Defeating major world cities like Madrid, Tokyo and Chicago in the bid for the 2016 Olympic Games, Rio de Janeiro will be the first South American city to ever host the games.

Chicago was the first city to be eliminated from the bid, Tokyo the second, and Madrid got second place in the race.

In celebration, thousands of people gathered on the streets of Rio on the evening of Oct. 2.

But what are the challenges that Brazil now faces?

First of all, the estimated cost of the Olympic project in Rio will be $14 billion, most of which will be designated to the infrastructure of the city. Before 2016, Rio de Janeiro’s government will have to build 16 new competition buildings, and the existing 18 will need some repair.

Brazil’s President, Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva, believes the Olympic Games are an opportunity to improve the country.

“We don’t have to look to what we are going to spend; we have to look to what we are going to win,” said President Lula. “This is an opportunity for us to fix the country a little bit more.”

The 2016 Olympic Games can bring development to Brazil. Companies and businesses might want to invest in Brazil due to the city’s availability of market and labor during the event. But with 36.2 million people living on less than $60 a month, I find it impressive how the Brazilian government can gather $14 billion for the Olympic Games and ignore all those living under the poverty level. And it also ignores the fact that public health and public education need more government funding to actually function properly for the society.

To watch the Olympic competitions in Rio, the average price for a ticket will start at $35. As mentioned before, almost 20% of the Brazilian population earns $65 a month. With those numbers, we can have an idea who will be enjoying the 2016 Olympic Games – the middle/high class and the tourists, referred to as “gringos.”

Another issue the city of Rio de Janeiro will be facing is the violence. Slums controlled by drug cartels are an immense contrast in this beautiful city. Last year, in Rio de Janeiro as a whole, there were 5,717 homicides.

The Brazilian sports minister, Orlando Silva, decided also to ignore those numbers, saying that security was apparently “a permanent challenge for all countries in the world.”

Yes, security is a challenge for major countries. But in Brazil, security is a huge challenge. A challenge I’m not sure the Brazilian government can handle, especially considering the Brazilian police are often accused of collaborating with the drug gangs

Corruption is a major problem in Brazil as well. Many Brazilians believe that the 2016 Olympic Games will be one more tool for Brazilian politics and companies to divert money, following similar occurrences that happened in the Pan American Games in 2007.

The Pan American Games is an event that happens every four years in the year before the Olympic Games among all the nations in the Americas. The last edition, in 2007, was held in Rio de Janeiro as well, which started with a $200 million budget and finished with an estimated cost of $1.5 billion, costs that were never explained to the population.

With the 2016 Olympic Games being in Rio de Janeiro, new promises from politicians will come. The population and the media need to make sure those promises will actually be performed, so Brazil doesn’t break the world record of corruption.