Brazil forcibly displaced thousands of people to make way for the World Cup

[kiva]

5. And if you think it's bad this year in Brazil,

just wait for 2022...oh wait, we don't need to because the death toll has already begun:

The 2014 World Cup is just one month away, but it’s not too early to start feeling intense emotions about the 2022 World Cup. Specifically, fury. That’s the feeling I left with after watching ESPN’s excellent E:60 documentary on the human rights disaster that’s unfolding eight years ahead of the Qatar World Cup.

From the opening shots of a small, red coffin carrying a young migrant worker, E:60: Trapped in Qatar is a gut punch. In addition to interviewing widows of Nepalese migrant workers, reporter Jeremy Schaap travelled to Qatar and took unauthorized cameras to see laborers’ cramped, squalid living conditions. Previous journalists had been detained by police for attempting to film in these dilapidated housing projects.

Those terrible images and individual interviews with grieving family members would be infuriating enough, but then the documentary goes into the actual numbers. Because Qatar has such a tiny population—the country has only about 280,000 citizens—and the World Cup is such a large project, most of the work to build the infrastructure and eight to 12 state-of-the-art stadiums will be carried out by the country’s 1.4 million migrant workers. In the past year alone, according to ESPN, 184 Nepali migrant workers have died, mainly from “sudden cardiac death” caused by terrible working conditions and extreme heat. The Nepalese embassy in Qatar, meanwhile, says 400 workers had died on World Cup projects since 2010. And that’s just the Nepalis.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/05/14/qatar_world_cup_migrant_worker_abuses_fifa_needs_to_do_something_about_the.html