With just a few short weeks before the 2016 Olympic Games are set to begin, Rio De Janeiro declared a financial emergency and requested funding for the Games. Not only is the whole circumstance troubling, it raises the important question: what is being prioritized?
Extreme poverty and income inequality has plagued this country. The middle class is expanded, thus decreasing the large disparity of wealth. Due to their debt crisis and high inflation years ago, the wage inequality rose and the extreme poverty rate has soared. More specifically, while the rich remains wealthy, the income of the poor still continues to decline, however, the Brazilian government wants to cut social programs to fund the Games.
According to data from the World Bank, nearly 16 percent of Brazilians live below the country's poverty line. That number has been halved in the last 10 years, but it still means around 31 million people are living on less than $1.25 per day. The richest 10 percent of people in Brazil have access to over 40 percent of the country’s income. On the other hand, the poorest 10 percent receive about one percent of the income. The contrast between the rich and the poor is made even clearer by the fact that they live alongside one another. Clearly, Brazil has had a rough economic time, making it extremely hard to comprehend why they were allowed to host in the first place.
The rights of thousands of people in Brazil were violated when Brazil was granted the FIFA 2014 World Cup, held two summers ago, and they are still being violated today as a consequence of these two major sporting events. Law enforcement has been removing the vast amount of unprotected and unsupervised children who are not only sleeping in the street but being innocently slaughtered by an effort to "clean up" the streets. The worst part is that this is all for the sake of appearance.
So now here's a question to ask the Brazilian government: what do you truly care about? A walk down any street could definitely reveal where money should and could be spent. Hundreds of thousands have been relocated to make room so that soccer stadiums, that will most likely never be used again, can be built. Roads and metro lines have been expanded in addition to renovating the airport in order to make it easier for tourists to travel while in the country while there has been little to no improvement towards the condition of their roads, schools, and hospitals. Brazil is also facing an outbreak of the Zika virus but it seems like the government does not care too much about improving the country's standard of living.
If you can not afford it, why host? How about you put your citizens first? Sports are supposed to make people happy and bring people together, yet most Brazilian citizens are the ones who are suffering the most.
