With only two years until Brazil finds itself on the world stage as the host of the 2014 World Cup, city neighborhoods are teeming with crack and addicts.
According to a recent Reuters report, as soon as night falls in neighborhoods that include Sao Paulo’s city center, where many of the World Cup events and 2016 Olympic Games will be held, drug dealers and addicts flood the streets looking for a quick deal — or a quick fix.
According to the report, policymakers are ill-prepared to deal with the burgeoning problem, which paints a picture of neighborhoods similar to the drug amnesty zone “Hamsterdam” portrayed in the HBO show “The Wire.”
“There is a lack of management and focus on the problem,” Ana Cecilla Roselli Marques, of the Brazilian Association for the Study of Alcohol and Other Drugs, told the news service. “There is no real drug policy at all in Brazil.”
Neighborhood raids and cleanups have also been criticized as ineffective and according to the report, there’s not enough resources for addicts who want help.
The picture painted by Reuters is a far cry from the country that celebrated winning the hosting rights of the 2014 World Cup as a sort of homecoming for an event it has ruled.
“Soccer is not only a sport for us,” then-Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in 2007, after the winning bid had been announced. “It’s more than that: Soccer for us is a passion, a national passion.”
The awarding of these major sporting events seemed to be crowning jewels for a country that is proud of its burgeoning wealth and development.
“We are a civilized nation, a nation that is going through an excellent phase, and we have got everything prepared to receive adequately the honor to organize an excellent World Cup,” Brazilian Football Confederation’s president at the time, Ricardo Teixeira, said in 2007.
But the Reuters report highlights the problem of street violence that made many wary of awarding Brazil the events. Reuters noted that on one Sunday night in Sao Paulo, the crack trade continued unbothered other than a single patrol car that shooed drug users off the road.
“Crackland isn’t finished,” said one hotel owner.
The report comes only months after a former Brazilian striker turned politician, Romario, warned that the country would be “embarrassed” by the country’s poor World Cup preparations.
“I think that (Brazil) won’t be 100% ready. Of the 12 stadiums (that are to stage World Cup events), maybe 10 will be ready,” the retired striker said in an interview with the magazine Istoe. “As to work on public transportation, none of the cities involved will be able to complete it fully.”
Later, in a Facebook post, he warned the World Cup would be an “embarrassment.”
With News Wire Services
