Rio De Janeiro, Brazil – This city’s famed Carnaval arrives this weekend with its usual flurry of drums, feathers and sequins – and more politics than ever before.
Neighborhood groups, or samba schools, that mount the season’s widely watched parades have prepared floats and theme songs tackling the hottest topics of the day, ranging from environmental disputes to a government bribery scandal that has gripped Brazil for months.
Even regional politics will be in play, with Venezuela’s leftist president Hugo Chavez spending hundreds of thousands of dollars of his country’s oil earnings to push his agenda of a united Latin America.
Politics and samba have always mixed during Brazil’s annual orgy of skin and percussion, but this year is setting a record for polemics, said Carnaval scholar Haroldo Costa.
“The songs and themes of the different groups is like a running commentary on what’s happening in the world,” Costa said. “It’s where people talk about what’s on their mind.” (EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM) Among blocos, or small, informal bands of musicians who march through the city’s streets, the bribery scandal has provided rich fodder. The members of one group perform in underwear overflowing with cash, a jab at a government aide apprehended last July with about $200,000 in Brazilian and U.S. currency in his underwear.
Chavez’s contribution to the Vila Isabel samba school, one of the city’s largest, has triggered the most heat, though foreign support isn’t unprecedented. Last year, Denmark sponsored a school that paid homage to Danish children’s book writer Hans Christian Andersen.
But Chavez’s ongoing war of words with the United States has made Venezuela’s contribution controversial.
Vila Isabel’s theme this year is “I’m crazy about you, America,” and its floats feature towering, cartoonish representations of Mayan pyramids, Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda and other Latin American icons. One sports an enormous likeness of one of Chavez’s idols, South American independence hero Simon Bolivar, who also advocated a unified Latin America.
The event, watched around the world, is a perfect place to broadcast Chavez’s vision of Latin American unity in the face of U.S.
dominance, said Nelson Gonzalez Leal, a spokesman for the country’s embassy in Brazil.
It’s also a way to promote Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, PDVSA, which is the official donor. PDVSA has bought prominent billboard space at the Sambodromo, the site of the annual parade. The company’s ad reads, “PDVSA is in Carnaval. Venezuela is in Brazil.” “Venezuela doesn’t consider Carnaval a political platform, but it’s a way to give PDVSA a bigger presence in Brazil,” Gonzalez Leal said.
Vila Isabel’s artistic producer, Alexandre Louzada, denied any political intent in accepting the Venezuelan funds, although he echoed Chavez’s call for regional unity. He wouldn’t say how much PDVSA had given, but he confirmed that it’s the biggest sponsor of Vila Isabel’s $1.9 million Carnaval entry.
“Our themes are cultural,” Louzada said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the empire or the politics of Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution.” Rival samba school Mangueira also jumped into the political maelstrom this year by picking as its parade theme one of Brazil’s most intense environmental debates.
Mangueira’s parade pays elaborate homage to the dying Sao Francisco River in central Brazil, which the government plans to reroute to Brazil’s parched northern regions.
Environmentalists have warned the plan will kill off the river, and a Brazilian bishop staged an 11-day hunger strike late last year to protest the project.
With Mangueira’s theme song this year exulting the river as a “fountain of life” full of “water for drink and travel” for the country’s northern states, many have accused the school of endorsing the rerouting project, an interpretation that Mangueira spokeswoman Marcia Rosario vehemently denies.
“Whether the rerouting is good or bad, it has nothing to do with Mangueira,” she said.
Nonetheless, the leaders of the state of Ceara, which would benefit from the government project, have poured about $240,000 into Mangueira’s parade this year, more than it spent on its own popular Carnaval festivities.
Rio’s celebration kicks off Saturday, with parades by smaller samba schools. The larger samba schools, such as Vila Isabel, begin marching Sunday, with Vila Isabel’s appearance scheduled for 1:20 a.m. Monday.
