For some, Rio’s Games dream is a nightmare

RIO DE JANEIRO: This is the story of two Rio de Janeiros a year from the start of the Olympic Games — and only one can survive.
The first is the Rio of Olympics construction frenzy, of billion dollar investments, cranes, bulldozers, shiny towers, swirling dust and sleek new real estate.
“A city that doesn’t stop,” boasts a billboard in the midst of a giant building site in the west of the city, where the main crop of stadiums for the 2016 Games is rapidly sprouting.
The second Rio de Janeiro is of the little guy.
It’s the Rio of Bruno Manso de Oliveira, an industrial fitter, and the Rio of his friends whose slum homes happen to be in the path of the Olympic machine and whose sole, humble dream is to stay put.
As the countdown to the Summer Games begins, this is the story of how for some a dream became a nightmare.
“It’s a war zone,” says de Oliveira, 29, standing in the remains of what was once a proud if impoverished neighborhood called Vila Autodromo, which the advancing Olympic Park is steadily reducing to rubble.
“It’s becoming very hard to live here,” he said. “But I will never move out just because they have told me to go somewhere. My house is not for sale.”
About 3,000 people used to inhabit the Vila Autodromo slum, or favela, which grew up as a fisherman’s settlement in the 1960s next to a picturesque lagoon.
Vila Autodromo had the dirt roads, sometimes shaky, amateur housebuilding, and open sewers typical of favelas, but none of the usual drug-fuelled violence, winning a reputation as a laid-back place for working class people to raise families.
But from the moment the Rio authorities decided to bid for the 2016 Olympics, those quiet days were numbered.
The wider Vila Autodromo area centred on a long-abandoned motor racetrack that for years was little more than an eyesore for rich residents in nearby Barra district. To the mayor’s office, the place seemed to be the perfect building site.
Today, the old racetrack is gone and half-finished towers and stadiums resembling recently landed spacecraft rise from the dirt. This will become the Olympic Park, ground zero in the world’s biggest sporting party next August.
Close by is the nearly completed Olympic Village, a forest of 31 matching tower blocks that will house many of the estimated 17,000 athletes and other participants. After the Olympics, the towers will turn into Rio’s newest upscale housing development.
Then in the middle, blocking a planned route into the Olympic Park, sits the Vila Autodromo favela.
And it has to go, says Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes.
The gradual disintegration of the tight-knit community has been a bitter affair, punctuated by occasional street demonstrations, fights with riot police and legal appeals.
But for some, the change has been nothing but good, proof that the Olympics isn’t just benefiting giant corporations like construction specialist Odebrecht, but ordinary folk.
“My quality of life has improved, so has my health,” said hairdresser Natalia Lacerda, 29, who is among the many accepting resettlement in a newly built apartment complex called Parque Carioca. Lacerda remembered the favela as a place of dirt, mosquitoes and difficult transport to the city centre.
In her new home, there is “everything. There’s a bus that goes everywhere, there’s basic sanitation. When it rains it doesn’t get muddy,” she said.
The holdouts facing off against the Olympic project see the equation differently.
“We lived humbly,” says Luis Claudio Silva, a 52-year-old physical education teacher, “but we were very happy before the Olympics came and this terror and psychological pressure was started.”
Residents report being offered as much as 400,000 reais ($119,600) by city authorities, sometimes double the value of their houses, but Silva says money isn’t the issue.