CRIME-plagued Brazil is heading for the most shambolic Olympic Games in history, a Sun investigation can reveal.
Rotting corpses have been spotted floating at the rat-infested sailing and wind-surfing venue as officials try to clean it up before the opening ceremony a week today.
Athletes have been robbed at gunpoint and even allegedly kidnapped by gangs of rogue cops on the streets of Rio.
Meanwhile the Olympians’ “Disneyland for Athletes” accommodation has been rendered virtually uninhabitable by a putrid open sewer gushing through the village.
Swimmers and sailors have been warned not to open their mouths when competing in case they pick up infections from waters poisoned by human excrement.
Team GB has been forced to employ its own Rio plumber after discovering blocked toilets and leaking sewage pipes at their digs.
Roads are clogged with traffic while a new Metro line is due to be completed just four days before the £10billion Games begin, allowing no time for vital testing.
Visitor numbers are set to be hugely down on previous Games with more than a million tickets still unsold.
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And tourists, along with many high profile competitors, have been scared off by the twin spectres of terrorism and the Zika virus.
The fiasco follows a sharp drop in Brazil’s financial and social wellbeing since it staged the successful 2014 World Cup.
The country is battling spiralling murder rates, a presidential impeachment scandal and its deepest recession since the 1930s.
Security has been massively ramped up following a string of incidents. In all 47,000 cops, 38,000 soldiers and 3,000 sailors are on duty — making Brazil the most militarised Games on record.
Fisherman saw kids pull corpse out of bay
A hulking battleship patrols the warm waters off Copacabana Beach where bikini-clad volleyballers play.
New Zealand jiu-jitsu athlete Jason Lee, 27, who is not competing in the Games, alleges two highway patrol cops in full military police uniform forced him at gunpoint to withdraw £465 from two cash machines.
According to reports, two officers have been arrested.
Gun-toting thugs also robbed Australian Paralympic sailor Liesl Tesch and team official Sarah Ross of their bikes while they were cycling in a Rio park last month.
Between January and April of this year, there were 1,715 homicides in the city, a 15 per cent increase on the same period last year.
Murders are causing further headaches for Olympic chiefs with bodies dumped in the heavily-polluted sailing and windsurfing venue of Guanabara Bay.
Fisherman Jose Rubens told how he watched children at the fly-blown Roquete Pinto favela on the bay’s rubbish-strewn shoreline haul a dismembered woman’s body from the waves.
Standing beside a gaping pipe spewing raw sewage straight into the bay, Jose, 56, revealed: “They found a woman’s severed buttocks and upper legs three months ago.
“She was already starting to decompose.
“We didn’t tell the police. It’s not what people do here. We just pushed the remains back into the water.”
The unidentified woman, a victim of Rio’s brutal drug wars, was left to putrefy in the very waves where
Olympic yachtsmen and wind-surfers will soon be fighting for gold.
Around 300 tons of rubbish are dumped in the bay every month — including condoms, discarded syringes, loo paper, old fishing nets, mangled furniture and a floating mass of household trash.
They found a woman’s severed buttocks and upper legs three months ago
Yet Marina da Glória, just seven miles from the favela slum along Guanabara Bay, was chosen as the
Olympic venue for wind-surfing and sailing events.
Swimming and triathlon competitions take place at the mouth of the bay at Copacabana Beach.
Rio medic Dr Daniel Becker said: “Foreign athletes will literally be swimming in human crap, and they risk getting sick from micro-organisms.”
Spanish women’s sailing team coach Nigel Cochrane labelled it “disgusting’” and said the team were very concerned about it.
Authorities have used ecoboats and barriers to gather rubbish flowing into Guanabara but last year the effort was interrupted after money dried up and workers went unpaid for five months.
The government and International Olympic Committee insist they are only using the cleanest sections of the bay for competitions and that the risk to sailors and wind-surfers is minimal.
But nothing typifies the false promises and sheer ineptitude of the authorities here more than these stinking effluent—filled waters.
When Rio successfully bid for the Games in 2009, it promised it would treat 80 per cent of the sewage pumped into the bay, nicknamed the “city’s latrine”.
Yet authorities here concede they now manage to treat just 48 per cent of the raw sewage from the city’s 12 million population.
Sewage has also become an unwanted feature of the Olympic Village digs where organisers were forced to launch a massive operation to fix a deluge of plumbing and electricity faults. This week an open sewer flowed just 50 metres from the new temporary homes.
The Australians and Argentinians reported that some of their rooms were unusable.
A Kenyan wrote: “Please fix my toilet” on a notice board there — while the Belarusians posted photos of dirty windows and blocked drains on their official page.
Swedish athletes are said to have left the complex in disgust.
An emergency squad of 600 plumbers and electricians has been drafted in to repair the shambles.
Team GB has its own workmen on speed-dial.
Meanwhile in teeming, traffic-clogged Rio, feverish last-minute building work is still continuing at
Olympic venues as next Friday’s opening ceremony fast approaches.
Arriving at the supposedly gleaming new international airport terminal on Monday evening, The Sun witnessed members of Team GB’s entourage dodging workmen in shorts and flip-flops as they used drills on the incomplete customs area and arrivals hall.
The world’s top four golfers did not make it that far.
An open sewer flowed just 50 metres from the new temporary homes
Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy, Aussie Jason Day and Americans Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson have dropped out of the first Olympic golf tournament since 1904 over fears of the mosquito-borne Zika virus.
The infectious disease has been linked to microcephaly in babies, a condition in which the brain does not develop properly, resulting in a head smaller than normal.
Wimbledon finalist Milos Raonic has also pulled out of the Games over health concerns. While the winter months and the change in weather here have seen a sharp fall in Zika cases, the virus is continuing to spread.
A nurse in the Maré favela slum said she was treating around six new cases of the virus in pregnant women every week.
The 29-year-old said there was always a risk that foreign visitors would contract it.
Zika is also thought to have hampered ticket sales.
Last week 1.6 million tickets were still on sale.
With the array of problems, there is little wonder many here seem less than excited by the Games.
Journalist Helena Chagas is former communications minister to suspended Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, who is facing an impeachment trial for breaking budget laws.
Helena said: “There is not a shred of enthusiasm among the population for the Olympics.
“Most people feel the same as they did before the 2014 World Cup — they think it’s a waste of time, energy and money, and resources would be better spent on health and education.” Last month even the state governor of Rio, Francisco Dornelles, admitted that the Games could be a “huge flop”.
Brazil’s economy is expected to shrink by about four per cent this year as a result of weak commodity prices, low demand from China and political paralysis following President Rousseff’s suspension.
As with Europe, the threat of terrorism also looms large.
Brazil — used to dealing with hordes of armed-to-the-teeth drug gangsters — has virtually no experience in dealing with IS assaults.
After the Paris attacks in November a jihadi sent a tweet saying: “Brazil, you are our next target.”
In May, IS launched a new social Portuguese-speaking media channel in a bid to attract new recruits.
Then on July 15 Brazilian authorities deported a French-Algerian professor who had been convicted in France in 2012 of providing logistical advice to terrorist groups.
Last week dozen of alleged IS sympathisers were held here after claims they had discussed an attack on the Games.
And the chaos has not just been felt by the Olympians.
The locals know all too well that a disastrous Games will be bad news for all.
Sipping a cold drink on Copacabana Beach, call centre worker Daniane Teles, 31, said: “The Olympics must succeed.
“If it doesn’t go well it will be the end for Brazil.”
With just a week to go before the opening ceremony, the omens do not look good.
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