What the Olympics Mean for Rio

This past weekend, Brazil’s acting President, Michel Temer, attended a ceremony to inaugurate the subway line that will take people to and from Barra, the Rio de Janeiro suburb where most of the venues for this year’s summer Olympics were built. The event was meant to showcase how the people of Rio will benefit from hosting the Olympics, but it couldn’t avoid calling to mind a litany of issues. Like many of Rio’s other Olympics-related infrastructure projects, the subway line was barely finished in time for the games. One of the construction firms that worked on the line had recently confessed to paying kickbacks on the contract. And, most troubling for the city’s largely working-class population, the ten-mile line served primarily to link two wealthy beachside areas—Barra and Ipanema—while a planned extension into the poorer north side of town remains on the drawing board.