Carnaval floats under the influence of one Molotov cocktail too many -- Photo credit: iG
iG reports from downtown São Paulo on acts of vandalism that marred this year’s carnival festivities:
Mayor Gilberto Kassab promised punishment for carnaval societies involved in the tumul during tabulation of judges’ scoring of the city’s competitive Carnaval parades on Tuesday. “We will be relentless”, he said during a press conference today at the Anhembi samba stadium.
SEE ALSO: Mocidade Alegre the victor of São Paulo’s Carnaval 2012
I try not to involve myself too much with local politics — because I find them unfathomable — but I do confess to a certain proprietary feeling about our — I think of him as our — mayor, Kassab.
Either the man is a total idiot or his PR machine is run by idiots.
The latest of his appeals to his core law and order constituency in São Paulo’s prosperous and paranoid”Hygiene City” runs as follows.
Kassab said he will not tolerate connections between the vandalism of the ballot box with leaders of any samba “school,” and was emphatic in saying that he will not rule out breaking off relations with LIGASP, the official league, should one of its member school be found responsible.
Vandal sprints away after seizing and destroying ballot box during vote tally. Shades of Bush v. Gore
“The celebration belongs to the City, not to LIGASP,” he said. According to Kassab, every means will be brought to bear on solving the case by the state judicial police. “Public funding cannot be handed over to a group involved in illegal conduct,” he concluded.
It was either last year or the year before that one of the schools from upstate São Paulo turned out to have been bankrolled by the apocalyptically evil PCC drug gang — just as Rio’s celebration has historic ties with the numbers rackets there.
What I find astonishing, however, is the following admission:
The mayor said that the city invested BRL 23 million in this year’s celebration. According to the terms of its contract with LIGASP, the League was responsible for security at the event.
In response to the incident, Kassab said that Sâo Paulo’s city government would take over security next year.
In a country beset with problems stemming from the de facto privatization of public security — Rio’s paramilitary militias, for example, in which security is sold by off-duty police engaged in a number of illegal side businesses such as black market cable TV – it is astonishing to find this politicians this tone-deaf being allowed anywhere near a microphone by their media handlers.
Kassab closed by saying that the episode, while lamentable, serves as a valuable lesson.
Neymar, the astonishingly gifted young striker for Santos said the same thing after the team’s defeat in the Fifa World Club championship game, which it lost 5-0 to Barcelona: “They taught us a lesson about football.”
The city has been running this event for years, if not decades; you would think it would have amassed a wealth of experience by now.
Meanwhile, this city spends a lot of taxpayer money on advertisments for itself in which it boasts of its capacity to host events on a massive scale, such as ts own version of Madrid’s White Nights — and, and this is the big tamale, the World Cup and Olympic Games not too far in the city’s future.
Currently, the League is responsible for organizing the festivities. It is hired by City Hall to stage the event and takes care of the order of march, the scheduling of technical rehearsals, the credentialing of press coverage, event security, and so on. Until 2011, the schools were divided into two categories, the League and the Super-League.
The League also presumably has a contract for media coverage with the likes of Globo and other homegrown networks.
The League is throwing a press conference of its own this evening:
A LIGA Independente das Escolas de Samba de São Paulo realiza uma coletiva de imprensa nesta quarta-feira, dia 22 de fevereiro, às 15h, em sua sede: Avenida Santos Dumont, 618 – Ponte Pequena (Metrô Armênia), com o presidente da LIGA, Paulo Sérgio Ferreira.
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