Das Bênçãos de Iemanjá aos Desígnios do Mercado: ‘violência’ e ‘paz’ no réveillon do Rio global

Abstract

This thesis intends to discuss the meanings that the newspaper O Globo gives to the terms ‘violence’ and ‘peace’ during the coverage of the New Year’s Eve in Rio, aiming to legitimize a city project. From the 1990s, when Rio began to be managed under the logic of ‘city marketing’, the meanings of such words in the journalistic panorama vary purposefully according to the political and economic conjuncture. In this sense, we used as a methodology the documentary research carried out in the collection of the aforementioned periodical, where we analyzed the coverage of new year's eve between 1993 and 2018. Therefore, we rely on the works of Letícia Matheus (2011) and Kleber Mendonça (2018). We also had as a reference, with regard to a look at the city and mega-events, the works of Carlos Vainer (2002 and 2016), Ricardo Freitas (2011 and 2014), Fernanda Sánchez (2010) and Verena Andreatta (2006). In this way we can see how the New Year's celebrations in Rio de Janeiro accompany urban development, from the reforms of Pereira Passos to the requalification process carried out by Eduardo Paes, aiming to transform Rio, through the Olympics, into a global city. We verified how New Year's Eve became a mega event in the city's routine, the influence of the construction of the Copacabana neighborhood in this process, through habits and behaviors molded from beach life. We cannot fail to mention the influence of Afro-Brazilian religions - with the rites of Yemanja - in the way we celebrate New Year. Thus, by tracing a history of New Year's celebrations in Rio, we were able to see how the news coverage of this party is used discursively to highlight or silence news that corroborates a neoliberal city project. In this context, the handling of the terms ‘violence’ and ‘peace’ is fundamental to the construction of discursive consensus legitimizing this process.