RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Environmental activists have sailed across Rio de Janeiro’s bay to protest pollution in the Brazilian city’s waterways and broken promises to clean them up around the 2016 Olympics.
Saturday’s silent flotilla on Guanabara Bay coincides with the one-year anniversary of the start of the Rio Games.
Activists and fishermen in boats displayed banners demanding improved sanitation.
Rio pledged in its Olympic bid to treat 80 percent of its water waste by the start of the Games, but it failed to deliver on that promise. Days ahead of the event, a study commissioned by The Associated Press showed dangerously high levels of contamination.
With the Olympics long over and the country in the midst of an economic crisis, expectations of any improvement are now low.