Human Trafficking Surrounding the Olympics

Frequently major international events such as the Olympics and the World Cup contribute to an increase in forced labor and sex trafficking in the country where the games are held. Sexual exploitation rose 30 percent in connection with the World Cup in Germany in 2006 and 40 percent at the World Cup in South Africa in 2010. Prior to the Sochi Winter Olympic Games in 2014, an estimated 70,000 migrant workers were brought to Russia. Many suffered long hours, unpaid wages, and overcrowded accommodation. Some saw their passports confiscated by employers. Unfortunately, the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro doesn’t seem to be much different.  

Since 2014 when 2,500 construction workers refused to work at the site of the Olympic Village until their demands of paid overtime, fair wages and better living conditions were met, there have been multiple documented cases of forced labor. In 2015, an investigation by Brazil’s Labor Ministry found 11 workers living in squalor with “cockroaches, rats and sewage in the residences.” Earlier this year, a group of 75 former construction employees angrily demonstrated outside the Olympic Park, insisting they were never paid for working on the Olympic tennis venue. Most of the construction workers for the 2016 Rio Olympics came from the Northeast of Brazil, a region with the highest rate of poverty and unemployment in the country.

The Northeastern states are also home to the majority of sex trafficking victims—there are an estimated half million child sex workers in Brazil. This enormous number is only expected to increase this month with the massive influx of tourists for the Olympic Games. There are fears it may have already started with the recent rescue of eight teenage girls who were forced to work in a sex-trafficking ring near the Olympic venue. As the Olympic games progress it will be a reminder that human trafficking can occur at any point during the Rio Olympic Games—from the laborers who built the Olympic Village before the games to the sexual exploitation of locals during the 16-day event.

(Article originally published by Michelle Lillie on Human Trafficking Search)

For the Displaced, the Olympics of Rio have nothing to do with our story

From the Washington Post, by columnist Sally Jenkins

RIO DE JANEIRO — Just over there, the dolphin-backed Michael Phelps glides through another heat. Over here, a lone ramshackle favela house practically leans against the Olympic Park where Phelps swims. Just over there, Simone Biles does a breathtaking handspring. Over here, the sodium stadium lights glint on the scarred hardpan that was once a vibrant community before it was bulldozed to make room for the Rio Games.

Just over there, the International Broadcast Center rises like a monolith, while over here it casts a shadow over the listing sheet metal roof of Delmo de Oliveira’s favela house, which sits directly across the parking lot. Just over there, Katie Ledecky lashes through the water, but over here there is no crowd noise, just a young man playing guitar for a handful of residents who refused to be evicted even as the Games begin. Just over there, International Olympic Committee members enjoy prime seating and dine on a per diem of $450 a day, while over here, the Brazilian minimum wage amounts to $228 a month, and nobody has a ticket to the Olympics, even though it’s just 50 yards away,

“If they didn’t want us to stay here, I don’t imagine they’ll invite us inside,” says Maria Da Penha Macena, 51.

The extent to which the Olympic “movement” has become a destructive force, driven by an officialdom whose signature is indifference, can be seen just outside the Olympic Park fences, and I mean just outside. The Vila Autodromo favela was once a working-class neighborhood of 3,000 residents curling around a lagoon and the perimeter of the park. Now all that’s left is Olympic parking lot tarmac, raw dirt and 20 tiny white utilitarian cottages, built grudgingly by the city as a concession to a core of families who refused to leave even as their homes were demolished. For a while, some of them lived in converted shipping containers. One of the new cottages bears a sign: “Museum of the Evicted,” it reads.

Most of the other 800 families who used to live here were persuaded to move to public housing or bought out or both. But not Da Penha, who once had a three-story home with a fruit tree garden. Or Delmo de Oliveira, 51, who won a hard-fought legal injunction prohibiting his favela house from being pulled down, though he doesn’t live in it anymore. He has left it standing mainly as a “symbol,” he says.

“The Olympics has nothing to do with our story,” he said through Washington Post reporter Dom Phillips, who acted as interpreter in conversations with residents about their battle to save their homes.

The thing to understand about a favela is that, more often than not, someone’s grandfather laid the ground floor 40 or so years ago. Generation builds on generation: De Oliveira built his home on top of his mother’s. People work and save for years for the money to buy the ochre bricks, small sacks of cement, corrugated sheet metal that they use to build hand over hand. What looks like a shanty represents decades of precious labor.

About a quarter of Rio de Janeiro’s population lives in favelas, which despite their lean-to appearance have tile floors, plumbing and electricity, sometimes siphoned from the city with a tangle of cables. In de Oliveira’s case, cables and pipes run like vines up the side of his house, alongside a corrugated iron staircase that rises up the exterior.

The residents of Vila Autodromo were among an estimated 60,000 people who lost homes to the Rio Games, which is part of a larger effort to turn the Barra da Tijuca area into condo-rich suburbia. The local developer, Carlos Carvalho, has declared bluntly there is no place for the poor here. “Some things won’t do,” he told BBC Brasil. The bulldozers and claws came in and started ripping away the masonry and prying up the metal. Residents say they were pressured, intimated, even threatened.

“We were being swallowed up,” De Oliveira said.

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Rio Olympics linked to Human Rights Abuses

The 2016 Olympics have prompted widespread violations of children’s rights and other civil liberties, according to a new dossier of alleged abuses compiled by academics and nongovernmental organisations.

Children in one of the largest favela complexes in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Thousands are being displaced ahead of 2016 Olympics and losing access to social services. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Evictions, police violence and poor labour conditions top a long list of problems linked to next year’s Games in Rio de Janeiro, claim the coalition of activists led by the Comité Popular who are calling on the International Olympic Committee to pay greater heed to human rights.

Brazil officials evict families from homes ahead of 2016 Olympic Games

 

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Their report – Exclusion Games – claims that at least 4,120 families have lost their homes and another 2,486 are threatened with removal as a result of infrastructure projects associated with last year’s World Cup and the upcoming Olympics. As a result, they say, thousands of children have been displaced and left – at least temporarily – unable to access education, healthcare and other social services.

The dossier claims other youths have been the victims of an uptick in police and army violence as a result of a struggling favela pacification program that is part of the city’s efforts to prepare for mega-events. Some have been shot and killed, many wounded and countless others psychologically scarred by gunfights and tension.

Terre des Hommes, the NGO that contributed the chapter on children, has produced video testimonies from some of those affected, including Naomy, a 12-year-old girl who sees swaths of her community Vila Autódromo demolished to make way for the Olympic Park, and Gabriel, a 13-year-old boy who was hit by a bullet while playing marbles after the army moved in to the Complexo da Maré favela complex ahead of the World Cup.

The report cites earlier studies by Brunel University, which found that risks of child exploitation – particularly with regard to labour and eviction – increased during previous mega sporting events such as the South Africa World Cup in 2010.

It also includes more recent research by Dundee University and the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro into the impact of the World Cup on local children. Among many concerns, it noted the disappearances of several street children who were removed from the streets in “social cleansing” operations ahead of major events.

Read more here:  http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/08/rio-olympics-2016-human-rights-violations-report