World Cup and Olympics Prep Devastates Workers’ Lives in Brazil

With the largest economy and armed forces in Latin America, and the eighth-largest economy in the world, Brazil is poised to mount a challenge to U.S. dominance in the hemisphere. Already a member of the G-20 (the leading capitalist powers that guide the international financial system) and of BRIC (the counter-U.S. bloc that also includes emerging powers Russia, India, and China), Brazil now seeks a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.

To advance its position, the Brazilian ruling class is busy strengthening its imperialist credentials around the world as it imposes police fascist terror at home.

As the military leader of MINUSTAH, the U.N. occupation force in Haiti that terrorizes the populace in the name of “security,” Brazil has spearheaded numerous atrocities since 2004, from a massacre in the City Soleil neighborhood of Port-au-Prince to the murder of union leaders and students. But Brazil’s brutal rulers were just getting started.

The Brazil-Israel Security Connection

In late 2010, Brazil signed a “historic” security cooperation agreement with Israel that could generate billions of dollars in classified procurement contracts between top Israeli defense manufacturers and various Brazilian security agencies (Xinhua, 12/2/2010).

Beyond giving Israel a platform to penetrate other South American markets, these arms deals will provide Brazil’s ruling class with the tools it needs (including Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and advanced satellite surveillance technology) to contain guerrilla uprisings on the continent.

“Homeland security” is a growing concern for the Brazilian ruling class as the country prepares to host the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. The Israeli arms industry will be the merchant/consultant for security arrangements for these events — a role for which it is more than qualified. Six of the seven companies competing for these contracts have been implicated in war crimes or in espionage, or both.

The biggest military contractors active in Brazil — Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and Elbit Systems — supplied the occupying Israeli army with the guns used for war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Richard Goldstone mission for the UN Human Rights Council. In particular, the Tavor rifle being produced for Brazil has been tried out in Israeli army attacks against Palestinian communities.

These companies have undermined the Geneva Conventions and a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice, the legal fig leaves that imperial powers are quick to discard whenever they conflict with their ruling-class interests.

Clearing the Favelas for Ruling-Class Sport

The same army and police that have brutalized workers in Haiti are now demolishing the shantytown favelas of Rio de Janeiro, leaving tens of thousands of residents without homes. They are destroying whole communities of the poor in a number of Brazilian cities to make way for the World Cup and Olympic stadium mega-projects, which produce huge profits for the local ruling class and international bankers.

As one local organizer said, “You can see that these projects will truly be constructed with the objective of driving out the impoverished inhabitants, to ‘clean up’ the city and bring in real estate investors to these areas.´´

In neighborhoods throughout Sao Paulo, as many as 90,000 families stand to be evicted. Similar disasters loom in Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, Horizonte, and Fortaleza.

Plans for alternative housing are inadequate at best. Workers will be forced to move 30 miles or more outside their cities, far from available jobs and typically in insecure areas. Compensation will be minimal, not nearly enough to find acceptable new housing elsewhere.

As the UN’s Raquel Rolnik admitted, “There are no mega-projects without mega-operations of eviction. With these projects we are producing more homeless.”

According to Brazil’s 2000 census, the country had a deficit of 6.6 million housing units, which amounts to 20 million homeless people, or more than 10 percent of the population. As the World Cup and Olympic projects roll on, these numbers will continue to rise even more sharply.

Brazilian Workers Must Fight Back 

As workers have begun to unite against these evictions, the fake Brazilian left has yet to voice any protest over the plight of these thousands of workers — or of the masses who suffer under capitalist rule. Of Brazil’s total population of 187 million, 55 million live in extreme poverty.

According to a state study from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 82 percent of Brazilian children and adolescents are illiterate. Half a million children between 7 and 14 don’t go to school at all.

These conditions reflect the capitalists’ greed and a system where the families of workers don´t matter. But mobilization and struggle can help prepare the residents to fight against the financial system and the politics that support them.

Friends of PLP and readers of CHALLENGE are working within tenant organizations to fight against the big capitalist housing interests. Building closer relations with the members of these groups — and expanding distribution of CHALLENGE — will strengthen workers’ political understanding and build a base for an international communist movement.

This will lead to the happy ending of the destruction of today’s voracious system and its replacement by a comunist society based on need, not profit.