“I didn’t have any idea how difficult this would be,” said Eraldo Boechat Leal, executive coordinator of the Unidade Gestora do Projeto Copa (“UGP Copa”), the project management unit overseeing all World Cup preparations for the state of Amazonas. “It was a huge, huge, huge challenge.”

Leal and I had lunch recently at a restaurant on the banks of the Rio Negro, an Amazon tributary that had supplied our spread of baked tambaqui fish and bolinhos de bacalhão (fried codfish). Outside the windows, an afternoon monsoon obscured the view onto an inlet littered with refuse, filled with fishing boats, and surrounded by colorful pink and orange shanty homes. The previous evening, Arena da Amazônia had hosted the top-flight Brazilian team Santos, giving Leal and his team a final chance to iron out the wrinkles before Manaus hands the stadium keys to FIFA at the end of May.

But “wrinkles” may be an understatement, considering that Arena da Amazônia saw three construction-related deaths—out of the eight total deaths that have occurred during Brazil’s $11 billion World Cup preparations. This is four times as many deaths as South Africa experienced during its preparations for the 2010 World Cup. Leal, however, was nonplussed. “We had almost four years of building and construction from the bottom until the stadium was ready,” he said. “We’re saying close to 1,500 days, with workers every day. At least eight hours a day and, in some months, three shifts of eight hours. Imagine how many events happened without accident.”

Not that all the work is done. Manaus is still rushing to complete sidewalks and roads outside the arena, while other stadiums such as the Arena de São Paulo are yet to be completed. I wanted to see these last-minute preparations first hand, and so I arrived to Manaus in late April to live here for three months while reporting on the tournament and more generally about the dynamics between environment and industry for The Christian Science Monitor, where I am a correspondent and an editor. I’d lived in Rio previously but never been to Manaus before, which people in Rio consider a continent away.

I was at the May 8 test-run match between São Paulo state’s Santos (the winningest team in Brazilian history) and Amazonas state’s Princesa do Solimões (whose team highlight is having once been good enough to compete in the Serie B division, which is a full division below the Serie A). And, admittedly, I was also one of many people posing for photos outside and inside the beautiful white stadium, designed to resemble a traditional indigenous straw basket.

The stadium stands in juxtaposition to most everything else about this unruly and unplanned city, constantly clogged with cars and buses because of the absence of ring roads or bypasses. Many people in Manaus work in jobs related to the free trade zone created in 1967 under the military government as a geopolitical strategy to populate and guard this porous border region. Since then Manaus has become the nation’s fastest-growing city, with a population of 2 million, and its third-largest industrial hub, a base for 550 major companies from Samsung to Honda assembling pieces of TVs and motorbikes that are shipped in from around the world and then shipped 900 miles back downriver to the Atlantic Coast for distribution to Brazil’s more populous southern states.

The future of the city is inextricably tied to the future of the free trade zone, which Congress is currently debating whether to extend by 50 years to 2073. Arena da Amazônia is a symbol that Manaus is here to stay, regardless. Some 20,000 people had quickly snatched up tickets for the sold-out May 8 match (only half the arena was open) and there was a palpable excitement that the famed Santos—the team forever associated with Pelé—had deigned to fly 1,700 miles to the Amazon. Even the police on guard couldn’t take their eyes off the field, stepping forward to the guardrail whenever Princesa managed to mount an attack against the visiting Goliath.

During the second half, I made my way up to the security control room, escorted by two members of the military police. There, in an extra-large luxury box high above the field, I met Igor Menezes Cordovil—who will oversee all city security during the World Cup (FIFA itself is in charge of security inside all stadiums). The white-walled room was filled with desks and computers and security monitors with feeds from 107 cameras inside the stadium and 50 cameras around the perimeter.

“Intelligence services saw you,” Menezes told me. “They asked me who you were.”

For this trial run, Menezes had deployed a veritable army of 3,500 security personnel that included police from the civil, mounted, military, federal, and special forces; a traffic unit; a bomb squad; gate stewards checking tickets and enforcing rules; and volunteers. The security room was connected in real time to the city’s command center a couple of miles away. Menezes claimed that in the event of an incident, it would take less than eight minutes to evacuate all 42,000 spectators—though it took me 10 minutes just to walk up the long concrete ramps into the stadium, let alone reach the nose-bleed section.

So far, instead of security problems, Manaus officials have encountered cultural hurdles that would be unfamiliar to other World Cup host cities. Because Manaus doesn’t have a team of its own or a tradition of hosting big matches, Manaus fans didn’t know to arrive early to a match, which meant many were rushing into the stadium at the last minute, causing confusion over seating. Amazonian weather is another challenge. The high humidity and heat—averaging 93 percent humidity and 81 degrees in June—are more than a concern for players and coaches: The tropical weather repeatedly delayed stadium construction and caused Manaus to miss FIFA’s end-of-2013 deadline for finishing the stadium.

It rains so much in Manaus that even as the rest of Brazil is experiencing its worst drought in decades, the stadium here is recycling rainwater for both the field irrigation and sanitation systems. Recently, heavy rains caused a partial ceiling collapse at the newly upgraded international airport, according to local reports.

The bigger challenge for Manaus, according to Leal, still lies ahead, in ensuring that the World Cup leaves behind a positive legacy and that the arena does not become the white elephant that critics have predicted. “We designed the World Cup in Manaus to provide a legacy to our people,” Leal said. “All the things we’re doing, every detail is connected to people.” That means using the event to attract investment and speed up construction of other planned city projects, such as a new water treatment system. It means reframing the World Cup not as a “cost” but as an “investment.”

Brazil already faced an uphill slog in recouping its investment. As Americas Quarterly detailed in an article three years ago, the World Cup normally only generates $3.5 billion in revenue (most going to FIFA), but Brazil would incur costs more than three times greater. The physical legacy of the World Cup, therefore, would need to yield a future stream of financial benefits for Brazil to recoup costs.

“I think it will be a waste of money,” Eryco Gomez, a 20-year-old biology student here in Manaus, told me in one of many conversations I’ve had with disgruntled Brazilians. “We don’t have good teams in Manaus, so why do we need a good stadium? After the World Cup, this stadium will be nothing.”

Many Brazilians have come out against hosting the World Cup because of the soaring costs and pervasive corruption. Massive nationwide protests erupted a year ago during the Confederations Cup, with fans booing President Dilma Rousseff during an opening event and later marching to the chant “Não vai ter Copa!” (“There won’t be a Cup”). Leal and Menezes told me that such protests in Manaus have been minimal and nonviolent.

“It’s going to be a strong emotion to see the World Cup open in Manaus,” Leal said. “I believe I will not hold back tears.”

I imagine the same for many people looking upon the future shell of the Arena da Amazônia, memories fading of the highly anticipated face-offs here between England’s Wayne Rooney and Italy’s Mario Balotelli, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and USA’s Clint Dempsey. It is hard not to draw parallels to the grand opening in 1896 of the city’s Teatro Amazonas, a world-class opera house built with riches from the rubber boom to lure the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso into the Amazon. The city’s downward spiral started soon after as Asia began producing rubber more efficiently, and the opera house was shuttered from 1924 until 1997.

Today, no one seems to remember if Caruso ever actually came.

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These are some of the questions that my wife and I have been asking ourselves since February 12, when members of Venezuela’s political opposition marched on downtown Caracas and were attacked by supporters of the recently deceased president, Hugo Chávez. Two students were shot in the head and killed, and the subsequent rage pushed the opposition to continue the most recent series of protests against the regime that inherited Chávez’s idea of power.

We live in an apartment half a block away from Plaza Altamira in Caracas, one of the main sites of the upheaval; several times, the tide of the struggle has penetrated the borders of our private life.

The origins of all this mayhem date back to Venezuela’s surreal chavista experiment, but the immediate trigger was a protest following an attempted rape at a college campus in San Cristóbal, the capital of the state of Táchira, on the Colombian border. The National Guard responded with extreme force, the demonstrators multiplied, and two opposition politicians—the youthful and charismatic former Caracas mayor Leopoldo López and congresswoman María Corina Machado—claimed that the only way to save the country was to occupy the streets and to build up the pressure against Chávez’s chosen heir, President Nicolás Maduro, who took office after winning by less than 2 percent of the vote in contested elections last year. In Maduro’s first year, Venezuela has continued to experience the levels of urban violence, inflation, and scarcity of basic goods usually associated with wartime.

López has since been detained by the authorities, and he is not alone. Foro Penal, a group of human rights lawyers, estimates that 15 people have died in the protests, and more than 700 protesters have been arrested. Reported cases of torture and abuse keep mounting, attributed to the three forces leading the crackdown: the Bolivarian National Police (named after Chávez’s inspiration, Simon Bolívar, Venezuela’s George Washington), the Bolivarian National Guard, and the fearsome colectivos, hard-line leftist groups reminiscent of the Cuban-financed urban guerrillas of the 1960s—except these guys have fast motorcycles, assault rifles, and total support from the government.

Demonstrators, for their part, have started blocking streets in their own middle-class neighborhoods in a blind expression of fear, rage, and desperation that exacerbates the country’s economic paralysis and the shortages that worsen the haves-versus-have-nots dichotomy chavismo is built on.

Throughout these dark days, my wife and I had been trying to keep our baby girl safe. Every day there have been protests in Plaza Altamira. A few nights have been very violent, and two even nightmarish. Those evenings, we had to take refuge in my home office, which has no windows that look into the street. There, between jazz records, old magazines, and a messy desk, my wife and our daughter slept in the guest bed while the National Guard hunted down the students they had just expelled from the square with tear gas and plastic shotgun pellets.

The National Guard wanted to take the students back to their headquarters, where, according to many student accounts, some would be tortured and handed back to their parents for a ransom that could climb to as much as $10,000 per prisoner. In U.S. dollars, of course—not even the regime’s thugs have faith in their own currency.

So we shut all the windows and waited there, gunfire and sirens blaring around us like a flock of Furies. Our neighbors shouted insults to the policemen or guards pursuing the protestors: “Son of a bitch!” “Cowards!” “Murderers!” To this day, no bullet has hit our apartment, and we’ve managed to keep the tear gas out of home. On Sunday nights, we’ve even enjoyed our dose of True Detective. But we’ve lived on various degrees of alert, and I’ve had to crawl out to the balcony at midnight, like a terrified cockroach, to be sure the gunfire has ended without risking my head.

Aside from looking out the windows, the only way to get some information is Twitter. Chavismo won the battle against its favorite bête noire, the press. My wife and I both trained as journalists, but there is no freedom to do in our country what we know how to do.

Newspapers are now reduced to a single section, whittled down to that ghostly existence by government currency controls that make it practically impossible to obtain newsprint. Bloggers and news aggregator websites are not very trustworthy. Three private TV stations have decided not to report about the protests for fear of summoning the regime’s ire. The public depends on social media to know what’s happening, fearing the day when those channels will also be shut down. On the government’s side, there are dozens of state-financed radio stations, seven TV stations, three newspapers, and an official news agency, all of them supportive of President Maduro. They broadcast the glory of Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution 24/7 and rail against enemies of the government—“fascists,” “homosexuals,” “terrorists,” “CIA agents,” “traitors,” “prostitutes,” “drug addicts,” “psychopaths.”

This is the ideal environment for collective hysteria, just as a civil war would be. But it’s not a civil war, although that’s been mentioned—with anguish, but also a certain eagerness—by people on both sides. Nor is it a coup d’état in progress, as Maduro repeats while he dances salsa in a rally with his wife that invoked the escapist spirit of Carnival.

The president has tried calming the upheaval: extending the Carnival holiday by a week, when his administration will preside over the commemorative anniversary of the first year without the “Supreme and Eternal Commander,” Hugo Chávez. Maduro trusts in the idiosyncratic tendency of Venezuelans to go to the beach and drown their worries in cold beer.

But the opposition is still marching in several places—in some cases under a cloud of tear gas. The colectivos are still shooting and looting, and the situation in the restive state Táchira remains unsettled. For the moment, Chávez’s heirs have no reason to change course: Maduro’s government retains some popularity and controls Congress, the military, the Supreme Court, law enforcement, and the oil revenues. But it can’t control the collapsing economy, and even if the current demonstrations lose momentum, it’s clear several more will follow. Venezuela has entered a state of violence and instability for the foreseeable future.

And we, from our panic room, are sure that this is no place to raise a child.

The post My Panic Room in Caracas appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When I walk to my bus stop in Buenos Aires, I zip my purse shut and clutch it tight to my body, like a football player running toward the end zone. When I play Candy Crush on the subway, I hold my phone in a two-handed death grip, lest it be snatched away. After a girls’ night out, I ask my friend to text me when she’s safely home. On warm spring days, my car windows remain shut because robberies have been known to happen at red lights.

And those deeper down the rabbit hole consider me foolhardily naïve in my lack of precaution. I know people who drive from their guarded apartment building garage to their office parking lot, and who avoid setting foot on the street even in broad daylight. Iron bars cover many ground floor windows on Buenos Aires streets, and increasingly the next floor up, too. Barbed wire wraps around some houses’ entrances like ivy. And then there are those who move to gated communities, where they can finally leave these quotidian safety measures behind—but instead end up living in a sort of custom-designed Truman Show of safety from “others.”

But the higher the walls, the more upper-middle-class porteños seem to be afraid. How necessary are these measures, and the correlated paranoia that seems to seep into every step we take?

Latin America may include some of the most violent places in the world, but that’s hardly a homogeneous statistic that blankets the entire region. Indeed, a recently released United Nations Development Program (UNDP) report on citizen security in Latin America found that Argentina and its Southern Cone neighbors have low rates of homicide.

Argentina’s is slightly below six murders per 100,000 inhabitants—far below the epidemic rates found elsewhere in the region. Robbery rates are fairly high, though the specific statistics vary, and crime increased steadily over the past 20 years—a trendline that influences perceptions more than absolute numbers do.

According to the same report, nearly 18 percent of the Argentine population has been a victim of this type of crime, compared to 25 percent in Ecuador and nearly 11 percent in Chile. Apparently I might be robbed, but probably not killed.

It’s hard to measure personal risk in any situation, and to establish the proper equilibrium between one’s behavior and actual threats. Moreover, people’s risk tolerance, even when actual risk can be assessed, will vary from individual to individual and from society to society, taking into account such things as expectations and the surrounding context.

According to the UNDP report, Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world at 86.5 per 100,000 inhabitants, yet eight out of 10 Honduran citizens feel safe in their neighborhoods. In contrast, in Chile, which has the lowest murder rate in the region (two per 100,000 inhabitants), only seven out of 10 citizens feel safe in their neighborhood. People in Iraq apparently feel slightly safer walking home at night than people in Argentina.

The report’s authors distinguish between the objective dimension of security, related to actual crime and violence, and the subjective dimension, involving feelings of fear and vulnerability. Fear doesn’t only stem from actual crime, but also from the tenor of media coverage about it, the lack of social cohesion in some areas, and a lack of faith in the public institutions charged with ensuring personal safety.

Crime is a very real and pressing problem in Latin America, but an irrational, oversized fear of it is an equally corrosive issue. Robert Muggah, the research director of the Brazilian Igarapé Institute and a consultant for the UNDP report, told me that the mismatch between perceptions of insecurity and actual crime rates can sometimes be explained by the relative increase of crime in some countries, while areas with high murder rates can develop a sort of social tolerance for the phenomenon. The population that is most vulnerable to violent crime—poor , young men—is also the group that is least likely to report fear.

Anecdotes of fear, like a grim card collection, are traded at social gatherings nowadays: friends whose parents’ house was broken into; the friend of a friend who had a gun pointed at his mother in a restaurant; friends who were held hostage at a birthday party while their hosts were robbed; the new vogue of “entraderas,” where thieves seize the moment you open your front door to rob you. And that’s just a recent sampling.

It’s offensive to be skeptical in the face of these stories, but it’s also hard to extrapolate a broader meaning from them. Statistics are powerless in the face of the intense subjectivity of the issue of perception. Rational conversation becomes impossible amid the never-ending litany of fear.

Gabriel Kessler, who wrote a book about the feeling of insecurity in Argentina, noted that there are nearly 10 times more deaths due to improper use of medication than as a byproduct of robbery. Not to mention road accidents.

Some deaths are scarier than others, he posits, and considered less socially acceptable. For example, a recent story about the guy who lived with his mother’s cadaver tied to his kitchen table for 10 years hasn’t inspired anything other than morbid curiosity. It’s not something that the average person can identify with and fear. Rather than a concrete fear of losing material objects or being harmed, it is crime’s sheer randomness that people find so frightening, according to Kessler’s research.

Preying on fear of crime is a political opportunity as well. Opposition politicians campaign on vague “tough on crime” promises. There is perennial national debate over trying minors as adults and the right draconian sentences to deter disadvantaged youth from petty theft. The national government, for its part, has recently proposed a revised and progressive penal code that introduces social considerations into criminal law. But it’s not clear if any crime-oriented measures could ever put a dent in the perceived problem of crime.

Porteños are not alone in their feeling of insecurity: less than 44 percent of Latin Americans feel comfortable walking home at night. We remain a region obsessed with seguridad, or—to be more precise—inseguridad. Harvard Latin America scholar Jorge Domínguez has said the media’s treatment of crime and violence in the region makes it seem as if insecurity is announced on loudspeakers on every street corner. The UNDP report makes special note of the role of the media in fomenting fear, and suggests more care could be taken to avoid fanning the flames.

The Argentine media, with a strong political agenda of its own, does not lag behind its counterparts in sounding the alarm on insecurity. Crime has moved from tabloids to the covers of establishment newspapers. Television crews are stationed at crime sites and endlessly interview victims, their families, and neighbors. The evening news reports are a sickening endless loop of interviews of victims and their families. When nothing new happens, victims of previous crimes are revisited. Crime is something you are presented with all day, every day. It’s hard not to feel as if it’s just a matter of time before you yourself are the victim.

I plead personal confusion, even after reading what the experts have to say. They tell me that the hysterical narrative I’m hearing is typical of my middle-class environment, and that my rejection of the phenomenon is typical of bleeding-heart progressives.

Yet this psychological academic assessment doesn’t really clarify how scared we should be—what I should tell tourists from other cities when they ask me about staying safe in Buenos Aires, or whether I can walk home at night alone, which I stubbornly do, even when I promise my mother I’ll take a cab. And so I am stuck, with little to help me unravel whether my uneventful walk home last night was a reasonable or foolish decision to make.

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