Rio de Janeiro was warned of the economic stresses an Olympics can place on a city - and now they are paying the price. State-employed performers have lined the streets in protest of late paycheques while hospitals overflow with long lines of patients waiting attention, news.com.au reported.
One doctor in Rio’s Tijuca neighbourhood summed up the desperate situation in one line: “It’s total chaos”.The Olympics brought a number of memorable moments for both the city and visiting countries throughout the fortnight-long “party” in Brazil’s capital - but residents knew what would come after the expensive festivities came to a close. “I think the Olympics were like the last ball of the empire,” one protester told PRI.org.
“We threw a party but we knew that this was going to happen afterwards.”Brazil’s Institute of Public Security revealed crime rates in Rio have soared since 2015 with street robberies between the January-October period jumping from 75,000 to 104,000. Wilful homicides also saw an increase from 3,400 to 4100 over the same period - but the problem doesn’t stop there.
Rio owes over 71 billion reas ($28.6 billion) to the federal government and other external entities according to their national Finance Ministry with the state beginning to miss debt repayments as early as May. “What we can say is that it was a bad decision from a financial point of view, and that giving these tax cuts did not result in jobs or economic growth to Rio,” political scientist Mauricio Santoro says. “And now the state is broken, and it has to cut salaries and pensions, so hundreds of thousands of people are going to suffer very negative impacts because of these decisions.”
Rio’s performer protests are one of the many displays of dissent for late payments since the close of the Olympics. In October, 400 cleaning workers rallied outside the Rio 2016 headquarters brandishing brooms in protest in demand for their pay. Despite its woes, Rio’s Olympic organisation committee believes the problem is slowly getting better and promised the owed money is on its way. The International Olympic Committee is set to pay the next month. “We will make sure everybody gets paid,” Mario Andrada, communications head for the organising committee said in an interview per Bloomberg.com. “The picture is better now. There was a little moment of panic.” The organising committee is set to disband in 2017 with organisers assuring their debts will be repaid.