Rio (Part two) - Faded glory, angry football, dirty politics

The Seleron Steps, Lapa, Rio de Janeiro

Taking a rest while climbing
The Seleron Steps

The Selaron Steps rise steeply up from Lapa to the hill top suburb of Santa Teresa, glinting in the clear beating sun of a Rio afternoon. The steps are covered in thousands of tiles of green, yellow and blue (the colours of the Brazilian flag) creating a giant mosaic rising a hundred metres over the metropolis. Individual tiles show scenes from foreign cities and countries and tourists climb the steps to find a little piece of home. Selaron, a Chilean artist renowned throughout Brazil and the world for his sketch drawings, had started embellishing the steps that started outside his house in 1992 and made it his life's project. And his life it did take - three years after completing the project in 2013 he was found dead on his own steps with burn marks on his body. His death remains unexplained.



We found our little piece of home (although sad that
 Kentish Town was just off the map)

At the summit of the steps, you come - exhausted from the climb - into Santa Teresa itself. A neighbourhood of grand mansions built in the eighteenth and nineteenth century by wealthy Portuguese to insulate themselves from cholera epidemics in the city below. In the 1890s a tunnel was opened in Rio to the beaches of Ipanema, Copacabana and Leblon and so the well healed residents left Santa Teresa to migrate to new modern homes by the seaside. The Old Portuguese mansions fell into disrepair and the area languished.  Santa Teresa became a spooky empty town on the hill, until a series of local and foreign artists (including Selaron) moved into the area and regenerated it in the 1970s and 80s, setting up studios and restaurants amongst the ruins.





The view across Santa Teresa



  

One of the mansions on
Rua Almirante Alexandrino

The neighbourhood is very atmospheric - particularly one extraordinary street, Rua Almirante Alexandrino. Neo Gothic houses, colonial palaces, baronial mansions all appointed with stunning views down upon the city below. The rich and tourists are coming back to Santa Teresa - luxury hotels, high end shops and fancy restaurants - and these have meshed into the bohemian vibe. We managed to find a place that sells recycled wooden sunglasses for one hundred pounds. Shoreditch eat your heart out.

 



The Sunday Futsal party

The place we were staying, a hostel in a huge 19th century building which we sorely wished was ours, sat a few doors down from the local Futsal pitch. Futsal is a sort of mini football that is played with a smaller and heavier ball, with smaller goals, a smaller pitch and teams of five a side. All Brazilian children play it and it is said to be the engine - alongside beach football - that endows so many Brazilians with exquisite technique. On a Sunday people from the local favelas invade the neighbourhood and play games on the pitch from 9am till 5pm. Sal and I headed down nice and early, me in my Blackburn Rovers strip, to see if I could get picked for the game. I had a romantic impression that it would be like school playground kickabout where we would all line up and get formed into teams. I figured by being foreign and wearing the natty blue and white halves I would be snapped up. My heart dropped (and Sal's rose) when everyone turned up with their own teams pre formed with four substitutes each, mostly comprising massive intimidating men, wearing their own specially designed kits and - couldn't quite believe this at a five a side game - their own managers prowling the touchlines.

Horsman, relegated to playing Futsal
alone on Copacabana beach

However after seeing a couple of players getting cleaned out by flying elbows and late tackles, and one full on brawl I gave myself a little pat on the back for staying on the sidelines. Sal found it all hilarious.... I fear I will leave Brazil without ever having the opportunity to be humiliated by the locals.

About 11am some more folks turned up with a converted Vauxhall Astra with boom-box speakers blasting out Brazilian funk, which isn't much like American funk. More like a South American version of Grime music as far as I could tell. Anyhow the bass made all of the neighbours windows shake, a man with a cooler on wheels turned up and the beer came out, and the place turned into a party with the footy in the background.

Gomez Bar, Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro

The same evening saw the results from the Brazilian presidential election come in. We were in Gomez Bar, a charming hundred year old bar in Santa Teresa, (which served really very tasty brown beer - a rarity in Brazil). The rain was pouring down outside with a big crowd flocking out into the street awaiting the numbers for the election to be called. We had a roll of Dilma (the incumbent president) stickers pushed onto our chests by enthusiastic supporters. A man in a 1980s Soviet Union top waved a huge red Dilma flag with the socialist star on it. Santa Teresa, like any self respecting bohemian neighbourhood, is lefty and proud.

Crowds gather in Santa Teresa awaiting the
2014 presidential result

The election campaign distinguished itself as dirty, bitter and unpredictable. Dilma's party - the Worker's Party - found itself  embroiled in a number of corruption scandals, including accusations over Dilma's own chairmanship of the nationalised oil company Petrobas. On the other hand - as we had been told in Lapa by some trendy young Workers Party organisers - her chief opponent Aecio of the conservative Social Democrats was "a coke sniffing neo conservative rich boy". The third most popular candidate in the race had died in a plane crash in August and his deputy had thrown her support behind Aecio. From Aecio being viewed as having little chance of winning only a month beforehand it was now a race too close to call.



Me, sporting a Dilma support sticker in
Bar Gomez, Santa Teresa



The Worker's Party has ruled Brazil for 12 years, ever since Dilma's predecessor Lula won the presidency back in 2002. Lula (the first ever Brazilian leader not from an elite family) was feted for introducing the Bolsa Familia - a welfare system that paid out small sums to very poor families primarily in the North and North East of Brazil based on the number of children they have and whether they are attending school. It injected spending power into the economy and stimulated growth, while also lifting huge swathes of the population out of absolute poverty - a policy so successful it has been mimicked by other governments across the globe. Also a booming world economy buying Brazil's raw materials through the mid 2000s saw Brazil GDP rise by 8-12% each year - an astonishing rate. Lula oversaw victories in the bids for the world cup and Olympics and would probably still be in office today but for the obligation for the president to leave office after two terms. Dilma - his personally appointed successor - came to office in 2010 but a weaker global economy, slow domestic growth, corruption scandals, and a lack of personal charisma left her vulnerable to attack.

In his challenge Aecio promised to open up the country's highly protected market to foreign investment, much to the delight of Wall Street whose currency traders boosted the Brazilian Real each time he climbed the polls. Also the wealthy and middle class Brazilians were attracted by his commitment to a reduction of the huge Brazilian import taxes. Further a pledge for greater transparency in government - something Aecio successfully championed when State Governor of Minas Gerais - deeply chimed with a public sick of corruption of those in authority.

Two friends embrace below a Dilma flag on
announcement of The Worker's Party election win

About 8pm in the evening, the rain bucketing down to form a near river in the street, the result was announced. Dilma had won, by a wafer thin 1.5% of the vote. The crowd in the bar loved it. Great shout of "Ole, ole", a bit of drunken dancing, cars honking their horns. We went with the flow of it and ended up in another bar to watch Dilma's acceptance speech (of course not understanding a single word), chucking back a few Caprinhas with a couple from Manchester we had met.

In Brazil even politics is an excuse to get drunk and have a party.