Kathleen McCaul Moura

The interim president of Brazil, Michel Temer, didn’t win the bid to host the Olympic games in Rio or organise the event. But he could regard the opening ceremony as a personal triumph. All over Rio last Friday there were protests against his leadership, which many are calling the result of a coup d’état. The words ‘Fora Temer’ – ‘Temer Out’ – could be seen on the beach, outside the Maracanã Stadium, painted on people’s bottoms. But the billions of viewers who tuned in to watch the beginning of the Olympics did not see this outcry, and the booing which accompanied the president's official opening of the games wasn’t obvious over the television.

'Tomorrow, are you ready to die?' Fadil asked me. He was the chain-smoking owner of the hotel in Jordan I stayed at 13 years ago, soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein. I was 22, had just finished university and was waiting for a ride across the desert to Baghdad, where I would begin working for Iraq's first postwar English language newspaper, the Baghdad Bulletin. I wasn't ready to die and thought I should maybe go home, but gave a watery smile, took a gulp of Fanta and fixed my eyes on the flickering TV, tuned to CNN.

A dead man lies on the floor with arms outstretched, his legs crossed. Beneath him are the words: ‘seja marginal, seja herói’ (‘be an outlaw, be a hero’). The image, created in 1967 by Hélio Oiticica, became an emblem of the resistance movement against the military regime that ruled Brazil between 1964 and 1985. When they displayed the picture on a flag at a concert in Rio, the musicians Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil were arrested, jailed, then sent into exile in London. But the word marginal does not only mean outlaw, it also means, simply, ‘from the margins’. Oiticica’s dead hero demands status for the marginalised in a country where the poorest have always been exploited by those in power.