FIFA has announced publicly that the stadiums in São Paulo and Curitiba will not be ready until the last minute. Personally from my years of experience here in Brazil I highly doubt they'll even be ready then. Itaquerão as São Paulo's stadium is commonly known is scheduled to host the opening ceremonies of the World Cup and it's woefully behind schedule. Some 20,000 temporary seats have yet to be installed and a huge section of the roof remains uncompleted as a result of two separate deadly accidents in which 3 workers were killed.
Rio's Antonio Carlos Jobim (Galeão) International Airport suffered an unexplained blackout last week and still has other unresolved problems such as major water leaks. Santos Dumont Airport is closed to arrivals and departures on almost a daily basis due to fog conditions. It is without a doubt the most useless airport in all of Brazil.
In Rio, many of the hotels that were promised to be ready for the World Cup aren't going to be completed, despite large amounts of public funds that were pumped into them by the federal government. Others that were abandoned decades ago and promised to be resurrected to meet the demand for World Cup accommodations in that city still sit abandoned and decaying mired in the crushing bureaucracy that Brazil has long been notorious for.
Other airports which were supposed to be upgraded all over Brazil are never going to be ready in time for the World Cup. The most noted of these is Marechal Rondon Airport in Várzea Grande a neighboring city of Cuiabá - MT which will be given a makeshift temporary canvas terminal roof. Worse still the transportation link from the airport was never constructed.
In Manaus, Amazonas the stadium is the ONLY thing that is ready. Every other project in the city and hotels that had been promised never got out of the starting gate. The stadium itself is destined to be a white elephant since Manaus neither has its own soccer team nor does it have a sufficient fan base if it had one.
Violence and protests have returned to plague Rio de Janeiro, as everyone predicted they would. Violence has returned to supposedly pacified favelas (slums) like Rocinha and the Complexo do Alemão. The Maré favela is proving much more difficult to gain control over than either police or the Secretary of Public Security ever imagined. The criminal activities of these favelas has simply been relocated to surrounding cities like Niteroi, São Gonçalo and the Baixada Fluminense. Organized crime figures have moved to even more remote cities in the state like Maricá, Buzios, Cabo Frio, Macaé and Campos dos Goytacazes among others.
São Paulo also is gripped by a wave of violence and protests that saw some 38 transit buses set afire in the garage over the Easter weekend in Osasco in Greater São Paulo. 8 young thugs walked into the facility completely unchallenged, since nobody would ever think (given the number of bus arsons that have already taken place throughout the state) to have armed security guards posted at transit garages. The area surrounding Itaquerão has become a zone of rampant street prostitution and all the criminal activities related to it. Blitz armed robberies of people withdrawing funds from banks and ATMs, known here as Saidinha do Banco are a daily occurrence everywhere in Greater São Paulo.
With just over a month remaining to the beginning of the games public authorities all over Brazil appear to be wholly incapable of getting control over the security problems, massive overspending, delays and cancellations. Clearly it isn't something that they can possibly come anywhere near resolving at this late date.
From my experience here, I have only one word of advice for anyone thinking of coming to Brazil for the 2014 FIFA World Cup
.. DON'T.
Cheers,
William James Woodward, EB Experts Team