Protests darken mood for Rio Olympic opening ceremony

Demonstrators scuffle with riot police during a protest against the money spent on the Rio’s 2016 Summer Olympics on the route of the olympic torch in Niteroi, Brazil, Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2016. The three-month torch relay across Brazil will end at the opening ceremony on Aug. 5, in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana stadium. (AP Photo/Leo Correa)

Protesters will take to Rio’s streets Friday during the Olympics opening ceremony and heckle Brazil’s unpopular acting president in the stadium, setting an angry backdrop to South America’s first Games.

With the eyes of the world on Rio, Brazilians furious over the country’s political crisis, crippling recession and what they see as an Olympics favoring the rich will seize the limelight.

Protests are scheduled in the morning outside a luxury Copacabana hotel, then later near the Maracana stadium where the Olympic torch relay will end with the lighting of the symbolic cauldron.

The protests, clashes between riot police and demonstrators at several stages of the torch relay, and plans to boo interim President Michel Temer during the opening ceremony threaten an unusually dark mood for the city’s big party.

While numbers are not expected to go much beyond the low thousands, demonstrators’ passion will be fierce. Equally determined will be the security forces who have deployed in huge numbers in Rio and have used tear gas and stun grenades several times in recent days against small groups of protesters blocking the torch parade.

“These Olympics are a calamity,” said Manuela Trindade, a freelance journalist and teacher who was planning to take to the streets.

She said demonstrators would focus their anger on Temer, who came to power in May when elected president Dilma Rousseff was suspended for an impeachment trial likely to see her ejected from office within weeks.

“We want Temer out. It was a coup,” Trindade, 32, told AFP. “It’s very important that people don’t get used to the idea of accepting his government.”

Asked if she were concerned about violence, Trindade said: “I am worried there could be repression of the protests. But we don’t have the right to be afraid.”

Boos and absent presidents

Temer, who has steered sharply rightward since taking over from the leftist Rousseff, faces heckling when he declares the Games open at the opening ceremony, which starts at 8:00 pm (2300 GMT).

Officials are working to minimize the embarrassment, according to Brazilian media reports, by keeping his statement extremely brief and following it immediately with loud music.

Temer says he is “totally ready” for boos, joking that the famous Maracana football stadium has always been an unforgiving place.

Adding to the political tension, neither Rousseff nor her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, will attend the ceremony — even if Rousseff oversaw most preparations for the Olympics and Lula was key in Rio’s winning bid back in 2009.

Rousseff is also deeply unpopular. But her impeachment and the rise of Temer have stoked existing anger on the left over cuts to social programs and what is seen by many as an Olympic Games riding roughshod over the poor to benefit the rich.

“These Olympics are marked by exclusion, militarization, expulsions and out-of-control spending of public money,” said Guilherme Boulos, head of the Homeless Workers’ Movement, who is also a columnist for Folha newspaper.

“The protest aims to denounce the illegitimate government in the country, the risks posed by Temer’s policy proposals to social rights, and the Olympic calamity,” he wrote.

Hard reality

When Rio won the hosting rights, Lula portrayed the victory as a sign that Brazil, long a struggling giant on the world stage, had come of age.

But the jubilant celebrations of 2009 have long faded.

Even if the leftist protesters gathering Friday are a minority, most Cariocas, as Rio residents are known, are in a deep gloom — and the Olympics do not make them feel any happier.

A poll by the Ibope research group a week ago found that 60 percent of Brazilians think the Games will bring more bad than good.

“I think Temer will be booed. The situation in the country is not good, the country is in crisis,” travel agent Thiago Ferreira, 26, told AFP.

“There are many benefits for public services, transport and revitalization of the center which was badly abandoned,” he said.

But the underlying problems of underfunded health services and rampant violent crime remain.

“That’s been covered up by the Olympics. In the Olympics everything will look nice but after we’ll have to go back to reality.”