Nobody Asked Rio’s Poor About The Olympics. So They Yelled Louder. – Huffington Post

“The world has recognized that the time has come for Brazil,” then-President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva declared, as the news that Rio would host the Olympics sparked celebrations all along Copacabana Beach in October 2009.

At least in the beginning, the country’s Olympic ambitions included the favelas. Social welfare programs put in place by Lula’s leftist Workers’ Party had begun to reduce illiteracy, extreme hunger and the worst of the poverty. In 2010, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes announced a new program to “re-urbanize” the neighborhoods. The Morar Carioca initiative would “put on the agenda issues which, in a way, the city abandoned,” Paes vowed. A mass “pacification” effort was already sending in police to drive out the drug gangs that controlled many of the favelas, purportedly making them safer and more open to the delivery of social services.

Perhaps officials thought their promises would keep the favelas relatively quiet as Olympic development rode roughshod over them ― as it had over poor residents of so many other host cities. Even among the people who lived there, social and racial stigmatization had fed the belief that the favelas were not worthy of better treatment.

“We are born fearing ourselves,” said Thais Cavalcante, a journalist at Jornal O Cidadão, which serves the Maré favela.

But not this time. This time, the favelas fought for themselves. It began with local reporters making sure that everybody knew what was going on.

In 2009, the community newspaper O Cidadão (The Citizen) ramped up its coverage of human rights abuses against Maré residents ― especially those related to the 2016 Olympics and the 2014 World Cup, for which Rio was also preparing. Maré never received one of the formal Police Pacification Units installed in more than 40 other favelas, but it was the object of a heightened police campaign. O Cidadão worked to document the effects of these “security” programs, asking a critical question: Was the government trying to improve public safety for everyone ― or only to secure the rest of Rio from the favelas?

A year later, Williamson and Catalytic Communities launched the news site Rio Olympic Neighborhood Watch, or Rio On Watch. Together with other community papers in the favelas, these publications began to scrutinize the Olympic planning process and its effect on the city’s poorest residents.

They were also there to amplify the cries of the people, as those who lived in the favelas started to push back against the broken development promises and blatant abuses.

One of the first protests occurred in October 2010, when residents of Favela do Metrô marched from their northern Rio neighborhood to Paes’ home to demonstrate against the construction of a parking lot for Maracanã Stadium, the iconic venue that Metrô overlooks. The project threatened to displace as many as 800 families.

Soon after, residents of Vila Autódromo, a small favela on Rio’s west side, began to protest their own planned evictions, which would make way for roads to access the Olympic Park.

Over the next six years, favela residents rose in near-constant protests to fight Olympic-related housing destruction and displacement, the failure to extend basic services as part of Olympic-related infrastructure improvements, the crackdowns on those peaceful demonstrations that soon followed, and other police violence to pacify the favelas.

The Olympic protests helped unite people around common issues. Groups like the Popular Committee on the World Cup and Olympics, which formed in 2011 to oppose removals and police violence, organized community events. The People’s Cup, for instance, was a soccer tournament in 2013 that brought together teams from various favelas threatened with evictions.

The new organizations also built on the journalists’ work to produce reports documenting human rights violations across the favelas. The Popular Committee’s final report, released in December 2015, laid out a list of more than 100 violations. Among its 16 recommendations for addressing those abuses, it called for better public transit that served all Rio residents, more public housing, protection of the rights to assemble and protest, and the promotion of sporting events to enhance “education, health, leisure,” not simply to make profits.