I sat down, along with millions of other football enthusiasts, to enjoy/suffer while England’s finest took on the Brazilians, who invariable boast some of the world’s finest footballers. On this occasion the Anglo-Saxons put up a half decent performance in the second half and came within a stone’s throw of stealing a rare victory. As it turned out, the perennial English underperformers will be more than happy with their two-all draw. The match was also a timely reminder that the Brazilian World Cup is a mere twelve months away and judging by the well-fed faces in the beautifully revamped Maracana stadium, it promises to be a welcome diversion from all the political and economic doom and gloom currently sweeping the planet. But not for all Brazilians.

By coincidence rather than design, two days earlier I had sat down to watch a Brazilian docu-drama about a Rio bus hijack carried out thirteen years ago by a lone hijacker whose motive was not entirely clear. The obvious assumption was that he was after a quick financial turnaround and then back onto the streets. But as the documentary unravelled it transpired that the hijack was as much an existential statement as a simple grab for cash. As the clever and sympathetic sociologist explained, the pain of being forced to live on the street is as much about their dispiriting and hopeless ‘invisibility’ as about their debilitating poverty. The wealthy city elites simply refuse to recognise the extreme poverty and brutality that surrounds them. Instead they busy themselves with Carnival, with beach parties and with sporting extravaganzas. This hijacker it seems had simply had enough of being invisible. If he was destined to die of poverty or police brutality he was determined to do so in a blaze of national publicity. In this respect he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations.

It is well known that there are millions of South Americans condemned to a life at the margins in slum shanty towns locally known in Brazil as favellas. It is well known also that the judicial system treats these disenfranchised citizens as beyond the law, to be rounded up, imprisoned, beaten and all too often, simply murdered by special police and para-military squads. All this is well documented. ‘Bus 174’ by tracing back the life of the lone hijacker, simply served, in the most graphic way, to underline all this state sanctioned brutality. But the question that must be asked, and asked repeatedly in every public and political forum; is the situation getting better or simply being airbrushed out of public sight?

Brazil is far from alone in this regard. Every country that hosts one of these global sporting jamborees is confronted with its own dark side. Australia, one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, was forced to airbrush away its appalling treatment of its indigenous population. South Africa, with its debilitating apartheid legacy, had its teeming shanty towns to massage out of the public eye. China, unencumbered with any democratic niceties, had no compunction in sweeping away entire townships of itinerant workers. London held its ‘glorious’ Olympics in the shadow of some of the worst urban deprivation in Europe. Post-Soviet Russia, preparing to host the World Cup after Brazil, will not hesitate in ruthlessly eradicating the homeless, the unemployed and the inebriated from public view. But all the time the same question remains to be answered; do these sporting jamborees make thing better or worse?

I recently blogged that the Rio authorities were cracking down on criminal syndicates operating in the favellas, but all that was being achieved was to push the criminality on to the next patch. Clearly it is not criminality that need to be tackled but absolute poverty the sea in which criminality can breed and flourish. Our hijacker on Bus 174, so completely brutalised by his grim life experience, was merely playing out that brutality for a national prime-time TV audience. Either consciously or otherwise, he was showing himself as perceptive as the sociologist who was endeavouring to deconstruct the situation. Previously our hijacker had witnessed his friends being murdered in cold blood in a public square by a police squad and clearly he was still traumatised by that act of state sponsored slaughter. His mother too had been murdered in an act of cold blooded brutality and again he had to be a witness to that cruelty. Since then, every-day life was a grim struggle for survival, stealing to eat, sleeping on the street and forever fearing the iron fist of an uncaring state.

It is great, great news that Brazil, like much of South America, is finally emerging from the dark night of US sponsored military dictatorship. But if we are to celebrate Brazil’s decade of sport, first the world must be convinced that the current Brazilian authorities, along with FIFA, the IOC, the IMF and the World Bank, are actively sweeping away the legacy of that dictatorship. And tinkering around the edges won’t do. South America needs a Marshall Aid type plan similar to that applied to Post War Europe. This would not be charity but rather the partial returning of wealth systematically sucked out of the sub-continent over the past five hundred years of European colonial rule. This is a legitimate demand that should be the sub-heading to every sporting headline over the coming four years. Repatriate South America’s Wealth: now that would be a true and fair legacy for our traumatised hijacker and his traumatised victims on Bus 174.