Once a symbol of growth and rising confidence, the sprawling suburbs outside Brazil’s urban centers are feeling the pinch as the economy nosedives. And there are few places in the country where it is so obvious how out of touch the bickering politicians in Brasilia are with the realities of daily life.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Aside from the humdrum backdrop of harrowing, everyday tragedy, three subjects have dominated the headlines in Brazil in recent months – the enormous Petrobras corruption scandal, the country’s economic downturn, and the political game of thrones being played out on a seemingly infinite loop in the capital of Brasilia.

The narratives inevitably intertwine – as Brazil’s very own Frank Underwood, the speaker of the country’s lower house, Eduardo Cunha, wages war on Dilma Rousseff’s struggling government, the Petrobras investigation appears certain to involve many leading political figures, including now Cunha himself, while the acrid climate of squabbling and corruption, coupled with Rousseff’s toxic approval ratings, torpedoes any attempts to keep a seemingly sinking ship afloat.

Observing such events unfold from afar, however, lends a detached, surreal air to proceedings, like watching an episode of House of Cards with the actors replaced by Rousseff, Cunha, former presidential candidate Aécio Neves and the rest. It is often hard to reconcile the self-serving manoeuvres of such hardened players of the jogo do poder (“the power game”) with the tough reality of life in Brazil’s working class bairros.

One such hard-knock neighbourhood is Jordão, tucked behind the airport in the southern periferia of Recife, and home to around 20,000 people. Divided between the municipal authorities of Recife and neighbouring Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Jordão suffers from the familiar problems of many of Brazil’s lower class neighbourhoods, particularly in the nordeste – an unreliable public transport system, low quality housing, limited accessibility to healthcare and schools, an intermittent electricity and water supply, poor sewerage, and high levels of urban violence.

Meanwhile residents do their best to fill the gaps in the services supplied by the government or city council. Ten years ago sisters Raquel and Rozeli Santos opened the Educandário Amara Maurício primary school in a tiny three room building, as neither Recife nor Jaboatão provided a public school for young children in the immediate area. “For years an up and coming local politician financially supported us,” Raquel told me, “making sure that local people knew all about his generosity. Once he was elected, the donations stopped.”

A new building has been constructed with eight classrooms, big enough for 300 children, and now the school survives (barely) on monthly fees of around U$27 per pupil, not enough to pay the ten teachers, all of whom are from the bairro, much more than the minimum monthly wage of U$240. When I visited the school just over a year ago, the yard was filled with jagged bricks left over from the building work, and there was nowhere for the children to play.

Jordão is often affected by water shortages and power cuts. “Some months the electricity is off for a few hours nearly every day,” said Jessica Santos, Rozeli’s daughter, at the time a teacher at the school.

“It feels like we’re forgotten,” said Raquel. “Recife forgets about us and Jaboatão forgets about us.” Drug addiction is a major problem in the neighbourhood, as is lawlessness. “They killed a young boy a few weeks ago,” Raquel said. “He hit someone’s motorbike, just a scrape. Someone pulled out a gun and shot him.” It is not a rare occurrence. Stories such as those of Klébson Gomes da Costa, the ten year old boy hit by a stray bullet during a shootout between police and traficantes (drug dealers) in May 2013, or Taísa Priscila Rodrigues da Cruz, a 20-year-old drug user who was shot and killed a few months later, are common.

In recent years residents of neighbourhoods such as Jordão have seen considerable improvements in quality of life, due to Brazil’s expanded Bolsa Familia welfare system, an increased minimum salary, and overall economic growth. Two years ago I sat in a scruffy bar and watched what seemed like half the bairro make its way to that essential staple of middle class Brazilian life, a plush new gym. It looked like better times lay ahead.

But now the government is introducing austerity measures and the growth has gone into reverse. According to research institute IBGE, the national unemployment rate last month was 6.9%, the highest June rate since 2010. The same study put the jobless level in Recife at 8.8%, although other surveys are even more negative – the Diario de Pernambuco, the oldest newspaper in South America still in circulation, stated that 12.9% of Recife’s workforce was unemployed in March.

Part of this statistic is Edilson Alves da Silva, a 36-year-old mechanic and factory worker. Edilson lives with his wife Elma and her daughter in a typically cramped Jordão house, with an imposing metal front door protecting a small bedroom, living room and kitchen. Another bedroom has been fashioned from a lean-to by the front entrance, and a tiny bathroom takes up one corner of the kitchen.

For the last eight years Edilson was part of the production line in a factory that makes the tin-foil plates used to hold quentinhas – the take-away lunches that are so popular in Brazil. His and Elma’s salary put the family firmly in the heart of the country’s swelling “new” middle class – Classe C and D, one of the groups that has suffered most during Brazil’s economic troubles.

Last October, just as campaigning in Brazil’s presidential elections entered its final straight, Edilson was made redundant, along with a number of his colleagues. “I think the company saw that the crisis was on the way,” he says. “When I lost my job I thought I’d find another one easily, but it hasn’t turned out that way. I’ve had around 20 interviews, but every time there’s a line of people like me looking for work.”

After working all his life, Edilson says it is difficult to get used to being unemployed. “It’s hard to survive, but at least my wife is working. My redundancy money was gone after three months – I wish the crisis had ended so quickly. Prices keep going up (some reports have put inflation at 8.47% over the last 12 months, but the price of many goods has increased at a considerably faster rate) which means what little money we have doesn’t go far.”

Edilson says he sees the results of Brazil’s economic woes everywhere he goes in Jordão. “There are lots of people standing around in the street, doing nothing, at 10 o’clock in the morning. They’re tired of going out every day delivering their CVs, having interviews, and not getting hired.”

Like many of his countrymen, he is scathing of the politicians’ attempts to solve Brazil’s problems, and their apparently greater interest in the jogo do poder.

“My hopes for the future are in the hands of the vultures in Brasilia,” he says. “The business leaders and politicians are supposed to have the influence and knowledge to find a way out of the situation. Those down below don’t have that option. All we can do is sit and wait.”

This year, the country didn’t deliver on everything international observers thought the country had promised, but Brazil still remains one of the 21st century’s most remarkable success stories. 2013 could be decisive.

For those paying attention to Brazil headlines, 2012 was mostly a bad year. For some, it was enough to re-evaluate the status as an emerging power that the country has euphorically held for years now.

The economy barely grew, and government involvement in the economy has surprised some international investors. The ruling Worker’s Party was dragged through the mud repeatedly as the Supreme Court handed down sentence after sentence for a vote-buying scandal from Lula’s first term. The PCC returned to the scene in São Paulo, and a small-scale war broke out between police and the gang. New laws dismayed environmentalists concerned for the Amazon.

But Brazil still remains one of the most remarkable success stories of the 21st century. This is true for a few simple reasons. 40 million people have risen out of poverty, and inequality has decreased. Despite the slowdown, unemployment is at record lows, and wages have continued to rise. Perhaps most importantly, we saw last week that President Dilma has an eye-popping 78 percent approval rating.

In short, the vast majority of the population support the way the country is being run, people are better off than ever, and society is more just. It’s important to remember that this is the whole point of economic growth and democracy in the first place. The results are there. We shouldn’t confuse means with ends, as is so easy to do when we journalists get caught up in the latest GDP numbers, or scandal.

Even some of the the year’s worst stories have a positive flip-side. As ugly as the corruption trial was, many believe that the tough sentences handed down to high-level politicians could signal an end to political impunity in the country. And despite the tragedy of a spike in violence in São Paulo’s periphery, the state’s murder rate is still much lower than it was a few years ago.

When Brazilians and observers (justifiably) complain about the country at the moment, a little context can be uplifting. What has the world been going through for the last 12 years, especially since 2007? How many countries in the world can you point to with: rising standards of living, reduced inequality, and widespread, long-lasting contentment with leadership? This is certainly not how things feel in my native California, or in Europe. And all of this in an open, liberal democracy? I can’t think of many examples.

But of course, nothing guarantees this will continue, and 2013 could be a decisive year. We can’t expect wages to rise forever without economic growth returning, and so the world will be holding their breath until it does, as expected next year.  But if instead there is more stagnation, or more of what the international community sees as state meddling in the economy, international investors could finally give up and concentrate on countries like Mexico or Colombia. And it’s hard to imagine how the PT would be seen by the people if any of the party’s social gains were reversed.

I personally don’t think either of those doom scenarios will come to pass. We’ll see. But for now, here are some of the bad, the good, and the interesting stories from 2012.

These are summaries – click the links for more in-depth info.

The bad

Corruption –

We watched all year as high-level politician after high-level politician was brought down for the ‘mensalão’ scandal from 2003, and a new hero of the opposition (and anti-corruption movements) was born in the form of Joaquim Barbosa (pictured above).

Violence –

War broke out for the first since 2006 in São Paulo. Again, the major parties were the PCC, the state’s main gang, and the military police. The latter lost over 100 officers to (mostly) targeted executions, while the murder rate in SP jumped.

The economy –

This is the big one. After growing 7.5% in 2010 (and causing us in the international press to rush here), then slowing to 2.7% in 2011, we may not do much better than 1% in 2012. Even more awkward was the moment when Finance Minister Guido Mantega joined the rest of analysts in wildly overestimating third-quarter growth, leading The Economist to call for his dismissal. Needless to say, President Dilma was not pleased to hear this from the British magazine.

But the economy is expected to pick up in 2013, thanks not only in part to the huge cut in interest rates carried out this year, which have finally come down to the levels of a normal country. And in reality, the 7.5% growth year was a statistical blip after -0.3% in crisis-hit 2009. Taken together, the economy had been growing at 3.6% a year, close to the average over the last 20 years, and to what we’re likely to see over the next few years.

But more worrying is that some investors believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the government has begun to micro-manage the economy and that the possibility of intervention may be unpredictable. Much of this has to do with the decision to lower energy prices. I personally think they’re wrong, or at least that this was a problem of the government’s way of communicating the changes rather than the changes themselves. But some people are on edge, and this is especially important, as a drop in investment is the real culprit for the bad numbers.

And of course, there remains so much that Brazil should and could do to increase productivity and upgrade its growth model.

Infrastructure –

We are still waiting on this one. This is one part of Brazil’s economy that most desperately needs to be resolved, and we’ve still only seen baby steps.

The environment –

My visit to the Amazon this year was not pretty, both because of the persistence of slave labor and the obvious destruction of the rain forest. Things took a turn for the depressing for environmental activists as the government rolled back protections in 2012.

The good

Politics –

Whatever you think of the ruling Worker’s Party (PT), it is undeniable that if you use the standard most often applied to political parties, Lula and Dilma’s have overseen a truly remarkable success story since 2003. Lula left office one of the most popular leaders in the world, and two years into her term, Dilma is already widely supported. 78 per cent approval is a breathtaking figure. And this after everything that happened in 2012.

Despite the mensalão mess, the PT did very well in municipal elections this year, and took back São Paulo, South America’s largest city. If 2014 elections were held today, all polls indicate Dilma would win by a landslide.

And without a doubt, the country plays a much larger role on the world stage than it did in 2002.

The PT, like everyone else, could improve greatly, but widespread support and a rising nation means you are winning, big. This is a tough act to follow.

The real economy –

As I mentioned above, for all the dismal numbers, life on the ground still feels better than ever. Families are still rising out of poverty. The explanation for this is a little complicated, but the reality is there. It can’t last forever like this, of course, but forever hasn’t happened yet.

Justice –

The flip side to the mensalão mess is a justice system which really has teeth for the first time anyone can remember. This has always been the case for the poor, but now politicians can be on the hook, too. This has many hoping they will think twice in the future.

Even some police are being held to account. Some of those that gunned down suspected members of the PCC and, by all accounts, set off this year’s wave of violence, are now in jail.

World Cup preparations –

For years we wondered if Brazil would be ready to host the World Cup. We haven’t sorted out our infrastructure problems, but it looks like at least the stadiums will be ready.

My personal take is the following: The World Cup will go the way Brazil does for most visitors. Something or another will go wrong. They’ll be stuck in traffic, or miss a flight, or end up spending more than they expected on this or that. But those things will be heavily outweighed by the charm of the country and the fun of the event, and most will go home raving about Brazil.

Cost of living –

For us foreigners, it’s been good news that the real has come down significantly this year. Brazil is no longer so maddeningly expensive. For Brazilians, the cost of living hasn’t changed much.

Corinthians –

“The people’s team” from São Paulo took the world club championship, and gave Brazilian football a much-needed boost. This also meant lots of traffic and nonstop fireworks in the city, but overall it was very good for the country, and for South America.

The unexpected and interesting

Lula back on the scene –

I suppose it was more of an anomaly that he was actually gone for a while. But after recovering quickly from cancer, the former president was given a grand welcome back and got to work quickly, helping out in this year’s municipal elections. Crucially, he has so far floated above the mess of the mensalão scandal, and insisting he know nothing of the scheme. We’ll see if he can keep this up in 2013.

Music –

2012 was a much more interesting year musically than 2011, in my opinion. We saw the rise of Brazilian hip hop to the mainstream, “techno brega” from the Amazon in the form of Gaby Amarantos, and funky pop from the likes of Tulipa Ruiz. Here’s our full interview with Emicida, and Criolo’s will be posted next year.

Eike Batista –

He did not have a good year. There was the unfortunate incident with his son, Thor. Then he attracted lots of negative attention, and fell quite dramatically from his position as Brazil’s richest man.

Race –

Hard to categorize this one as good or bad, but the country stared two deep-seated problems in the face this year: relations with indigenous populations, and the government’s approach to black Brazilians.

Tourism –

The sector is doing quite well, but it has nothing to do with the gringos. The sector is almost entirely powered by Brazilians moving around their own country.

The rebirth of the center –

Long more famous for being “Crack land” than anything else, we saw interesting new movements coming up from the street.

Evangelical power –

Much to the dismay of bien-pensant liberals, Brazil’s numerous, and often unsettling, Evangelical Christian churches revealed themselves as an ever more potent political force.

Exhibitionist turn –

We saw Brazil’s sub-celebrity realitytainment industry power into the same bizarre gears we’ve been accustomed to around the world. First, there was the sex, or perhaps rape, transmitted live on Big Brother Brasil. Then we had the young girl who auctioned off her virginity for $800,000.

Petrobras – Graça Foster –

One of South America’s largest companies inherited a true rags-to-riches story as Graça Foster took over. Here’s hoping she can help navigate Petrobras out of its current mess.

Niemeyer –

And finally, we bid a sad farewell to nation-defining visionary architect Oscar Niemeyer, who passed at 104 years old. Here’s an interview I did with him last year, and perhaps next year I’ll post my pictures from his 104^th birthday party.

Here’s hoping 2013 goes better. Happy New Year.

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South America’s largest country is finally, hopefully, on its way to patching up its woefully lacking infrastructure. But fixing one problem sometimes means dealing with others.

By Dom Phillips

Living in Rio can at times feel like living on a construction site. Construction is all around: a new metro line, new highways, the whole decayed central port area being redeveloped, Olympic facilities, the Maracanã stadium. Not to mention all those people doing up their houses.

It’s not just Rio. Brazil is in a frenzy of construction. And much of it is around infrastructure.

Because infrastructure is something that Brazil sorely lacks. Trains, for instance. There is no train between the country’s two biggest cities: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Just planes and buses. There is no train between any of the four airports in these cities and their centres. Just buses and taxis.

Or cars, which seems to have been the only default transport option successive governments thought of in Brazil. And now much of the population has a car, and the roads in big cities are jammed.

Too many cars, not enough roads, not enough railways to carry cargo so it goes on trucks which fills up the roads further. So the government’s announcement recently of a public-private partnership to build 7,500 kilometres (4,660 miles) of roads and 10,000 kilometres of railways, involving R$133 billion ($66 billion) over 30 years was broadly welcomed.

Even the government admitted it was long overdue. “The first structural initiative to endow the country with an adequate transport system, after two decades of low investment,” the government declared in its announcement document. Given that the ruling party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT, or Workers’ Party, has been in power for one of those decades, one can’t help wondering why they hadn’t thought of it before?

A taxi driver bemoaned the lack of transport options to me the other day, as we trundled through the endless Thursday night traffic on the way into town from the Riocentro centre, out past the Rio suburb of Barra de Tijuca. A carioca (Rio native) said the same thing, as he explained the traffic problems in the suburb of Jacarépagua: all this stuff grew up without any expectation that anything more than a car or a bus would ever be needed to get there.

Riocentro is where the Rio+20 United Nations sustainable development conference was held. This week it hosted the enormous Rio Oil & Gas conference. 50,000-odd turned up to both. Both times there were shuttle buses to central points. But obviously, no train. “Back when they built Riocentro, this was all outback,” said the taxi driver. “But today everybody has a car.”

The Olympic Park is going to be situated nearby. So the government are extending a metro line which will go some of the way then meet a highway that will have a bus rapid transit link (BRT). BRT sounds flash. But it’s still a bus.

Then there are bigger state-sponsored projects, such as potentially vast sub-salt oil reserves, thousands of metres below the sea bed, hundreds of kilometres off the Rio and Espirito Santo coasts, that government-controlled oil giant Petrobras is going to extract.

Petrobras is getting as many of the rigs and production platforms constructed in Brazil as it can to meet government rules on ‘local content’: essentially, requirements to build a large amount of this stuff in Brazil because we want to grow our domestic industries.

Brazil used to have a decent shipbuilding industry, but it fell into disuse and disrepair. Now the government is hoping the sub-salt boom will help to revive it.

Politically, this makes sense – more jobs, more votes. For Petrobras shareholders, it means a slower journey towards increasing production of oil and gas, because some of the shipyards where their rigs are going to be built are themselves still under construction.

In the North of Brazil minerals giant Vale is duplicating the one-track railway line it has that runs from its iron ore mine in Carajás, in the Amazon, to São Luís. It’s there that development hits rural reality. Not only does the track run through land where around 100 members of an uncontacted tribe, the Awá live, it also passes near quilombos, which are agricultural settlements of the descendents of slaves.

In July a judge in São Luís suspended work on the railway because of its environmental impacts. The ban has now been lifted. But there are still legal problems looming for the railway project. But there’s also a gigantic quantity of iron ore to be moved from the mine, which the company is expanding – as it is, in 2011, Vale exported 109.8 million metric tonnes in 2011. The view from São Luís is of a constant line of giant cargo ships, steaming out of Vale’s port near the city. That number is going to increase to 150 million metric tonnes by 2014.

But Brazil needs the income those iron ore exports bring in, much of it from China. Just as it wants the income from all that oil it’s going to produce – 4.2 million barrels of it a day in Brazil by 2020. Just as it needs the electricity that will be produced by Belo Monte, the controversial hydro-electric project in the Amazon, whose construction involves flooding hundreds of kilometres of rain forest, threatening the livelihood of tribes who live there.

This is the problem with development – once you start, there’s no stopping it. You can’t grow the income and industry of a country this big without making a mess. You can’t do this without dramatically impacting on the lives of the populations that live in isolated places like this. On one hand, the economic benefits works like this could bring to these isolated rural populations, on the other, the environmental impact inevitably involved cutting down trees and dramatically affecting the life of those same populations.

“Brazil without misery. Rich country without poverty,” is the government’s slogan. But at what cost? Never mind the economic benefits, is all of this just going to expand the country’s army of consumers? Will they be happier? Will the Amazon just be decimated into a series of theme parks criss-crossed by highways and dotted by mines and dams, with islands of biodiversity, like in the film Jurassic Park?

Business daily Valor ran a story on what 12 indian tribes affected by the Belo Monte dam wanted as compensation. 40 four-wheel drive pickups with air conditioning were included, along with 303 houses with indoor bathrooms were included on the list. And 1,300 heads of cattle, 500 of them from the Nelore breed. Not to mention 12 cellphone towers with wireless internet capacity.

The Indian tribes didn’t think of asking for a railway line development. Pity. Vale – which bought a 9% in the Belo Monte project in 2011 worth $1.5 billion – is apparently pretty good at them.

Despite sky-high prices, experiences with cell phone service or at airports in Brazil are often not just bad. They can be downright Kafkaesque.

By Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro

I think my smartphone is having an existential crisis. It spends an inordinate amount of its time either Sem Serviço (without service) or Buscando(looking), rather than connected. What is it looking for? Some sort of meaning in this random sequence of disconnected events we call life? Or just a signal?

I’d like to believe its failings were down to some very human error, an organic element in the relentless takeover of all aspects of modern life by technology. Sadly I suspect it’s more to do with the failure of my cellphone operator to get its 3G system working properly here in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second-biggest city. The Brazilian government is gearing up for 4G auctions. They might want to sort out the 3G network first.

I don’t want to finger my operator, which is one of Brazil’s big four, so will just hint at its three-letter name and call it KEV. One of its genius advertising devices involved three bald men painting themselves in the company colours and staring intensely into the lens. Perhaps they were looking for meaning too. Or just a signal.

I was pathetically grateful when last year they sold me a cheap iphone on 12 monthly payments – I worked out too late it was an out-of-date model. Somebody at company headquarters must have realised they had a giant warehouse full of smartphones about to become obsolete, and sent out the command to sales staff: “Shift them, quick! Yes I know the battery only lasts an afternoon! No need to tell anybody that.”

Service in Brazilian restaurants, shops and bars is usually pretty good – attentive, personal, informal – depending where you are. Service when it comes to big, impersonal companies is pretty shabby. KEV is a perfect example.

KEV sold me a portable 3G modem for laptops, which almost instantly broke. They angrily refused to change it, referring me instead to its Chinese manufacturer, whose helpline, predictably, was never answered. In my flat near Central Rio de Janeiro, I can’t make or receive calls. In much of the rest of Rio, the signal varies between full 3G, a signal that hovers somewhere in between 3G and just cellphone, a basic calls-and-texts connection, and nothing at all.

Nor does it work in the centre of Parati, one of Brazil’s most famous historic tourist towns, on the Rio coast. The only thing that doesn’t vary is the bills. Brazil has one of the highest cellphone tariffs in the world.

Enter into KEV’s call centre service, and it rapidly becomes Kafka-esque. I discovered recently that the personal voicemail facility – that most basic of cellphone operator services, where you can say, “Hi, this is Dave, I’m not available right now” – had been summarily cancelled.

I complained about lack of a signal at home, and a very pleasant girl said she would alert the technical team, who she suggested might re-align the beam from the nearest antenna to include my apartment. Much as I loved the idea of a crack team of KEV technicians carefully manipulating the signal to appease a grumpy gringo client, I suspect my complaint went straight into the nearest virtual waste-bin.

The KEV 3G signal wasn’t even working at the official KEV shop I visited at one of Rio’s biggest shopping centres, even as queues of customers were busy snapping up smartphones. “Oh,” said an assistant serving me diplomatically. “The signal oscillates in here.” Oscillates? What do you mean, oscillates? I didn’t buy an iphone for a signal that oscillates. I bought an iphone for a signal that works.

Many Brazilian cellphone users would echo my complaints. Nor are UK cellphone operators much better, but at least their signals work. But services are much more expensive here than they are at home, and telecoms companies in Brazil repeatedly reap some of the highest profit margins in the world [editors note: In São Paulo I pay around r$400 a month here for my blackberry plan, more than 4 times more what I paid in London – Vincent] And it’s emblematic of a bigger Brazilian problem: infrastructure. This is what happens when you have a rapidly-expanding consumer base, and a lot of companies trying to cash in on it without having the basic structure to manage that growth. Consequently Brazil is increasingly painfully expensive. And you increasingly don’t get what you pay for.

Witness the overcrowded, chaotic airports, with their endless queues to buy overpriced coffee and pastries. Witness the horrendous delivery delays seen two Christmases ago by one of Brazil’s biggest online shopping groups. Once again, hordes of customers took to social networks and youtube to complain – frequently the only way irate consumers get any kind of satisfaction, a strategy so successful that big companies employ social network agencies to monitor the airwaves and quash complaints before they go viral.

Witness the hotel I stayed at in the capital Brasília a few weeks ago. It was called the Bay Park Resort Hotel. It should be renamed the Bates Motel. It looked like a Soviet housing bloc from the 1970s. It was unpleasantly full and chaotic. Nothing worked – not even the TV in the room, which looked like a hospital toilet, and stank of disinfectant. The food in the self-self restaurant was disgusting, which is perhaps why it was all over the grubby tablecloths. All this for $100-plus a night.

The poor guy on the desk had lost his voice from dealing with so many complaints. The third time I headed back there with a room key that refused to work, he shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Ah, Brazil.”

The impression big Brazilian service companies like these leave is that they honestly couldn’t give a toss about their customers and just want to fleece as much cash as they possibly can out of them as quickly as possible.

Maybe they just don’t believe Brazil’s inexorable economic rise is going to last – and recent growth figures suggest that concern might be a little justified. In which case KEV might want to think about hanging on to the customers it already has, because their loyalty is likely to oscillate as much as its signal.

Dom Phillips is a British journalist and writes for The Times of London, Bloomberg World View, The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and British Soccer magazine 442. He has been in Brazil since 2007 and now writes From Rio for the From Brazil Blog. He is the author of Superstar DJs Here We Go (Ebury/Random House 2009).

Photo above is a screen shot from The Onion’s video, “Prague’s Kafka International Airport Named Most Alienating Airport“. Watch below:

[youtube gEyFH-a-XoQ]

One brave idea proved much too mouth-watering for its own good at São Paulo’s Virada Cultural

By Claire Rigby

There were sharp elbows, sharp tongues and a few sharpened knives out over the weekend, when an event intended to bring the cream of São Paulo gastronomy to the streets attracted more would-be diners than it could feed. To a loud chorus of tutting and media disapproval, the planned 500 free portions of galinhada – a signature chicken dish at Dalva e Dito, the less formal sister to chef Alex Atala’s world-famous main restaurant, D.O.M. – were eked out to 600 on Saturday night, but were unable to feed the crowd of 5,000 who turned up hoping to try it.

Part of the Virada Cultural, São Paulo’s 24-hour annual cultural marathon, held over the 5-6 May weekend, the outdoor cookup was a new event, Chefs na Rua (Chefs on the street), which brought kitchens downtown from twenty of the city’s most exciting restaurants to serve up takeaway versions of their dishes at prices ranging from R$5 to R$15.

The late-night event, which was preceded by a rainy and wet ‘dry’ run in April, had started out with the best possible ingredients.

Take one initiative meant to bring a taste of São Paulo’s gastronomic excellence to the masses, and mix it with a well-matured VIrada Cultural, in its 8th year and going from strength to strength. Add Alex Atala, chef–proprietor of two of the city’s finest restaurants, one of which (D.O.M.) was last week voted up from 7th to 4th best restaurant in the world, and a popular, instantly recognisable face nationwide.

Season with equal parts of media hype, collective pride at Atala’s achievements, culinary curiosity, and social media promotion gone viral. Set aside.

From the (probably over-estimated) 4 million people who filled the streets for the VIrada Cultural, skim off 5,000 assorted fans of world-class cooking, celebrity chefs, and free food. Fill them with expectation and place them on the Minhocão, a blot-on-the-landscape inner-city raised expressway, which is closed to traffic on Sundays and at night, and which you have pre-heated with a series of street events, including March’s excellent Baixo Centro festival.

Leave to marinate for a bit longer than planned, thanks to organisational difficulties with the delivery of gas, electricity and even water to the chef’s tents, and then bring the mixture briskly to boiling point.

Queremos galinhada!

By midnight on Saturday, some 5,000 people had gathered on the Minhocão, where restaurants like Mocotó, Sal Gastronomia, Las Chicas and Lá da Venda had also set up camp. As harried chefs battled to get the food heated and served, struggling with a lack of power, the crowd hoping for a taste of Atala’s famous galinhada grew and grew, and tempers frayed, with São Paulo’s polite-to-a-fault manners giving way to some unseemly pushing and shoving, chanting (‘We want galinhada!’), and a few lost tempers. More than an hour late, 600 lucky and/or pushy members of the public had a lukewarm paper carton of the chicken-and-rice dish, while the rest wandered off to enjoy the rest of the all-night Virada.

Cue a series of TV news reports delivered in that special, scandalized tone of voice newscasters reserve for disgraced or fallen celebs – ‘Confusion on the Minhocão!’ ‘With no Atala, Virada packs Minhocão and causes tumult’ – and much loud disapproval from the press. A round of squawking by all the tweeters and gawkers. And an announcement by SP prefeito Gilbert Kassab, as opportunistic as any mayor anywhere on God’s Earth, that he was considering creating a Virada Gastronômica.

But it wasn’t chicken stew many of those in the crowd were really after: they wanted a piece of Alex. And by the power of social media, which had been buzzing with news of the event, they expected to get it. But Atala was absent, forced to turn back by the organisers in the face of a densely packed crowd, having come within a couple of hundred metres of the field kitchen.

Perhaps they feel a sense of ownership. Atala, 43, is a household name and media friendly to a fault, appearing in the press and giving long, thoughtful interviews, writing books, and at one time appearing on TV as co-presenter of the programme Mesa Para Dois (‘table for two’).

And he appears as comfortable grinning out from a Citibank ad – ‘That’s my Citi’ – as he does rattling capably through the script for an ad currently showing on TV, for the NGO Banco de Alimentos, which campaigns against food wastage and for access to quality food for the poorest. A familiar face, he’s an easy target for the build-them-up, knock-them-down school of media, both mainstream and ‘social’.

Smart Alex

Yes, he’s a self-promoter – he’s a charismatic, successful one-man brand in the same mould as Jamie Oliver. Yes, he makes money – lots of it, potentially. But he’s also a passionate advocate for Brazilian ingredients and culinary traditions both mainstream and exotic, for food equality and fairer distribution, and for sustainable and fair-trade produce.

Beyond that, he’s one of São Paulo’s most compelling cultural players. Well liked and well-connected, he connects the dots between the culinary scene and some of the most interesting strands of SP culture. He’s a regular sight at punk and rock gigs and at places like Choque Cultural, the city’s urban-art gallery par excellence. I once spotted him twice in the space of a week, first at a punk revival gig at Madame in Bixiga, and then at a deserted Estação Pinacoteca art gallery on a rainy Sunday afternoon, quietly taking in Jac Leirner’s fantastic found-object art installations.

I had the chance to interview him last week, when he gave a series of short interviews at Dalva e Dito, table-hopping amiably between waiting journos, and amidst the concentrated, intense 15-minute rush of Atala ideas on regional cuisines, awards, his favourite SP restaurants, and ant-eating, it was impossible to miss his occasional frustration with the relentlessly fickle nature of press attention. (Find the interview in next month’s issue of Time Out São Paulo, when it will also go online.)

But what shone through most was that, as well as being a shrewd operator with the knowhow to mix his impeccable palate and understanding of Brazilian flavours with inspiration, artistry and science, he’s a genuine, committed enthusiast for the causes he embraces. He’s the real thing, with a punkish love of rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in, that can leave him open to criticism from more cynical souls, especially when plans go awry.

At the interview on the eve of the Virada, I asked why he’d decided to offer his galinhada for free. ‘I know a lot of the other chefs will see it as a potential alternative source of income,’ he said. ‘But I want to do it for free. I want to try and inspire people and show them that Brazilian cuisine is a dream that’s possible – that it’s not about cheap or expensive food, but just about well made food. Plus, I love ideas like this, so I’m going along to support it.’

Claire Rigby is the editor of Time Out São Paulo, in English. She was previously the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires, and has worked as a freelance journalist for titles including the Guardian and the Telegraph.

She writes for From Brazil every other week.
Follow @claire_rigby
Time Out São Paulo

SAO PAULO, Brazil — If you plan to fly somewhere in Brazil on a busy weekend, you’d better be prepared to wait. At some airports, up to a third of the flights can be canceled or delayed.

If you choose to drive, you’ll sit in traffic. The 50-mile trip from Sao Paulo to nearby beaches for the Carnaval holiday this year took as long as five hours.

If you’re counting on the planned bullet train between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, good luck with that. It won’t be ready when Brazil hosts soccer’s 2014 World Cup. In fact, the transportation minister said recently that it won’t be operating until 2022, at the earliest.

And if you’re a farmer, whose commodities are helping fuel Brazil’s export boom, you’d better count on up to a third of your harvest falling out of trucks navigating bumpy old roads on the way to market. Then you might wait for days at overwhelmed ports to unload the rest.

Continue reading “Brazil wins the gold medal in gridlock” at the Los Angeles Times.

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