Rio de Janeiro faces challenges on eve of Brazil's first Olympics.
| Autor | Scruggs, Gregory |
The Summer Olympics Games, which will open on Aug. 5 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil's second largest city, will mark the first time the international sporting event lands on South American soil. On the eve of the opening ceremony, however, Rio faces a series of social, political, economic, and environmental issues that will potentially affect the execution of this mega-sporting event. As costs have mounted and criticism has poured in, the city's Olympic legacy may be tarnished before the competitions even begin.
When Rio was first awarded the Olympics in 2009, it already faced hurdles with regards to transportation infrastructure, public safety, and water quality. Having embarked on ambitious efforts to remake the city's transit networks, police favela communities long beholden to drug traffickers, and clean up the city's polluted waterways, those efforts are now wobbly. Meanwhile, an economic downturn, massive public debt, an epidemic of the mosquito-borne Zika virus, and a political crisis that may result in the impeachment of the president have all added to Rio's misfortunes (NotiSur, March 9, 2012, Sept. 11, 2015, and Feb. 19, 2016).
"[The Olympics are] a missed opportunity," Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes said in an interview with The Guardian newspaper. "We are not showcasing ourselves. With all these economic and political crises, with all these scandals, it is not the best moment to be in the eyes of the world. This is bad."
The Olympic games come to Brazil two years after the country hosted the 2014 World Cup just as its economic rise was starting to crest. Massive spending on stadiums, security, and other infrastructure soon revealed severe financial mismanagement that, coupled with a drop in commodity prices, has sent the economy into a tailspin in the last two years. Predictions that the US$13 billion spent on hosting the World Cup--the most ever by a host nation--would yield investment and increased tourism revenues have not panned out (NotiSur, Feb. 7, 2014, June 20, 2014, and Aug. 1, 2014).
"The World Cup generated a lot of interest but no lasting business," Salvador Saladino, head of the Brazilian Incoming Travel Organization, told Bloomberg News in January 2015. Indeed, even the immediate bump in employment on account of hosting the event, as predicted by Brazilian officials, did not occur. Instead, in June 2014, the month the World Cup began, the Labor Ministry reported the slowest rate of job growth since 1998.
While the US$9.7...
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