Why Brazil Is Protesting Its Own 2014 World Cup
What’s the Latest Development?
In Brazilian favelas (the Portuguese word for shantytowns), young people and workers are demonstrating to increase the pubic’s awareness of how funds and development projects for the upcoming 2014 World Cup will affect the country’s native population. “In Fortaleza, Brazil – the fifth most unequal city in the world, according to the United Nations – the protests were led by the young and middle-class. … The World Cup, say campaigners, has justified ‘the distancing of the poorest to remote areas on the fringes of Fortaleza, causing segregation and social distinction’.”
What’s the Big Idea?
Fundamental questions of social priorities arise when governments commit billions of dollars to a soccer tournament while their citizens toil in poverty. Speaking from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s former minister of public security Luiz Eduardo Soares said: “There are several agendas [of the protests] but citizenship rights, the quality of public services, the choice of priorities and the ruin of politics are the core. People cannot stand any longer the theatre of authorities and political leaders pretending that everything is getting better in our land of promises, in our tropical paradise.”
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