World Cup glare exposes political divide

At next week's opening ceremony of the World Cup there will be two very different Brazils on show.

President Dilma Rousseff, as leader of the host country, will be there representing one of the world's largest democracies as it takes on Croatia in the opening game. Almost 30 years after the return of civilian rule she is the country's first woman president, a former guerrilla who fought the military dictatorship and was jailed and tortured.

Only the second leader from the left, her ruling Workers Party has overseen one of the most aggressive efforts in Brazil’s history to tackle the country’s huge social inequalities.

But there will be another president at the ceremony who typifies an older, more reactionary Brazil that, despite the advances the country has made in recent decades, remains deeply entrenched in public life.

As head of the Brazilian football confederation CBF, José Maria Marin is perhaps best known in Brazil for being caught on television pocketing for himself a player's medal at a youth tournament.

But such a crime is trifling compared to his involvement in one of the most notorious episodes of the dictatorship.

In 1975 as a prominent member of the political party that backed the military, he led a campaign against a state-controlled television station after it aired a documentary on the Vietcong, accusing the channel of harbouring left-wing subversives.

After Marin demanded action, the head of the station’s journalism department, Vladimir Herzog, was called in for police questioning. He was tortured and killed in custody in one of the most notorious crimes of the dictatorship.

Denial

Marin denies any involvement in Herzog’s death, which the regime tried to claim was suicide. But a year afterwards he publicly praised Sérgio Fleury, the police official who oversaw Herzog’s detention and who Rousseff’s former husband accused of involvement in his own torture when detained by the military.

“Fleury masterminded the illegal prisons where the torture and illegal killings took place in São Paulo. He killed dozens of people, tortured women and children. He is a monster. Marin knows that, yet he praises him as a hero and Marin is the guy heading up the World Cup in Brazil,” says Herzog’s son Ivo. “It is as if Germany eight years ago had someone from the former Nazi party organising its World Cup. Is that possible? In Germany, of course not. But it is in Brazil.”

Since Marin assumed command of the CBF in 2012 President Rousseff has kept him at arm’s length, refusing to meet the man who heads the World Cup organising committee and insisting that at official events when both are present that he not sit beside her.

This difficult arrangement symbolises what Herzog labels a culture of “long transitions and long negotiations when Brazil moves from one status quo to another. Here we do not do ruptures”.

Frustrated with Marin’s role in Brazil, he has asked Fifa to act. His petition was referred to the organisation’s ethics committee, where it remains under review.

Second career

For many it is no surprise that Marin found a second career in the authoritarian world of Brazilian football administration.

“Brazil’s football authorities are one of the last redoubts of the country’s dictatorship and will be among the last institutions to be reformed in the country,” says campaigning football journalist Juca Kfouri.

“Brazilian football politics is not conservative but profoundly reactionary and opposed to any sort of change.”

Marin only got the top job at the CBF after his predecessor Ricardo Teixeira had to resign and flee the country after decades of corruption investigations finally caught up with him. On replacing him Marin lavished expansive praise on his predecessor, who now lives in exile in Miami.

Marin’s elevation to the presidency was a disappointment for anti-corruption campaigners, who sought Teixeira’s removal as a first step to cleaning up Brazilian football.

Corruption

“In Brazil we have a phrase ‘the flies change but it’s the same old shit’,” says

Luiz Carlos Azenha

, one of the authors of the recently published

The Dirty Side of Football

, an investigation into corruption in Brazilian football. “You switch Marin for Teixeira but it is the same gang. It is a mafia that controls football here. Teixeira’s daughter sits on the World Cup organising committee. All the VIP packages CBF sells are handled by business partners of Teixeira and he will take his cut. He might have been forced out, but he will still make a lot of money from the World Cup.”

But the tournament has undermined the power of football bosses in Brazil. “The relentless attention focused on them by the World Cup preparations has weakened them,” notes journalist Juca Kfouri.

While she refuses to meet CBF’s executives, Rousseff has welcomed leaders of a new players’ union into the presidential palace, publicly backing their campaign to reform the sport.

“I think reform is coming in Brazil because we cannot just continue along being exporters of players for Europe. I think Dilma realises this,” says Azenha. “For now the bosses seem solid because they are a mafia that defends itself vigorously. But they are in a fight now that I think they will eventually lose.”