A World Class Police State

Like a scene from Star Wars, #WorldCup security beneath #Brazil‘s skies: http://t.co/TNq6Xf17PM (via @AJEWeather) pic.twitter.com/rd8QJoFHoH

— HospitalityLawyercom (@hospitality_law) June 1, 2014

Vac Verikaitis condemns the militarization of the World Cup:

There are 170,000 or more security troops assigned to the World Cup – not to protect the thousands of tourists who will be coming to Brazil to watch the matches, but to quell dissent. Among them are a group of 40 FBI agents, part of an “anti-terror” unit. In January, French riot police were brought in to train their Brazilian counterparts. There are several Israeli drones, the ones used to chase down suspects in the West Bank, as well as 50 robotic bomb-disposal units most recently used by US forces in Afghanistan. There are also facial-recognition goggles that police can use to spot 400 faces a second and match them against a database of 13 million.

But there won’t be that many tourists, so exactly whom, people want to know, are the police checking? At a cost of nearly $1 billion, the international composition of the security measures is not only a contentious issue among Brazilians, but a cruel irony given FIFA’s mandate of bringing the world together through football.

Meanwhile, Steven Kurczy checks in on a stadium in the Amazon rainforest:

In a competition for most improbable place to host the World Cup, the city of Manaus would surely make the finals. Its Arena da Amazônia sits in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, 900 miles up the Amazon River in Brazil’s isolated Amazonas state bordering Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru. “The Amazon Arena” will host four matches [this] month—including one featuring the English team, whose coach got into a spat with the mayor of Manaus after complaining about the prospect of having to play “in the middle of the Amazonian jungle.”

So perhaps more than any other of Brazil’s 12 World Cup host cities, Manaus faces a Sisyphean task during [this] month’s influx of futebol superstars and their rabid fans: prove that it was worthwhile to build a $300 million, 42,000-seat stadium in an isolated port city lacking a serious futebol culture, or experience hosting major events.