Rio Cancels Carnival Street Parties but Keeps Parade

RIO DE JANEIRO — While Rio de Janeiro’s famend Carnival parade will go on, the town will cancel its road events, the mayor mentioned on Tuesday, to the dismay of tens of millions of revelers who pour into the town’s public areas yearly to rejoice and wash away any sorrows in samba, sweat and beer.

The freewheeling public events “won’t be possible,” Mayor Eduardo Paes mentioned at a information convention on Tuesday. “It’s been decided: There won’t be street carnival in the tradition of the past.”

Mr. Paes mentioned the official parade, during which samba teams placed on elaborately choreographed exhibits in an space flanked by bleachers that seat 56,000 individuals, can be held, but with some well being precautions.

But Cariocas, as Rio residents are recognized, had been devastated.

“I was very excited, very hopeful, for the 2022 Carnival, even more so after a year without Carnival,” mentioned João Victor Ramos, 26.

Mr. Ramos, a designer, mentioned that as quickly as he learn the information on his cellphone, he shared it with buddies, who had been already having an excellent time deciding what costumes to put on.

“It poured cold water on us, everyone was so sad,” he mentioned, earlier than including reluctantly that the choice was comprehensible, because the impact of year-end celebrations on Brazil’s coronavirus caseload was already noticeable. The variety of instances is ticking up once more, after plunging for months.

Many within the metropolis had begun cautiously rehearsing for the festivities, planning for the citywide outburst of pleasure. After two years of a pandemic, they mentioned, it was sorely wanted.

“There was a twist that we were not expecting,” mentioned Tatiana Paz, the organizer of one in all Rio’s a whole bunch of road efficiency teams generally known as “blocos,” which play music and lead throngs of dancers by way of the streets for days. “With most Brazilians fully immunized, we thought it was happening. But then the situation worsened again, and there is nothing we can do about it.”

Other main cities akin to Olinda, São Luís and Florianópolis have additionally canceled their Carnival occasions within the final 24 hours.

Rio canceled each the parade and the road events in 2021, when Brazil’s dying toll surged as its vaccination marketing campaign was off to a sluggish begin. But towards the top of the yr, as pictures turned extra broadly accessible, Brazilians embraced them: About 68 % of the nation’s inhabitants is totally vaccinated, and the nation’s caseload and dying toll plunged.

The interval of relative calm that adopted allowed the inhabitants to start socializing once more. Streets, seashores and bars turned packed as summer season set in. On Copacabana Beach, many welcomed the New Year below a sky full of fireworks — although with out the same old concert events that go together with the celebration.

However, infections began rising once more because the extremely transmissible Omicron variant, which in some instances can infect even vaccinated individuals, unfold all over the world. Average each day experiences of latest virus instances in Brazil have surged once more previously few days, though the numbers stay far under the peaks reached in May and July.

Rodrigo Rezende, who’s the pinnacle of a bunch of blocos, mentioned that they had already been making use of for official permits when the dangerous information got here by way of.

“We were getting ready,” he mentioned, “but were very aware that it could eventually not happen.”

Mayor Paes suffered a backlash for his determination, with many criticizing his option to maintain the pricey Carnival parade, which is broadcast on tv nationwide, whereas canceling the free, public celebrations within the streets.

The determination “favors the industry, and it excludes the regular people,” mentioned Nyandra Fernandes, one of many dancers of the Tambores de Olokun bloco.

The mayor responded on Twitter, disregarding allegations that his determination was elitist: “With all due respect to couch analysts and progressives,” he wrote, “the poor and the humble” are strongly represented within the official parade.

“They are the creators of this incredible cultural manifestation,” he mentioned.

Rio’s annual Carnival, thought-about to be one of many largest on the planet, takes place within the weeks main as much as Ash Wednesday, the Western Christian holy day that marks the beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday falls on March 2 this yr.

The metropolis’s custom, with its full of life music and elaborate costumes, has endured and infrequently thrived even in troublesome occasions. Brazilians have danced by way of wars, hyperinflation, repressive army rule, runaway road violence and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic. Official calls to postpone Carnival in Brazil in 1892 (for sanitation causes) and in 1912 (to mourn the dying of a nationwide hero) had been largely ignored.

Conversely, this yr’s Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans seem like transferring ahead after the occasion was canceled in 2021 due to the pandemic.