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Tents cover a lot near the soccer stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where thousands are protesting the lack of affordable housing in the midst of what they see as lavish spending on the World Cup.
While people around the globe are obsessed with the World Cup, there is a small corner of Brazil that is deliberately ignoring the tournament. The World Cup is breaking global television records, but a small corner of host county Brazil is ignoring the headline-grabbing tournament.
That corner is a poor shanty town of 4,000 inhabitants which is just three kilometres away from Arena Corinthians where the World Cup kicked off June 12.
The only television in the shanty is deliberately switched off during the matches, even when Brazil are playing.
The shanty town of makeshift settlements has called itself, with a heavy sense of irony, ‘Cup of the People’, in protest against the 424 million dollars that the stadium cost.
“Brazil played Chile Saturday and in ‘Cup of the People’ there was complete silence. The matches are not watched here. If somebody wants to see them, they have to leave the settlement,” University of Sao Paulo anthropologist Marciano Kappaun told dpa.
Kappaun has been living in the settlement for a week to study their protest.
‘Cup of the People’ is a hillside shanty town which has only been in existence for around two months. Most people come from the district of Itaquera and had to leave their homes because the construction of the stadium drove up rental prices in the area.
“People used to pay around 300 reales (150 dollars) a month in rent before the building of the stadium but afterwards rents went up to around 600 and many of them moved out here,” said Kappaun. The shacks are made of wood, nylon and corrugated iron, and the bathrooms are collective. “The conditions here are terrible, but this is the best we can do. Here we have rain, cold and insects,” said an inhabitant called Francisco.
“I see the matches at work. I understand that people here do not want to see them. We have other priorities. Even so, we still want Brazil to win. We are just as Brazilian as those that go to the stadia,” another inhabitant called Katja told dpa.
The inhabitants insist they are not against the World Cup but simply against the excessive cost of tournament. Side by side with the World Cup, they are staging a four-a-side football tournament in ‘Cup of the People’ with the final scheduled for July 13, the day of the World Cup final.
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