Today people of Rio de Janeiro, residing in the area of the Maracanã World Cup stadium, woke up to find out that missiles have been placed on the roofs of their bloc of flats. Not just missiles, but actual military bases have been set up over night on their homes. The Navy of Brazil are “positioning airspace surveillance and air defense equipment” on the terrace of a building with 15 floors and 90 apartments in Tijuca north of Rio, 600 meters from the Maracanã. They want to “defend the anti-aircraft Maracana.” Residents of the building Chateau Grenoble have noticed army soldiers on their roof. Retired economist Almir Gomes Cardoso, 72, says he was shocked to see the marines on the roof. “They (the military) confirmed that they will install a missile on the roof,” said Cardoso, who lives on the top floor. Just like that. Nobody asked him anything: “The landlady did not report anything. It was a fait accompli.”
The military say the missiles are meant to defend the “airspace” on an area of 13 to 15 km around the stadium Maracana, as well as around the other 12 stadiums where the games for the cup will take place. But the reality is that from the roofs of the building they will be actually spying on and monitoring protestors on the ground – this is their main concern.
Not surprisingly, FIFA’s HQ’s is a replica of Dr.Strangelove’s nuclear nuts’ war room, as John Oliver hilariously pointed out in an anti-FIFA rant.
A state army of 200,000 uniforms, a third of which are army soldiers, are deployed for FIFA’s most expensive show ever — and the biggest theft from Brazil’s public budgets:
-> ”A gigantic theft of public resources would take place. For us that was clear from the beginning. But we had not anticipated that the fraud would be as big as he is now! Beginning it was said that the Copa (World Cup) would make do with a budget of 2 billion U.S. dollars. Now, over 10 billion U.S. dollars spent been! That’s why the people are outraged! Source
-> “These are the fortunes being funnelled into construction companies – the largest campaign donors in the country – to build unnecessary new stadiums; by the forcible eviction of poor communities so that land is handed over to developers; or indeed by the fact that an event whose cost was essentially born by the state stands to be FIFA’s most lucrative ever. “In short, what irks protesters is the blatant rapaciousness of the privatisation of profit and socialisation of costs that is the basic business model of FIFA and the International Olympic Committee – two private bodies that are not accountable and travel the world selling state of exception (a state’s power to suspend the rule of law) packages to preferably undemocratic investment-hungry nations, in what’s undoubtedly the most continuously victorious example of shock doctrine capitalism.” Source
-> “Theft from public money: There’s a pattern here, which has never been investigated. Private contracts from the public budget end up costing up to 100 times more, at the end of the Olympics. This theft plunges countries in crisis with debts which are blamed on its working classes, who are made to endure incredible punishments. Numbers are quite telling… “In 2007, the UN-funded Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) concluded that over the past 20 years, the Olympic games, have forced two million evictions. The Olympics were listed as one of the top causes of displacement and real-estate inflation in the world.” Read more, here.
FIFA broke yet another record, when it claimed that the accusation of corruption, known as Qatar-gate, are “racism,” especially since in Brazil, where their war on poor is justified by economic racism, despite what their president claims.
Laws have been issued so that people can be preventively arrested, that is if they are “suspected” of intent to protest against the injustice and abuses they endure because of FIFA’s World Cup. 200,000 armed to the teeth brutal boots on the ground show just how brutal FIFA’s class war waged against working people is.
130,000 working poor living in Mare have been invaded and occupied by state’s army and police. They are on the way of new facilities IOC wants to build ahead of the Olympics games of 2016.
Repression has been exponentially increasing and becoming ever more bloody and brutal, since last year’s brutal crackdown on protests, as hundreds of thousands were evicted for FIFA’s stadiums and parking lots. Army’s tanks and helicopters have invaded and occupied the working poor communities, poor kids have been murdered by the police for protesting or just for playing on the street. Police have confiscated even an entire hotel threatening to shoot at tourists and protestors.
Cops attacking tourists and protestors in a hotel they invaded during a protest.
One year ago, while the national anthem of Brazil was sounding on the streets, cops were unleashing madly against people, attacking them with rubber bullets and tear gas, and beating them with batons. One year later, there are more cops, and they are ever-more brutal.
Bits of horrific history from the real World Cup
“I think the 1978 World Cup is one of the deep wounds of Argentine society.” — Norberto Liwski, former political prisoner
While The World Watched: At the same time Argentina hosted the 1978 World Cup, the nation’s dictators were waging their “Dirty War” of repression, kidnappings and torture. As the tournament again draws near, ghastly memories are flooding back.
”Military officers sodomized him in a torture chamber, the hot current burning his insides, raping him with electricity. He remembers the sharp but manageable pain of something forcing its way inside you, followed by the fear of what might come next, then the panic, then the explosion of fire. The right-wing military dictatorship had arrested him in April 1978 for wanting to help poor people get health care, and for being a vocal leftist. Officers broke into his house, shot him in the legs and drove him to the hidden concentration camp in Buenos Aires. They dragged him from the car straight to the torture room, where sometimes the soldiers played loud recordings of Hitler. The guards stripped Liwski naked. They wanted names. For the next few days, they shocked him with a cattle prod, on his gums, on his nipples, on his genitals, on his stomach and ears.
Everyone got shocked, usually in the first hour of captivity, not as a punishment but as a sadistic welcome. Men took the cattle prod in the anus. Women took it in the vagina. The young soldiers seemed fascinated with the female anatomy and delighted in painful exploration. On at least one occasion, a baby was shocked to pressure the parents into talking.
In Liwski’s first week of imprisonment, his torturers beat him with wooden sticks on his back, on the backs of his thighs, on his calves and on the soles of his feet. His skin burst open and he bled, and the soldiers ripped off his shirt to apply fresh shocks, tearing open the scabbed-over wounds. During breaks, he hung from hooks in a cell. They showed him a bloody rag and told him it was his wife’s underwear. She’d been kidnapped too. They showed him a bloody rag and told him it was his daughter’s underwear. They burned him with what he thinks was a hot nail. They took a razor or a scalpel and stripped the skin off his feet. He screamed like an animal. Men tortured his testicles, and it felt like his insides were being pulled out. They jammed the metal rod into his ass and turned on the electricity.
The military didn’t simply seize power. It was asked to seize it. Two years before, the nation suffered through a conflict that on its worst days looked like civil war: right-wing paramilitary groups, engaged in battle with communist guerrillas, both trying to fill the power vacuum left by the death of President Juan Peron, who defined postwar Argentine politics. The violence spread to the streets, bombs exploding, both sides kidnapping their enemies, or anyone who might bring a ransom. The right-wing assassins killed students, and the left-wing militants murdered a former president. People wanted the military to step in, and on March 24, 1976, it did. Tanks rolled through the streets. The conservative military crippled the guerrilla groups, using a torture and targeting machine, breaking the left-wing resistance in just a few months. The dictators won, but the torture continued, driven by fear and hatred, killing union leaders, advocates for the poor, students and teachers, and finally, anyone who supported liberal political positions. The wrong book meant a death sentence.
The military managed the World Cup with the precision and intent of its torture machine. By the start of the tournament, the military had never felt stronger, emboldened by the extermination of political enemies and not yet battered by the rising inflation and lost public faith that would follow. The generals would use violence and cruelty to maintain the authority originally given to them; they would rule for five more years before collapsing after a failed invasion of the British-held Falkland Islands in 1982. But the peak of their power, and of their violence and cruelty, coincided with the World Cup, which ended in an Argentina victory, although in many ways it hasn’t ever really ended at all. Those 25 days remain hidden in the national shadows, and with the games starting in Brazil, those days are forcing themselves back into the light.
“I think the 1978 World Cup is one of the deep wounds of Argentine society,” Liwski says. “Every four years, a new World Cup reactivates those wounds.” Read it all, here.