Icon – The Statue of Christ the Redeemer

The first proposal to build a statue on the peak of Corcovado (the name means “hunchback” in Portuguese) goes all the way back to the mid-1850’s, but found no favor with the royal family of the time.

The second proposal, the one that ultimately resulted in what we have today, was made in 1921, by a group of religious laymen in Rio de Janeiro.

And it wasn’t a government project. It was financed by donations from Brazilian Catholics.

Initial proposals included a Christian cross and a statue of Jesus with a globe in his hands.

Construction of the winning design, in reinforced concrete covered with soapstone, took nine years and cost the equivalent of $3,000,000 in today’s U.S. dollars.

You can get there by tram...

...or by road.

Inside there’s a metal stairway that offers access to every part of the interior, and there are viewing ports in the hands and the head, but they’ve long been closed to the public because of the strong winds that blow almost constantly at that height.

The breadth of the statue from fingertip to fingertip is 28 Meters (92 feet).

The granite peak on which it is built, is 710 meters (2,329 ft) above sea level.

The statue and the pedestal add an additional 110 meters (361 feet).

Here’s the view you get from the base of the statue.

You can still spot the head and extended arms from a distance of more than 20 kilometers at sea.

I have.

And hope that, someday, you’ll be as lucky.

Leighton - Monday

Disaster in Samba City

Samba City, a complex near the port area of Rio de Janeiro, is where the warehouses of the major samba schools are located.

The warehouses, immense spaces with ceilings twelve meters high, have been built to accommodate the huge floats displayed in the parades.

The costumes are tailored and stored there – and so is everything else the schools need to put on their shows.

There was a time when the production and preparation was done in the neighborhoods where the schools were founded. Floats were constructed in the open air. Costumes were stored in the homes of the women who sewed them.

But the Cariocas (citizens of Rio de Janeiro) pride themselves on making every Carnival bigger and more elaborate than the last.

And bigger and more elaborate shows demanded more space for preparation.

So the schools began transferring their operations to abandoned factories.

Those factories were often in the outlying districts, making them difficult to get to.

Or in poorer areas, making them dangerous to visit.

Samba City, an initiative of the municipal government, was designed to end all of that.

Space was provided for each of the Class One samba schools.

The vast warehouses placed at their disposal could be used to hold social gatherings, do rehearsals, even put on shows for tourists – and thereby earn much-needed funds.

The neighborhood selected for the project wasn’t in the best part of town.

But the area inside the fence was to be heavily patrolled.

And the schools were promised a state-of-the-art sprinkler system that would protect them from fire.

The directors of the schools rejoiced.

The complex opened in 2005.

And, six years later, disaster struck.

A fire broke out.

The vaunted sprinkler system was faulty and inadequate.

Four of the fourteen warehouses were destroyed.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time.

It takes a year for a samba school to produce a show.

And, this year, there isn’t a ghost of a chance that three of them will be able to recover prior to the event.

In financial terms, the damage has been estimated at four million US dollars.

That’s big money for folks who live in shantytowns.

But the major damage, the emotional damage, is immeasurable.

The members of the samba schools live for carnival.

It’s the center of their existence, the most important event of their year.

The tourists aren’t going to be happy either.

As many as 700,000 foreigners are expected to attend Carnival in Rio this year.

And they’re not going to be able to see the show they might otherwise have seen.

If you’re unfamiliar with samba schools, or how the event is celebrated, I suggest you take a moment to read my post of February 7, 2010: http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/search/label/Carnival

I posted it one year to the day before the fire.

This year, Carnival begins on Friday, the 4th of March. We'll be up all night throughout the weekend, watching the desfiles (parades) on television.

Leighton - Monday

Rio - The Movie

Rio – The Movie

It’s been a long time since the city of Rio de Janeiro formed the backdrop for a major work of feature film animation.

The last time was when Walt Disney released The Three Caballeros, back in 1944.

That’s about to change.

Carlos Saldanha’s Rio will be debuting in April.

Saldanha is a Brazilian animation director, a native of Rio de Janeiro, who’s been working in the United States since 1991.

You might not know his name, but the odds are you’ve been exposed to his work.

Like the scrat.

The scrat is Saldanha’s saber-toothed squirrel from the Ice Age series.

The one that loves acorns even more than he does the scratte, his female counterpart.

Now, Saldanha is hoping that Blu will become equally well-known to the movie-going public.

Blu is nerdy “flight challenged” macaw who, as the film begins, is living happily in his cage in Minnesota.

Happily, except for one thing: he believes he’s the last of his kind.

But then it’s discovered that there is another surviving bird of the same species.

She’s a female, and she lives in Rio de Janeiro.

Where he goes to find love.

To get the visuals right, Saldana brought a gang of animators, writers and artists to Brazil.

Where he put them through an intensive course of study in one of the most photogenic and three-dimensional cities in the world.

They flew over the city by helicopter.

They participated in a rehearsal of a samba school.

They went up to Pedra Bonita and risked flights on the hang gliders. (This is work?)

 You can’t tell a story about Rio without music, so there’s a lot of that, too.  And, to execute it, Saldanha was able to count upon the collaboration of one of Brazil’s musical greats, Sergio Mendes.

The movie looks like it’s going to be great fun, but under it all is a serious message, one with which I’ll be dealing in my December release, A Vine in the Blood.

It’s the trafficking of exotic animals.

And by the time I launch the book, no one will ever believe I wasn’t inspired by the movie.

The world premiere of the movie will be in Rio de Janeiro on March 22nd with the full cast. Here's one of the trailers:

Leighton - Monday

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Last week, in a gesture reminiscent of the raising of the American flag over Mount Suribachi, the Brazilian forces of law and order signaled their victory over the drug lords by displaying a national flag on the heights above the Favela do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro.

More than forty tons of marijuana and three hundred kilograms of cocaine were confiscated in the operation.

Hundreds of weapons were apprehended.

Dozens of felons arrested.

The ramshackle shantytown now enjoys a degree of peace and tranquility that no resident under the age of ten has ever known.

To achieve the result, eight hundred members of the military joined with more than two-thousand cops, civil, military and federal to pull off the highly-successful operation. But, as always seems to be the case, there were a few rotten apples in the barrel.

Someone apparently tipped-off many of the gang leaders, who were caught on videotape by Brazil’s major television network as they escaped over a back road that bordered the favela.

Worse: Many residents fled during the operation and returned to find their homes broken into. Not by the bandits, but by the police.

Police corruption, as the above cartoon illustrates, is endemic. The cop is telling himself, you’re under arrest.

Indeed, the situation is so bad in some areas that it’s hard to distinguish between the cops and the criminals. In this one, the kid looks one way and says, “Look, Mom, a crook.” Then he looks the other way: “Look, Mom, a cop.” And when he bursts into tears: “Who can help us now?” 

Here are a few examples of the kind of stuff that took place in Rio during the sweep:

From longtime resident Daise dos Santos, the cops stole seven bottles of imported perfume. She’d planned to sell them to pay her credit card bill.

They nicked a forty-two inch TV, and two-hundred Reais in cash, from Carlos Lopes da Silva.
They swiped a television, a notebook computer and her daughter’s basketball uniform from Isabel dos Santos.
And the pastor, Ronai de Almeida Lima Braga Júnior, lost thirty-one thousand-five hundred Reais (about eighteen-thousand-seven hundred U.S. dollars) in church funds. The perpetrators in that case were apparently some civil cops. A neighbor reported them breaking-down the front door of Ronai’s home.
The military police has dispatched a mobile unit to the region, and residents have been invited to drop in and file complaints against the police.

A full and detailed investigation of each case has been promised.

Proof, of course, is hard to come by.

So the betting is that there won’t be many arrests.

Or that much of what has been stolen will ever be recovered.

Leighton - Monday

Class Warfare

 

From what I can judge, by scanning European and American newspapers on the internet, the coverage of the violence in Rio de Janeiro this week has been pretty extensive.

But I do have something to add, something you are unlikely to have heard about unless you live in Brazil. First, though, for those of you who might have skimmed over the press coverage, here’s a résumé of the situation:

The great favelas of Rio de Janeiro, home to hundreds of thousands of the underprivileged, have long been infested by drug gangs. So numerous and powerful are these gangs that they’ve assumed virtual control of their neighborhoods. Until now, the law-enforcement establishment has lacked the manpower to suppress them.


And not all of the residents want them to.

The drug gangs support crèches, community activities and samba schools. They pay kids to act as lookouts and offer (illegal) employment opportunities to many.

But now, finally, an operation is underway to break their stranglehold on their communities.

SWAT units from the civil, military and federal police forces, working together with elite units from the Brazilian military have launched an all-out attack.

The photo above shows the arrival of more ammunition. In the last week, they’ve fired a lot of it

Some folks say the government has been compelled to act because Brazil will play host to both the Football World Cup, in 2014, and the Olympics in 2016. And, if tourists stay away, the investments currently being made won’t be recouped.

Others say the politicians took the initiative because violence has begun spilling out of the favelas and into the neighborhoods populated by the privileged and influential. And the privileged and influential aren’t about to stand for that.

And then there are those who think it’s been done to benefit the folks who live in the favelas. (They’re few and far between – and I’m not one of them.  The politicians have had years to better the lot of the innocent in those favelas - and it’s not just coincidence that they’ve chosen to do it now.)

Okay, so much for the situation. Now, for what I wanted to tell you about.

It’s this, a statement issued by a joint committee representing the three principal (and rival) drug syndicates. It begins by asking that Rio’s poor join with them in their struggle against “police repression” and the “cowardly spilling of blood”. They ask that people take up arms and show their support by shooting at buildings and imported automobiles and by looting businesses, shops and markets.

They decree that “for every innocent poor person who dies at the hands of the police, two rich people will die.”

They further decree that “for every member of a drug syndicate who dies, two policemen and their families will be executed.”

They go on to blame the “middle classes” and the “rich” as the root causes of the troubles “because they’re the ones who buy the drugs.”

And call for a revolution against those “who wear suits and neckties.”

It remains to be seen whether the gangs are going to be able to recruit enough people to make good on their threats.

But this document is nothing less than a declaration of class warfare.

And it’s scary.

Leighton - Monday

Ronnie's Rio Adventure

At 6:50 PM on Wednesday, the 7^th of August 1963, as it had done every night for 125 years, the Glasgow to London mail train set off on its journey from Scotland to the Capital. The second car behind the engine, where registered mail was sorted and valuables were carried, contained 2.6 million pounds in used bank notes. They’d be worth over forty million in today’s money and were being returned to the Bank of England for destruction. Shortly after 3 AM the driver, Jack Mills, responded to a red signal light and brought his train to a stop. But Mills had been fooled; what he’d seen was a ruse. A gang of robbers from London had covered a green light and connected a six-volt battery to power a red one. They quickly dominated the men in the locomotive and the mail car. Then they uncoupled the engine and the first two cars from the train. Mills was forced to drive them one and one half miles to the designated unloading spot: Bridego Bridge.

There, the thieves removed 120 sacks containing two-and-a-half tons of money, brought it back to their safe house and divvied it up. Within forty-eight hours a flying squad from Scotland Yard had been formed and was busy chasing the criminals. Their first break came when a suspicious vehicle was reported at Leatherslade Farm about 30 miles from the scene of the crime.

Inside the abandoned farmhouse they discovered a few of the stolen banknotes, a number of empty post office sacks, and a ketchup bottle upon which there were fingerprints belonging to a petty criminal named Ronald Biggs.

Biggs was arrested a few weeks later. He was subsequently tried, sentenced to thirty years, and incarcerated in Wandsworth Prison. That was supposed to have been the end of the story – but it wasn’t. Fifteen months later Biggs escaped, underwent plastic surgery to disguise his face and disappeared. Four years later, it turned out that the place he’d disappeared to was Australia. He was spotted, but managed to evade his pursuers and disappeared for a second time. Scotland Yard didn’t give up. They kept searching and finally caught up with him again in 1974. By that time, Biggs was in Rio de Janeiro. They gleefully pounced, only to discover that his Brazilian girlfriend, Raimunda de Castro, was pregnant.

And guess what? Before the law enforcement people could get their act together, the baby was born.

As the father of a Brazilian child, Brazilian law proscribed Biggs’ extradition. And, since he’d committed no crime in Brazil, there were no grounds upon which to arrest him.

The cops, both British and Brazilian, gnashed their teeth, but there wasn’t a thing they could do about it. But it wasn’t all sunlight and roses for the former fugitive. The money the gang had stolen had, in turn, been stolen from them, and Biggs was broke. To support himself and his little family, he hit on the idea of turning his home into an “invitation only” barbecue restaurant where the price of the meal included a free “I had lunch with Ronald Biggs” T-shirt and where, for an extra charge, you could have yourself photographed arm in arm with the host. 

The restaurant endeavor led to invitations to perform with various punk rock groups...

...and participation in a series of advertising campaigns. This one, done late in life, was for a lingerie manufacturer.

Finally, in 2001, requiring the kind of medical care he could no longer afford in Brazil, but could get for free in an English prison, Biggs voluntarily returned to the U.K. to serve the remaining 28 years of his sentence. 

He was released from a Norwich prison for elderly inmates (on compassionate grounds) on the 6^th of August, 2009, two days before his eightieth birthday.

Ya gotta wonder how Ronnie is dealing with the climate after thirty-odd years in the tropics.

Leighton - Monday