Yes we can. Brazil confident about World Cup security
In
Log in if you are already registered
It was calm along the Esplanade on the afternoon of Friday, May 23rd. Most demonstrators who protest in front of the futuristic buildings along Brasilia’s divided highway of government were gone for the weekend.
After former president Jose Inacio Lula da Silva (known as “Lula”) made headlines by saying that anybody who uses the Metro (in Rio and Sao Paulo) to travel to FIFA World Cup games is an “idiot” (babaça) it was the perfect time for president Dilma Rousseff’s media team to call a press conference about World Cup security.
The setting for around 70 journalists and government media advisers was the huge foyer of the Planalto Palace, the working office of the president, designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Defense minister Celso Amorim and justice minister José Eduardo Cardozo outlined the $530 million program to guarantee the security of the World Cup tournament and the “federal mixture” of military and civilian organizations that are providing around 50,000 personnel to provide it.
Cardozo revealed that the Federal Police are operating a center for international police integration which receives input from United States agencies, and many other nations.
An information booklet provided by the ministry of defense noted that the government is using drones as part of the security effort.
In addition, a cybercrime unit is operating to defeat efforts by global hacktivists who have boasted online that they will take down parts of the internet infrastructure essential to the World Cup.
Credit: Fox News
High profile public security, a Brazilian tradition
With the launch of the Novo Estado (new state) by leader Getulio Vargas in the 1930s, Brazil adopted policies that mirrored the high visibility public security infrastructure of the right wing verticalist regimes of Portugal and Italy.
Today, under Brazilian-style democracy, high profile security remains an inevitable consequence after an estimated one million Brazilians last June took to the streets.
The protesters linked government expenditures on World Cup infrastructure with a basket of social ills including high public transportation costs, rising food prices and problematic public education. Labor unions, street gangs and violent factions of official fan clubs known as organizadas, that are sponsored by major Brazilian first division FIFA football teams joined in, adding some muscle to the mix.
International influence was evident. The organizers of the demonstrations cleverly cloned tactics from abroad, mimicking the “Occupy Wall Street” movement. They focused on Brazil’s freely elected government and FIFA much as global capitalism was attacked in the United States as an exercise of America’s constitutionally protected right to free speech in the context of “digital democracy.”
In spite of the popular social inclusion programs operated by her Workers Party government, which critics say are a naked attempt to buy support at the ballot box, the disruptive protests caused president Dilma’s approval rating to drop to an all-time low.
Now, a year later, social unrest continues. However, while it receives high profile media coverage, the overall protest movement in Brazil has lost some momentum due to structural problems and a lack of strong leadership.
A few days after the May 23rd press conference at the Planalto several hundred indigenous tribespeople and members of the landless and professional squatter movement MST faced shock troops as they tried to get close to the Mane Garrincha Stadium in Brasilia to protest about World Cup infrastructure costs, indigenous issues and the lack of free land and adequate public housing.
Shock troops used tear gas to disperse the crowd, which pelted them with stones and arrows. Two members of the security forces suffered injuries to their legs from arrows launched from bows by indigenous protesters. Around a dozen protesters suffered minor injuries in tussles with government forces.
Now, with test matches for the FIFA Brazil World Cup underway, organizers in Sao Paulo can still muster between 7,500 and 10,000 demonstrators who are protesting about the same basket of issues as they did last year. But direct linkage to the World Cup issue is now tenuous.
Inflation, public transportation costs and strikes by the transportation workers in the world’s second largest metropolis are driving the unrest.
Demonstrations have partially paralyzed the Sao Paulo financial district. The situation is exacerbated by a politically contentious drought that has caused water rationing to millions, and the use of recycled “grey water” in some areas of the nation’s largest state (43 million population).
Protesters claim the security forces are using excessive force. At the same time, law enforcement contends that some demonstrators are actively provoking violent confrontation with them.
Media profits by adding fuel to the fire
Because the protests are “buzzy,” selling newspapers, magazines and on line clicks, both national and global media continue to play up events on parity with last year’s riots, fueling the current confrontations.
The collateral effect of this feeding frenzy supports efforts by global governance advocates and their NGO allies to link Brazil with the branded “Implosion Theory” of economics that posits that nations who spend large sums on social programs are becoming challenged to finance them and will see their economies implode from the burden.
Ironically, the Obama administration Cold War-style public diplomacy campaign and some western media assets are saying that the economic sanctions being applied to Russia in connection with Ukraine and Crimea will make the Russian economy become a victim of the "Implosion Theory" too.
To this end the branded “Implosion Theory” discourages international investment in nations like Brazil, which feature economies with strong government participation and regulation.
Protesters. Pawns in the government vs. governance game?
While the Dilma government seeks to provide security for the World Cup the global governance movement is attempting to reduce the scope of Brazilian sovereignty in the Amazon and other areas of poor Northern Brazil with its concept of including international private business, libertarians and NGOs in a coalition that could effectively de-Brazilianize nearly one third of the world’s sixth largest economy. While their media assets work around the issue, they are exploiting concerns voiced by environmental NGOs, indigenous groups and landless peasant organizations, and even some evangelical religious groups in an effort to disrupt and privatize more of Brazil’s government dominated hydroelectric power and petroleum industries.
The structural problems inherent in the “Occupy Brazil” protest movement have been an invitation for them to do that. They include:
-the absence of an effective and disciplined command and control structure
-excessive pluralism causing lag time in making sound decisions
-the absence of an independent “NGO audit” that would provide transparency by tracking how much NGO money actually reaches the direct action components of the funded groups and how much is allocated to the elites who use it in ways not much different than how Brazil's political class use it.
-the transitory participation of youthful protesters, whose lifestyles and truncated attention spans are influenced excessively by online social tools, among them Twitter.
In spite of the current shitstorm president Dilma’s approval rating bounced up to 40 percent in May. Based on that statistic the repected scientific polling organization, Datafolha, indicated that the probability that Dilma will win another term against a weak list of opponents in the first round of presidential voting in October is good.
Update: A new Datafolha poll released yesterday after this blog was posted now indicates that Dilma's popularity has dropped 6 points (plus or minus two as a margin of error). There was also a big jump in the number of undecided voters from 8 to 13 percent among the 4,337 who responded to the survey. However, the popularity of her main oppnents also fell.
Brazil, like “Occupy Wall Street” and “Arab Spring,” is a reminder that digitally driven, branded “groundswells” of disruption work just once regardless of how much they are promoted as winners by public diplomacy assets and opportunistic media who sometimes mine and trade data from conversations and comments for their own marketing purposes.
There is enough street level intelligence and structured data available to Brazil’s institutional security structure to predict that there will be riots, looting and deaths regardless of whether Brazil or someone else wins the World Cup. That is the nature of big mega events.
In a televised interview that aired on the Record network June 4th president Dilma said “protests are the price one pays for democracy.”
Meanwhile, president Dilma has become a big fan of the national team, making it difficult for protesters to blame losing the World Cup tournament on her. She even had a friendly, high profile meeting with FIFA president Sepp Blatter on June 2nd.
Above all, president Dilma’s main focus is being elected to a second term as Brazil’s first female president. Brazil winning the World Cup can help. Excellent security at the World Cup can help her too, even if the presidential election goes to a second round. Like sports pundits in the United States say, “nothing hurts when you win."
