At the carnival of rage

For millions of Brazilians, both poor and middle class, the World Cup is the vanity project of a reckless and violent state. Niren Tolsi crossed the water and got down with the resistance

Getting glitter-bombed before entering a favela is not recommended. Even if the favela is named Prazeres (Pleasure) and the vertiginous hike to the bar at its peak leaves you within grabbing distance of the stars hanging over Rio de Janeiro.

Any hard-ass credibility you may have had plummets and everyone - including the infants running around at midnight - appears to size you up as a space-gringo with a penchant for hippie drugs.

A young single mother, gossiping with a pal near the bar, casts a shy, sympathetic glance. Her friend Juno, a beautiful transvestite, lets out a mawkish laugh and pats the seat next to her.

The men drinking beer at the counter shake their heads ruefully. It is unclear whether this is about Flamengo's results from a football match earlier that day or this middle-class incursion which appears to be a by-product of Rio's favela "pacification" programme.

The pacification, or occupation of favelas by Rio's Unidade de Policia Pacificadora (Pacifying Police Unit, or UPP), started in 2008 in an attempt to break the control of narco-trafficking gangs and stabilise the slums that line the city's many morros (hills).

Pacification has been stepped up in anticipation of World Cup and Olympic tourists.

In its least aggressive form, pacification allows government to reinstate some semblance of law.

In its worst, it's a crackdown on the favelas' living politics - their mobilisation against arbitrary evictions and the government's "first world" hygienisation programmes, which seek to impose a more sanitised, restrictive ambience on favela life.

And there is a rising spirit of resistance - as expressed in graffiti on the heights of Santa Marta, the first Rio favela to be pacified in 2008, reading: "Voz Sim Medo" (voice without fear).

Favela parties, such as the Baile Charme, under way at the foot of Prazeres, feature armed policemen in flak jackets stationed at regular intervals, idly absorbed by their cellphones. Undeterred, "artivist" glitter-bombers with smacked-out eyes line-dance with ghetto kids to R&B hits infused with sheep-cheese electro-beats.

Many of these middle-class "artivist" kids are part of a collective operating from Casa Nuvem, a rented house in downtown Rio. They are organising the "carnivalisation" of the protests against Fifa and the World Cup. The protests have picked up again, after hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Brazil's cities during last year's Confederations Cup.

At the bar at Prazeres's summit, the dance floor is empty, despite a view that inhales the glittering lights of Rio's downtown through a chicken-wire fence. The music is muted and the people outside speak in hushed tones, as if there is a prohibition in place.

"You need the authorisation of the police for everything - parties, events, political meetings, to protest against evictions - this affects your freedom of expression, whether cultural or political," says Vitor Lira, a resident of Santa Marta.

"The police monitor you daily," he continues, "they are constantly stopping and searching everyone: women, children, old people. Why does this never happen on Copacabana beach?"

Lira first experienced a stop-and-search when he was six. Since then, and especially because he is an activist, Lira says he has been beaten and psychologically tortured many times.

Lira is a fifth-generation resident of Santa Marta, and one of 150 people facing evictions from their homes. The top of the favela is peri-urban: lush jungle encroaches onto subsistence plots wandered by chickens. Dogs prowl the rooftops, guarding the shacks while their owners are away at work.

In January 2011, authorities declared the area "high risk", and the land unstable for buildings - but Lira says this is a ploy to gentrify the area. "We have done our own counter-study, a diagnostic evaluation by qualified engineers, that shows there is no risk here."

Santa Marta's views - like most of Rio's favelas - make for increasingly prized locations, and the threat of gentrification is growing. Vidigal, a favela that overlooks the upper-class beach suburbs of Leblon and Copacabana, made the cover of Wallpaper magazine in 2011, and even boasts a sushi restaurant. David Beckham is rumoured to have bought up six properties in the "favela chic" slum to build a mansion.

The government has spun Santa Marta as a model for pacification and progress. Tourism has been encouraged and Lira, who is a tour guide, estimates that every month around 5000 to 6000 tourists tramp through its labyrinthine concrete alleys, pungent with the stench of raw sewage.

One of Madonna's charities works in Santa Marta and when the pop star visited the favela on a hot Rio day, she came in a heavy jacket zipped up to the neck - to conceal a bullet-proof vest underneath, according to local gossips.

In 1995, Santa Marta was the location for Spike Lee' s music video for Michael Jackson's They Don't Care About Us . And halfway up Santa Marta stands a bronze statue of an emaciated, ghoulishly leering Jacko.

Next door, at one of a handful of tourism shops, you can buy postcards and spray them with the official scent of the Maracanã, Rio's myth-laden stadium, or of Santa Marta itself. The latter is sickly sweet and bears no resemblance to the slum's actual fetidness.

The state's attempts to clean up urban spaces ahead of the Cup echoes South Africa's own repressive pre-2010 approach. There is a clampdown on street children and informal traders, while thousands have been evicted from homes to make way for stadium expansion and infrastructure.

And the Maracanã, renovated at a cost of R4.7-billion, is no longer the storied mass of concrete that accommodated 200000 people for the 1950 World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay, which the hosts lost - an unforgettable shock.

Chico Buarque, the poet and bossa nova singer, said of that final: "When the players needed the Maracanã most, the Maracanã was silent. You can't entrust yourself to a football stadium - that's the lesson that sank in after 1950."

The contemporary, post-renovation version of the Maracanã - anodyne, characterless and requiring an expansion of transport routes that led to the 2011 eviction of Favela do Metrô residents - has moved Buarque's observation off the pitch and into homes destroyed.

According to research conducted by the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), evictions in the Vila Autódromo favela, where much of the Olympics will be staged, grew from 112 homes in 2011 to 327 last year.

Cesar dos Santos, 58, wiry and a touch eccentric, is a member of the Movimento Povos dos Ruas (Movement of People on the Streets), one of several social movements that gathered for a "People Affected by the World Cup" meeting in Belo Horizonte in May to strategise anti-Fifa protests and share their experiences of state repression.

Dos Santos's home was demolished to make way for the Grêmio stadium in Porto Alegre, and he has since moved between shelters.

An itinerant lifestyle hasn't dimmed his philosophical energy: he jumps from quantum physics to ancient Roman and Greek history to the Cup resistance.

"The manifestations [protests] broke the gap between the favelas and the 'asphalt' [a colloquial term for the middle class, who live in areas with tarred roads] last year," says Dos Santos. "The middle class experienced what the police do to the favelas every day, and asked 'How can you do that?'"

What began as a protest against a hike in bus tariffs soon exploded into outrage at corruption, police brutality and contested public spending. When Brazil won the World Cup bid, the authorities promised that stadium upgrades would be privately funded.

But the state will spend at least R142-billion on the Cup, while public infrastructure projects have either stalled or, in the case of Rio's public transport system, only been upgraded to link richer suburbs.

Brazilian society appears to have inverted Simon Kuper's observation, in Football Against the Enemy, that "football is never just football. In debating football, the Brazilians also debate the kind of country Brazil should be."

Like many ordinary Brazilians for whom government repression is a lived experience, Lira noticed the ebbing away of the middle-class in last year's protests as police became more brutal. Meanwhile, anarchist groups like the Black Bloc - who took to the streets of Rio last week - increased their militancy.

Around 15000 homeless people marched in Sao Paulo last week to protest against their plight in the face of reckless government spending - and 2500 indigenous Indians faced off against armed, mounted police in Brasilia.

Lira and Dos Santos are "uncertain" whether the scale of the Confederations Cup protests will be replicated now - or whether a classless front will develop against a mega-event seen as a scandalous act of state hubris.

At Casa Nuvem, off the party strip near the Arcos da Lapa, activists are printing T-shirts with slogans such as Não vai ter Copa (There will be no World Cup) or insolent spoofs of the Fifa World Cup mascot. Another project is the stamping of reais banknotes with the words "Fuck Fifa."

"We want to take this stereotype that the cameras always focus on and define Brazil by - the carnival - and subvert it," says Edu, a dance choreographer.

The favela has not met the asphalt here though.

But the planned "carnivalisation" of protest is a savvy move, given that the government has already suspended constitutional protections of free expression and association by signing in the General World Cup Law: it prohibits demonstrations that are not "festive and friendly".

Thiago Dezan is a member of Midia Ninja, an alternative media collective that emerged out of Fora do Eixo (Outside the Axis), a network formed in 2006 to appropriate new technologies and invent alternative communities.

When I meet him he is sweaty, flustered, and much paler than usual, with a bicycle helmet strapped to his belt and a shoulder bag with video camera and goggles across his back.

"The police killed an eight-year-old girl in Macacos [a favela to the north of Rio]," says Dezan. "Shit man, there was teargas and bullets everywhere."

Dezan, who was on the frontline recording the confrontation, seems to be riding on a mixture of adrenaline and shock. Midia Ninja came to the fore during last year's protests as Dezan, 26, and others captured acts of police brutality and "uploaded [videos] as soon as possible, so that we get what is happening out to people".

Midia Ninja's reportage led to many instances of police scaling back on brutality against protests on the asphalt. But Dezan does not believe it is a strategy that can be applied by favela residents - "because the police are much less afraid to shoot you there".

In Brazil, the gap between the asphalt and the favela still appears far wider than the physical distance between them - and wider also than the focal lens of football's premier event.

But much of Brazil's popular politics - anarchic, contradictory, divided between its past and present - is expressed in the spirit of its football, as described by Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: "The most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dances of big-city slums. There are no right angles in Brazilian soccer, just as there are none in the Rio mountains."

There are no right angles in Brazilian politics either.