Demonstration In Rio To Protest World Cup Evictions

On Saturday, July 30, 2011,the day of the World Cup Draw, the Popular Committee of the World Cup and Olympics will have a public action in defense of “The People's Cup.” A march for the People's Cup will begin gathering at the Largo do Machado at 10am.

While the 20 million dollar party for choosing the qualifying groups for the 2014 World Cup is happening on the 30th of July in Rio de Janeiro, thousands of the city's residents are being removed from their homes in preparation for the tournament, street vendors are prevented from working and the vast majority of the population will not have enough money to pay for tickets to the World Cup.

Put simply, the World Cup has corporatized the people's game and now it will remove the people who love the game so that the Plutocrats may enjoy it. If the people will receive anything, and it's doubtful they will, it will be the trickle down. A disgrace.

Leave The Uncontacted People Alone!!

CNN has reported that an "uncontacted tribe" has been sited in the Peruvian-Brazilian Amazon. The story isn't really surprising:

Researchers have produced aerial photos of jungle dwellers who they say are among the few remaining peoples on Earth who have had no contact with the outside world.

Taken from a small airplane, the photos show men outside thatched communal huts, necks craned upward, pointing bows toward the air in a remote corner of the Amazonian rainforest.

The National Indian Foundation, a government agency in Brazil, published the photos Thursday on its Web site. It tracks "uncontacted tribes" -- indigenous groups that are thought to have had no contact with outsiders -- and seeks to protect them from encroachment.

More than 100 uncontacted tribes remain worldwide, and about half live in the remote reaches of the Amazonian rainforest in Peru or Brazil, near the recently photographed tribe, according to Survival International, a nonprofit group that advocates for the rights of indigenous people.

Look at the photo and notice the obvious harmony of the tribe with its environment. Do they need our help? Do they need our influence. Do they need us to be flying over them in our airplanes? Do they need us to be driving them from where they are?

Illegal logging in Peru is threatening several uncontacted groups, pushing them over the border with Brazil and toward potential conflicts with about 500 uncontacted Indians living on the Brazilian side, Survival International said.

Its director, Stephen Cory, said the new photographs highlight the need to protect uncontacted people from intrusion by the outside world.

I know we're all curious about these people, but would it be too much to ask that they be left alone? What, I wonder, is the huge rush to be in "contact" with these people we've "discovered"? Can't we let them continue without our impending, destructive intrusions, including our overflights, and free of our "superior" culture, technology, and diseases. Can't we protect these people from their biggest danger, which is us?

It's all sadly reminiscent of Alejo Carpentier's masterpiece The Lost Steps. As the narrator, a musicologist looking for primitive, indigenous musical instruments, progresses further and further up a South American river into the jungle, he recedes further and further into civilizations and times long past. He ends up with Carpentier's version of "uncontacted" people. But, ultimately, when an airplane arrives in the jungle to "rescue" him, Carpentier's protagonist doesn't choose to remain in paradise. He returns to civilization, leaving behind him his new, simpler, peaceful life for his former, complicated, civilized one. He's far poorer, I think, because of his choice. Why, I wondered about the book, couldn't he say to those on the plane, "Go away. Leave me alone. I like it here. I'm not coming with you?"

The "uncontacted" people here don't have the same choice. Is it to much to ask that we just leave them alone?

Jorge Amado's Salvador, Brazil

Jorge Amado (1912-2001)

Imagine my surprise and delight this morning to find in the New York Times a travel article about Jorge Amado's Salvador, Brazil:

...now, more than six years after his death, Amado’s exuberant spirit, aesthetic and characters seem to permeate the streets of the place he described both as “the most mysterious and beautiful of the world’s cities” and “the most languid of women.”

For visitors keen to experience those tropical mysteries, Amado went so far as to suggest an itinerary in his novel, “Tereza Batista: Home From the Wars.” He wanted tourists to see not just “our beaches, our churches embroidered with gold, the blue Portuguese ceramic tiles, the Baroque, the picturesque popular festivals and the fetishist ceremonies,” but also “the putridity of the slum houses on stilts and the whorehouses.”

That kind of dichotomy was typical of Amado, who, especially in his early years, tended to see everything as pairs of opposites: good and evil, black and white, sacred and profane, rich and poor. He even managed to impose that Manichean vision on the geography of Salvador, scorning Rua Chile, then the main commercial street of the upper city, and its well-to-do clientele in favor of the lower city and the port, where sailors, longshoremen, beggars, prostitutes and grifters saturated him in “the greasy black mystery of the city of Salvador da Bahia.”

I remember with joy when I first "discovered" Amado. About 30 years ago, I found a paperback copy of his 1958 novel, Gabriela, Cinnamon and Clove, at the bookstore on Spring Street a few doors off West Broadway. I bought the book because I had just discovered (a little late) the Latin Boom, and without having a guide to direct my reading, I bought books just to try them out. It was not a particularly risky way to go: the Latin Boom was being translated and published in English in paperback. In retrospect, that I devoured it should not have been a surprise. Unknown to me, Sartre called this book "the best example of a folk novel." Of course, I loved it. How could I not? For years I referred to it (or Vargas Llosa's The Green House) as one of my favorite novels. No matter that so few people had read Amado in English, I read and re-read his work. Most recently, I was delighted by Amado's 1988 novel The War of the Saints, also set in Salvador. How I wish there were more of his work.

I'm putting Salvador, Brazil on my list of places to visit, right next to Neruda's Temuco, Chile.