O Jogo Bonito

This level of discontentment is remarkable given the complex and deeply-rooted cultural and political history of soccer in Brazil, especially with regard to race and class. As former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva said without hyperbole when his country was chosen as the future host of the world’s most-watched sporting event in 2007, “Soccer is more than a sport for us, it’s a national passion.”

In 1888, around the same time that soccer was introduced to Brazil by upper-class British expatriates, it became the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. After importing approximately forty percent of the African people who were kidnapped and shipped to the Americas during that era, the post-abolition government subsidized a racial miscegenation program known as “branqueamento” (“whitening”) that brought an influx of working-class immigrants from various European countries to Brazil during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These white European laborers introduced Brazil’s black and brown working class to what soccer icon Pelé would later call “o jogo bonito” (“the beautiful game”).

Unlike the post-abolition United States, Brazil did not enforce a system of legal segregation or discrimination after it abolished slavery. Race in Brazil has been defined socially, by appearance — not legally or officially, by heritage.

Echoing Roberto Damatta’s 1991 essay on Brazilian society’s classist and racist “authoritarian rituals,” Joaquim Barbosa, the first black judge to sit on the country’s Supreme Federal Court, put it simply in 2012; “Racism in Brazil is well hidden, subtle, and unspoken . . . It is nevertheless extremely violent.”

For years, soccer in Brazil had been enjoyed almost exclusively by wealthy, mostly British elites, but the sport’s simplicity made it an accessible activity for poor laborers with little disposable income. The formation of recreational clubs and leagues in the early twentieth century was encouraged and sometimes financially supported by employers who were happy to have their workers playing and watching soccer rather than organizing with the radical socialist and anarchist groups that were emerging around that time.

Soccer rapidly became the country’s national pastime. In 1923, more than two decades before Jackie Robinson broke the color line in American baseball, the Vasco de Gama soccer club in Rio de Janeiro fielded a team consisting primarily of black and mixed-race athletes. The squad went on to win the city championship that year, breaking the color line in Brazilian soccer with emphasis.

Futebol & Democracia Racial

In 1930, Uruguay hosted and won the inaugural World Cup, in which Brazil fielded a mixed-race team. They failed to progress past the first round. One of the black players, Fausto dos Santos, “A Maravilha Negra” (“the Black Wonder”), was widely considered the best Brazilian midfielder of his time, but he faced racism at home and during his brief stint in European leagues in following years.

Just months after Brazil was eliminated from the 1930 Cup, a bloodless military coup brought the authoritarian corporatist Getúlio Vargas to power as president of Brazil. The Vargas regime dissolved congress and became a dictatorship in 1937, forcibly crushing the leftist opposition, including various Afro-Brazilian movements.

Still, the 1934 and 1938 World Cup teams (both of which failed to make the finals) fielded black players, including Brazil’s biggest star until Pelé, the legendary striker Leônidas da Silva, known as “O Diamante Negro” (“the Black Diamond”), as well as the man who would later “discover” Pelé, Waldemar de Brito.

World War II put international soccer competitions on hold, but brought economic development to Brazil, in large part due to its deepening ties with the United States. As the war wound down, Vargas seemed unable to reconcile being the only South American country to send troops to fight against the Axis dictatorships with the authoritarian nature of his own regime. Beginning around 1943, he attempted to tack to the democratic populist left, but was overthrown by a coup in 1945.

Nevertheless, Vargas won election to the Senate in 1946 and the candidate he endorsed, Marshal Eurico Gaspar Dutra, won the presidency. Vargas was elected Dutra’s successor in 1950, espousing an economic policy that consisted essentially of “capitalism with a human face” while attacking Dutra’s economic policies for having favored the rich.

1950 was also the year that Brazil hosted the World Cup — the first since the tournament was suspended due to the war and the last to take place in Brazil until this year. Political, economic and athletic hopes were high. In front of some 200,000 fans at the Estádio de Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro — then the largest soccer arena on Earth — the Brazilian national team faced off against Uruguay in the championship match. Brazil lost, 2 to 1.

As Joseph A. Page describes it in his 1996 ethnography The Brazilians, the 1950 World Cup loss was “a catastrophe the extent of which is difficult for outsiders to grasp.” Citizens dubbed it the Maracanazo, using the same disaster-signifying suffix as the Bogotazo — the 1948 assassination of the Colombian populist liberal politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and the ensuing riots which decimated the capital city and killed thousands, ultimately leading to decades of bloody internal conflict.

It was no coincidence that the two players most scapegoated were dark-skinned. Many Brazilians, especially the mostly white European elite, had long felt that the mixed-race composition of their society had somehow impeded the country’s political and economic progress. For them, the 1950 loss confirmed that race was even hampering the country’s potential athletic greatness.

At the same time, many Brazilians, especially lighter-skinned members of the middle classes, thought of their country as a “democracia racial” (“racial democracy”) — a society that does not discriminate based on skin color. This ideology essentially dismissed the very notion of racism in Brazil, arguing instead that European miscegenation had “whitened” Brazilian society to its benefit and that societal inequalities were the result of circumstance, not race.

Dilma showed how entrenched this ideology remains in Brazil in December 2012. Moments before protests broke out against the upcoming Confederations Cup, the “dry run” for the World Cup, Dilma told a global television audience that Brazil was a country “with no prejudice or exclusion and where there is a respect for human rights.” For those marching in the streets to object to persistent societal inequalities and excessive police violence against the poor, the president’s statement could hardly have sounded more out-of-touch.

Ordem e Progresso

A period of economic and political instability followed the demoralizing 1950 loss, culminating in the suicide of President Vargas in August 1954, just a few weeks after Brazil had been eliminated from that year’s World Cup quarter-finals. Brazil was left to the rule of tenuous caretaker governments until the administration of President Juscelino Kubitschek, who took office in 1956.

With the motto, “fifty years of progress in five,” Kubitschek further opened his country to foreign capital and promoted ambitious development projects. One of his most grandiose plans was the construction of a brand new capital city, Brasilia, completely from scratch in just four years.

Kubitschek’s policies helped grow and industrialize the economy, although issues such as homelessness, poverty, and inequality persisted. As Page put it, Brazilians felt at the time that their economy’s nascent modernization “had not required slavish imitation of foreign models. [They] could win in their own way.” Brazil won the 1958 World Cup in Sweden — the country’s first international title. Two years after the official inauguration of their new capital city, Brazil picked up their second at the very next tournament in Chile in 1962.

However, the “miracle” began to dawn in 1964 when a US-backed military coup deposed leftist President and former Vargas Labor Minister João Goulart. Goulart was succeeded by one of the military officers who had led his ouster, Marshal Humberto de Alencar Castelo Branco. The Castelo Branco government proceeded to institute drastic neoliberal economic reforms that resulted in massive unemployment and civil unrest, while carrying out an often violent purging of leftists reminiscent of the Vargas government.

At the 1966 World Cup in England, the Brazilian national team was humiliatingly eliminated in the initial stage, suffering 3-1 losses first to Hungary and then to its former colonial master, Portugal. In 1968, Brazil’s military government dissolved congress and began resorting to assassinations, forced disappearances and torture (with help from the US and the UK) to suppress dissent.

Brazil won the World Cup for a third time in 1970, but as Page put it, “the glory soon faded.” Despite relatively strong economic growth under military rule, human rights abuses, inequality, unemployment, poverty, and illiteracy continued throughout the dictatorship’s political “abertura” (“opening”) of 1974 and beyond.

O Rei de Futebol

Brazilian soccer legend Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known worldwide as Pelé, plays a particularly allegorical role in the political history of soccer in Brazil. “O Rei do Futebol” (“the King of Soccer”) was born in 1940 in Três Corações, Minas Gerais. He began his professional career at the age of 16 and at 17 he made his debut with Brazil’s first championship-winning squad at the 1958 World Cup.

The youngest athlete to ever play in a Cup match, Pelé scored three of the goals that led Brazil to a crushing 5-2 victory in the final game against host country Sweden. Pelé also played on the 1962 championship team, and in 1970 he set a record he still holds by becoming the only person to have played on three Cup-winning squads.

Pelé, “A Pérola Negra” (“the Black Pearl”), is an officially-designated national treasure. He the first black man on the cover of Life magazine and Brazil’s first black minister. In 1967, the combatants in Nigerian civil war called a ceasefire so they could watch Pelé play.

But the dark-skinned Brazilian from a working-class family has been remarkably apolitical as an international soccer superstar, rarely voicing a strong opinion on social or political issues and never openly condemning the atrocities of the Brazilian military dictatorship.

In this regard, Pelé stands in sharp contrast to former national team striker Romário de Souza Faria, who played on the World Cup-winning 1994 and 2002 teams. The dark-skinned soccer star-turned-congressman has been a fierce critic of social inequalities and a strong supporter of the ongoing protests.

In June 2013, the infamously apolitical Pelé called on Brazilians to “forget” the anti-Cup protests occurring at that time and to support the national soccer team. Many Brazilians were outraged. Romário said at the time, “Pelé has no fucking awareness of what’s going on in this country.” Even Pelé’s more recent condemnations of the government’s World Cup preparations failed to recognize both the sources and the scope of the country’s many problems.

In 2011, it was revealed that Pelé had been investigated by Brazilian authorities in 1970 for suspected leftist ties. Despite no evidence of Pelé being involved in any political movements or actions himself, he had allegedly received a manifesto from a government employee seeking amnesty for political prisoners. Whether because of lack of conviction or government intimidation, Pelé kept quiet.

On July 18, 1971 Pelé played his last international match for Brazil against Yugoslavia, a game that ended in a 2-2 draw. Many Brazilians began to view Pelé as a sellout when he left Brazil (with some help from Henry Kissinger) for the US in 1974, where he earned millions of dollars lending his talent and international prestige not to a local team his own country, but to the North American Soccer League as a player for the New York Cosmos.

Retorno à Democracia

Mirroring the quarter-century of political and economic asphyxiation Brazil underwent during the years of the dictatorship, the country would not win another World Cup until 1994 — a full five years after Fernando Alfonso Collor de Mello became the first directly-elected president since the 1960s.

The symbolism of winning Brazil’s first post-Pelé Cup — its fourth altogether, another record — on American soil by beating a European country was powerful. Still, the Washington Consensus-style neoliberalization forced on Brazil had already exposed many elements of its economy to the pressures of globalized capitalism, including its beloved national pastime. Only half of the players on the 1994 roster (and only three of the starting eleven) played professionally for Brazilian club teams. The rest played in European leagues, which paid much higher wages.

At the time, professional soccer was also becoming less accessible to average Brazilians. Workers’ wages were stagnating as the price of admission to local matches rose, and many players were forced to work second jobs to supplement their tiny salaries.

As Lever wrote, “This is a vicious cycle: the more players leave, the worse the quality of regular league competition becomes, and consequently, fewer fans are willing to pay to see their teams.” On the 2014 squad, only four of the twenty-three athletes play for Brazilian club teams. The rest all play in the European, Russian or Canadian leagues.

Cardoso e Lula

In 1994, the year they once again made soccer history, Brazilians elected the neoliberal former Finance Minister Fernando Henrique Cardoso as president. Cardoso, the son of wealthy Portuguese immigrants, continued privatizing state enterprises and dismantling social programs like education and healthcare. Growth slowed, corruption abounded, crime was on the rise, and many of the social reforms promised by his administration had been only partially fulfilled or slow to materialize.

After yet another decade of unfulfilled “free market” promises, the Brazilian people were ready to forge a different path. In June 2002, Brazil broke its own record by winning a fifth World Cup. In October, they chose their third directly-elected president since the end of the dictatorship: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known simply as “Lula.”

However, the scope of the change promised by Lula and his “socialist” Worker’s Party (PT) was mitigated by the influence of Brazil’s integration into the world economy, including the $41 billion IMF “aid” package the country had accepted under Cardoso in 1998. By early 2002, capital markets were threatening to pull the plug on the country’s economy if it did not redouble its commitment to neoliberal reform.

Worried that his election as a self-proclaimed socialist could spark a financial attack on the country, Lula and the PT’s campaign rhetoric became much more market-friendly. Lula wrote and published an open letter to the Brazilian people during the final days of the 2002 World Cup, expressing his desire to avert a fate similar to that of their soccer arch-rival Argentina (which had been eliminated in the tournament’s first round): “What is important is that this crisis must be avoided, because it would cause irreparable suffering for the majority of the population. To avoid this crisis it is necessary to understand the margin for maneuver in the short run is small.”

Lula was elected later that year and whatever “crisis” was averted was replaced by an IMF-dictated economic policy that helped spawn a regressive social spending system. Nevertheless, when Lula handed off the presidency in 2011 to his former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff, he had an 83% approval rating — the highest of any president since the dictatorship.

As Favelas

Nearly four years into the Rousseff administration, more than half of Brazilians view her  influence on the country as negative. Economic growth has slowed. The poverty rate has barely budged after falling from 35% during Lula’s first term to around twenty percent by the time he left office. Similarly, unemployment has hovered around five percent after being halved from 12% to 6% during the Lula years. Brazil, along with many of its Latin American neighbors, still ranks among the worst countries in the world for income inequality.

According to recent studies, a large majority of Brazilians believe racism exists in their society, but only a tiny percentage consider themselves racist. While few people still refer to Brazil as a “racial democracy”, the essence of the ideology still survives despite a decade-long crawl toward racial affirmative action policies in public education and employment.

In 2011, the year Dilma took office, government census data showed that people who identify as “white” are a minority in Brazil for the first time since the nineteenth century. Government studies have shown that people who identify as black or brown earn less than half their white counterparts and are much more likely to lack access to basic services like security, education, healthcare, and sanitation.

One particularly illustrative example of this race-class conflation can be found in the illegal settlements, known as “favelas,” that exist in most major Brazilian cities. Migrants from rural Brazil, many of them of black or indigenous ancestry, flooded into rapidly industrializing urban areas during the early twentieth century.

Combined with the government-sponsored importation of European labor under the “whitening” program, this created an urban housing crisis that Brazil has never truly solved. According to government statistics, 1.8 million of Brazil’s roughly 200 million people are homeless. More than one million are estimated to live in favelas.

Many favela residents have no legal title to the land or structures they occupy, enabling the government to carry out forcible evictions of entire neighborhoods to make way for “development” projects in recent decades. In 2011, the Special Rapporteur of the UN Human Rights Council on the right to adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik (a native Brazilian), expressed concern with “a pattern of lack of transparency, consultation, dialogue, fair negotiation, and participation of the affected communities in processes concerning evictions undertaken or planned in connection with the World Cup and Olympics.”

Reports of police torturing, assassinating and “disappearing” the poor, mostly black and brown residents of Brazil’s criminalized urban communities, are neither new nor uncommon. The killing of a young favela resident in April 2014 sparked protests in Rio as well as the Twitter hashtag “Eu Não Mereço Morrer Assassinado” (“I don’t deserve to be murdered”).

Earlier that month, violent protests had erupted over the death of an elderly woman who was caught in the crossfire of a gang versus police shootout. A recent Pew poll found that nearly two-thirds of Brazilians think the police have a negative impact on the country.

Copa 2014

Although the term is frequently employed above, “anti-Cup” is perhaps not the best description of most recent protest actions. Most citizens are not opposed to the World Cup per se. Of course, Brazilians will root for their team during the tournament. Even Dilma cheered for the championship 1970 team from the jail where she was imprisoned and tortured by the military government.

Most Brazilians love soccer and wanted to bring the World Cup to their country. But not only did the government “promise something it never delivered,” it has focused almost obsessively on preparing for the event with little consideration for democratic consent. The state has razed people’s houses to build soccer stadium parking lots. The police have chased the poor away from the beaches and hotels and shopping districts back to the slums, only to invade and occupy their neighborhoods in order to “pacify” them. The government has spent nearly $1 billion on World Cup security alone while many favelas still lack basic utilities.

Many favela residents volunteer their limited spare time to help their neighbors build, repair, and upgrade their homes in a practice known as a mutirão. Community budgeting projects begun under the Lula administration showed the benefits of democratic participation in local spending decisions. Giant state projects rife with injustice, corruption, and mismanagement like the World Cup debacle only serve to remind Brazilians that in many key moments of the country’s history, the government has been an impediment to progress.

At the individual level, the protests may be about evictions, security, wages, or any number of other issues. They express a deep desire for the government to rectify past injustices based on race- and class-based political and economic exclusion rather than pursuing promised future greatness.

Radical leftist politics is nothing new in Latin America, but the swelling wave of activism in Brazil has a deeper and wider significance beyond being simply “anti-neoliberal” or “anti-capitalist.” The demonstrations are a diverse and broad-based movement articulating various critiques of a “socialist” government from the left.

Despite significant gains in recent years against poverty and unemployment, a large majority of Brazilians disapprove of the current economic situation. Since the last time it hosted the World Cup, Brazil has gone through periods of neoliberalism under dictatorship, neoliberalism under liberal regimes, and now neoliberalism under a self-styled socialist government.

In 1950, Brazil’s working class had its hopes inflated and dashed by the World Cup. This time around, they dedicated themselves to action and organization years in advance, demanding “FIFA-quality” wages, homes, schools and hospitals to accompany the “FIFA-quality” stadiums they helped to build.

The citizens in the streets and the workers on strike are not part of a “systemic campaign” against some nebulous “us,” as Dilma recently claimed. Nor do the vast majority want to disrupt the World Cup out of sheer spite. Students, workers, people of color, and others have rallied around this event and used it as a collective microphone to voice their grievances, which have gone unaddressed for years.

As the multibillion-dollar capitalist bonanza of the World Cup plays out, pay close attention to the movements opposed to what the World Cup symbolizes for so many Brazilians — exploitation, enduring racism, and the ongoing criminalization of the poor.