Brazilian President Hosts Dinner, Defends World Cup Preps

With just a few more days before the 2014 FIFA World Cup kicks off, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff hosted a dinner for international journalists and thwarted criticism of too much spending on stadiums while infrastructure projects were allegedly neglected.

The president said in the dinner that many of Brazil’s infrastructure plans were never intended to be finished in time for the World Cup, but the prestigious sports event was simply used as an excuse to get projects off the ground.

“Nobody builds a metro in two years,” she reportedly said on the a terrace of the presidential residence, Palacio da Alvorada, designed by renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, according to a CNN report.

Report said of the 143 billion reais ($63 billion) earmarked for infrastructure projects, only 8 to 9 billion reais were meant to be used specifically during the Cup. “The rest isn’t for the Cup, it’s for Brazil,” Rousseff said.