The other side of the ‘exclusion games’,
The Olympics party has started in Rio, but plenty of Brazilians are refusing to join the celebrations.
Hours before the opening ceremony, Rio’s troubled Olympics faced a big street demonstration when several thousand protesters marched down the Copacabana seafront in a sea of red shirts.
This was the biggest demonstration yet to dog the Games. The Olympic torch faced smaller protests in a number of towns across Rio state in recent days – some of which were met by heavy police tactics, including tear gas and rubber bullets.
On Friday, demonstrators occupying an abandoned concert hall staged an alternative Olympic opening. But like that event, yesterday’s march was peaceful and the mood celebratory rather than confrontational, and bands of drummers accompanied the marchers, providing a carnival mood.
Demonstrators took aim at two targets – Brazil’s interim President Michel Temer, who took over when Dilma Rousseff was suspended and ordered to face a controversial impeachment trial, and the Olympic Games themselves. Large banners used the Olympic rings as the letter O in the Portuguese phrase ‘‘Fora Temer’’, or ‘‘Temer out’’.
Leonardo Ladeira, 22, was among a group of young demonstrators whose red T-shirts bore the name of their grassroots protest group Youth Revolution.
He said the Olympics in themselves were a worthwhile event, but the declaration by Rio’s cashstrapped state government in June of a ‘‘public calamity’’ in its finances proved that the city couldn’t afford to stage them.
Youth Revolution was one of several Left-wing organisations represented, together with trade unions, socialist parties, activist groups and a group called the Homeless Workers’ Movement. The demonstrators gathered in front of the famous Copacabana Palace, near a temporary stadium erected for beach volleyball, then moved along the seafront, chanting and listening to speeches as they went.
Many saw no contradiction in protesting the Games even though Rio’s 2009 winning bid was championed by Rousseff’s predecessor and fellow Workers Party leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Guilherme Boulos, the Homeless Workers’ Movement’s national coordinator, said his group objected to the way the Games had been organised in Rio, with residents of some poorer communities, called favelas, evicted to make way for Olympics work, and an increasing military presence.
These were ‘‘exclusion games’’, he said.
Despite the political theme of the protest, there was also a sense of fun. One man wore a cardboard costume of a rat on his head, with the word Temer painted on its side.
Another came costumed as a cameraman for Brazil’s Globo television network, the nation’s biggest broadcaster. Many protesters accuse Globo of supporting Rousseff’s ouster, which they argue was, in effect, a coup d’etat. They say the network did the same when it supported the military after it seized power in Brazil in 1964 and established a dictatorship that lasted two decades.
Some demonstrators had travelled from other parts of Brazil. Luiz Lunardelli, 30, was in a group of 50 postmen who had travelled from Blumenthal in the far south of Brazil – all of whom were wearing their yellow and blue work shirts.
Brazil’s post office is a Rio 2016 sponsor, and Lunardelli and his colleagues were protesting cuts to staffing and reductions to their health plan and profit sharing.
Brazil did not have the money to stage an Olympics, Lunardelli said. ‘‘Look at the reality around you.’’
Bank worker Mariana Lima, 36, was holding a homemade Olympic torch and had travelled from Santo Andre, near Sao Paulo, with 50 colleagues on a bus.
The bank Lima and her colleagues work for, Bradesco, one of Brazil’s biggest, is another Rio 2016 sponsor. ‘‘But it is the champion of layoffs,’’ she said. ‘‘And Brazilian media does not show this.’’
Her colleague Rafael Clemente, 35, came dressed as a comedy rich banker and was acting the part. ‘‘I am investing in these Olympics because I like money, I want clients. I don’t like sport,’’ he said.
Wearing matching Team USA T-shirts, a family of four from Corpus Christi in Texas watched from the beach as the demonstration passed by.
Nick Longo, 48, said: ‘‘It made me automatically want to learn more,’’ Longo said. ‘‘When I look at this, I see democracy in action. Protests don’t scare me. It’s like a magnet.’’
His wife Serena, 48, noted that the protesters were standing with ‘‘Temer out’’ signs behind the Olympic rings on Copacabana Beach – meaning tourists taking pictures could not avoid including the political message in their holiday snaps.
She nodded at a swimmer passing by in tight swimming trunks.
‘‘It’s those Speedos that freak me out,’’ she said.