For the academics of Rocinha, the samba school in Brazil’s most famous favela, 2021 was to herald a new dawn.
Twelve months ago, the group had hit one of the lowest ever ebbs: drowning in debt, torn by infighting, and relegated to the third division of the Rio Carnival championship after getting bottom of the group. This month, as the annual festivities returned, the new drivers were determined to jump back.
“I am extremely competitive,” said Marcos Freitas Ferreira, a Rocinha resident who became president after last year’s debacle and dreams of leading his school back to the United States. Special group, the main class of carnival. “We need to do things that people will still be talking about in a century.”
The coronavirus outbreak, which killed nearly 240,000 Brazilians, temporarily undermined Ferreira’s backlash, canceling Rio’s official samba parades – which should have started on Friday – for the first time since it began in 1932. Not even World War II. managed to extinguish the spectacular nighttime processions that Brazil’s cultural capital is known for.
When a rainstorm this week hit his school’s eerily understated headquarters at the base of the giant hill community, Ferreira said robbing Rio of its carnival was like denying a human water.
It’s unreal. I’ve never seen anything like it, ” sighed the 39-year-old lawyer, looking around a largely empty dance hall that, in normal times, would have been packed with costume makers and performers finalizing for this weekend’s competition.
Jorge Mariano, the school’s carnival director, said he felt a jumble of emotions in the absence of a spectacle that defines his life and provides much-needed employment opportunities for residents of the 100,000-strong community and favelas across Rio.
There is grief. There is emptiness. There is desire, ”Mariano said, showing off a 23-page sketchbook full of designs for flamboyant feather-dusted costumes that would no longer be made, at least not this year.
“And that’s nothing to say about all those people who depend on this financially – the props, the seamstresses, the carpenters, the cleaners, the guards, the man who sells them all the food.”
Marcus Paulo, the carnival who comes up with Rocinha’s kaleidoscopic costumes and floats, said he’d never seen his seaside birthplace look so out of place.
‘Everything is so uncomfortable. It’s as if we’re not in Rio, but in another horrible dimension, at a different point in time, ”the 44-year-old said sadly.
“It’s such a colorful city at this time of year, but everything feels so gray and gloomy without the sound of percussion.”
Until recently, the Rio authorities had hoped they could simply postpone February’s festivities until July, when the worst epidemic could be over. But Rio’s horrible death toll, which is more than 17,500 higher than any other Brazilian city, fears of new variants and a second wave, and the delay in vaccination sank that idea.
Earlier this month, the mayor, Eduardo Paes, announced the complete cancellation of festivities between February 12 and 20, and warned groups that disobeyed that they would be banned from next year’s event. All police leave has been canceled as authorities prepare to ban all unlawful revelry this weekend.
“Don’t be silly,” Paes urged those who wanted to play Covid at a time.
Oscar Niemeyer’s 88,500-seat Sambadrome, which hosts many of the parades, has been transformed into a drive-through immunization center where older residents are vaccinated.
The Rocinha samba dancers said they supported the cancellation despite all their melancholy. They hoped that Paes, a samba lover who lives just down the road from their community, would visit them soon and help them clamber out of a financial precipice exacerbated by the pandemic.
They were less friendly about Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist who has attacked Carnival, rarely ventures into the brick favelas and whose reaction to the coronavirus has been condemned worldwide.
Bolsonaro has claimed that his decision not to impose any form of lockdown was intended to protect the Brazilian economy and the livelihoods of workers in low-income communities such as Rocinha.
But the samba dancers had little time for a leader who has shunned face masks, touted unproven remedies, called Covid a “minor flu” and halted the vaccination program that would allow them to parade again.
‘He’s not interested in the people. This president only cares about himself, ”said Maurício Amorim, a veteran composer who joined Acadêmicos in 1991, three years after it was founded with the help of Dênis da Rocinha, a mobster who controlled the favela and its drug trade for 20 years.
Dênis, who reportedly chose the school’s symbol – a multi-colored butterfly – while behind bars for human trafficking, was found dead in his prison cell in January 2001. Weeks later, the Acadêmicos would be promoted to the second division of the carnival with a procession paying tribute to Brazilian women. In 2005 they reached the top flight.
Mariano said he was determined to repeat and surpass that past glory and said his mind was already buzzing with ideas for the 2022 parade, which the mayor promised last week would be the best in Rio’s history. .
“Rocinha is a relatively young school compared to the others, but we have a grand vision of the future,” said the sambista as he stood on the top of the favela on the roof of his family home and looked out over the muffled but still Rio’s ever-breathtaking scenery. .
Over the next few days, he planned to hit the studio to record the samba track that he hoped would catapult academics back to division two next year.
‘Samba can torment,’ sparkled Amorim, quoting a text from one of Brazil’s best people samba dancers, Nelson Sargento, who was recently vaccinated against Covid-19 at the age of 96. “But it will never die.”
Additional reporting by Alan Lima