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Rio’s long decline

The Olympic games will not revive the host’s fortunes

By THE DATA TEAM

ON AUGUST 5th South America’s first Olympic games will kick off in Rio de Janeiro. Once the games are over, whether they dazzle or disappoint, Rio’s 6.5m inhabitants (known as cariocas) will find that the Olympics have done little to arrest the city’s long decline. The mood there is grim. According to a Rio Como Vamos, a local pollster, 56% of Rio’s inhabitants want to leave the city, up from 27% in 2011. The roots of Rio’s discontent go back at least to 1960, when Brazil’s federal government moved to Brasília, the purpose-built capital. Rio had lost industrial leadership to São Paulo, which had more space and more immigrants, 40 years before. By the 1980s nearly all federal agencies had disappeared. The financial sector followed.

Cariocas hoped that the games might be a catalyst for better public services and more jobs. The city’s government has partly met those expectations. The mayor, Eduardo Paes, nearly trebled spending on health and education. Violence declined from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, largely because of greater prosperity and better policing, which reduced crime rates across southern Brazil. Starting in 2008 the Rio de Janeiro state government sent troops into 38 favelas (shantytowns) to evict drug gangs, then set up “pacification police units” to keep the peace. Violent crime in the city halved between 2009 and 2012. But since then progress has halted, and Rio’s reputation for violence has cast a shadow over the Olympic games. A successful games could lift Rio’s downbeat mood. The spectacular scenery makes people want to come, but it will take more enlightened crime-fighting, better fiscal management and improved public services to make them want to stay.

Read full article here.

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