Directors of the beautiful Casa Daros art space stunned Rio when they announced it would shut its doors just two years after opening. Does this forebode a dark period for cultural projects as the city is pounded by recession and scandal?

By Nathan Walters
Rio de Janeiro

A tragedy has struck Rio de Janeiro, and unfortunately, it seems to be part of a larger pattern. Botafogo’s exquisite Casa Daros art space will close this December after only two years of exhibitions, despite the fact that tens of millions were spent refurbishing the neoclassical mansion. The directors blame high maintenance costs and say the decision is irrevocable, but some are still hoping for a change of heart or for some deep-pocketed investors to step up.

More than a few observers are questioning the Zurich-based Daros Collection’s real motives for closing. Some are whispering about real estate speculation, without proof for their suspicions. A few have used the closure as a starting point to discuss high labor costs, but this can’t be fully explanatory. These are a headache for any business owner in Brazil.

Across the board, low turnout, high costs, and a local economy hit especially hard by the Petrobras scandal paint a grim picture for the future of private art institutions in Rio.

The city has witnessed an encouraging expansion of cultural spaces in recent years, and Casa Daros was one of the best. A beautifully refurbished 19th-century structure, a former Catholic school for orphaned girls, would house large-scale contemporary works from Brazilian heavyweights like Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, and Luiz Zerbini.

Daros has one of the most impressive collections of Latin American artists, and exhibitions were as fun as they were thought-provoking. The museum seemed to always be comfortably uncrowded, but it was also common to see Botafogo’s hipsters scoping a Cildo Meireles installation alongside school kids.

As with the some of the other museums that have opened recently, such as Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Casa Daros had a strong educational agenda and sought to enhance access to contemporary art. The loss of high-quality cultural programs could compound problems that the loss of oil revenues – Rio’s main industry is petroleum, whose company Petrobras is mired in a multi-billion dollar scandal – poses for education funding in Brazil, and Rio in particular.

The project got off to a rocky start and refurbishing work proved to be more challenging than initially planned. The Daros institute sought to refurbish the space to its original splendor, and went through a painstaking process, sourcing original materials and plans. The result was magnificent.

Problems with construction work didn’t seem to deter Daros, and in a lemonade-from-lemons-gesture Muniz created the Nossa Senhora das Graças photo(pictured above), based on the seal that adorns Casa Daros’ façade, from the trash leftover from renovation.

But much here is troubling. How is it possible that a presumably highly organized group like the Daros Collection planned so poorly? Or did something else happen behind the scenes? Have costs jumped so much higher than forecasted?

The wave that Brazil had been riding for ten years has come to an end, yes, but is it really this bad? Or was the grim reality of the country’s current state not considered when the company was shelling out millions to refurbish the 12,000 square meter space?

“Times are tough now, but we Brazilians, who have seen worse times, look for creative ways to respond to the changes,” says Rio-based curator Bat Zavareze. “I don’t understand the response from Casa Daros. It’s not the apocalypse. But is a real pity because it’s a very important cultural and education space.”

The curator for the avant-garde Multiplicidade music festival, Zavareze says he is working in a much different climate than a few years ago but still finds a way to make it work. Other emerging Rio-based artists say they have seen a slowdown in the frequency of government-sponsored events, but continue to work more or less as they have in the past.

The hysteria surrounding Brazil a few years ago has been replaced by the re-emergence of old problems. Staggering corruption, violence, and economic problems have re-appeared, and that is making more than a few foreign individuals and companies nervous.

The idea that the Olympics would be followed by a great exodus of foreigners always seemed more of a joke than a reality, but a completely different outlook on Brazil’s future is prompting some to consider a real exit.

Sunday was full of surprises, and most of them dispiriting for the groups that thought they’d made gains during last year’s protests. Here’s the five biggest.

By Mauricio Savarese

1 – Marina Silva out of the run-off

From presidential front-runner to the falling star of Brazil’s politics. The former environment minister was a bad player from the start of her campaign. Not all of her demise is her fault, of course. As usually happens with third way candidates, she preached new politics and became an easy target for the left and right. But her defeat doesn’t have to do only with her rivals: she flip-flopped on gay rights, lost many of the staff that were working with her deceased former running mate Eduardo Campos, avoided openly supporting of conservative politicians, played victim too soon, failed in answering criticisms from Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves (who are now heading to the run-off), and failed to make Brazilians more confident about what kind of president she would become. In the end, anti-government voters left her when it became clear Aécio Neves might have a better chance of actually taking down Rousseff.

After getting roughly same vote she did in 2010, it’s hard to see her as a presidential contender again. For now, supporting Neves in the run-off is all that is left for her – and if he loses that will show her political leverage is even smaller than many expected.

2 – Increase in abstention after street protests

Street protests last year suggested new political forces would appear. That was not the case, at least at the ballot box. What was more noticeable was a rejection of candidates in general. The number of Brazilians who chose not to show up (voting here is mandatory), or cast votes for no one reached 29% this year, the highest level since 1998. This is only a small uptick, but it would be impossible to say that street protests re-energized the country politically, at least in the electoral sense.

It is hard to see Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves as so exciting to all the voters that went to the streets last year. And those voters are not putting forward any policies that could be embraced by the candidates. If you look at the first round results, June 2013 looks like too much ado for nothing, at least in terms of the ballot box.

As one left-leaning friend in São Paulo put it on Facebook:

“What happens in June
Stays in June.”

Or, here’s some alternate theories from Rio Gringa.

3 – Brazil’s conservative Congress

Preachers, the military, policemen…Brazil’s new Congress is has become more conservative. Almost 40% of the Congressmen are rookies, which makes for the biggest shakeup since 1998. The Worker’s Party suffered a major defeat: they lost 18 seats and will have 70 in 2015. PMDB comes right next, with 66 seats — they had 71. The most voted-for candidates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are extremely conservative politicians Celso Russomano,  Jair Bolsonaro, and Marco Feliciano.  If Dilma Rousseff is elected, that means her reform agenda will be even more difficult to carry out. If Aécio Neves wins, there may be more reforms, but some of them could be very controversial: allowing minors to be tried as adults is one example.

Bolsonaro, above, says that the government supports gay pride marches so that it can tear apart ‘the fabric of society’ and make it easier to control the population. In other charming moments, he has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship.

4 – São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin wins easily

There is a water crisis in Brazil’s wealthiest state. There are various corruption allegations about a cartel that operated for years in subway here. São Paulo’s military police provided, with their brutality, the spark to set off the biggest street demonstrations that the country has ever seen. Yet governor Geraldo Alckmin, who could be held accountable for all those events, breezed to re-election. He won in all cities of the state but one.

Depoliticized voters, plus a lack of enthusiasm for a Paulista third way, represented by businessman Paulo Skaf, gave the 2018 presidential hopeful a shockingly easy ride. Some analysts expected him to win – his power in the Paulista countryside is unmatched. But so easily? That was shocking.

5 – PT wins in Minas and Bahia

This was a major blow to Aécio Neves in his home state and a surprising victory in the battleground state of Bahia. The best news for Dilma Rousseff was that the gubernatorial races there ended in the first round. Taking Minas Gerais from Neves’ allies means governing Brazil’s second most important state with a close friend of hers, Fernando Pimentel. Rui Costa’s victory in Bahia keeps in PT hands a state that was on the verge of going to the opposition. None of those two results were expected a few months ago. In Costa’s case, it wasn’t expected a few days ago.

Follow Mauricio Savarese on Twitter

If Brazil is such a macho, backwards country, how has it managed to put on a major presidential race between two progressive women*, with barely a sexist protest in the national media? It may take decades before something like that could happen in the United States.

By Anna Jean Kaiser

On the heels of Chile’s Presidential election last year, Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff’s battle in Brazil is the only other presidential election I can find where the two principal candidates are women. This milestone for gender equality seems to comes from an unlikely place, as Brazil and Latin America are infamously “machista” and sexist. But Dilma’s gender barely made ripples when she was first elected in 2010, and the topic has gone practically unmentioned as Marina and Dilma go at each other a month before the first round of this year’s elections.

Putting the candidates’ politics and criticisms aside, it’s a huge feat for women in politics that Marina and Dilma are facing off to be the president of the world’s fifth largest country. This is something I don’t see happening in my country, the U.S., for decades, if not centuries.

The paradox is that I, like many others, generally regard the United States as more progressive on women’s rights than Brazil. In the World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Report” which measures gender equality based on economic participation, educational attainment, health and survival and political empowerment in 135 countries, the United States was ranked 22 and Brazil is ranked 62.

In 2011, Newsweek/The Daily Beast published a study on the best and worst places for women among 165 countries, and the US was ranked 8th and Brazil was ranked 84.

Sexism in Brazil exists in all forms, from domestic violence and rape, to objectifying women’s bodies and inequality in the workforce. It exists in everyday language, from cat-calls on the street to the popular expressions like “da para casar” which means “you’ll do to marry,” which is used to compliment a young woman’s cooking.

Yet despite these realities, two women are running to be the head of state of the world’s seventh largest economy, and there’s a refreshing lack of sexist questions like the ones we see when women run for president of the United States, such as, “will she be too emotional to govern a country?”

What explains this discrepancy?

Furthermore, if you take a look at the backgrounds of these two women – though completely different – both reflect a progressive electorate. Marina Silva is a mixed-race woman from the rural Amazon, the daughter of poor rubber tappers. She used to work as a housemaid and was illiterate until she was 16. She’s now made a name for herself as a fierce environmentalist and politician. Dilma Rousseff joined a radical left-wing guerrilla movement when she was a young adult during Brazil’s right-wing military dictatorship. In 1970, the regime arrested and tortured her for two years.

Meanwhile in the U.S.A., the thought of electing a woman like Hillary Clinton – who, by the way, fits the exact narrow profile of the majority of U.S. presidents in almost every way except her gender (i.e. she is white, has an elite education and experience in the Senate and White House) – raises a sexist and misogynistic media uproar.

Despite a few questions raised about Dilma early in first her presidential bid, she was never subject to the same misogyny as Hillary Clinton was and still is. Perhaps the fact that Dilma was the hand-picked successor of Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (the most popular president in Brazilian history) helped her bypass some sexist hurdles. Lula himself, though, recently admitted he thought Dilma has suffered from sexism while in office.

While Hillary spoke in New Hampshire, a heckler began chanting, “iron my shirt,” and held up a sign with the same message. She was constantly referred to as being “bitchy,” “shrill” “emotional” and “hysterical” by commentators and media outlets, who also paid meticulous attention to her looks and how well she was aging. The analogue that comes to mind in the case of Dilma is that she is constantly referred to as “mandona,” which you might loosely translate as “bossy.” Many have asked, would a male president be criticized for being “tough” and giving orders?

Sexism exists in many different forms across the world – in almost every country – but where I come from, this Marina-Dilma race looks quite progressive.

Follow Anna Jean Kaiser on Twitter. Above, a photo from a recent debate.

[*Editor’s note – Of course, the Dilma camp contests that Marina is “progressive” while Marina insists that Dilma is not. By global feminist standards, it may to difficult to consider either ‘progressive’ objectively, as both oppose legal abortions and gay marriage. However, they are most certainly progressive in the relative sense, in that they both claim to be progressive (no one here is a declared conservative) and are to the left of Brazil’s political center. Also, an earlier version of this article failed to adequately discuss the importance of Chile 2013]

The Cup went well enough that we finally got to focus on the soccer for a few weeks. Now, it’s back to the real problems.

Vincent Bevins
Rio de Janeiro

Since early May, and really, since June 2013, we’ve seen the meaning of the World Cup shift radically, many times. Before it all started, the questions were “Is this going to happen?” and, “Will Brazil hate their own World Cup?” We thought it would probably be fine, but many thought otherwise.

Then it started, and the mood in the country was “Wow, this is going pretty well.” By week two, it was time for the World Cup optimists and government supporters to declare victory, as well as to say “I told you so.” But in the last two weeks of the tournament, another shift took place, to a theme which never should have been surprising.

Lo and behold, this was actually a soccer tournament. After the Brazil-Chile game, few were talking about organization, or protests, or the effect on the election (except for die-hard partisans with blogs/Twitter accounts). People have been talking about the games – Brazil snuck by Colombia, and then was massacred by Germany. Costa Rica almost made it past the Netherlands, who were eliminated in an unimpressive semi by Argentina. How did Germany get to be the best? How does Brazil need to change its training to be more like them? These have been the issues. Soccer issues – finally.

To mix sporting metaphors, the World Cup should have been a slam drunk for Brazil. It should have been incredibly easy to prepare 8 venues well in advance of the June start date, and then simply to allow the interaction between foreigners and Brazilians to flourish in the streets and the magic to take place on the pitch. It’s a lovely country, and it’s a lovely tournament. There was no need to complicate things.

But it seems the government promised too much, both to its population and the all-important companies who pay for political campaigns here, and then seek profits from large construction projects. A World Cup, as it turns out, is not that complicated of an event. But Brazil’s government choose to pretend that an entirely new country would be delivered to its common people in time for kickoff. That backfired badly.

As it happened, the World Cup was a success. The fact that we could stop talking about logistical breakdown or mass protests is evidence of that. But it was only a success after exposing some of Brazil’s deep social problems, and damaging Brazil’s reputation a bit, at least for a while.

It will be two years before sports is the main focus again, when the 2016 Olympics start. In the meantime, it’s back to the real issues, a a bruising election and the bruising that Brazil’s military police seem to eager to hand out to anyone who gets in their way. If you haven’t seen it, check out the video of a cop brutally assaulting a Canadian documentary filmmaker at a protest Sunday.

The soccer is over. That was a kick to the face, not to a football. Back to the real problems.

A testing route to the final lies ahead, with Colombia up next. The players and coach Luiz Felipe Scolari have at times looked unnerved by the pressure and emotion of playing a World Cup at home, with captain Thiago Silva crying before even taking the field against Croatia, and Scolari growling at journalists in the press conference that followed the Mexico game.

The World Cup will not fall apart if Brazil are eliminated, but there is no doubt that those Brazilians caught up in the patriotic fervor currently swirling around the country (encouraged in no small part by a rash of tub-thumping TV commercials) might take a rather dimmer view of the tournament should the unthinkable happen and Brazil are knocked out.

World Cup melting pot

In a country where even the most erudite publications and media outlets continue to use the word gringo as a catch-all for foreigners of every stripe, and where the world is seemingly divided into Brazilians and non-Brazilians, the arrival of hundreds and thousands of visiting fans has been an eye-opening experience. It is unlikely, in fact, that Brazilians have ever had quite such an opportunity to observe the rest of the world up close.

For the most part those fans have done themselves proud, supporting their teams loudly, passionately and in many different ways. Stadiums have echoed to the sound of throaty, old-school and defiant English fans (who amusingly refused to participate in such frivolity as “the wave”) and raucous, flare-waving Algerians. Hordes of Argentinians have invaded the Maracanã and the Beira-Rio in Porto Alegre, singing about why Maradona is better than Pelé. An army of Mexicans have made Julio Cesar and the rest of the Brazil team feel that as though they were playing at the Estadio Azteca and not the Estadio Castelão. There have been American frat boys and swaggering Germans drinking together in rain-lashed Recife. Thousands of boisterous Colombians have swamped Belo Horizonte and multitudes of Chileans have taken over Copacabana. In general, all this cross-border intermingling has passed off peacefully. The world has come to Brazil and been made to feel welcome. Perhaps, in return, the host country has learnt a little bit about the world beyond its borders.

U.S.-Brazil relations are still strained due to allegations of high-level NSA spying and corporate espionage. In the unlikely event that the US team makes a strong showing at the World Cup this year, how would Brazilians respond? Any chances of success hinge on today’s game against Portugal.

Nathan Walters
Rio de Janeiro

I am always surprised when I ask Brazilians which team will win the World Cup, and the answer is not a quick and emphatic “Brazil, of course.” Most weigh the possible outcomes: the usual suspects Holland and Germany can’t be ruled out (just a few days ago Spain was also on the list); Belgium could do something amazing. I always find this strange because whenever anyone asks for my forecast I invariably say “The United States, of course.”

The response is usually greeted with laughter (sometime more than is really called for), and then a short explanation of why this is not possible.

Granted, even the (German) U.S. men’s team coach Jurgen Klinsmann [pictured above] doesn’t think his team can win the Cup. Though this may seem un-American considering US fascination with highly improbable situations, especially when it comes to sports, Klinsmann is probably right.

The team landed in the “Group of Deadliest Deathly Death,” and even if it manages to advance to the final 16, the level of play will only prove more challenging. No problem. U.S. teams are known for miracles, such as the 1980 U.S. men’s hockey team’s Miracle on Ice, and Brazil is a country where miracles are known to happen. The Brazilian economic Miracle of the 1970s is still fresh in the minds of many Brazilians.

So the setting could even be perfect for a legendary upset by the U.S. squad that would most certainly go down in history as the “Miracle at Maracanã” or “Only a Dream in Rio” (with James Taylor intro music opening every ESPN segment analyzing the victory).

After the U.S. men’s team hard-fought Monday night 2-1 win over nemesis Ghana, I found myself thinking more about what a U.S. miracle victory in Brazil might mean for the relations between the two countries.

The U.S. and Brazil have enjoyed a long, stable relationship and the citizens of both countries seem to have traditionally had a high level of interest, if not admiration, for each other. But the relationship has also been riddled by conflict, and recent spying allegations have laid bare some unsettling activities that have helped push the suspicions to a new high and State relations to a new low.

Brazilians have been notoriously fond recently of saying the World Cup is ‘fixed,’ though without any evidence. Some say an easy penalty awarded to Brazil in the opening fueled these suspicions.

If the U.S. were to, say, miraculously win the championship, the victory may not be attributed to skill or even divine intervention but the NSA or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the well-known international agency of what is sometimes considered the US “Empire” in Latin America.

Snowden in limbo

Unsurprisingly, considering his previous residency in Hawaii, former NSA contractor/ spy is fearful of another Moscow winter and has made clear his desire to obtain asylum in Brazil. The move would put him closer to Glenn Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, and who knows what type of eye-opening revelations could result from the two being neighbors or even roommates (if that is not fodder for a sitcom, I don’t know what is).

Snowden says he is seeking refugee status in Brazil, but so far only a handful of Brazilian politicians have spoken in favor of granting the request. Is it too ridiculous to think a strong US appearance in the World Cup could affect this, for better or worse?

Trade secrets

Last week, Didier Deschamps, the coach of France’s national team, told reporters that a drone had flew over his team’s practice. Soccer espionage? If it was a drone it probably had to be the U.S., or Amazon, or the BBC gathering footage for its World Cup film.

The U.S. is still handling the fallout from accusations of NSA spying on Brazil’s state-controlled energy giant Petrobras and Rousseff.

The revelations, based on documents disclosed by Snowden, rattled U.S.-Brazil relations, prompting Rousseff to cancel her official October 2013 visit to Washington, D.C. Joe Biden made the to Brazil last week to watch the U.S-Ghana match and took the opportunity to pay a visit to Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. Is was a small step to repair strained relations, one that could be quickly forgotten with a U.S. Cup victory (unless president Obama makes the trips for the final).

Perhaps significantly, Brazil’s Presidential office made no official announcement about the results of the Rousseff-Biden visit.

If the US wants any more attention during this World Cup, however, they’ll have to beat Portugal today.

As many annoyed travelers are currently finding out, visas are required even for tourist travel between the two countries. It’s the consequence of ‘reciprocity,’ which increasingly feels like officials in Washington and Brasília needlessly banging their heads against one other. But in the wake of the Snowden revelations, things are not likely to improve.

Anna Jean Kaiser
San Francisco

I’ve spent the last few days watching chaos ensue at the San Francisco Brazil consulate as thousands of Americans try to get their Brazilian tourist visas. For fear of driving away their biggest customers, FIFA has put big-time pressure on Brazilian consulates to grant visas to World Cup fans, so ticket holders are given a free visa and priority over other services. If you’re a tourist without World Cup tickets, the likelihood of getting to Brazil is low.

Brazilian consulates in the US are swamped and lines wrap around the block. In soccer-loving San Francisco, Wednesdays are World Cup drop in days – where some 200 people show up with tickets in hand, take a number, and wait.

Americans will be the largest represented foreign fan base at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil – with 154,412 tickets sold to Americans as of early April. But more than a few have run into an often unexpected road bump: unlike citizens from most European countries, all Americans need to obtain tourist visas prior to visiting Brazil.

As a US citizen living in Rio, I’ve had my fair share of headaches dealing with the visa system. But as we’re often reminded, Americans are only put through this because it’s what the US puts Brazilians through. Brazil’s immigration policy is based on the principle of ‘reciprocity’  – that is, Brazil forces citizens of foreign countries to go through what their country makes Brazilians put up with.

In practice it’s actually tougher on Brazilians, whose experiences with the US consulates can be time-consuming, costly, and sometimes insulting. They often have to travel long distances to get to interviews, they have to pay a much higher fee (proportional to national GDP per capita) and they are actually asked questions – tough questions – at their interviews. They are sometimes denied the right to visit the US. For US citizens, the “interview” rarely consists of more than –

“You’re going to Brazil for tourism?”

“Yes.”

“OK. Have fun.”

Reciprocity as a guiding principle seems to be as sensible of an immigration policy as one could come up with. But given the fact that the friendly countries generally seek to attract tourists and trade from one another, why does it feel like they continue to push each other away?

A lot of it has to do with the failure of relations between the two largest countries in the Western Hemisphere to improve under Obama and Rousseff. In the wake of Rousseff’s disgusted reaction to the Snowden revelations, there’s little hope that will change soon.

Obama and Biden have said repeatedly that the US wants Brazilians to visit – Brazilians spent US$10.5 billion in the US in 2013, according to the US Department of Commerce, a 31% increase from 2012.

A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by Roger Cohen described contemporary US/Brazilian relations as an “odd hostility in the Americas.” While far from being enemies, Brazil and the US don’t have a particularly prosperous partnership. On top of strict immigration, there’s no doubt that in recent years, Lula and Dilma have made problematic moves in the eyes of the White House, and vice versa. Brazil’s relationships with Cuba and Venezuela have made Washington uneasy and Lula’s signature on a nuclear deal with Iran and Turkey led US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to say that Turkey and Brazil were “making the world a more dangerous place.”

The NSA revelations showed the world that among the US’ spying targets were President Dilma Rousseff and Brazil’s oil company, Petrobras. Soon after, US Secretary of State John Kerry came under fire for these actions during a state visit in Brasília, and Dilma became the first Head of State to cancel a White House dinner. She made her anger known and demanded an apology, which she did not receive.

This strained relationship goes back many decades. The US abused the region for much of the 20th century.

After years of US -backed military dictatorships and the perceived failure of imposed ‘neoliberal’ policies associated with the “Washington Consensus”, standing up to the US has been an easy way for Latin American politicians to score points domestically. When we saw the rise of the center-left at the turn of the century – Lula, Kirchner, Chavéz, Morales – they all ran on a ‘take no orders from the US’ platform.

And so it remains. Brazil and the US, two huge democracies with similar cultures and citizens who mostly love each other, continue at loggerheads. It’s a shame. And for travelers, a headache.

Photo – chaos outside the US consulate in São Paulo in 2012. Editing and additional writing added by Vincent Bevins in São Paulo.

From sensuality, samba and football to racism, violence and marginalization, Brazil’s struggles around its self image move onto the world stage, as a select group of Brazilian authors takes on the themes dominating Brazil’s crucial international image.

By Claire Rigby

With the 2014 World Cup just around the corner, practical preparations for welcoming the expected hordes of visitors to Brazil are now kicking off in earnest, with guide books, programmes and brochures being commissioned left, right and centre here in São Paulo. As the country prepares to come under sustained international scrutiny, including from close up, the way it is presented, and the way it presents itself have never seemed of greater importance.

Soul-searching questions about where Brazil is headed and where it has come from are matters of constant debate here, not least as a result of the explosive, insurrectionary month of June. But last week, in a precursor to what may lie in store in 2014, those debates also took to the international stage, at the 65th Frankfurt book fair, to be aired painfully, publicly – and, perhaps, cathartically.

Brazil was this year’s guest of honour at the book fair, in a starring role sponsored by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and National Library Foundation. The project, which had suffered countless alterations and delays in the period between the announcement of Brazil’s role in 2010 and the fair itself – not least due to the three Ministers for Culture the country has gone through in those three years – brought 150 Brazilian publishing houses and no less than 70 authors to Germany, plus a selection of musicians, artists and a special, Brazil-themed pavilion.

Aesthetically challenged

Ana Maria Machado, a children’s writer and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, used her opening ceremony speech to call for wider understanding of Brazil, reaching beyond stereotypes based on physical manifestations of culture that revolve around the body: Brazil as more than just a pretty face. “That body’s intellect is usually forgotten,” said Machado, “in favour of a celebration of our dances and our music; of football, capoeira and other sports; of sensuality and bronzed skin on display on our beaches; of Carnival and of caipirinha.”

While scores of the world’s less aesthetically gifted countries can only dream of having problems like these, Machado’s comment nevertheless encapsulates some of the motifs that are often internalised and presented to the outside world by Brazil, as being Brazil. It also finds echoes in other complaints about simplistic conceptions of the country, including in the ways it is represented visually, in photography.

But in the case of Frankfurt, Machado’s wish for a deepened, more complex and intellectual consideration of Brazil’s nature had come true. “Brazil has revealed itself to be an anguished country,” said Juergen Boos, the book fair’s president during its closing ceremony on 13 October, “but one that keeps moving forward.”

Much ado 

The controversies began in the run-up to the event, when the world-famous Brazilian author Paulo Coelho objected to the list of 70 Brazilian authors invited to Frankfurt. Withdrawing from his planned appearance at the book fair in protest, Coelho gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Welt, suggesting that the selection might be tainted by nepotism, featuring writers who were presumably “friends of friends of friends”. Coelho, the Jack Vettriano of Brazilian literature, who sells millions of copies of his books but is looked on with scorn by the Brazilian literary establishment, complained that he had only heard of 20 of the 70 authors, and questioned whether they were all professional writers.

In contrast with Brazil’s previous appearance as the book fair’s guest of honour, in 1994, when the country presented mainly canonical authors like Jorge Amado and Machado de Assis, the Brazilian contingent sent to Germany this year comprised a youngish, São Paulo-heavy cohort, many of whose works have been published in recent anthologies like Granta’s The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, and in a new anthology, Other Carnivals: New Stories from Brazil, launched at this month’s first Flipside festival – a UK mini-version of the Flip literary festival held each year in Paraty.

Coelho also commented on the fact that the list of authors only included one indigenous author, Daniel Munduruku, and one black writer: Paulo Lins, author of the 1997 book Cidade de Deus [City of God], which became the award-winning, hard-hitting favela-set film of the same name. At the end of the fair, in his closing-ceremony speech, Lins said,“Brazil is a racist country, like the majority of the countries in Europe. There was no racism in the list of authors who were invited.” Speaking to the Brazilian website G1 afterwards, Lins said the list was racist only to the extent that it reflected the prejudice that exists within Brazil, “because there are very few black writers in the publishing market.”

Straight talk

But trumping them all, an opening-ceremony speech  by the author Luiz Ruffato tackled some of the country’s most painful problems head on, and mercilessly. Pouring petrol on the football-samba-Carnival paradigm, setting it alight and booting it into an audience that included Brazil’s discomforted Vice-President, Michel Temer, and Minister for Culture Marta Suplicy, Ruffato reeled off a series of statistics illustrating Brazil’s savage social inequalities, citing high levels of homophobia, domestic violence, illiteracy and institutionalized racism, in which “housing, education, health, culture and leisure are not the rights of everyone, but the privileges of some.”

Speaking at length of the violence, marginalization and discrimination that mar Brazil, Ruffato said, “We were born under the aegis of a genocide. Of the 4 million Indians who existed in 1500, there are just 900,000 left now, many of whom live in miserable conditions in settlements by the side of highways or in large city favelas.” He referred scathingly to Brazil’s euphemistic self-image as “a racial democracy”: “If our population is mestiço [mixed race], it’s due to European men mating with indigenous or African women. In other words, assimilation came about as a result of the rape of native and black women by white colonizers.”

Presenting himself as “the son of an illiterate laundress and of a semi-literate seller of popcorn,”Ruffato introduced the idea of literature as a force for change. “I myself a popcorn vendor, a cashier in a bar, a shop assistant, a textiles worker, a metal worker, the manager of a diner, had my destiny modified by contact, however fortuitous, with books. … If the reading of a book can change the course of somebody’s life, then society being made up of people, literature can change society.”

Read on

And it can, without a shadow of a doubt, also change the way a society is seen, for better, for worse – or for sheer complexity and depth. Ruffato, the author of a five-volume series fictionalizing the story of the Brazilian working class, from its rural beginnings to the start of the 21st century, is one of ten authors whose work, it was announced last week by Amazon, will soon be published in English on its AmazonCrossing imprint.

Ruffato’s first novel, Eles Eram Muito Cavalos (There Were Many Horses), is one of five full-length works slated to be published (the others are by Eliane Brum, Sérgio Rodrigues, Josy Stoque and Cristovão Tezza) following the Kindle-only publication of short story collections by five other Brazilian authors. Ruffato’s novel takes the form of 69 fragments – moments that all take place on one day in São Paulo, from the points of view of their many protagonists – and his emergence into the sights of a wider audience raises the prospect of new, explosive slants on Brazil, and of new opportunities for interested readers to dive in and learn to understand Brazil, warts and all, as the complex, horrifying, delightful, fascinating place it is.

What’s going on with the Brazilian currency? Like many ’emerging market’ countries around the world, Brazil has recently been unpleasantly reminded just how linked its fortune is to the decisions of the United States, and the Federal Reserve. The real has been all over the place since 2008, making things quite difficult here, and that has relatively little to do with what Brazilian politicians have done.

Take a look at the chart above to get an idea what a headache running a developing country has been since the 2008 financial crisis, and especially since the US Federal Reserve, which controls the global supply of dollars, began talk of ‘tapering’ earlier this year. ‘Tapering’ is Federal Reserve-speak for going back to the way the US Central Bank used to do things before 2008, which in practice means much less cheap money floating around the globe, since the Fed will slow down its direct asset purchase program (background here). The process of tapering is the first step towards stopping the Fed pumping extra money into the US economy, and (probably) the first step towards raising interest rates.

Just the possibility that the tapering might happen crushed the Brazilian real down to 2.45 against the dollar, from a high of 1.55 just two years ago. How can you create economic policy in a country in which the cost of both your exports and imports swings so violently, and how do you explain to your citizens that yesterday they could traipse around Argentina (and Miami and New York) buying everything, but now, really won’t be able to afford that trip to Europe (or even to Paraguay)?

Since 2008, Brazil’s currency became much too strong for its own good, and then also lost value much too quickly. As if Brazil needed further proof of how dominant the influence of the Fed is here, when we got wind that the ‘tapering’ wasn’t actually going to happen as soon as had been thought, the real jumped back up to 2.2. Maybe it will stay around there. Some credibly think it will have to hit 2.65. We don’t know.

Brazil’s government has made some very real economic mistakes in the last few years. But the pseudo-tapering debacle has reinforced the uncomfortable fact that at least in terms of the currency, Brazil has been on a roller-coaster since 2008. And except for small interventions, it is not President Rousseff or Finance Minister Guido Mantega doing the driving. The real protagonists here are huge flows of international capital, swooshing around the world, guided by the noises coming from the central bank of the United States.

Recent history

But of course banks aren’t required to invest in the US, and many quickly caught on that they could make a killing getting free money in the US, and then investing in growing emerging market countries where they could earn easy returns. This was especially true in Brazil, where interest rates have long been punishingly high for borrowers and a free meal ticket for investors. Brazil was also riding high on a decade-long Chinese commodity boom, and the government had a card up its sleeve to pump up the economy further in response to the crisis (basically, pump credit into the economy so that new middle class Brazilians could buy consumer items and pay the super-high interest rates), and so dollars poured into the economy.

By 2010 the economy was growing by 7.5% annually and was a darling of international investors (and those of us in the international economic press), and by 2011 the currency hit a high of 1.55 reais to the dollar. This meant it was extremely, extremely overvalued and virtually guaranteed to kill off Brazilian manufacturers that now found their goods too expensive to sell abroad – Mantega had railed against the US dumping so many dollars into his country and started the largely ineffective ‘currency war’ as a response in 2010. Nevertheless, the super-strong real generated a lot of positive press and confidence here in Brazil. Travelers felt rich. The Brazilian stock exchange had some spectacular years ‘in dollar terms.’ Brazil’s economy got larger than the UK’s. Eike Batista got far too rich as excited and cash-flush foreigners bet on his slightly exaggerated dream.

Since then, the realities of the Brazilian economy (not actually so dynamic outside of agricultural exports and credit growth) combined with some major mistakes in the Dilma administration (which of course got much more attention than they would have had they happened during the upswing) and growth inevitably slowed back to previously normal levels, and then almost ground to a halt last year. In the background, the US began to feel confident in its own recovery, and it became increasingly clear that a whole bunch of shale gas in the ground could power an energy boom.

Despite the solid long-term foundations of the Brazilian economy, the chaos in Brazil’s currency in the last few months has been about the Fed switching its strategy back to normal. The money river is drying up and the money went pouring back the other way, to the US. Or at least ‘markets’ remembered that they will. The peaks in dollar strength in that chart correspond exactly to those two points.

Much to the chagrin of everyone down here, we’ve been reminded that Brazil’s place in the global economic system is often more important than the national headlines we’ve been chasing. Even worse, they’ve realized it’s all about Uncle Sam all over again.

What can be done

Many thought Rousseff and Mantega were making excuses and picking fights by decrying the inflow of dollars into Brazil after 2008. They were, a little. But they were also right that Brazil was suffering due to the flood of foreign capital, and Brazil is now suffering at the way things have changed directions so rapidly.

Unfortunately, given the state of the international economic and monetary system, there’s little emerging market countries can easily do to avoid huge swings in the value of their currencies. The dollar is the international reserve currency, and the vast majority of Brazil’s trade is conducted in dollars, too. Some hope for a world in which neither of these things is true, and the US stops dominating global monetary conditions, but that is a long way off. In the mean time, one can only watch the Fed, or take comfort that the US may not be able to dominate forever if it keeps shutting down its own government.

Artists from Latin America and the world come together in Porto Alegre for a Bienal still named after Mercosul, the stalled regional integration project. Claire Rigby reports on the transformations on offer there.

By Claire Rigby

Moving, evocative, mysterious, provocative: not all great art supplies these sensations, but when it does, it has the power to leave your brain smouldering with new ideas for days. Taken in sufficient doses, that sense of connections being made, and new understandings taking shape via artworks, can even last a lifetime. It’s transformational – it’s the point of art, and it’s art’s sacred calling.

Last week’s opening weekend at the Bienal do Mercosul Porto Alegre, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, was suffused with interesting, important ideas transmitted via a collection of artworks chosen with precision, all woven into in an interconnected web by the thoughtful young curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.

Entitled ‘Weather Permitting’ (‘Se o clima for favorável’, in Portuguese), this biennale is a tapestry of big, poetic ideas around shapes and masses underground and in the atmosphere, and concepts related to time travel, space and climate – climate in a physical sense, rather than in the concept’s ecologically-charged, more common present-day guise. The exhibition takes place in a row of three adjacent museums in downtown Porto Alegre, and in an old gasworks building, the Usina do Gasômetro, repurposed as a cultural centre. It also takes place in a monthly series of discussions-slash-expeditions to a nearby island and former prison, Ilha do Presídio.

This is the Bienal do Mercosul’s 9th edition – the first took place in 1997, when Mercosul, the Southern Cone economic bloc founded in 1991 and modeled on the EEC, still seemed like it might become a meaningful regional force. As one of two biennales in Brazil (the other is in São Paulo), the Bienal’s setting in the breezy, creative city of Porto Alegre has come to mean more to it than its connection to the failed South American political alliance.

In the grandest of the three main venues, Santander Cultural, a giant, hyper-realistic ceramic squid by the Peruvian artist David Zink Yi lays splatted on the floor, dead, its ink oozing around it (see main image, top). In the main atrium of the next-door building, Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, a thick carpet of powdered rust has been laid down by the always compelling Cinthia Marcelle, aided by the reckless intervention of nocturnal insects, scurrying minute tracks into it, night by night. And in the adjacent MARG (Museu de Arte de Rio Grande do Sul), a suspended 6m-long satellite made of finely meshed wire hangers and ham radio equipment looks almost invisible until you are right beneath it, staring up. It was constructed by the artistic duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla with the intention, in part, of making contact – real contact, by radio – with the International Space Station as it spins through the atmosphere, passing over every 90 minutes, 250 miles overhead.

The opening weekend brought the static artworks together with a series of performance pieces. On the grassed-over roof of the gasworks, the artist David Medalla gave a performance that wove dance, poetry, clouds of balloons and the setting sun into a joyful happening that left parts of the audience, thick with artists, gallerists and a Brazilian and international art crowd, wreathed in smiles and tears.

The work of Medalla, who was a leading member of the 1960s avant garde and a co-founder of London’s Signal Gallery in 1964, has been gathering new interest and recognition in recent years, not least thanks to his association with São Paulo’s Baró Galeria, and he was one of only a handful of artists to have more than one work in the Bienal, including a specially commissioned version of his 1960s Bubble Machine, a cluster of perspex towers from which dense, featherlight foam sculptures are emitted slowly, minutely, and around the clock. Earlier that afternoon, in a techno-music/psychogeographic sound performance, the young Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui worked a radio signal from the Ilha do Presídio island, out in the estuary, into a hypnotic and discomforting soundscape, shaping the sounds with his hands using a theramin-like contraption on his mixing desk.

You can see a short film here, of the curator, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, pointing out the prison island along with the rest of the Bienal’s venues as she flies over Porto Alegre in a helicopter (in Spanish). In person, Hernández, who lives in New York, is a fascinating speaker, expressing her ideas with precision, artistry and effortless depth.

This is the curator speaking off the cuff as she smoked a cigarette down by the river on the Saturday afternoon of the opening weekend, when questioned about the ideas that influenced her choices of themes for the Bienal: “Understanding the weather is also a way of understanding how observation works – understanding the importance of contemplation, and of observing something.”

Some new people turn up at the riverbank, in sight of the gasworks, where another performance is taking place. Hernández gets a light for her cigarette, greets the new arrivals, and picks up her train of thought again. “When I say ‘observe’ and then I move to ‘contemplation’, it’s because they’re related: they are about looking inside – a constant movement between what you are looking at and what you know. Understanding the reality, and co-existing better. It’s about losing yourself, but also understanding yourself more.”

• The Bienal is on until 10 November, and if a trip to Porto Alegre is possible, it’s highly recommended. If not, some of the texts associated with the Bienal are available for download here. An e-book of essays, The Cloud, and one of the artworks, an album of songs by the Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres, commissioned for the Bienal, can be downloaded track by track at the same page.
• Listen to the sound of mud bubbling and popping in a vat, part of ‘Mud Muse’, a sound and mud sculpture originally made in 1969 by Robert Rauschenberg.

All photos Ⓒ Claire Rigby.

It’s easy to see why the Brazilian government likely sees this as a “Obama 0 – 1 Dilma” situation

It’s clear that Obama had nothing to gain from being stood up by Brazil’s President Dilma. He has been given another little kick for being caught spying. At best, he continues to be embarrassed that one of the many security professionals in the US has absconded with secrets and is airing Uncle Sam’s dirty laundry around the world. At worst, he has just been a little humiliated by a more assertive Brazil, during what is already arguably the foreign policy low point of his presidency, due to Syria and Snowden.

But does Dilma come out ahead here? The benefits of cancelling seem to have outweighed the risks of showing up. 

Sure, she would have been on TV in the US on October 23 had she not cancelled (oops, I mean, “postponed”) the visit. But other than the symbolism of the dinner, what was likely to be accomplished there? In both countries, spying allegations were likely to dominate the coverage of the events. And what if the two presidents came to an agreement now, only to wake up to a new spying story leaked on October 22?

On the other hand, there are real some political points to be scored for Dilma.  In diplomacy, just like in personal relationships, there are usually advantages to be had when you catch the other party doing something wrong. This is especially true for Latin Americans taking on Washington. As Fabio Zanini put it on Folha.com: “No one has ever heard of a Latin American leader that loses political points by snubbing the Yankees.” This is especially true when the Yankees quite demonstrably made a mistake, at least by public standards.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Dilma already knew, or supposed, that the US had been spying in all three ways reported by Glenn Greenwald for Globo – on citizens, on her, and on Petrobras. But the calculus changes when things become public. The calculus changes when Snowden is on Globo on Sunday night. Electoral politics enter into the mix.

As it turns out, few of us civilians know much about how the sexy world of government intrigue and international spying really work, but one assumes that everyone knows everyone else is trying to get as much information as possible. And everyone knows that the US is probably the best at this kind of thing. But, if you get caught, you still have to pay a price.

So Brazil had two very decent options – either try to extract a pound of flesh from the White House, or get to righteously stand up to stand up to Obama. We don’t know what happened during the Obama-Dilma phone call late last night, but Brazil ended up taking the latter route. More than a few on Brazilian Twitter exploded with glee at their president taking on the world’s most powerful man. I can’t imagine this wasn’t expected. This may shore up the base in a tough moment for Dilma. And there’s still the chance that – if there is any truth to talk the meeting was only delayed – Brazil can save face and still get something out of all of this in the future.

[Guest post] – After a decade of economic growth and explosive protests, how does one explain what Brazil is to the outside world? Mauricio Savarese, a journalist from São Paulo, recounts his experiences over the last year in London, and dealing with a reputation often defined by old stereotypes or a tiny circle of traveling elites.

By Mauricio Savarese

“Why is Brazil important?” As the only foreigner in a very British MA course, I expected loads of strange questions about my country from my 49 colleagues. But I wasn’t ready for that one. It happened more than once during my first week in the course back in September 2012. One year later, I feel they know a bit more about the place I call home, but it isn’t clear whether that is because Brazil was more in the news recently or because I am the first Brazilian most of them have ever talked to. Perhaps both, maybe neither.

Before arriving, I took it for granted that every Briton had heard of the Amazon, the growing economy and the major sporting events coming here in the next years. I was sure many of them had been to Rio or Salvador. I believed those who refused to visit were too focused on reports of violence. But time after time I noticed I was wrong. Very often all I saw was a gigantic question mark on their faces. It wasn’t arrogance or disregard for our achievements. It just wasn’t a place they could relate to. Why should it matter?

At first I blamed the Commonwealth countries for their lack of knowledge about Latin America’s powerhouse. After all, Brazil was never a British colony. But that notion faded as I told them about the issues I covered as a journalist. One of those who asked about the importance of Brazil suddenly started studying our landless movement. Others debated the recent protests with real interest. Many promised to come for the World Cup. The more information they had, the less reservations they showed. But it was just curiosity.

If Brazil is an interesting country and foreigners get tempted when I talk about it, why is it so difficult to translate what we are about to people around the world? It was a shock to see that a big part of the blame for their indifference seems to belong to us. Again and again I heard Brazilians who knew nothing about their country using stereotypes to explain it. Some were too condescending, others were too whiny. Brazilians who want a say in the international community had no clue where they come from.

That made me see that the gap between what Brazil needs to say and what foreigners think about it is greater than I thought. It became evident as soon as the protests were on the BBC. After a first wave of support, as if Brazil were Turkey, most colleagues and fellow journalists gave up. They were confused by the hysterical behavior that Brazilians very often mistake for passion. Many international friends were turned off by those suggesting a boycott to the World Cup. Others, by pro-government enthusiasts.

Who can blame them?

One of the reasons for the confusion is the fact only a small elite has the chance to be overseas and explain what Brazil is. Out of guilt, as I noted in many conversations in Europe, some of the wealthiest Brazilians talk about issues as if they had nothing to do with them, no responsibility for them. As if the bad governments they themselves put in power were never a part of the problem. The class of Brazilians that created, reproduce, and profit from huge inequality then turn around to lament that inequality to foreigners.

In the few weeks that I’ve been back, all I heard was Brazilians thinking, more than ever, that they were sure that foreigners will understand us, make our agenda global and help us get attention in protests during the coming sporting events. They promise nothing back. Brazilians want to be understood by foreigners, but do they make the same effort to understand the rest of the world?

And foreigners seem less interested than ever in anything that isn’t their own (frail) economic recovery and the places they already know. Latin America still seems to be a different universe to many people around the world, but many Brazilians barely even recognize they are part of Latin America too.

Not all is lost for Brazil to be recognized as an important country and for our citizens to behave accordingly. During my time abroad, as it goes for many Brazilians, I realized I can be a bridge. There is a generation that could gladly live abroad in places like New York, or London. But they stay for an even better cause: making a real difference in improving their home country.

Mauricio Savarese is a Brazilian journalist, originally from Ipiranga, in São Paulo’s zona sul, and is the author of the blog, “A Brazilian operating in this area.” He was formerly a reporter in Brasília for UOL and is active on Twitter.

Things that seemed impossible less than a month ago are now happening every day here in Brazil. In a political Big Bang of swirling movements, causes and new protagonists, a new Brazilian universe is taking shape. Above, protestors in front of Congress, Brasília.

By Claire Rigby

Thousands of column inches have already been written on recent events in Brazil, and more are surely being written as I write these. Nobody could have predicted, on 3 June, the day of the first in the series of protests organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL, Movement for Free Public Transport), that events would take this turn, impelling a political and social Big Bang from which the fall-out is still spiraling, stars colliding and new bodies emerging in the Brazilian sky.

The protests and their aftermath have given rise to a cast of thousands and indeed, millions, in what is perhaps the most profound effect of the unrest: the sudden political protagonism of huge swathes of formerly passive citizens, on the street and on social networks – mainly Facebook. The site has come into its own brilliantly as a public–private forum for discussion and planning, for real-time reporting, and for registering protests, repression, meetings and assemblies in text, film, photos and audio.

Less than a month ago, as noted by Samantha Pearson in yesterday’s FT, two of the main slogans of the multi-sloganed protests, ‘The giant has awoken’ and ‘Vem pra rua‘ – ‘Come to the streets’ – were most famous as straplines for Johnnie Walker and Fiat TV ads, respectively. And even if, in the weeks preceding the slow-building explosion of people onto the streets to demonstrate, hundreds of images and texts were being shared here about the protests and repression in Taksim Square, Istanbul, there was nothing to suggest that Brazil might be next.

Less than a month ago, the Confederations Cup was already looming large, but the idea of there being protests associated with it was nowhere near the agenda. ‘Imagina na Copa‘ (meaning ‘if it’s this bad now, imagine what it will be like in the World Cup’), a catch-all phrase for structural problems large and small, was little more than a collective, anxious fretting over the World Cup, and the likelihood of Brazil’s infrastructure being ready for it. But it is now linked to protests and skirmishes outside the stadiums, and to discontent with what’s perceived as massive over-spending as well as bad planning for the Cup.

As I write this, in the streets of Fortaleza, North-East Brazil, where the Confederations Cup match between Italy and Spain is underway, a ‘sonic cannon’ crowd-control weapon has just been switched on for the first time by police, and protests have turned to tyre-burning on the parts of protestors, and tear-gassing and shooting on the part of the police. Witness this Storify of the days’ events in Fortaleza, which shows protesters with a FIFA GO HOME banner, police firing smoke bombs and teargas, and protesters scattering, their faces covered. One tweet by @KetyDC, whose feed is a tireless, compelling ticker-tape covering protests all over Brazil, reads ‘Palestine? No, Fortaleza. #ProtestoCE #VemPraRua #ChangeBrazil (AFP) ‘.

And in an example of the hundreds of causes spiraling off from or piggy-backing the protest movement and its original demand for a reduction in the cost of public transport, another image on the Storify shows a set of designer-sunglass-wearing, bermuda-shorted young men holding signs reading, ‘Political Reform Now!’ That call for political reform, not a issue in the original protests except, arguably, in the most peripheral way, has been in the mainstream political pipeline for some time now, and its revival has become one of the ways in which Brazil’s government – federal, state and municipal – is scrambling to accommodate (or be seen to accommodate) protestors’ perceived demands.

On 25 June, President Dilma Rousseff announced a five-point plan for change that included public consultation on political reforms. In vintage Brazilian style – the level of bureaucracy in Brazil, for even the simplest piece of business, is daunting – Dilma’s announcement contained half-a-dozen procedural steps to get to the matter at hand: a proposal for ‘a debate over the convening of a plebiscite to authorize the functioning of a constituent process to carry out the reform’.

The ‘debate’ on that lasted less than 24 hours, and Dilma, along with the rest of government, is now looking at simply calling a plebiscite on reform. (The political reform in question is twofold, covering the way elections should be funded [Dilma’s party, the PT, wants them to be publicly rather than privately funded], and whether the currently proportional voting system should be changed to voting on the basis of districts [the PT, a relatively small party, would prefer it to stay as it is].)

Who’s who

As for the sunglass-wearing protestors in the Storify, they’re an example of the multiplicity of actors now onstage all over Brazil, on the streets and online, making their voices heard. A battery of assemblies, meetings, demos and street battles is going off on all sides, in city centres and across their peripheries, in an atmosphere in which working out who is who has become almost comically difficult at times. On Tuesday night, I attended a public assembly about the democratization of the media, held underneath the looming hulk of the MASP museum on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. As a speaker was proposing ‘agrarian reform of the airwaves’, a march approached along the avenue, and drawing level, stopped. The two groups regarded each other with a mix of curiosity and suspicion for a few moments, trying to get the measure of one another.

‘Vem pra rua!’ called the marchers, unsure what kind of assembly they had stumbled upon. The assemblists regarded them silently, sizing up the placards, noticing the Brazilian flag around one pair of shoulders, wondering. Eventually, with an expression of solidarity, the speaker holding the microphone deftly sent them on their way, albeit a little uncertainly, and picked up where he’d left off.

The confusion is understandable: lots of things aren’t what they seem, and others seem not to be what they are. Some young men in Occupy-style Guy Fawkes masks turn out to be rightist agitators, hurling abuse at left-wing parties on 20 June, when a PT march was routed from Avenida Paulista. A photo of an unlikely burly, white-shirted and masked rioter who stood out from the crowd, piling in at São Paulo’s City Hall and smashing at the door, was suspected by protestors of being an infiltrator and a provocateur, but turned out to be an over-enthusiastic architecture student. A ‘General Strike’ event on Facebook, since removed, with at least 700,000 confirmed attendees, was found to have been called not by workers’ movements, but created by a single person: a man named Felipe Chamone, an amateur marksman who appeared photographed bearing a gun, triggering a counter-event on Facebook, ‘Denouncement of the General Strike event‘. Even more confusingly, a group of unions now apparently has called a general strike, for 11 July… 

‘Think hard,’ reads the page urging people not to join the General Strike event, ‘before you join any event related to the protests, even if your participation is only symbolic or virtual. Make yourself aware of who is responsible for the initiative, and whether it aligns with your convictions.’ Given that less than a month ago, out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have now taken part in the protests, many would have displayed little reaction to news of a protest other than a loud tut at the disruption to traffic, it’s to be hoped that the habit of critical thinking, developed during these first weeks of the movement, will persist.

For now, as various strains of conservatism scramble to contain, co-opt, appease and control what parts of the movement they can, the Movement for Free Public Transport (MPL), having met with Dilma this week (and having declared her to have a woeful lack of knowledge about transport), is moving onto its own real agenda. Hint: the clue’s in the group’s name, and in its slogan, ‘For a life without turnstiles’. Having achieved the 20¢ reduction in bus fares it took to the streets for at the start of June, the MPL is continuing to campaign for universal free public transport, a gateway right, its activists claim, without which many other rights – to hospital treatment, to education, to culture – are impossible for people to exercise.

Walk this way

In an open letter to Dilma in advance of its meeting with her this week, the MPL wrote about a range of other issues beyond transport, including the militarization of the police, the plight of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and the ongoing repression and criminalization of social movements. It might be a logical progression, too, for an overtly anti-car current to emerge in or around the MPL. There’s no apparent sign of it yet (though the MPL’s open letter refers to an eleven-times greater public investment in individual than in public transport).

But given a set of factors, in São Paulo at least, that include chronic traffic gridlock, a vocal cycling activist lobby, a horrifying death toll annually on the roads, and the sharp focus on transport nationwide, a serious critique of cars and car culture would be an interesting development, to say the least. Coming in the wake of growing demands and actions here in São Paulo for people to ‘occupy the streets’ together, in the form of festivals, demonstrations and other events, the wave of recent protests managed to sweep cars from the picture effortlessly, banishing them from the scene in a single stroke and filling the streets with throngs of people, walking in unison.

There’s even a ready-made slogan, crying out to be appropriated – it’s the punchline of that Johnnie Walker TV ad: Keep Walking, Brazil.

Follow @claire_rigby on Twitter

There has been lots of noise about how to fix Brazil’s giant health deficit recently, but little clarity as to what, if anything, will be done. Above, the Cuban and Brazilian foreign ministers setting off the heated debate.

For the past week, Brazil has been having a somewhat puzzling discussion about its medical system. There has been talking of bringing in doctors from Cuba, or perhaps not, or perhaps from somewhere else, and lots of conflicting talk from separate parts of the government as to whether or not any of that is possible, or even desirable.

The only thing that seems to be clear at this point is that many parts of the country are severely underserved, especially compared to other parts of the country, and that there is currently no concrete plan to fix the problem.

Last week Brazil and Cuba’s foreign ministers announced a plan to send 6,000 Cuban doctors into far-flung parts of Brazil. Everyone understood that there are some parts of the country, notably the Amazon, where there are no doctors for miles. In the North of the country as a whole, there are less than 25% as many doctors per person as there are down here in São Paulo.

But the country’s Federal Medical Council (CFM) struck back harshly at the plan, calling it political, and saying that having no doctor is better than having a (presumably Cuban) doctor that is (presumably) under-qualified.

I wrote a quick web item for the LA Times on the argument, and Professor Greg Weeks rightly pointed out that there are a number of interesting strings to pull on in the story, namely that 1. economic inequality is still huge here, especially between regions, despite advances 2. the way Cuban doctors are deployed by their government for diplomatic purposes is endlessly interesting 3. that immigrant/aid labor has effects on local market price mechanisms, and will throw up winners and losers, and 4. That the CFM said some kind of shocking things, for example:

“Pseudo treatment is worse than no treatment,” [President Carlos Vital] said. “If you don’t have a doctor in your city, you can go to the next city and have a quality doctor.”

Sure, just go 100 miles to the next city if you don’t have a doctor. Nothing to see here!

This will sure look a lot like crass self-interest on the part of the local doctor’s lobby – who would likely see their wages lowered by Cuban doctors – to many observers.  It’s one thing to insist on qualifications for arriving doctors, it’s another to tell sick people in rural communities to just hop on a boat for days.

Then, this week, the story got more complicated. Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said that importing doctors cannot be taboo and must be explored. But he avoided the Cuban doctor issue entirely and said the focus should be on doctors from Portugal and Spain.

At first glance this just seems like a preference for Western Europeans over Cubans (in Brazil’s history, preference for people from this part of the world can bring up tough memories). I’m sure there may be good reasons to prefer the Europeans over Cubans (Higher unemployment in Europe? They would stay here permanently?), but why not mention them?

As many experts have pointed out, unless incentive structures are changed and it becomes more attractive to serve far from the big cities, any new immigrants with full rights will likely just re-produce the same imbalance we currently have, with everyone huddling around São Paulo and Rio. What we see with our current education/salary schemes is a lot of upper-middle class kids gravitating towards specialist degrees and then clinics in the big cities, according to Telmo Ronzani, a specialist in public health at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora.

All of this raises two questions:

1. What is actually going to happen and who is in charge of this? The Foreign Ministry, the CFM, or the Health Ministry? Do they really not talk to each other except through polemical statements to the press?

2. If can they get together to bring in a temporary solution, as it looks like they might, will there be a political movement to push Brazilian doctors into the countryside? It shouldn’t cost much. and the many sick without doctors are one of the gaping holes in Brazil’s success story.

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Brazil’s relationship to its former imperial power has changed dramatically in recent years, reports Dom Phillips from Lisbon. Above, a bookshop there

By Dom Phillips

“I went to Brazil about seven years ago,” Sandra Meleiro told me, sipping a beer in the weak Lisbon Spring sunshine. “I have relatives there. I love it. And it used to be so cheap for us.” She smiled wanly. “Not any more.”

Hanging out one recent Sunday at the LX Factory, a former industrial area transformed into a second hand market and food fair near the river in Lisbon, Sandra and her diverse group of friends were in agreement on one thing: things are not going well in Portugal. As her comments illustrated, the relationship between little Portugal, once an imperial power, and big Brazil, its former colony, has completely reversed in recent years.

The Portuguese discovered Brazil in 1500 and dominated their far-flung colony until it broke free in 1822. Even a decade or so ago, Portugal was one of the countries Brazilian economic emigrants headed for – as illustrated in Brazilian director Walter Salles’s 1996 thriller Terra Estrangeira (Foreign Land). But the Portuguese economy is in recession and contracted another 3.2% last year, unemployment is a staggering 16.9%, and the broke government is battling the constitutional court to get the tax rises through it needs to hang on to its European Union bailout plan. In vivid contrast, while Brazil is not the darling BRIC economy it was – its economy grew just 0.9% in 2012 – it still enjoys almost full employment, has no major foreign debts, and is increasingly a target for foreign professional immigrants, not just from Portugal, but even from countries like the United States.

Now it is the Brazilians who command the relationship between the two countries. It is Brazilian tourists who wander Lisbon streets, because for them, Portugal is a cheap holiday option, not the other way round. And instead of Brazilian immigrants flooding into Portugal looking for work as they once did, today it’s Portuguese heading the other way. Sandra says she knows many Portuguese who are desperately trying to emigrate to Brazil.

This was my first time in Portugal, and it reminded me of Brazil in the food, the architecture, and the colourful porcelain tiles. Colonial Brazilian cities like São Luís echo the colourful, winding streets of Lisbon. Portugal’s old world formality survives in Brazil. As does the language, which the Brazilians simplified to get rid of one of the two forms of ‘you’ common in Latin grammar. But Brazil is made up of much more than Portugal or the Portuguese – witness its indigenous place names, the African religions and rhythms, or the huge immigrant groups like Japanese, Germans, Italians or Lebanese.

Both countries are as different as they are similar. Lisbon is a subdued, polite city, where people talk in hushed tones. In this, it is very different to garrulous, go-getter cities like São Paulo and Rio, where people sometimes joke that the Portuguese are dim-witted, blame the Portuguese for their cumbersome, overcomplicated bureaucracy and corruption, or even argue that if Brazil had been colonised by another country instead of Portugal, it would be an organized, first world country today.

In his book ‘1808’, journalist Laurentino Gomes described how, with Napoleon and his army bearing down on Lisbon, the entire Portuguese royal court boarded a fleet of ships and relocated to Rio de Janeiro. The impact on what was then a colonial backwater of 5,000 European aristocrats, along with artists, musicians, clerks and hairdressers, was dramatic. It dragged Rio de Janeiro into the modern world. The book was a huge bestseller in Brazil, as was Gomes’s follow-up ‘1822’, in which he described how the Portuguese prince Dom Pedro, left in charge after his father, the king, returned to Portugal, declared independence.

Brazil finally became a republic in 1889. Perhaps the Portuguese are yet to forgive them. Some observers argue that both countries need to rethink the way they feel about each other. One is British ex-pat and Lisbon resident Michael Dacosta Babb, a specialist in business development and former executive director of Portugal’s Creative Industries Development Agency. He says that both countries should look to redefine the relationship, much as the USA and the UK did with their ‘special relationship’ when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan formed such a close bond in the 1980s. “Portugal has to do the same in its relationship with Brazil. It is not just about a common past and language. It is about economy and good sense,” said Babb. “For that to happen the Portuguese must swallow their pride and stop using national stereotypes. The same needs to be done by the Brazilians.”

Babb argues that Portugal’s inherent conservatism is what holds it back – particularly in the creative industries. Brazil certainly has one quality Portugal seems to lack: a sense of optimism, of change, of possibilities. Of a future to be lived, not a past lived long ago. Portugal could do with a little of that Brazilian confidence, drive and hustle. Then, just maybe, the Portuguese could go back to taking holidays in Rio.

I don’t believe that it’s just because I lived there that my eyes are on Venezuela today. I think everyone with an interest in Latin America is paying attention, after Hugo Chávez, one of the region’s most transformative leaders, died yesterday at the beginning of another six-year term.

It goes without saying that the man is as loved by his supporters as he is despised by many around the world. We should see an election soon, which will probably mean another referendum on his socialist, “Bolivarian” project – but this time without him.

Here’s a round-up, and things to watch:

Here in Brazil, President Dilma called him a friend of the Brazilian people and said he’d leave “a void in hearts, in history, and in Latin America’s struggles.”

This annoyed some on the Brazilian right, but today, Folha’s Eliane points out that it was originally former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso that made friends with Chávez – for pragmatic reasons, he was a valuable friend to both PSDB and PT governments.

In Venezuela, an outpouring of emotion – photo gallery at Folha.com

And for those that speak Spanish and like news from the horse’s mouth, here are two sites to watch as the story develops:

Venezolana de Televisión – Venezuela’s official state-run TV channel

Globovision – Venezuela’s powerful anti-Chávez TV channel (yes, that exists…), voice of the opposition

Photo from @elizondogabriel who is in Caracas this morning. Follow him, he’s on the ground.

Here, is something I wrote last year comparing politics in Brazil and Venezuela – A tale of two elections

I’m here in Brasília at Congress but will be on Twitter paying attention, too, and hopefully posting things as I see them.

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The ‘people’s team‘ from São Paulo upset Chelsea this morning in Japan and delivered Brazilian football a particularly delicious triumph.

By Dom Phillips

It has been six years since a South American team won the FIFA Club World Cup. But today Corinthians deserved every centimetre of their 1-0 victory, having outplayed Chelsea with a performance that showed the São Paulo team at its very best.

Owned by a Russian billionaire, managed by a Spaniard, with a team stocked by expensive, international players like Spain’s Fernando Torres and Brazil’s Ramires, Chelsea were far and away the favourites.

But Corinthians played with the technique, the skill, the defensive capacity, and most of all the garra – or sheer force of will – that characterises their game at its best. And with a headed goal by Peruvian forward Paulo Guerrero that gave them the trophy, the team have caused a major upset in world football.

At kick-off, it did not look so balanced: Corinthians had struggled to beat Egyptians Al-Ahly 1-0 in the semi final, whereas Chelsea had effortlessly disposed of Mexico’s Monterrey 3-1. Even Corinthians coach Tite had refused to promise victory, saying instead the team would leave fans proud.

This was precisely what they did, taking the game to Chelsea from the beginning, while growing in confidence and stature as the match developed and it became obvious that, yes, the team from London could be beaten. Chelsea threatened time and again. But when the Corinthians defence did falter, goalkeeper Cássio held firm – a goal-line save with his legs was just one of his heart-in-the-mouth, match-saving moments. He deserved his man-of-the-match prize.

This was a tense, but fluid game. But Corinthians kept coming back and kept coming forward. Tite’s advance defence system – in which every player, no matter how far forward he is, has the job to close down the opposition and get the ball back – saw Corinthians winning possession time and time again.

It took them 69 minutes to score as the ball rebounded from the Chelsea goalmouth, out to midfield and back again. In a deft and determined play, Danilo moved laterally across the area to shoot – and Guerrero seized upon the rebound to head the ball home. Even then, Corinthians did not sit back: they defended hard, fought for the ball in midfield, constructed attack after attack, while Chelsea, technically superior, always looked dangerous on the break.

And when the whistle blew, Chelsea looked stunned in defeat. They had not expected to lose. With the game over, the cameras panned over the sour, disbelieving faces of Chelsea’s Frank Lampard and Fernado Torres. “Chelsea fume after world final defeat,” read the Guardian headline.

The victory tops a remarkable year for Corinthians. In December 2011, on the same day that they were mourning the loss of their former captain Sócrates, Corinthians sealed the Brazilian championship. Six months later, after decades of disappointment, the team beat Boca Juniors to win the Libertadores – South America’s Champions League. And now, a hard-fought and, outside of Brazil at least, unexpected victory over European champions Chelsea.

It was all very different a year ago, when the high hopes that Santos would beat Barcelona were crushed 4-0. And it is a victory Brazilian football should be grateful for. Two years away from hosting the World Cup, the Brazilian national team still struggles to find its rhythm and has just been given a new manager: ‘Big Phil’ Scolari. In Brazil, attendances are low and the game even in the country’s top division cannot compare to the pace and finesse of Champions League teams. Corinthians are not celebrated for playing the fluid, creative ‘beautiful game’ Brazil is famous for. But today they gave Brazilian football a much needed shot in the arm.

Because for a team from São Paulo that is largely made up of workmanlike Brazilian league players to go to Japan and beat one of the richest, most famous, and most successful teams in Europe with its multi-million dollar line-up of global talent, is a particularly delicious Brazilian victory.

By Dom Phillips

The game is being scripted as an epic battle: glamorous, strutting Chelsea, Champions League winners, up against the gritty, passionate Corinthians and their army of fans. São Paulo’s so-called ‘team of the people’ finally beat their decades-old jinx and won the South American Libertadores in July. They were also 2011’s Brazilian Champions. A win on Sunday would crown a perfect year for them.

Both teams conquered their trophies with efficient, defensive games. Corinthians then floundered in the Brazilian national league, before rallying back with some recent wins. Chelsea are already out of this year’s Champions League and struggling under unpopular new manager Rafael Benitez. But they are still clearly the favourites

In past years, the trophy has been much more valued by South American teams. But recently the Europeans have won it. Even so, expectations were high before last year’s Club World Cup Final that Santos, where two of Brazil’s brightest talents Neymar and Ganso were playing, could beat the Barcelona team being called one of the greatest of all time. Could Neymar, the one young Brazilian genius not to have left Brazil to dazzle alongside Lionel Messi? Dream on. Santos didn’t even get a look in, losing dismally, 4-0.

I was in São Paulo in December 2005, when São Paulo FC beat Liverpool 1-0 to win the FIFA Club World Cup. The noise of cheering, firecrackers, and car horns blaring reverberated around the city, much to my disappointment. Liverpool is not my team, but it’s pretty much my home city and Brazilian friends took no prisoners in rubbing in the defeat.

Rafael Benitez was Liverpool manager then. But he won the title with Italy’s Inter in 2010. And he’s now in charge of Chelsea – with three of Brazil’s national team in his squad. And he knows exactly what this trophy means to a South American team.

“Maybe in Europe people don’t consider the Club World Cup important. But talk to Brazilians or Mexicans and you will see how they see it. For them, it’s a chance to show the level they’re at against a great European team,” Benitez said recently.

Benitez also has three Brazilian national team players in his squad: midfielders Oscar and Ramires and defender David Luiz. Ramires scored a key goal for Chelsea to take out Barcelona in April on their way to this year’s Champions League victory. Both Oscar, in a deft one-two, and David Luiz, masterly in a rare midfield role, contributed to Chelsea’s 3-1 defeat of Mexico’s Monterrey in Thursday semi-final. Which will have rattled the thousands of Corinthians fans flooding Yokohama’s streets, many of whom watched as Chelsea effortlessly dispensed with the Mexicans.

But this Corinthians team is an efficient soccer machine that coach Tite has crafted over the past year or so, adjusting his system to different players. When the team is playing well as a unit, it is adept at getting the ball back as soon as it loses it, at getting the goals it needs, at hanging on to a lead.

Nevertheless, they struggled to beat Egypt’s Al-Ahly, the African champions, 1-0 in Tuesday’s semi-final with just one goal from their new Peruvian centre-forward Paulo Guerrero – and this despite the army of fans they had dominating the stadium. It is midwinter in Japan and many of the team had never seen snow. Brazilian sports sites are covered in pictures of Corinthians players smothered in giant parkas, scarves and beanie hats, eyes glittering with cold.

But the team has a tradition of putting itself and its supporters through all kinds of cliff-hangers before occasionally pulling out the magic at the last minute. And this stadium has been lucky for another Brazilian team before: Brazil won the 2002 World Cup here, defeating Germany with two goals from the great Ronaldo. Whose last team before retiring, in the twilight of his career, was Corinthians.

Guido Mantega – Taking heat. In the last 3-4 days, international opinion on the Brazilian economy has turned.

It all started last week, when Guido Mantega, Brazil’s Finance Minister, predicted the beginning of a turnaround in the country’s economy. Then the actual third quarter results came out, far below what he, and even the most pessimistic economists, had predicted.

This has set off a wave of doubt, head-scratching, and criticism, especially abroad. It’s a significant moment, as people are beginning to really question what is going on here, where there had recently been almost miracular economic growth.

As always, I think the propensity of those of us in the media is to exaggerate and then indeed exacerbate short-term swings in economic cycles (we as probably did on the way up in 2010). Unfortunately (we) foreign correspondents can actually matter on these kinds of issues, affecting investment flows. So this conversation is an event in itself.

For the record, I think Brazil’s long-term fundamentals are still very strong, a rebound will come, and that some of the current problems are over-stated, specifically the worries that the state is becoming dangerously interventionist or that rules and contracts here aren’t clear. That criticism to me seems ideological – if China and Korea are allowed to be so different from the US or the UK, why can’t Brazil do things their own way? There are more ways than one to run an economy. The state plays a big role here, and it has been that way for a long time. Dilma has changed very little. Let’s not forget another little fact: during this period of stagnation, no is one losing jobs and wages have continued to rise. But since this isn’t about me, let’s let them talk:

Washington Post – Amid slowdown, Brazil turns inward – Echoes Washington’s accusations of protectionism

Reuters – A case study in Brazil’s economic troubles – a company hurt by Dilma’s move to lower the price of electricity

Nomura – Brazil, the confidence paradox (PDF) – The most in-depth and, for my money, the best analysis. Says – the Brazilian government is solving the right problems, but in ways that make international investors uncomfortable. Is it worth it?

Reuters – Brazil’s economy, five strengths and weaknesses – Right on the money about high costs, and on how we haven’t yet seen the (significant, positive) effects of lower interest rates

Financial Times – Beware membership of this elite club – This one may hurt the most. Argues that it’s a very bad time to be a BRIC

Financial Times – Downturn shakes Brazil from its dream – A good overview. What is going on? What can be done?

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In many ways, political culture in South America’s two most-watched countries couldn’t be more different. Brazilian voters, like this one walking over campaign flyers yesterday, are less politicized, and choose between candidates who agree on the big questions.

Yesterday, Brazilians and Venezuelans went to the polls. Here, voters broadly voted to maintain the powers that be and gave President Dilma’s Worker’s Party a pleasant surprise by giving Fernando Haddad a shot to be mayor of São Paulo. Northwest of here, Venezuelans re-elected “controversial”* president Hugo Chávez again, setting him up for an astonishing twenty years in power.

The two countries are the most-watched in South America, and from outside, it may appear that since they share a border they have much in common. They do. But after being a correspondent in Caracas and watching elections there, and now covering votes here, it’s obvious that in many ways their political cultures couldn’t be more different.

Click here to see the LA Times summary of the Brazil election, or here for more detail from Folha, or below to continue to me explaining these differences.

Talking to voters yesterday in Penha, on the poor outskirts of São Paulo, I heard many people – many, many people – tell me they didn’t really know why they voted the way they did. Some said: Whatever, they are all the same, liars and cheats. Others said: Whatever, things are going fine, and I don’t know anything about these people, really.

In hyper-politicized, deeply divided Venezuela, hearing someone say something like this would be enough to make your head explode. It just doesn’t happen. Most Venezuelans you come across will have spirited, and most often well-thought out arguments as to why they support or do not support Chávez. You’re likely to disagree with around half of the conclusions, but they are informed opinions. Topics like socialism, capitalism, corruption, politicians, revolution and democracy fill their heads and barroom conversations far more often than they do here in Brazil.

Brazilians, in my experience, are far less political than Venezuelans. This can be explained a few ways, and can be seen as either good or bad.

It may be that Venezuelans have been forced to pay attention due to the transformative and conflictual nature of the Chávez government. It may also be that Brazilians pay less attention than they should. One should also mention that voting is mandatory in Brazil – meaning those who truly don’t care still cast ballots – and that Venezuela is a country with a revolutionary tradition, whereas in Brazil most historical advances were arrived at through compromise and smoothed over by ruling elites. Brazil never had a revolution, civil war, or any real open political conflict.

The second way Brazilian political culture is different than Venezuela’s is probably directly related to the first.

That is, that in Brazil, most of the major political parties broadly agree on what Brazil should be doing. Namely, more or less what they’ve been doing for 15 years. Despite the small differences between Lula’s PT and Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s PSDB that the two parties love to exaggerate, they both agree on the same kind of government. They oversaw, and continue to propoose, a more or less markets-friendly social democracy with a mid-sized state presence. This approach, combined with a boom in Chinese demand for commodities, has lifted 40 million people out of poverty and increased the country’s presence on the world stage, but of course has not solved by a long shot problems of shocking inequality, persistent corruption, and woefully lacking health and education systems.

If you compare the small disagreements within Brazil to the fights going on in Venezuela, they appear even tinier still. In Venezuela, plenty of people really do – despite the incredulence of much of the international press – want radical socialist revolution. And plenty of others there want a total break with everything Chávez has done, and share much more of Washington’s idea of development than Brasília is likely to soon.

Those fundamental questions are open in Venezuela, but in Brazil there is general agreement on a path. So perhaps, why should those here get too involved? No one yesterday in São Paulo seemed too concerned things could change much one way or another. In Venezuela, I’d be willing to wager, everyone was.

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Photo Vincent Bevins 07 – 10 – 2012

*Sarcasm

A mostly pointless post in which I quickly and subjectively compare the two countries, and share some (slightly) juicy, but meaningless, gossip about glamorous Argentine President Cristina Kirchner.

I just got back from Buenos Aires, and it has occurred to me to do a very quick post on the (very significant) differences between the two countries. But this is all based on cursory investigation, stereotypes and first impressions, and is extremely subjective. I know a lot about Brazil but much less about Argentina. Actually, I am just comparing Brazil to Buenos Aires. I will also share some stories about Cristina (reportedly) acting a bit important.

This post isn’t journalism – just a blog. Don’t take it too seriously, if you even read it.

Argentines care more about politics. A lot more. One could call Argentina a place where your man on the street is extremely politicized. Extremely. One could not say the same for Brazil. You stumble across all kinds of protests in Buenos Aires, and quite earnest ones – I saw a large one complete with Che flags, covered faces, and clubs – and barroom conversations turn to politics quickly. Brazilians are indeed tuned into the social issues they live with daily, but the response to them and the ongoing conversation are not as explicitly political.

As one Brazilian said in Argentina: “It’s incredible. All the graffiti here is political. In Brazil, most of the graffiti is the name of the tagger or his gang.”

Or as another said: “It’s crazy here. These people talk about politics like we talk about football.”

Argentines take themselves more seriously. This one smacks you in the face quite quickly and is one of the most often-repeated stereotypes. I find it’s broadly true. Brazilians are laid back and extremely unpretentious. Argentines are many things. Unpretentious is not one of them. Even for the most intellectual Brazilians, being able to laugh off your ego and hang out in an extremely laid-back manner with absolutely anyone is a prerequisite to social behavior. In Argentina, you’ll come across a remarkable amount of people with purposefully challenging haircuts who want to talk about all the very difficult books they read.

I’m not sure which I like better. Something in the middle, is probably the easiest answer.

Argentines only eat red meat and red wine. That is the only thing they eat. The only thing. This makes for a fun couple of meals, kind of like having ice cream for breakfast, but it didn’t do my system much good in the long term. In Brazil, yes, steak is central, but it will invariably be served with rice, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. In Buenos Aires you are lucky to get some french fries on the side.

Brazilians aren’t anti-American. At least, not like that. Perhaps the clumsy, sunburnt, fat American tourist is viewed as an idiot (where isn’t he?), but not so much as a representative of Empire. In Buenos Aires I was called bourgeois and yankee a few times, and only as a half-joke. Most everyone liked me, but thought I was Brazilian at first, and most were often a little let down when I was American. They were quick, though, to insist, relieved, that it must have been because I realized my country sucks and decided to leave forever. This stirred fond memories of my time living elsewhere in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Buenos Aires is nicer. São Paulo is a terrifying mega-city which brings to mind 20th-century visions of a post-apocalyptic future. Blade Runner, most notably. I love it, and I love its energy, but it is not nice. In São Paulo, you need a lot of money to live well, and for a large section of that (hyper) rich population, living well just means hanging out in impossibly tacky shopping malls.

In Buenos Aires, you can cheaply enjoy a very high quality of life in a sophisticated environment that reminds of Paris. It’s neat urban space with stunning architecture and natural interactions with other people in public areas. São Paulo is totally closed and private.

Rio is set within a stunning natural environment, but the city itself is not nearly as nice as Buenos Aires. The inequality gnaws at the conscience of most foreigners in Rio, and it’s also deadly expensive.

I’d personally rather live in São Paulo. It is more exciting, more is happening, and the city and Brazil suit me, especially at the moment. But Buenos Aires is nicer, hands down.

Brazil is more “investor friendly”. Brazil has emerged as an economic and global power, during a period in which the government established macroeconomic stability. It’s an environment in which citizens and investors know more or less what to expect. It’s a vision much more in line with what the US-educated banker or economist thinks a country should do to grow. In Argentina, you are immediately struck with the realities of a more heterodox, more old-school Latin American, approach to development.

As a foreigner you can change your dollars at the official rate, or you can go to a black market dealer, who will pay you more, because the government is currently limiting the amount of dollars Argentines can buy with their pesos. So those who need more than they are allotted go to the black market. And there was of course the famous debt default a decade ago, which cut off access to capital markets. Locals don’t trust the system, either – you have to buy your home in dollars, and nowhere takes credit cards as payment.

In Brazil, if you tried to tell a favela resident that they couldn’t change their money to dollars, or that they couldn’t use plastic to pay for lunch, they’d stare at you in disbelief.

I’m not taking sides – a lot of smart and earnest people support the current economic policies in Argentina, and the default, few would disagree, worked out fairly well. But Brazil certainly feels more like the US in the way the economy works.

They treat the government differently. Argentina is a classic republic – like most of the rest of Latin America, a nation originally founded through struggle and bloodshed, inspired by 19th-century republican ideals. Brazil is a different, more subtle story. It is a huge piece of territory that was handed down from monarchy to empire to democracy, to dictatorship, and back to democracy. And all of this, remarkably, happened with comparatively little direct confrontation. Brazil is not a revolutionary country, like Mexico or the US or France or Argentina.

This may or not be related to the fact that the government and its symbols are treated with more reverence and seriousness in Argentina. Or that may just be an issue of national personality. Or, it may be an issue of the personality of the current president of Argentina, who is rumored to, as it turns out, take herself a bit more seriously than Dilma or Lula.

According to two figures in the São Paulo business and political community, Cristina acted a bit funny on a trip here. It is totally harmless, pointless stuff, but serves to illustrate the way Brazilians see Argentina. The story comes from two figures high enough in the Brazilian business and political community that their opinions matter, but not high enough that you can figure out who they are. I can’t confirm they are telling the truth.

They say that when the food was served at the first official lunch with then president Lula, Cristina presented a problem. She would not be having the Brazilian food which had been elaborately prepared for the foreign visitors. She had brought her own from Argentina, they said. This caused great offense until Lula smoothed things out.

Then, they had planned to shuffle her into a helicopter to the next event – this is extremely common in São Paulo. She refused. Doing that would mess up her hair, the story goes, and she was going to be photographed later. So she preferred to go by car. Everyone had to wait three hours to be able to shut down massive Avenida Paulista and bring her a motorcade.

As they told the story, it was clear the Brazilians thought this was a little bit annoying, but very hilarious and mostly, preciously Argentine.

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Anyone with a feel for Brazilian soccer should tune into Wednesday night’s final: Argentina’s Boca Juniors against São Paulo’s Corinthians. This heavyweight title fight is the first leg in a two-game final to decide the Libertadores South America-wide club competition – the continent’s equivalent of Europe’s Champions League.

All eyes in Brazil will be on Corinthians, the country’s second most popular team, who have never even made the final, never mind actually won the trophy. This is a deeply emotional matter to their 30 million fans. And a cause of great amusement and incessant jibing for everybody else in Brazil.

In 2010, when veteran defender Roberto Carlos joined the great attacker Ronaldo in the team, he promised to win the Libertadores trophy for Corinthians. It looked good. Both were former members of Brazil’s 2002 World Cup winning team. It was Corinthians’ 100th anniversary. But then Corinthians lost 1-0 to Flamengo under torrential April rain in Rio de Janeiro, when the faulty drainage at the Maracanã stadium turned it into an ankle-deep swamp.

Corinthians won 2-1 on the return leg in São Paulo, but as away goals count double in a draw, Flamengo went through. Roberto Carlos left for Russia the following February. The joke had already gone around Brazil: 2010 wasn’t the team’s centenário – or centenary. It was their centenada (nada means nothing in Portuguese).

In 2011, the Corinthians Libertadores campaign got even worse. They team went out in the first phase, 2-0 down to a nobody team from Colombia called Deportes Tolima. The jibing intensified. Ronaldo retired that year.

So this is the closest, then, that Corinthians have ever been. They can smell victory, and they can also remember the bitter taste of defeat. Although the Boca team they face at the Bombonera is not what it once was, Argentine clubs have a good Libertadores record against Brazilian teams. When River Plate, another Buenos Aires team, turned a Corinthians 1-0 home lead into a 3-1 defeat in 2006, furious fans stormed the pitch at the Pacaembu municipal stadium the São Paulo team calls home.

This is pretty much the same Corinthians team with which coach Tite won the Brazilian championship with in December 2011. Some of the players to watch are Emerson, our main forward, Chicão, another veteran defender, Danilo, who scored a crucial goal against Santos, and new goalkeeper star Cássio. But Tite hasn’t got to here by playing the ‘beautiful game’ Brazil was once famous for. Instead he has done it by forming an efficient football machine that is as focused on defence as it is attack, that marks its opposition heavily, and that badly lacks a craque – star, or genius player.

“The whole team has the function of marking, not just the defence system. They begin at the front, making it difficult for the ball to go back and the whole team has this function,” Tite told me in a recent interview.

“Much like Chelsea,” quipped the Flamengo fan on my local newsstand the other day, referring to the mixture of dumb luck and heroic defending that saw London’s most hated club defeat the glorious Barcelona and then beat Bayern Munich to win this year’s Champion’s League. On a smaller, less glamorous scale, perhaps it’s a little like how Corinthians defence faced down the fluid, creative attack of Santos and their star players Neymar and Ganso in their recent Libertadores semi-final.

As a gringo Corinthiano, like most of the club’s fans, I couldn’t care less. I just want them to win. This is a results-based team – and we want a result. Resolute, constant defending is, I have decided, a much neglected art. And anyway, it fits the mood in today’s Brazil, with the economic growth of the last years stalling, and a hard-nosed technocrat like Dilma Rousseff as president, instead of her flamboyant predecessor and mentor Lula.

It’s all about number-crunching and bottom-line in this most capitalist of countries – despite an ostensibly left-wing government. On Monday the giant Brazilian state oil company Petrobras, suffering a falling share price and falling production figures, presented a revised business plan for the next four years to a skeptical audience of analysts.

Its new CEO, another hard-line technocrat called Graça Foster, is a friend and former colleague of Dilma’s, and she laid down the law. Petrobras had for nine years promised unrealistic production targets and failed to meet them. Now it was all about the detail, the projects – and the results.

“Here, nobody works with comfort of absolutely anything,” said Foster sternly from behind her glasses at a press conference afterwards. “Comfort is a word absolutely prohibited between us. We work with total discomfort. Here it is discomfort 365 days a year to attend the demand of all our senhores and senhoras.”

Preparing his team for their Bombonera showdown, and the second leg Wednesday July 4^th in São Paulo, and living under the expectations of 30 million rabid fans, Corinthians coach Tite knows exactly what she means.

Game is Wednesday night, 21.50, Brasília time, played in Buenos Aires and aired on Globo. Second leg Wednesday is July 4^th, at Pacaembu, 21.50. Check online to see where it might be streaming or aired in your country.

[Photo – Emerson at a training session in preparation for the game, in front of the famous Corinthians logo]

Links:
The people’s team
Who is Neymar?

Whether or not they liked Lugo, everyone in Latin America that is not a Paraguayan legislator seems to agree there was something fishy about the way they rushed through his trial, not allowing him time to prepare a defense.

Everyone has gotten together to criticize Paraguay and throw them out of both Mercosul and Unasul until there are new elections, and we will have emergency meetings later this week in Argentina. That is the gist of the short piece I wrote today for the Los Angeles Times

Go to: Paraguay faces fallout after president’s ouster at Los Angeles Times

But many questions remain, not least of which are what Mercosul wants, what they are prepared to do to get it, and whether or not Paraguay will respond.

And why did Paraguay do this in the first place? Why throw him out 9 months before his term was going to expire? And why not let him prepare and mount a lengthy defense? They could have just nodded off during proceedings and vote him out anyways. Why cause this huge incident to get rid of a lame-duck president in two days? It seems there is something I am not getting.

Collective efforts to deal with crises in Latin America have a mixed record recently. Two incidents stand out: the cross-border bombing raid Colombia carried out in Ecuador in 2008, and the 2009 coup in Honduras. In the former, a meeting of the region’s leaders managed to more or less successfully smooth things over. In the latter, opinion was divided on the proper response. Brazil allowed ousted president Zelaya to live in its embassy for months, without ever accomplishing anything except to be able to escape and watch elections take place in which the anti-coup forces did not take part. One can argue that country is still suffering from the consequences of the confused and contradictory response outside of Honduras.

I visited Honduras in the wake of that crisis and it was not pretty (link to Guardian comment piece). Word is things have gotten much worse.

What will Paraguay look like in five years? Will all of this ‘parliamentary coup’ business be sorted out this week, or could it lead to crisis and conflict? A lot of that may be decided at the Mercosul meeting on Thursday and Friday.

Even as the sex scandal surrounding Secret Service agents in Colombia continues to unfold, we have a new incident, involving a Brazilian woman, that the US may have to defend itself against.

Former prostitute Romilda Aparecida Ferreira (pictured) has said she will sue the United States Embassy this week.  She claims 3 Marines and another government worker ran her over and left her bleeding in a nightclub parking lot.

The Americans had been in the process of contracting her and her friends for sex  when a scuffle broke out, she says.

As I noted in this piece for the Los Angeles Times last week, the US government has already disciplined the military officers, all of whom have left the country.

I talked to Ms. Ferreira’s lawyer last week, who said the charge against the Embassy would be for supplying an automobile that was used in a case of attempted murder. This is on top of possible criminal charges that Brazilian government prosecutors could file against the individuals themselves.

The incident took place in December, but Ms. Ferreira and her lawyer waited until now to come forward, they say, because they were in negotiations with the US over a payment for her medical bills and to keep her quiet. The US Embassy denies this.

Of course, there are a lot more Marines than Secret Service workers, and they are not generally held to the same standards of conduct.  But no one representing the US government abroad – no, scratch that, no one at all – should be leaving women wounded in the streets.

If they did so in the US – regardless of the circumstances that led to the injuries – they would lose a lot more than one military rank.

We will see this week if the lawsuit materializes, and what becomes of it. We don’t really have the other side of the story at this point.

But this much is clear: As a US citizen working in Latin America, this is very embarrassing.

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Over lunch recently, a high-ranking executive gave me a strikingly obvious bit of off-the-record advice: “There might be a day when the Chinese stop building so much with steel, but there will not come a day when the Chinese stop eating.”

China is the most important consumer of Brazilian goods, and that is not likely to change anytime soon. At the moment, Brazil’s #1 export is iron ore, #2 is oil, and #3 is soya. But economists argue China needs to shift from a construction-heavy model to one based more around consumption. It’s also clear that Brazil’s potential to develop its arable land is enormous, and that the country could become one of the world’s breadbaskets.

Earlier this month, I reported on some more bits of good news for the agricultural sector in this piece in the Financial Times.

Click here to keep reading, “Brazil: soya bonanza” at the Financial Times.

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Heads of state from all the countries in the Americas will spend the weekend in the beautiful city of Cartagena das Índias, on the Colombian coast. The meeting promises the same old scenes: speeches about the blockade on Cuba, Chávez acting up, and Obama’s glittering smile, with the Caribbean as backdrop.

Meanwhile, Latin America is drowning in a sea of blood. It’s the most violent piece of land on the planet, much worse than Africa. Out of the 14 countries with the world’s highest murder rate, seven are in Latin America, starting with El Salvador, where the chance of being shot to death is higher than in wartime Iraq.

Brazil is in the Olympic competition for the most murderous countries, coming in at 18th with 26 murders per 100,000 residents, or more than Palestine, Afghanistan, and Mozambique. In absolute terms, we win the gold: no other country in the world kills as many as we do.

The reason for the violence is as clear as the waters of the Caribbean: the war on drugs.

Over the last 40 years, since Richard Nixon sat in Obama’s place, the US has led a repressive offensive on drugs throughout our entire continent.

The fierce laws give criminals a monopoly in a very lucrative market, allowing them to be better armed and better paid than our own official security forces.

The result is that violence skyrockets. Paradoxically, increases in drug use do not slow down, as a result of a lack of investment in health in education. All that money is already earmarked for guns and prisons.

The war on drugs is now the main obstacle to development in Latin America, bringing down businesses, increasing our costs and scaring away tourists. But for many years now, no politician in the region has had the courage to face the problem – they’re scared to death of our big brother to the North, and of losing votes.

This has started to change. Last month, Otto Peréz Molina, the president of Guatemala – the world’s 7th most violent country – proposed that we should start talking about solutions to the problem – including the idea of creating controlled markets for marijuana, in an attempt to bring down the profitability of drug trafficking, and as a result, the amount of weapons involved.

Perez Molina is no bearded hippie. He is a hard-line general that was elected after saying he’d “crush the cartels with an iron fist.”

And he’s no dope, either. He knows he has no chance of winning as long as our drug policies enrich the enemy armies. Support for Molina’s courageous position popped up in important countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile.

The US did exactly what we’d expect: they sent the vice president to go give Molina a stern rebuke, and acted outraged. They’re playing to the crowd: in an election year Obama can’t be seen as “soft on drugs.”

Colombia’s former president Cesar Gaviria, said that the majority of US officials already know that the war on drugs has been a mistake, and that they don’t end it because “it’s on automatic pilot.”

In the midst of all this mess, one country is fundamental: Brazil. If Dilma gives clear support, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, the three biggest economies in Latin America, will be on the same side, defending the region against a bloodbath. This will lead to changes around the world.

But Brazil pretends that this is not our battle. The Foreign Ministry refuses to say anything, other than giving a vague declaration that the country “is not opposed to opening a debate.” Our politicians must be too busy writing speeches about Cuba.

Denis Russo Burgierman is a Brazilian journalist and author of “The end of the war: marijuana and the creation of a new system to deal with drugs.” (Leya)

Photo: Fabiana Andres Lopez, left, and another relative, mourn on the coffin containing the body of her son Elmer Constantino Castro Andres, after the identification and repatriation of the remains from Mexico at an Air Force base in Guatemala City , Wednesday, March 21, 2012. According to Mexican authorities, Castro was one of 72 migrants allegedly executed Aug. 25, 2010 by the Zetas drug cartel in the northeastern Mexico town of San Fernando, just 100 miles from the U.S. border. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

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Of course on an economic level, this will get the country absolutely nowhere. Though Obama was likely telling the truth when he said he understood Brazil’s concerns, he has plenty of his own. Unfortunately, on the list of considerations that end up dictating US monetary policy, the President’s relationship with Brazil may not be in the top 50.

But politics is about politics, and naming and shaming the US may be worthwhile sometimes. It was indeed the US that caused the financial crisis, and reminding them that the rest of the world suffers as a result could be good for diplomatic leverage.

Back at home, what can be done to save Brazilian manufacturing? What should be done? Fears about the death of industry have become the main political and economic concern in Brazil recently – I explored this issue quickly in the LA Times after workers took the streets last week – but opinion is divided.

Amongst economists, business leaders and government officials, there are three basic schools of thought.

1. Brazil’s manufacturing sector is fundamental to the country, and world-class. If it weren’t for unfair and unexpected developments coming from the US, China, and Europe, we’d be doing fine, and something needs to be done to combat those countries.

2. Brazil’s manufacturing sector is fundamental to the country. But despite the problems caused by the value of the dollar, the real problem is a lack of competitiveness, and the government needs to undertake radical reform to reduce costs in Brazil.

3. Forget it. Brazil doesn’t need to export manufactured products, and even if it did, long-term economic trends will make it impossible. Brazil should focus on managing the transition to a natural resources economy. That doesn’t have to be so bad, they say. Australia and Norway have managed quite well.

Position one is held by the government and by representatives of the industrial sectors. This is especially true if you judge them by their actions rather than their words. Both Dilma and market leaders do agree that reform is necessary, but actually trying to do it has so far been out of reach. It would be costly and politically difficult to improve infrastructure, reform the tax code, and adjust government expenses. What we’ve seen instead is the currency war and a set of stimulus packages for the struggling sectors.

Position two is held by some economists and business leaders that you might say belong to the “development” school. Brazil should be very worried about trying to exist on basic goods alone – the country worked very hard to overcome dependency on selling commodities, and we shouldn’t let that slip away. The government should do all that is possible, including everything listed above, to save the sectors.

Position three is held by a surprising amount of serious commentators, who might be called the “free market” or “comparative advantage” school. Yes, reform is needed all around, they say, but things will be getting even tougher for industrialists. In the long term, the dollar will drop more and more, and the pre-salt reserves will only exaggerate the circumstances in favor of commodities producers. History is not on your side. Deal with it and move on. Unsurprisingly, the fact that serious people even think this does not please either the government or most business leaders.

When Dilma gets back, this will be the debate she will be wading through for probably the rest of her presidency.

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It’s the locals. The numbers of Brazilians travelling around their own country has shot up in the last five years.

In this piece for the Financial Times, I write that with 95% of travel and tourism driven by domestic spending, Brazil now has one of the least international tourist industries in the world.

Take a stroll down Copacabana Beach these days, or talk to hotel workers around Rio, and it’s clear that the tourist industry in Brazil is doing just fine. But it’s not the stereotypical sunburnt gringos that are powering the sector. Almost all of the growth is coming from Brazilians travelling around their own country.

Continue reading “Brazil tourism: forget the gringos” at the Financial Times

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Dilma’s government is willing to stand up to the big powers, it seems, and Brazil’s status on the world stage these days means she can get away with it.

First Dilma attacked rich countries – but specifically the European Central Bank – for unleashing a ‘tsunami’ of cheap money, much of which could make its way to Brazil, further pushing up the value of the currency and exacerbating the currency wars.

Right away, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she understood Dilma’s concerns, and that they’d discuss them in their March 5 meeting.

Then, shortly after the US Air Force unexpectedly cancelled a contract to purchase Brazilian warplanes, the Ministry of Foreign affairs issued a very strongly worded statement:

“The Brazilian government learnt with surprise of the suspension of the bid process to purchase A-29 Super Tucano aircraft by the United States Air Force, in particular due to its manner and timing,” the communiqué reads.

“This development is not considered conducive to strengthening relations between the two countries on defence affairs.”

But by then General Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz had already said the cancellation was an “embarrassment” for the Air Force.

“There’s no way to put a happy face on this,” he said.

No, this was not a response to Brazil’s official statement, but it was a clear indication that parts of Washington know they gave Brazil a bit of a raw deal.

Of course, it’s one thing for the rich countries to play nice, and another to actually change European monetary policy, or restore the contract to buy the Embraer planes, to please Brazil. Neither is likely to happen.

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The US Air Force has abruptly cancelled an order for 20 attack aircraft from Brazilian company Embraer, saying it was not satisfied with the documentation on the contract.

What remains to be seen is if this is just a setback for Embraer, or for military relations more broadly between the two countries. Dilma will visit Washington next month.

The US has given no real explanation for the turnaround, but a piece in today’s Folha offers two theories: In an election year and with the economy in the doldrums, the government faced political pressure to give the contract to an American company, or, the US is less agressively pursuing a hotly contested multi-billion dollar contract to sell jets to replenish Brazil’s air forces.

If Embraer had succeeded in selling the “Super Tucano” (Super Toucan) light attack vessels to the US, it would have greatly boosted Embraer’s military sales, given one of Brazil’s more important advanced companies – a leading supplier worldwide of regional aircraft – a big credibility boost and established a commercial military relationship between the hemisphere’s biggest countries.

This may have given US-based Boeing a better chance at the contract to sell to Brazil.

“While we pursue perfection, we sometimes fall short, and when we do we will take corrective action,” Michael Donley, air force secretary, said in a statement.

This was not good news for Embraer. “It was like a cold shower”, said one person familiar with the negotiations.

Relations between Dilma’s government and the US have been positive, in many ways probably even an improvement on the Lula-Obama days. But these days the US government is focusing much more on its own problems than reaching out to Latin America.

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