The end of Brazil’s World Cup brings the death of a protest

BRASILIA, Brazil — The chanting began as it would on any day during the World Cup — a group of Brazilians, some wearing jerseys, some banging large drums, singing in unison before the match kicked off.

Except they weren’t at the match, and they weren’t going. Their yellow jerseys weren’t for Brazil’s team — they read “VIOLATION” on the back, and displayed the number 0. And most important, their chants weren’t about soccer. Instead, anyone in the middle of the large bus station in Brasilia heard:

“If the World Cup is not for me, I will go to the streets!”

Go to the streets they did, about 50 of them, marching with a giant World Cup trophy wrapped in tarp and chanting slurs at FIFA as they walked toward the brand-new stadium in the capital. On this Monday afternoon, Brazil’s team was warming up inside to play Cameroon in the final match of the group stage — what seems like a lifetime ago before the country descended into mourning after Germany stomped on their dreams.

Vanessa Minnie surveyed the crowd. She had expected more people to show up, for one of the bigger protests planned during the Cup. Almost exactly a year ago, swarms of Brazilians protested against the government, and the rage felt contagious. They lit tires on fire in front of the stadium. They were interviewed by journalists from around the world. They told them that the billions of dollars spent to create the World Cup wasn’t helping Brazil with its major shortcomings in public education, health care, and transportation. Their message was getting through.

But on this day there were more police officers than protesters, and hardly anybody noticed.

What happened?

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Brasilia might be the strangest city in Brazil. In a country crowded with dense, dirty metropolises, Brasilia is a carefully planned capital with a flat, manicured landscape punctuated by funky yet beautiful buildings.

In 1957, Brazil’s president began to move the capital here from Rio de Janeiro. To build Brasilia from scratch, the government shipped in construction workers from around Brazil to live in temporary housing while they erected new landmarks.

Some of those men rode on the backs of trucks for a week to work on the ambitious construction task. They worked double shifts, some of them not sleeping, for extra money. They didn’t have hard-hats. Many of them died.

One of them who didn’t die was a man who married and started a family that included two daughters who almost instantly became two of Brasilia’s most famous activists. When she was 7 years old — in the 1980s — Leiliane Reboucas saved her neighborhood from demolition.

Leiliane wrote a letter to the president of Brazil asking him to halt the government’s plan to tear down their homes. She asked her mother to take her to the president’s residence, where every Friday he walked down a ramp to wave to the public. Without telling her mother what she’d written, Leiliane ran through the legs of a police officer and handed the president the letter. She was all over the newspapers and TV the next day — and her reward came a few days later, when the president decided it was wrong to demolish the neighborhood.

Leiliane became a de facto voice of the people in Brasilia, fighting to preserve a city that her father built. She befriended activists of different stripes — architectural purists, women’s rights advocates, and, when Brazil won the rights to host the 2014 World Cup, anti-FIFA protesters.

In the past year Brasilia has become a symbol not just of Brazilian corruption, but of the absurdity of the World Cup. The new stadium cost $1 billion — enormously more than what was expected, thanks to corrupt contracts like the shipping company that charged $1.5 million to move some seats that were supposed to cost just $4,700. What’s almost worse is that the stadium will barely be used when the games are over — Brasilia is a basketball city and has no professional soccer team that could fill it.

“Toothpick dispenser,” Leiliane calls it as she drives by, referring to the stadium’s long and thin poles that support the bowl.

She has something pithy to say about almost every structure in Brasilia:

The presidential residence, incidentally down the street from her neighborhood — “Dilma lives next door but she never asks me for a cup of sugar.”

Congress — she once dressed as a devil to protest a congresswoman who accepted “dirty money.” Leiliane shouted “You’re going to hell!” at her until she was arrested.

Her neighborhood, Vila Plateau — “There are rich and poor living on the same street because I asked the president that everyone have the same rights here.”

A memorial for 500 workers who were killed by police in 1959 because they protested poor conditions — “The newspapers and the magazines: silence.”

A half-century later, protesters in Brazil have a much bigger enemy than rotten food. They’re trying to take on FIFA. But many of them are afraid. They’ve seen the police get violent, and they wonder if speaking out against a probably lost cause is worth a broken bone.

Still, on the day of the Colombia-Ivory Coast match in Brasilia, about 80 protesters decided to play a soccer game of their own.

In the same bus station where they plan almost all the demonstrations, Leiliane and her team created a soccer field that even included goals. They shouted to the police, asking them to join in playing soccer — a sardonic attempt to play their cat and mouse game on the same level. The police, obviously, declined. And the protesters called it a win by forfeit.

For two hours, as long as an actual soccer game, they held their demonstration, though it’s unclear how many people outside the bus station were aware of what was happening.

Meanwhile, a mile or so down the road, 68,000 people crammed inside the national stadium. The majority of them were Colombians — barely 100 are from Ivory Coast — but a sizeable number of Brazilians, most of them white and rich just like every other Cup game this year, paid to support Colombia as well. One reason that Brazil is hosting the World Cup is because they’re undeniably in love with soccer. The Brazilians wore their Neymar jerseys to the Colombia-Ivory Coast match, applauding for the Colombians, but also cheering for the Ivorians during their national anthem and for their most famous player, Didier Drogba.

In the stands high above the pitch, dozens of Brazilians reached out to an Ivorian family climbing to their seats and begged to take pictures with them. A pair of girls tried on one of their traditional African headbands.

When Colombia scored, the Brazilians tossed beer and hugged each other as if the Selecao had just put one in the net. Even when Ivory Coast got their only goal of the game, yellow jerseys sprung up from the seats to celebrate not just a team or a country but a sport for which there is seemingly no critical mass.

Many of the protesters claim to loathe soccer, but some of them clearly struggle to divorce themselves from it. Take Athos Benther, a 24-year-old IT guy who last year jumped into the protests because he felt it was his calling.

“I was so overwhelmed at the feeling of being Brazilian,” he said. “It felt like the Arab Spring — ‘Shit, man, the world’s changing.’ ”

Except Athos isn’t anywhere near the protests this year.

In fact, I met him outside the hotel in Brasilia where the national team arrived — one of 200 fans lining the streets in the night hoping to catch a glimpse of the bus as it pulled in. And not only has Athos abandoned the rebel inside, but he now works at the FIFA Fan Fest in Brasilia.

***

“I hate soccer.”

Vanessa was an orphan until she was 4. She was adopted, but when she was 9 her father left. Then when she was 17 her mother died of a heart attack, and she was an orphan again.

She grew up poor but learned English, and as a fledgling adult with no family whatsoever she moved to Brasilia. She became a teacher.

On the anniversary of the June 20 protest, Vanessa organized a party. Almost nobody remembered that the protest movement that drew international media attention had begun exactly one year ago. The World Cup had been rumbling for about a week, and the triumphs and follies of Neymar and Messi and Ronaldo proved more newsworthy than the staggering gap between the Brazilians who live in crowded neighborhoods and those who take helicopters to work. Even with the spotlight brighter than it will ever be again, the protest movement was sputtering into oblivion.

“People are upset because they feel every day that they should have a better life, and they don’t,” Vanessa insisted as a slideshow of protesters flashed on the wall and samba music echoed in the common room of an apartment complex.

Leiliane was also at the party. She told Vanessa about her letter to the president when she was 7. “Ah, I’ve heard this story,” Vanessa said in admiration. They started talking about the difficulty of divorcing Brazilians' love of soccer from their desire to make their country better.

Leiliane: “They tried to use the World Cup to make people blind — ‘Let’s not think about anything. Let’s go party.’ ”

Vanessa: “I’m a teacher. I make 2,000 dollars per month. You’ve got a guy who just plays soccer and he makes 5 million. I don’t agree. That’s so much nonsense. But people pay for that.”

The consensus was that the media has also been corrupted — along with the police and the government.

“When it is interesting, they cover us,” Vanessa said. “When it’s not interesting, they are blind. Not only that — they say those people in the street, they want to break everything.”

On a table at the party is a megaphone, with the words “Young Anti-Capitalist” scrawled on it in marker. Next to it is a pile of fliers for planned protests in Brasilia, all on days that the boondoggled stadium will be packed. The sarcastic mascot for the protesters is the World Cup armadillo called Fuleco, with a bandana wrapped around its mouth.

***

If Brazil is struggling, then so are many Brazilians who want to demand change during the World Cup but also want their team to win it.

Some Brazilians are openly rooting for rivals like Argentina, or for Brazil’s game-day opponents like Mexico and Croatia. But most of them still reserve 90 minutes to watch the games on TV.

When Brazil’s team plays, it’s an actual holiday across the country. Public transportation was free in Brasilia when the team squared off with Cameroon in the capital.

The morning of the match, Leiliane walked through her neighborhood while horns blared in the streets. She passed by the historic homes she fought to preserve, and an orphanage that cares for 20 disabled children, one of the few buildings that has received help from the government — because the orphanage’s president is married to a former government official.

One child inside who couldn’t speak and was confined to a wheelchair pointed to the TV above him, which was tuned to a preview of the match. He patted his heart with his hand, pumped his fist and swung it past his head as if to say, “Let’s go!”

Then Leiliane went to the protest in the bus hub, where Vanessa expected more people to show up. There was a brief moment to celebrate — two days before, the government acquiesced to a minor demand for more public housing. In exchange, the officials asked those protesters not to demonstrate during the match.

Reporters covering the protest wore company-mandated flak jackets and helmets. A few feeble chants of “power to the people” went nowhere. A tourism guide brought in by the local government to help during the World Cup remarked, “There are few people here, so I don’t think it will work.”

A loud firecracker exploded, people cheered, the chanting got louder with drumming — “our fight is every day” — some people with Neymar jerseys stopped to watch, Vanessa painted her face so it read “Cup for who?” and they marched toward the stadium, but really toward the police barricade they knew they would never get past.

The police lined up on all sides of the ragtag squad of protesters. An officer unholstered her pepper spray and put her finger on the trigger, just in case. There were three helicopters and an army truck.

Nobody got hurt.

After a little while, the protesters left — just in time to get home to watch the game.

***

Two weeks later, Brazil fell to Germany in the semifinals. At first people were worried about protests and riots in Brazil, but nothing happened. Sadness eclipsed rage.

Stunned Brazilians walking the street couldn’t escape the defeat as it replayed over and over, in their minds but also on the televisions that stick out of every bar and store from Rio to Recife. Again and again, the Germans scored while commentators lamented. And when Argentina beat the Netherlands the next day, Brazilians then faced a miserable choice over whom to back in the final: the country that squashed them 7-1, or their biggest rival in the world.

Marcelo Carneiro da Cunha, a Brazilian writer who thinks the protesters live in a futile and delusional world, said the grieving over Brazil’s defeat won’t end for decades.

“I grew up haunted by 1950,” he said, referring to Brazil’s loss to Uruguay in the final game the last time the country hosted the World Cup. The loss has since come to be thought of as a national tragedy. “Now it’s a lot worse.”

Leiliane, meanwhile, who had openly supported every opponent Brazil faced, sent me a message on Facebook after the match:

“We lost the game. And it is unfortunate that Brazil will not learn anything from it. … I think now, people will return to normal, will return to their normal day-to-day and pay attention to the wrong things in this country.”