely accessible to the public, which was in fact the excuse for wasting 4.6 billion dollars for the organisation of the whole event.

Instead, only 15 of the planned 27 facilities had any sports events hosted in them. The other remained largely deserted. One example is the center for water sports, which is in total collapse both from inside and outside. If you look at the picture above, you would realise that the entire Olympic park is that way.

The plan to open the swimming pool and the rowing canal downtown for the public was never realised. The new mayor Marcelo Crivella has also decided to cancel the transformation of the handball hall into a school. Now it is breaking apart too.

Same about 31 tall residential building in the so called Olympic village. The idea to offer the apartments for sale as luxurious estate is almost completely failing, the bulk of those apartments remaining deserted. The collapse of the city's sports infrastructure has reached so far that even the legendary Maracana stadium, the symbol of Rio for many decades, has remained without electricity because of unpaid bills worth nearly 1 billion dollars.

The consequences of the Rio Olympics are as sad as they are expected, given all the political chaos that has marred the times both before, during, and after the Games. Former Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva who proudly proclaimed the hosting of the Olympics back in 2009, has been sentenced to 9 and a half years in prison for taking 5 billion dollars of bribes. His successor Dilma Rousseff was ousted out of the presidency through a nasty impeachment process, again for corruption. These are just two among more than 200 officials involved in a grand corruption scandal, affecting public projects in various sectors, including the construction of the Olympic facilities.

Michel Temer, Dilma's political rival who took her post, is also being investigated. Last year he was famously booed by the crowd at the very opening of the Olympics.

The corruption scandals have caused mass demonstrations for months all across the country, some of these lead to violent clashes with the police, including in Rio. In the meantime, crime, corruption, and even the Zika epidemic, have vastly added darker and darker colours to the sombre landscape that followed after the super-expensive Olympics. The crumbling infrastructure is just the tip of the iceberg, the most visible manifestation of the hole that the Brazilian society has dumped itself into.

Comments

[asthfghl]

At least they impeach and prosecute their corrupt leaders. Unlike us.

[airiefairie]

Your northern neighbours are doing much better in that regard.

[asthfghl]

Damn right.

[0rder]

In point of fact, while Rousseff was indeed accused of corruption, she was actually removed only for (putatively) breaking budgetary laws. Ostensibly to bolster her political standing, but not in the vein of the systematic bribe-taking going on amongst those who voted to impeach her (or with Temer himself).

Given that this is the story of every Olympics, it is a wonder that anyone competes to host them any more. These gargantuan events are always pitched as great ways to boost economies and push through major infrastructural projects (this was how Chicago tried to justify their bid several years ago). But they never seem to live up to their promises. It seems hard to imagine that they're anything other than corruption-driven, with politicians voting to commit their cities/countries to hosting well before any of them need to worry about any kind of electoral fallout.

[kiaa]

IMO, only cities that already have most of the infrastructure needed for hosting such an event, should be allowed to bid. If you allow a place that is yet to build most of the facilities, you're of course risking pouring lots of money into a sinkhole.

This would put smaller countries at a disadvantaged position, granted. But it would also save a lot of trouble.

[ayebydan]

What is the most devastating thing to me is that so many of these venues and those from the football world cup held in a similar time frame were created on land stolen from native tribes. They now see concrete monsters on what was their heritage. :(