{"id":42608,"date":"2014-05-12T12:00:28","date_gmt":"2014-05-12T11:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=42608"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:35:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:35:00","slug":"why-is-blackwater-helping-to-train-brazils-world-cup-security","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/05\/why-is-blackwater-helping-to-train-brazils-world-cup-security\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Is Blackwater Helping to Train Brazil\u2019s World Cup Security?"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Apr 2014 – <\/em>In news as shocking as it was unreported in the United States, the Brazilian press revealed earlier this week<\/a> that Academi\u2014the rebranded private militia once known as Blackwater\u2014has been providing security training for the 2014 World Cup. The notorious company, responsible for the 2011 Nisour Square massacre<\/a> in Iraq, has been training Brazilian security forces in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Hosting mega-events comes with astronomical costs. This summer\u2019s World Cup in Brazil is the most expensive ever<\/a>, with a tab so far of $11 billion to $13 billion. These costs promise to catapult even higher as unfinished projects linger long after the soccer fans have returned home, with some estimating the final price tag to crest at $15 billion<\/a>. In addition to being the most expensive, the World Cup organizers plan to deploy more force than any previous tournament. More than 170,000 security personnel from the military, police and secret service will be on hand, 22 percent more than worked the previous World Cup in South Africa<\/a>. Now we know that some of these forces will be trained by a private security firm with a dodgy history.<\/p>\n

In Rio, the \u201cpacification\u201d of favelas is already hurtling ahead full throttle. Amnesty International described the Pacifying Police Unit\u2019s recent incursion into the Mar\u00e9 complex of favelas as \u201ca military occupation.\u201d<\/a> The suspicious disappearance of a young man named Amarildo Dias de Souza<\/a> from his home favela of Rocinha sparked a public outburst and media-led investigation that spurred criminal charges against the neighborhood\u2019s commanding officer and his minions. The security officials sit in prison awaiting trial, accused of torturing De Souza to death and discarding his corpse in the jungle. Not surprisingly, a recent national poll found that less than a quarter of Brazilians trust the police.<\/p>\n

The conflation of terrorism and activism is also rampant. Lawmakers in Brazil are angling to use the state of exception that sports mega-events inevitably bring to pass drastic legislation. The Brazilian Congress is contemplating an antiterrorism bill<\/a> that would impose hefty sentences\u2014fifteen to thirty years in prison\u2014for \u201ccausing or inciting widespread terror by threatening or trying to threaten the life, the physical integrity or the health or liberty of a person.\u201d Human-rights groups have clamored that such proposals are overly broad and could be used to squelch all kinds of protest and actions during the World Cup.<\/p>\n

For security mavens, Academi\u2019s involvement training Brazilians at its company headquarters in North Carolina may come as no great surprise. After all, Wikileaks revealed<\/a> in a 2009 cable from the US Embassy in Brasilia that the US government views the crises brought on by hosting sports mega-events as prime occasions to cash in.<\/p>\n

After power outages rippled across Brazil in 2009, the US Mission wrote, \u201cThe newly heightened concerns about Brazil\u2019s infrastructure as a result of this blackout, combined with the need to address infrastructure challenges in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, present the United States opportunities for engagement on infrastructure development as well critical infrastructure protection and possibly cyber security.\u201d In short, Brazil\u2019s misery created room for opportunism.<\/p>\n

The cable encouraged US government agencies like the Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security \u201cto explore these opportunities in the near-term.\u201d With Academi\u2019s involvement in Brazil, this type of \u201copportunity\u201d is taking shape.<\/p>\n

The indomitable critic Eduardo Galeano recently said of FIFA<\/a>, the world\u2019s governing body for football, \u201cThere are visible and invisible dictators. The power structure of world football is monarchical. It\u2019s the most secret kingdom in the world.\u201d People across Brazil concur\u2014disgruntlement with Fifa\u2019s arrogance and opacity is widespread. Earlier this month, a poll found, quite remarkably, that in the football-crazy country of Brazil only 48 percent of the population<\/a> favors hosting this summer\u2019s World Cup, plummeting from 78 percent support in 2008. Meanwhile, 41 percent actively oppose it, up from only 10 percent. Last summer, the 2013 Confederations Cup provided a prime-time dress rehearsal for principled dissent. Almost everyone expects cross-country protests at this summer\u2019s Copa do Mundo.<\/em><\/p>\n

Under intense public pressure, Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes recently remarked<\/a>, \u201cWe\u2019re not going to build a Bird\u2019s Nest [Stadium] in Rio de Janeiro. If you go to Beijing today, the Bird\u2019s Nest has become a mausoleum to honor wasted public money. We are not going to do this here.\u201d The mayor was right about the perils of white elephants. But another threat lingers: the intensified militarization of public space in the name of protecting the sports spectacle. Now it looks like private security firms like Academi are in on the deal, and that\u2019s unsettling for anyone not under the spell of historical amnesia.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

Dave Zirin, <\/em>The Nation<\/em>\u2019s sports correspondent, is the author, most recently, of <\/em>Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down.<\/em> Named one of <\/em>UTNE Reader\u2019<\/em>s \u201c50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,\u201d Zirin\u00a0is a frequent guest on MSNBC, ESPN and <\/em>Democracy Now!<\/em> He also hosts his own weekly Sirius XM show, <\/em>Edge of Sports Radio<\/em>. His other books include <\/em>What’s My Name Fool?<\/em> (Haymarket Books),<\/em> A People’s History of Sports in the United States<\/em> (the New Press), <\/em>Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love<\/em> (Scribner) and, with John Wesley Carlos,\u00a0<\/em>The John Carlos Story.<\/em> You can find all his work at www.edgeofsports.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Jules Boykoff is an associate professor of political science at Pacific University in Oregon and the author of Activism and the Olympics: Dissent at the Games in Vancouver and London, Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games, and Beyond Bullets: The Suppression of Dissent in the United States. He is a former professional soccer player who represented the US Olympic Team in international competition.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original- thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

25 Apr 2014 – The Brazilian press revealed earlier this week that Academi\u2014the rebranded private militia once known as Blackwater\u2014 the notorious company responsible for the 2011 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq, has been training Brazilian security forces in North Carolina for the 2014 World Cup.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-in-focus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}