Dave Zirin: When the World Cup and the Olympics come to a country – and it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about Brazil or China or the United States – you see advancements of three different things: displacement, debt and the militarization of public space. And what I’ve seen with my own eyes in these countries is that once these spaces get militarized, it’s very difficult to pour that wine back in the bottle.
So that’s one of the things that these mega-events allow for, the increase in the surveillance state and the normalization of police presence.
The second thing is debt, and this is very important because debt allows for the collectivization of costs and the privatization of profit. All the stadiums get built for the benefit of certain industries in the countries, particularly for construction and real estate. And yet the cost of construction is placed on the people themselves, the bill is on the people themselves, which of course erodes their power in a country and makes them more subservient, as debt always does.
And then the last element is displacement, which is a question of urban justice from the San Francisco Bay Area to South Africa to Brazil. The idea of who’s going to live in the cities. It’s the same patterns are everywhere: Will poverty be suburbanized? Or, in other words, will the poor be pushed to the margins, while the cities become playgrounds for the wealthy?
This is true for all the countries I’m talking about: Each country has debt, displacement and the militarization of public space. What makes Brazil different, though, is that you have some of the strongest squatter rights. So the issue of displacements becomes paramount in the objectives of the Brazilian state and in terms of a very critical, longstanding civil right that we know nothing of in this country and that in Brazil people are trying desperately to hold onto. More here.