Rio de Janeiro has in recent years evicted drug dealers from hillside slums, carved fast-moving bus lanes into sclerotic streets and cracked down on unauthorized food vendors along the city’s 93km of beaches.
Now, as they gear up for this year’s carnival, officials are taking aim at another old Rio scourge: public urinating.
Urine flows as freely during Rio’s famous annual festivities as beer and the cane liquor known as cachaca.
For as long as locals remember, the sight of people relieving themselves has been as much a part of carnival as half-naked women, samba schools, drag queens, body paint and drunk foreigners.
However Rio, Brazil’s second-largest city and its most popular tourist destination, now wants to stop the peeing.
To sanitize some of the revelry, officially starting today, city hall has deployed thousands of agents to spot and detain offenders.
“It’s the biggest complaint we get,” says Alex Costa, Rio’s secretary for public order, echoing angry residents whose doors, curbs and car tires get anointed by bursting bladders.
In recent weeks, the city has touted the number of mijoes, or “pee-ers,” that agents have detained during pre-carnival rehearsals and block parties: 321 since Jan. 20, including 16 women and three foreigners. Particularly lewd offenders are fined, but most detainees merely get shuttled to police stations where they miss the rest of the party.
The pee patrol is part of an overall effort to impose more order as carnival’s popularity soars.
Rio’s carnival stems from the tradition by some Catholics to get sins out of their system before the austere season of Lent.
Not too long ago, a volatile economy and rampant crime relegated most of the celebration to a sterile, concrete promenade where professional parade organizers compete in a televised spectacle. It is a far cry from grass-roots revelry.
As Brazil’s economy rebounded in recent years, city officials cleaned up Rio’s marquee neighborhoods.
Block parties and amateur street parades blossomed; adding to events expected this year to generate US$665 million for the local economy.
In the past four years, the size of marches by neighborhood groups, trade organizations and other cliques has doubled, attracting a projected 6 million people this carnival.
Nearly 500 blocos, as the bibulous bunches are known, are scheduled to march by carnival’s end on Wednesday.
To cope, the city has deployed 18,000 portable toilets around town. Along with thousands of police already on patrol, 7,700 municipal agents, more than twice as many as last year, control everything from unlicensed street vendors to illegal parking.
They are also pursuing pee-ers.
In plain clothes so as not to draw suspicion, the agents stood out anyway among 25,000 partiers donning everything from lingerie and Angry Birds masks to grass skirts and devil suits.
The agents milled about side streets and a nearby canal, where their targets might drop trousers.
At first, the pickings were slim.
However, soon enough, two men in miniskirts and sailor caps stumbled toward the wall of a hippodrome. Four agents surrounded the men just as they started to urinate.
Though perturbed, the mijoes finished the task at hand. When they turned, the agents accosted them.
In a square, the revelers rallied like runners at the end of drunken marathon. Catching mijoes was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Meanwhile, Felipe Rodrigues, a 21-year-old soldier in plaid shorts, unzipped by the side of a bush.
Maywald snuck to the other side and pretended to field a phone call. When Rodrigues was done, Maywald walked over and collared him.
“Of course, I was in the wrong,” Rodrigues said, “but I really had to go.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not