For the Academicians of Rocinha, the samba school in the most famous favela in Brazil, 2021 should announce a new dawn.
Twelve months ago, the troupe had hit one of its worst ebbs: drowning in debt, divided by internal fights and relegated to the third division of the Rio carnival championship after being last in the group. This month, with the return of annual festivities, its new directors were determined to recover.
“I am extremely competitive,” said Marcos Freitas Ferreira, a native of Rocinha who became president after last year’s collapse and the dream of taking his school back to Brazil. Special Group, the first carnival league. “We need to do things that people will still be talking about a century from now.”
The coronavirus outbreak, which killed almost 240,000 Brazilians, temporarily damaged Ferreira’s reaction, forcing the cancellation of Rio’s official samba parades – which should have started on Friday – for the first time since they started in 1932. Not even the second world war managed to extinguish the spectacular night processions for which the cultural capital of Brazil is famous.
As a storm hit the frighteningly subdued thirst of his school at the feet of the gigantic hillside community this week, Ferreira said that depriving Rio of its carnival is like denying a man water.
“It is surreal. I’ve never seen anything like it, ”sighed the 39-year-old lawyer, looking around an almost empty ballroom that, in normal times, would be packed with costume designers and performers making the final preparations for this weekend’s contest.
Jorge Mariano, the school’s carnival director, said he felt a confusion of emotions at the absence of a show that would define his life and provide a much needed job for residents of the community of 100,000 inhabitants and favelas across Rio.
“There is sadness. There is emptiness. There is nostalgia, ”said Mariano, displaying a 23-page notebook full of fancy costume designs and dusted with feathers that would no longer be made, at least not this year.
“Not to mention all the people who are financially dependent on it – the accessory makers, the seamstresses, the carpenters, the janitors, the security guards, the guy who sells all the food for them.”
Marcus Paulo, the Carnival who designs Rocinha’s kaleidoscopic costumes and floats, said he had never seen his hometown so out of fashion.
“Everything is so sad. It is as if we were not in Rio, but in some other horrible dimension, at another time ”, said the 44-year-old, sorry.
“It is such a colorful city at this time of year – but everything looks so gray and somber without the sound of percussion.”
Until recently, Rio officials hoped they could simply postpone the festivities from February to July, when the worst of the epidemic could have passed. But carioca The terrible number of deaths, which in more than 17,500 is greater than any other Brazilian city, fears about new variants and a second wave, and the delay in vaccination sank that idea.
Earlier this month, Mayor Eduardo Paes announced the total cancellation of the festivities between February 12 and 20 and warned groups that disobeying them would be banned from participating in next year’s event. All police licenses were canceled as authorities prepared to extinguish any illegal revelry this weekend.
“Don’t be silly,” Paes asked those who were thinking of playing in a Covid era.
Oscar Niemeyer’s Sambadrome, with a capacity of 88,500 people, where many of the parades are held, has been transformed into a drive-through immunization center, where local elderly people are being vaccinated.
Rocinha samba dancers he said that, despite all their melancholy, they supported the cancellation. They hoped that Paes, a samba enthusiast who lives near his community, would visit them soon and help them out of a financial chasm aggravated by the pandemic.
They were less kind to Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who attacked carnival, rarely ventures into red-brick slums, and whose contemptuous response to the coronavirus has been globally condemned.
Bolsonaro said his decision not to impose any type of blockade was designed to protect Brazil’s economy and the livelihood of workers living in low-income communities, such as Rocinha.
But the samba dancers he had little time for a leader who avoided masks, proclaimed unproven drugs, called Covid a “little flu” and showed his own vaccination program that could allow them to parade again.
“He is not interested in people. This president only cares about himself, ”said Maurício Amorim, a veteran composer who joined Academicos in 1991, three years after its foundation with the help of Dénis da Rocinha, a gangster who controlled the favela and the drug trade for two decades. .
Dennis, who allegedly chose the school symbol – a multicolored butterfly – while behind bars on charges of trafficking, was found dead in his cell in January 2001. Weeks later, Scholars secured promotion to the second division of the carnival with a procession that honored Brazilian women. In 2005, they reached the first division.
Mariano said he is determined to repeat and overcome the glories of the past and said his mind was already teeming with ideas for the 2022 parade, which the mayor promised last week to be the best in Rio’s history.
“Rocinha is a relatively young school, compared to the others, but we have a great vision of the future”, said the sambista while standing on the roof of his family’s house at the peak of the favela, looking at the silent landscape, but still breathtaking. .
In the coming days, he planned to enter the studio to record the samba track that he hoped would help catapult academics back into the second division next year.
“Samba can agonize”, shone Amorim, citing a letter from one of the biggest living names in Brazil samba dancers, Nelson Sargento, who was recently vaccinated against Covid-19 at the age of 96. “But she will never die.”
Additional reporting by Alan Lima