THE ROVING
EYE The hottest party in the
galaxy By Pepe Escobar
RIO DE JANEIRO - It's midnight on Friday
at the monstrous Help disco in Copacabana. Rio's
carnival has not even started, but the posse of
five black brothers and a southern whitey in
basketball T-shirts fresh from Baghdad is on a
mission from God - or rather King Momo (the
sovereign of carnival).
The mission is as
delicate as patrolling Haifa Street in surge mode:
but this is target identification with a twist, as
the only heat-seeking missiles on view are a horde
of spectacularly
curvaceous Brazilian babes
and ueber-transvestites, ranging from coal
to cream to golden hues, ready to inflict maximum
damage on the "enemy".
As the American
wild bunch enters (screams?) "Help" - roughly a
larger-than-life Bangkok girlie bar set as a
rollerball arena - to the sound of ear-splitting
funk do morro and past a table full of
Muslim Indians gone crazy on lethal caipirinhas,
they finally reach the Green Zone: or Paradise in
the carnivalesque geopolitical scheme of things.
One black brother can't help it: "Make my day,
Muqtada al-Sadr!"
These "maintenance" guys
on an officially sanctioned 15-day
rest-and-recreation break are among hundreds of
soldiers, security forces, private contractors and
assorted mercenaries who have subscribed to the
hottest ticket in summer (in the global South):
Miami-based Tours Gone Wild's US$3,000, 10-day
package to Rio.
And it's not only Iraq:
they come all the way from Afghanistan, Central
Asia and all points north and south in the
worldwide empire of US military bases. Message to
the Pentagon: a few nights in Rio and US troops in
Iraq would never dream of perpetrating another
Mahmoudiya, where soldiers gang-raped a teenage
Iraqi girl and burned her body to bury the
evidence.
This Asia Times Online
correspondent and an editor at France24 - the new
French 24-hour news channel - hit the same groove,
sort of. We had had enough of tracking the Iraq
quagmire, the imminent war on Iran, the latest
al-Qaeda rap on video and Kim Jong-il's
machinations. It was time to explore a new breed
of combat mission.
Rio's carnival pace is
as frantic as patrolling Baghdad. The jungle
groove is relentless. The sensuous, steamy city is
like a huge, pulsating vulva sucking in everything
in its stride. The headline in one of the local
gory dailies unveils what goes on in the entrails
of the system: "Red Command films killing of Fed
and shows the video in a funk ball". The Red
Command is the prime drug gang in Rio. A massive
federal police force had been sent to Rio even
before carnival. And funk balls - heavily
controlled by the drug rings - are where the
underprivileged masses get down to party.
The Sambadrome - conceived by the late,
great anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro as a stage for
"the biggest popular party in the world" - is the
arena for the glitzy, wealthy, sprawling samba
schools, which are in fact run like corporations.
This week the top 13 samba schools were spending a
total of almost $30 million (not to mention dodgy
undeclared funds) in allegories and costumes
alone. The Sambadrome extravaganza is now a staple
of global mainstream tourism. Meanwhile the real
action - the Rio version of roadside bombs - is
the bloco.
Blocos are sort
of spontaneous neighborhood associations, fueled
by a well-oiled marching band, whose purpose is to
dress or cross-dress outrageously and hit the
streets, slowly crawling from bar to bar, dancing
and singing at the top of their lungs a classic
repertoire of marchinhas. Musically, the
marchinha ("carnival march") epitomizes
what the perfect carnival tune is all about: a
kind of revved-up samba with a mean break beat,
hilarious horn breaks and pun-filled lyrics. At
9am on Saturday, no fewer than 200,000 people were
already massed under the scorching heat to hit the
Black Ball Bloco - a crowd three times the
Sambadrome's.
Surviving Help the night
before involves hours of lounging beachside
protected from the scorching sun by a steady
supply of fresh juices extracted from mind-blowing
Amazon rainforest fruits - just in time to catch
the classic Banda de Ipanema, the healthy,
typically Rio crossover of anarchism with family
values. An inevitable assortment of devils,
transvestites, fake office workers, the occasional
Angelina Jolie and a gorgeous Miss Piggy are on
show.
The Band of Ipanema, founded in
1965, always mocked the Brazilian military
dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. The front
banner still reads "Yolhesman Crisbeles" - which
means absolutely nothing in any language, living
or dead, but for the military, it was a subversive
communist code. Imagine the Pentagon reaction to a
Band of Baghdad hitting the streets of Sadr City.
One of the band's founders claims it is the only
institution that ever worked in Brazil's colorful
history - because it has no platform, no rules, no
statutes and no boring people.
By Saturday
the hefty Anglo-American contingent is also going
nuts. In Bahia, Fatboy Slim gets ready to DJ on a
trio eletrico - a truck-mounted sound
system. Brazil's minister of culture, iconic
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