More than a hundred squatters recently displaced from their neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro moved into a building that was once primed to become a luxury hotel for the city’s Olympics, the Associated Press reported this week. The squatters reportedly entered the vacant building through a hole in the fence that now surrounds it, after the company that was supposed to develop it into the hotel went bankrupt.
According to the AP, Rio, the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics, could soon take legal action against the squatters, who said they would not move until the city gave them a place to live. Thousands of Rio residents have been displaced by construction efforts tied to the Olympics and World Cup, which Brazil hosted in 2014, and by government efforts to “pacify” its favela neighborhoods. More than 300 families, for instance, were recently relocated from their homes to make way for parts of the Olympic village, which will become luxury apartments after the games are over.
Though the government has said it supplied replacement housing for those who were moved — sometimes forcibly as part of so-called “pacification” efforts — due to construction, real estate speculation driven in part by the two mega-sporting events has also caused rises in housing prices that have transformed poor neighborhoods and made it hard for some of Brazil’s poorest residents to find homes. Before the World Cup began, more than 5,000 Brazilians squatted near the Arena Corinthians, which hosted the tournament’s opening match, because they could not afford a place to live.
Though it is unclear from the AP report whether the squatters were relocated due to Olympic construction, their protests are similar to those heard in massive protests ahead of the World Cup: why is Brazil spending so much money — an estimated $30 billion between the World Cup and Olympics — on sporting events instead of addressing problems facing its poorest people?
“That’s the only thing that occurs to them to spend money on,” one squatter told the AP of prioritized spending on the events and related construction projects. “They don’t provide affordable housing, health care, education or security.”