Rio de Janeiro’s famed carnival parades return Sunday

Rio de Janeiro: Shaking the ground to the beat of their drums, Rio de Janeiro´s famed carnival parades returned Sunday in a swirl of glitter, sequins and samba, the festival´s first full-on edition since Covid-19 and Brazil´s bitterly divisive elections.

The world´s biggest carnival, which officially started Friday, hit peak party level as Rio´s top samba schools opened their annual parade competition in the giant avenue-turned-stadium known as the "Sambadrome."

"Celebrating carnival after the pandemic is a feeling of freedom and happiness so big I can´t even describe it," said 25-year-old Debora Soares, who was beaming in a sequin-studded costume atop a giant green-and-gold float as she prepared to dance in samba school Imperio Serrano´s parade.

"It also comes after a historic, watershed election, after all the darkness we went through. Carnival brings the hope that the coming years will be better," added Soares, an event planner and model from Cidade de Deus, or "City of God," the Rio favela made famous by the 2002 film of the same name.

Rio is ready to party, after two pandemic-disrupted carnivals and October´s polarizing presidential election, in which veteran leftist Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva ousted incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, an ultra-conservative carnival critic accused of authoritarian tendencies.

The iconic beach city canceled carnival in 2021 because of the pandemic and held a reduced version last year, banning the epic street parties known as "blocos" and postponing the parades by two months because of a surge of Covid-19, which has claimed nearly 700,000 lives in Brazil.