Due to the crash’s violence, it took a week to transport Campos’s remains back to Recife, Pernambuco, the state he governed for eight years. His funeral was televised as an all-day Sunday spectacle. His pitiful performance in Tuesday’s interview was all but forgotten, his malformed thoughts elevated to slogans. “We can’t give Brazil up!” is shared and exploited as a catchphrase, while Recife’s people take the streets to sing “Eduardo/warrior/of the Brazilian people!” during the funeral.

Perhaps the exploitation of a famous politician’s death by the army of individuals who salivate for a piece of his memory is natural. Campos has been described as a “promising leadership,” a “negotiator,” a “statesman” who “transcended party lines.” All of these are lies. And that’s why it’s even more necessary to set the record straight on what Campos was and represented. He was an old school politician, inserted in the old system by the old elite, who protected our old crony capitalism; a personalistic politician firmly entrenched in the old habits of the Brazilian northeast’s elites.

Powerful institutions tend to perpetuate themselves and fluster attempts by outsiders to enact change. But Eduardo Campos wasn’t an outsider. He lived his life comfortably positioned inside in the power ranks, where he was placed by his grandfather, former Pernambuco governor Miguel Arraes. Campos wasn’t trying to subvert structures, but to put them to his service.

The state government employs “at least a dozen” of his or his wife’s relatives. Having supported the allied base of the federal government for many years, Campos successfully campaigned for the appointment of his mother to the Federal Court of Accounts and placed two of his relatives in the state Court of Accounts, a branch of government responsible for overseeing his own actions. Recife’s mayor is one of his trusted men, an unknown before the election, but leveraged by Campos’s name. Eduardo Campos justified the omnipresence of his relatives in the state as a result of their “abilities.” A prodigious family indeed.

Eduardo Campos has been described by the international press as “amicable” to markets and the Sao Paulo stock exchange reacted poorly to his death. That’s unsurprising: Tax exemptions and direct subsidies signs are displayed in front of virtually every industrial plant in Pernambuco. The Pernambuco Military Police, under the direct control of Eduardo Campos, repeatedly acted to protect the interests of the construction companies from the Novo Recife project — consisting of the privatization of very well located land in the Pernambuco capital to benefit contractors — beating up protesters and, later on, stating they wanted to talk. Marina Silva, his vice-presidential candidate, then hypocritically said she was against police violence and that several people in the movement against Novo Recife were members of her party.

On other occasions, Campos had no problem in giving building companies the land they demanded, such as when they wanted to build Riomar Mall over a swamp area, displacing hundreds of people from their stilt houses. These people had similar fates to the thousands of families who were expropriated and forcefully evicted for the construction of the Arena Pernambuco for the World Cup. It’s not by chance that construction companies, formerly lukewarm toward Campos’s party, made generous donations this year to the Socialist Party of Brazil. And it’s not by chance that large banks, industries and agribusiness companies lamented the loss of such a trustworthy ally.

His mellifluous narrative of favoring the poor hid a policy of control, suppression and infiltration of social movements. Campos’s political choices were always obfuscated by the convenient lie of “efficiency” in public management. In a recent interview, he said that abortion should not be legalized, reaffirmed his support for the war on drugs, recycled the tired idea that crack cocaine is a vicious drug that enslaves people, and stated he wanted to put “drug dealers” behind bars.

The more than 100,000 people who cry on streets because Eduardo Campos is dead remember only his most cynical side: The “modern” politician, who wanted to rid the country of “cronyism” and “favoring,” someone who was willing to “build alliances,” promote “sustainable growth,” “think about the poor,” and to defend “more humane politics.”

Someone like that really would have a lot of problems in the political system. Eduardo Campos didn’t have many.

He died, but his ideals live on — unfortunately.

Some made fun of the tiny increase that revolted many. But most Brazilians knew better: The 20 cents only rubbed it in. People would pay more to ride overcrowded buses slugging through hours of traffic jams with no comfort nor alternatives. Soon protesters started explaining that it wasn’t about the 20 cents. It was the principle; the idea that an increase in 20 cents was but the tipping point of a larger social issue, a wider and systemic problem.

But, in the end, it was 20 cents.

Fast-forward to 2014, and recently the New York Times published a story (“The Brazilian Bus Magnate Who’s Buying Up All the World’s Vinyl Records“, August 8) on the Sao Paulo bus magnate who owns an astonishing vinyl disc collection. It’s impossible to exaggerate the extent of the collection held by Zero Freitas, 62, owner of a bus company that serves Sao Paulo’s suburbs: He himself is only able to estimate that he possesses “several million” discs.

Freitas doesn’t hold back in his obsession. He has never sold an album, not even duplicates, and buys from all over the world. He has imported around 100,000 discs from Cuba. He employs a dozen interns to catalog the albums that he keeps in a huge warehouse. He doesn’t discriminate between music styles: According to the Times story, not even polka albums are safe from his hoarding impetus.

Zero Freitas is indeed a curious figure, a Roberto Carlos fan who wears a common t-shirt and khaki shorts, sports a hippie style and has an unlimited budget for buying discs.

The Times story, however, left out a very interesting part of Freitas’s trajectory in their attempt to find a more humanized angle: His company is part of one of the most criminal oligopolies in Brazil.

You don’t have to believe me, but you should believe the millions of people who took the streets in 2013. All the people who ride buses daily like canned meat in Sao Paulo and in the rest of Brazil prove that public transportation is not the most honest line of business nowadays.

Their drivers and ticket collectors went on strikes for better pay and working conditions in May 2014, September 2013, May 2012, February 2012, and July 2011 — I’m limiting myself to the last 4 years.

What the story neglected is that the company headed by Freitas acts in a market that not only curbs the attempts of new competitors to enter the market, but also restricts any and all alternative modes of transportation in the capital. Vans and mototaxis are unheard of in Sao Paulo. Licenses for new cabs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Uber, which has just arrived, is being chased off already.

Not only public transportation alternatives are suppressed: Sao Paulo even lives with road rationing since 1997, which bans the circulation of given cars on certain days of the week in parts of the city, making private vehicles even less attractive (though still a better alternative to public transportation, as Sao Paulo’s record traffic jams show).

From all sides, Sao Paulo dwellers are faced with attempts to restrict their movement and artificially inflate costs of transportation. The government and the bus racket work together to extract the maximum rent from the individual and cripple his or her ability to move around.

That’s why they wanted the 20 cents in 2013.

No one told Brazilians that the 20 cents would be passed on to millionaire entrepreneurs such as Zero Freitas, with his ambition to create the largest music library in the world.

Certainly Brazilians would be more than willing to contribute to such a noble endeavor and perhaps they wouldn’t have taken the streets in the 2013 to refuse exploitation had they known about that incredible collection.

After all, it was only 20 cents and as Zero Freitas states, in his vinyl buying ads, he pays “HIGHER prices than anyone else.”

On June 3, #OcupeEstelita had their victory (partial, up to this point) formalized by the municipality, whicht begrudgingly suspended the authorization of demolition of the warehouses.

Decades abandoned, the Estelita warehouses are relics from the old sugar cane economy of the state of Pernambuco, and used to belong to the now defunct Federal Railway Network. The land where the warehouses are located was auctioned off in very sweet terms to a consortium of developers who planned, along with the municipal authorities, the New Recife project.

New Recife consists in the building of 12 skyscrapers of over 40 stories in the area, one of the best located in town. Moreover, the project also consists in the capture of the debate by the government. By the mayor’s and the developer’s plutocratic logic, which has been able to find adherents, there’s the camp in favor of progress, new apartments and urban development, and there’s the team who favors the past, backwardness, the continued abandonment of an area potentially very valuable like the José Estelita Docks.

It’s obviously a bogus dichotomy and has been challenged by the Direitos Urbanos activists, who debate urban solutions for the city. As a forum for discussion and activism, Direitos Urbanos gathers many different positions on how to occupy and plan the city. Unfortunately, not only are they diverse, but they’re also vague and a little bit too slanted towards a middle class urban outlook. They emphasize not the legitimacy of use and property of urban land, but a specific view on how these spaces should be put to use: mixed communities, plazas, squares, trees, bicycle lanes instead of car roads, etc.

There’s nothing wrong with mixed urban spaces, which should be favored rather than disincentivized by legislation (as they are nowadays), but the fundamental problem of the use of urban land remains, even with a aesthetic rejection of the developers’ claim to Estelita’s warehouses. The fundamental discussion should be: Who should be able to use the land?

We can sort out the details about how later. First, we should talk about how to take the state out of public land. Clearly, a privatization that puts a huge and extremely well located plot of land in the hands of a consortium of developers is unjust.

And the government doesn’t have any legitimacy to sell them off and exclude the rest of the population of the possibility to homestead the area. Unfortunately, the details of such a process of taking the land out of the control of the government can be messy.

So, I’d like to advance a modest proposal.

In Brazil, it is calculated that between 200 and 250 thousand families have been evicted from their houses because of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. Many have gotten laughable compensations for their property while others haven’t received rent assistance at all, or it has been insufficient to pay for any decent place to live.

I propose a solution: Developers can build all the skyscrapers they want in the area, but the apartments should be occupied by people who were violently evicted from their homes by the government.

It seems fair: If the government conducts an excluding process of privatization, it’s only natural it should favor those who were previously excluded. Land for the people.

If the victims of the World Cup benefit from it, we can think about urban impact later. What do you think, Urban Rights people?

Il calcio è anche alla base del patriottismo brasiliano, che durante i mondiali si innalza. La bandiera nazionale diventa oggetto d’adorazione. E sventola nell’aria.

Ma nel 2014 è diverso. Slogan come “La Coppa del Mondo non Esiste” abbondano, ci sono proteste e l’opinione pubblica si divide sull’impatto dell’evento. Le persone interessate dalle preparazioni hanno scritto una lettera aperta e, il quindici di maggio, c’è stata la Giornata Contro la Coppa del Mondo, che ha spinto migliaia di persone nelle strade in tutto il Brasile.

È stato il risultato prevedibile delle politiche adottate nel paese, politiche che hanno promosso l’uso massiccio di denaro pubblico e il pugno d’acciaio dello stato per mandare via la gente dalle loro case (espropri discutibili anche secondo i traballanti standard legali brasiliani) e costruire pachidermi bianchi per usarli soltanto per un breve periodo. I principali beneficiari sono la FIFA, le ditte di appalti, le grandi aziende alleate tra loro e lo stesso stato.

Per schivare la concorrenza, secondo la Lettera del Primo Incontro delle Persone Interessate dalla Coppa del Mondo, “la Legge sulla Coppa del Mondo istituisce zone di esclusione per un raggio di 1,25 miglia (2 chilometri) attorno alle aree della FIFA e gli stadi, e aree per i fan dotate di megaschermi, aree in cui soltanto gli sponsor possono vendere.” I venditori ambulanti, che muovono miliardi ogni anno, sono esclusi da grosse porzioni delle città.

Si potrebbe dire che viviamo una “situazione sportiva d’eccezione”, ma è un fatto che le preparazioni dei mondiali abbiano mostrato tutte le disfunzioni e le ingiustizie dello stato brasiliano. Le grandi imprese hanno ricevuto grossi aiuti economici tramite la banca pubblica BNDES, imprese che si sono alleate tra loro per attaccare coerentemente la proprietà dei poveri. C’è stato l’impulso irresistibile a controllare l’accesso dei poveri alla terra, per non dire della repressione generale dei venditori ambulanti in un paese in cui le leggi dicono di difendere la classe lavoratrice.

Questo incubo sportivo è la realtà quotidiana del paese, una realtà che punisce i poveri più di ogni altro, ma che oggi appare più evidente che mai per via dell’associazione con uno degli eventi mondiali più importanti per i brasiliani. Questo stato di cose è sempre esistito, ma oggi c’è un pretesto. Il paese del calcio ha capito che i campionati non sono semplicemente sport. Hanno a che fare con il denaro, le influenze, i mezzi politici, non lo scambio volontario.

Niente serve meglio ad illustrare la differenza tra mezzi economici (lavoro, produzione, scambio) e mezzi politici (forza, costrizione), per dirla con Franz Oppenheimer. Un’altra Coppa del Mondo è possibile, un mondiale senza espropri, repressioni, soldi pubblici, ma sarebbe una Coppa del Mondo senza il potere dello stato, fatta da persone che fanno a meno della forza.

Nel 2007, il governo disse che la Coppa del Mondo sarebbe stata pagata interamente dal settore privato. Con lo stato che ci ritroviamo oggi questo non accadrà mai. Nessuna società è disposta ad accollarsi il rischio di investire in un mondiale politicizzato come quello brasiliano. Neil Stephenson, in Snow Crash, la mette così: “Ecco com’è lo stato. È stato inventato per fare quello che un privato non si sognerebbe di fare, il che significa che probabilmente non c’è alcuna ragione di farlo.” Lo stato fa questo, ma fa anche cose che fanno pendere l’ago della bilancia a favore di certe imprese private.

“Speriamo che la nostra storia non sia soffocata dall’urlo goal,” dice la Lettera del Primo Incontro delle Persone Interessate dalla Coppa del Mondo. Se dovesse prevalere la coscienza, l’ingiustizia dello stato nel nome dello sport non potrà essere dimenticata.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

Soccer is also one of the foundations of Brazilian patriotism, that reascends during the FIFA World Cup. The flag colors come to be worshipped, the flag itself is flown.

In 2014, however, it feels different. Slogans such as “There Will Be No World Cup” abound, there are protests and public opinion is split regarding the event’s impact. There was an open letter from those affected by the preparations and, on May 15, the Day Against the World Cup, that pushed thousands of people to the streets everywhere in Brazil.

It was a predictable result of the policies adopted in the country, that promoted the extensive use of government money and the iron hand of the state to remove people from their houses — in expropriations questionable even according to the dubious legal standards of Brazil — and build white elephants that will only be used for a short while. The greatest beneficiaries are FIFA, the contractors, allied corporations and the government itself.

To sidestep competition, according to the Letter from the First Meeting of the Affected by the World Cup, “the General Law of the World Cup establishes zones of exclusion of 1.25 miles around FIFA’s areas, stadiums, and fan areas with large screens, where only official sponsors will be allowed to sell.” Street sellers, who move billions every year, yet again, are excluded from large swathes of the cities.

One could argue we are living under a “sporting state of exception,” but it is a fact that preparations for the World Cup have amply shown the disfunctionality and injustice of the Brazilian state. There have been huge subsidies to large enterprises through state bank BNDES, and the uncompromising defense of the property of big corporations allied to the consistent neglect to the property of the poor. There has also been an irresistible impulse to control the poor’s access to land, not to mention the repression of the street sellers all over a country in which the laws claim to defend the working classes.

This sports dystopia is always the reality in the country — a reality that overwhelmingly punishes the poor — but now it seems clearer than ever because it is closely associated with one of the most important world events for the Brazilians. This state has always existed, but it now has a pretext. The soccer country has learned that Cups are not only sport. They are about money and influence, about the political means, not voluntary exchange.

There is no better illustration of the difference between the economic means (labor, production, exchange) and the political means (force, coercion), as Franz Oppenheimer put it. Another World Cup was possible, without expropriations, repression, subsidies, but it would be a World Cup without the power of the state, made by free people forgoing the use of force.

In 2007, the government stated that the World Cup would be paid for entirely by the private sector. However, that would never happen with the state we have nowadays. No company would ever take the risk of investing in a politicized World Cup like the Brazilian one. Neil Stephenson, in Snow Crash, put it like this: “[T]hat’s how the government is. It was invented to do stuff that private enterprise doesn’t bother with, which means that there’s probably no reason for it.” The government also does stuff that allows private enterprise to tilt the table in their favor.

“We hope that a shout of goal won’t suppress our story,” states the Letter from the First Meeting of the Affected by the World Cup. Should conscience win, state injustice in the name of sports can’t be forgotten.

Translated into English by Erick Vasconcelos

Translations for this article:

• Italian, Il Brasile Ha Capito che i Mondiali non Sono Solo Calcio.

We may harken back to Henry David Thoreau. He used to criticize the idea that we should expect the majority to change a law or an unfair government action, because man should live according to his conscience, not by the majority’s will.

Because of that, “when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.” He referred to slavery and the Mexican-American War, which led him to stop paying taxes.

Lysander Spooner, on the other hand, teaches us how to resist the state peacefully, in the market. As a jurist, he argued for the unconstitutionality of the United States Post Office monopoly. Like Thoreau, he didn’t stop at words and wait for the majority to take action.

Spooner, in 1844, opened up a competitor, the American Letter Mail Company, much more efficient and charging lower prices than the government monopoly. Despite the government’s determination to close it, which it was finally able to do in 1851 with the approval of a more stringent law that closed the legal loopholes that Spooner had been exploiting, the action was successful: Government was forced to lower its prices by pressure of competition of a civil resistant!

How can we do something similar during the World Cup?

We can trespass the zones of commercial exclusion created for FIFA’s benefit, giving their partners a selling and advertising monopoly in a given area. We can also record with our cell phones every instance of police abuse against free protests during the World Cup.

As Augusto de Franco said about the occupation and reconfiguration of public spaces by free commerce:

Each one of those activities reconfigures hierarchies dominated by autocracies toward more networking (more distribution, connectivity, interaction) and freedom. There is no other way of doing that besides civil and political disobedience.

If this “entrepreneurial civil disobedience” happened in a large scale, we would be making a large step toward liberty from the coercive institutions of the state. Because the occupation of public spaces by markets and free exchange, challenging the territorial monopoly gifted to FIFA, would reverse the mentality that allowed our freedoms to be taken away and weakened the liberating potential of voluntary cooperation networks.

Again, as Augusto de Franco said, social revolution “is not that taking of some Winter Palace nor electoral victory against ‘the elites!’ It is not just a change in the people who make up the state, but something that happens at the very core of society, altering the interaction flows of social life and changing people’s behaviors.”

Individual freedom and liberation from poverty and political exploitation will only be achieved through the widening of the social cooperation networks and markets. As Thoreau would say, that’s the counter-friction that should stop the machine and break its injustice.

The government is generally not as straightforward in trying to protect corporations from losses. It seems that this time, the state didn’t try to be very roundabout and just funneled money directly from the pockets of the tax-paying poor to those of the tax-eating rich.

The consortiums that control other World Cup stadiums have similar sweetheart deals, with “investment” money generously coming from BNDES, the largest tool of upward wealth transfer in Brazil. President Dilma Rousseff appears frequently on TV to assure us that the total spent on stadiums was “only” $4 billion, whereas total overall is around $11.5 billion, most of which should actually be “recouped” by the public, because they were “loans.”

Rouseff forgot to account for subsidies and concession contracts. She also forgot to account for evictions and urban make-up projects intended to hide our poor from fearful tourists. Not to mention the cost of the police state that has wreaked havoc since the World Cup and the Olympics were announced to be held in Brazil.

We’re less than a month from the World Cup and yet we see few flags hanging from windows, few paintings of the tournament’s mascot on walls. The announcement of the national team was met with little anticipation or surprise, and very little positive speech is heard about the championship at all.

Protests and criticisms have abounded, however, culminating on May 15 in the International Day of World Cup Resistance (15M). People took to the streets in many Brazilian capitals, accompanied by teachers, public transportation workers and, in Pernambuco, police strikes. Also worthy of note was the manifestation of the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST), comprised of people who have the biggest reasons to complain: The World Cup caps off a model of urban development that evicts the poor from the city centers and pushes the value of their labor even lower.

The government, as always, tries to paint the Worker’s Party (PT) administration as the halcyon days of neverending development, but the honeymoon is over. No matter who conquers the World Cup, the real winner is corporate capitalism.

Nothing illustrates this better than the gentrification of Maracana stadium, once a hub for the people, but now a place attended exclusively by the elite, where fans are supposed to watch the game sitting down, taking off your jersey is forbidden, fireworks are “unsafe” and the flags you take are strictly regulated according to FIFA’s rulebook. If not even soccer is like we used to do it, we can only ask the biggest question from 15M: World Cup for whom?