Saturday, May 7, 2011

In Brazil: Dumped for the World Cup


Brazilian authorities are forcibly removing more low-income Brazilian communities in the name of the 2014 World Cup; this time in Porto Alegre’s Chocolatão—a neighborhood involved in the city's participatory budgeting, which appears in our documentary, Beyond Elections. The community will be evicted this week. If you speak Portuguese, here's a short video on the situation and the injustice.

As the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics approach, the reality for the residents of the Chocolatão is being repeated across the country. Here are a couple of articles on this issue I wrote over the last year and a half, (Rio Crackdown - Cleaning up Drug Gangs to Create the Olympic City & Brazil's World Cup Development Debacle). This is a video my partner and I produced for VJ Movement in 2009. Here's a more recent article from The Guardian (UK), and the New York-based human rights organization Witness is also doing some important media work to help raise awareness of the issue. Stay tuned. The illegitimate evictions will only multiply as we approach the upcoming mega-events.

Image of the front entrance to the Chocolatão.

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