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| Children sleeping on the streets of Sao Paulo |
Brazil, country of beautiful games…. Brazil, the largest country in the world….
The dream of having a World Cup again on the American continent still has in the conscious (and subconscious as well) for many the romanticism of those years where football was played "for the love of the shirt" and where laughter and tears were mixed together almost leaving behind other interests other than the encounter between sporting rivals, where everyone (….EVERYONE….) ended up somehow happy with the results, but even more so with the competition and the celebration of union between the peoples.
Wake up, you were dreaming. Nothing could be further from the truth. Brazil is becoming by far the most expensive World Cup (economically and socially) in history.
These are billions of dollars spent (although it is vehemently insisted that the correct word is "invested") with the objective of fulfilling the requirements demanded by FIFA and the club of partner companies of the World Cups, in a country where those resources would have better uses, such as providing more education,
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| Militarized zones in Brazil try to quell protests demanding social justice |
health and safety instead of entertainment (?); a situation that, when analyzed, becomes more critical when, according to several economic specialists, the "profits" compared to all this investment can be translated into "happiness" for the inhabitants.
This "happiness", however relative, surely never reached or will never reach the families who were evicted to build sports centers and accommodation sites for athletes in those spaces, or the street children executed so that the world does not see the misery of the country today ranked among the 10 "richest" in the world or "disfigure" the environment for tourists, or the neighborhoods and entire areas militarized to forcibly quell social protests.
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| Advertising and counter-advertising towards Coca Cola, one of the biggest sponsors of the World Cup. |
It is clear that FIFA's attempts to position it as the first environmentally and socially sustainable World Cup (such as green buildings, waste management and carbon footprint calculations), in addition to those made by the Brazilian state to showcase the country's beauties, fall short compared to the coordinated and targeted state pattern of violence, which can be summarized as war propaganda, militarization of society, criminalization of poverty; as well as the strengthening of megaprojects to transfer public resources to large economic groups installed in the state bureaucracy.
Today, around the world, more and more critical voices are being raised in support of the Brazilian people and their demands for tangible improvements in the quality of life and which invite people not to attend the World Cup, nor to follow it on TV (the medium that offers greater visibility to the sponsoring companies), as well as to stop consuming the products they offer as a way of showing more and more people the reality that surpasses the media fiction surrounding the World Cup.
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