Published in July 2017, this photo essay by Instituto Pacs surveys Rio de Janeiro one year after the Games and more than R$42 billion in spending. Site by site, it contrasts the promises with the reality: the failed Guanabara Bay clean-up and the threat to artisanal fishing; the still-closed Deodoro Radical Park and fenced-off Olympic Park; the resistance of Vila Autódromo’s remaining 20 families and their Evictions Museum; the buried tracks of the Célio de Barros Stadium; the costly and underused Subway Line 4 amid bribery investigations; the saturated BRT and empty light-rail lines; the repression of street vendors; rising police killings; and the destruction of green areas for a golf course flanked by luxury towers. The text reads as a visual indictment of an Olympic legacy of debt, displacement and militarisation.

The text was originally published on PACS’s Medium and later made available in PDF for public consultation in the library’s digital archive.

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