The World Cup opens Thursday and airports are bracing to welcome the crush of international travelers flying in for soccer's premier event. Brazilian authorities insist they're ready, but passengers may find themselves in for a rough landing.
For example, officials had nearly seven years to prepare Brazil's largest airport, Sao Paulo's Guarulhos, yet only a quarter of the new $1.3 billion international terminal is operational. Many weary travelers will deplane into a dim terminal with severe concrete architecture dating from the military dictatorship of three decades ago.
On Monday, the wait time for a taxi at Guarulhos was more than two hours and nearby traffic was at a standstill due to a crippling strike by subway workers.
"Let's just put it this way: We are not showing the world the best we could," said Luiz Gustavo Fraxino, an airport infrastructure consultant in Curitiba, one of the cities hosting World Cup games.
Experts blame poor planning and excessive government control for the airport problems. A long-delayed privatization drive began too late for most upgrades to be ready.
President Dilma Rousseff has dismissed complaints that Brazil isn't ready. The overstrained infrastructure, she says, is a sign of a nation on the move, as the middle class expands and previously poor Brazilians take to the air for the first time.
"We aren't building airports just for the World Cup, just for FIFA," she recently said. "We are building for Brazilians."
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