Over 30 journalists and bloggers have been murdered in Brazil since 1992, making it a dangerous place for those who speak out against local corruption – especially in the country’s remoter regions. And a culture of impunity means the killers are rarely brought to justice. 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

In a country like Brazil, where there were more than 52,000 murders in 2014, it is not always easy to identify patterns. Especially in cases such as that of Roberto Lano, murdered in the town of Buriticupu in the northern state of Maranhão just over a week ago, and victim of one of the most typical types of Brazilian homicide – a gunman pulling up on a motorbike, squeezing the trigger, and speeding off into the night.

Or the death of 30-year-old Ítalo Eduardo Diniz Barros, killed in almost identical circumstances in another Maranhão town, Governador Nunes Freire, the Friday before that.

Or even the murder of Israel Gonçalves Silva, shot dead in a stationery store at 7.30 in the morning, again by men on a motorbike, in Lagoa de Itaenga, in the north-eastern state of Pernambuco, on November 10^th. He had just dropped his two young children off at school.

What connects the deaths of Roberto, Ítalo and Israel – or Décio Sá, murdered in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, in April 2012, or Gleydson Carvalho, shot last August as he presented his radio show in Camocim, Ceará, or any of over thirty other homicides in Brazil since 1992 – is that all were journalists or bloggers, and were apparently killed because the investigative or critical nature of their work had made them some powerful, dangerous enemies.

Ítalo Diniz criticised local authorities on his blog, and had told colleagues that he had often received threats from “mayors and town councillors”, while Lano had also recently attacked local politicians. Israel Gonçalves Silva regularly talked about corruption allegations on his radio show.

Another blogger, 67-year-old Evany José Metzker, was found dead in the countryside of the south-eastern state of Minas Gerais in May this year. His decapitated body showed signs of torture, and according to reports, police believe that the murder was motivated by the journalist’s investigations into child prostitution and drug trafficking.

Many other Brazilian journalists have had to deal with violence, threats, and even imprisonment as part of their work. A report by Brazil’s Associação Nacional de Jornais (National Newspaper Association), quoted in this article in The Guardian, has said that in addition to the killings, 24 journalists have been imprisoned, 33 have been the victims of assault and 59 have received threats since 2008.

Police intimidation and aggression is also an issue. A June 2013 survey by the Associação Brasileira de Jornalismo Investigativo (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism) revealed that during the massive month-long street protests of that year, eight journalists were arrested and 52 were beaten across ten of Brazil’s 26 states.

“The killings, particularly coming so close together, are very worrying and we urge authorities in Maranhão to make every effort to get to the bottom of them,” Andrew Downie, the São Paulo-based representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, non-profit organization, said after the murders of Roberto and Ítalo.

“We ask that they devote the necessary manpower and expertise to finding the culprits and that they conduct their investigations in as open and transparent a manner as possible.”

“Other local bloggers have told the CPJ that threats are a common practice in the region and it is vital that local, state and federal government act together whenever possible to ensure they send the message that threats against the press will not be tolerated and will not go unpunished,” added Downie.

According to the CPJ, at least 16 journalists have been murdered in Brazil in retaliation for their work since 2011. To make matters worse, the killers are rarely brought to justice.

While the murderer of Décio Sá was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment in 2014, and the killers of two other murdered journalists, Walgney Assis Carvalho and Rodrigo Neto, were also recently brought to justice, the CPJ points out that “as with the majority of cases…accountability has extended as far as the gunmen but not the mastermind.”

Brazil ranks 11^th on the organisation’s global Impunity Index, which spotlights nations where “journalists are slain and their killers go free”. That makes the country slightly tougher at dealing with such crimes than Russia, in 10^th position, but less effective than Bangladesh, India and Nigeria.

President Dilma Rousseff has promised to tackle the problem. “The federal government is fully committed to continue fighting against impunity in cases of killed journalists,” she said in a meeting with CPJ representatives in Brasilia in June last year, when she pledged to support legislative efforts to federalize crimes against freedom of expression.

Rousseff’s current political woes, however, mean that the safety of journalists is unlikely to be her struggling government’s top priority at the moment. And in any case, a tougher stance from Brasília against those who murder bloggers and journalists may not prove to be much of a deterrent against the often corrupt local level politicians and pistoleiros that hold sway in the backlands of states such as Maranhão and Pernambuco, where local law enforcement and infrastructure can be lacking.

For now then, it seems Brazilian journalists and bloggers who have the courage to speak out against corruption and wrongdoing in their communities will have to continue looking nervously over their shoulders.

São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, a 24-hour mega-party featuring more than 900 acts, put the best and the worst of São Paulo on display last weekend. Despite headlines dominated by crime, Claire Rigby had a great time, alongside millions of others, and argues that these kinds of events should be a source of pride for the city.

By Claire Rigby

Headlines – “DEATHS, ROBBERIES AND MASS MUGGINGS MAR THE VIRADA CULTURAL” – “DEATHS AND MASS MUGGINGS: CULTURE LOSES OUT TO VIOLENCE” – “VIRADA OF THE MASS MUGGING” 

São Paulo’s population, waking up after another Virada Cultural, the city’s annual 24-hour cultural marathon, could be forgiven for shuddering with horror at São Paulo’s newspapers over their Monday morning coffee. But for millions of people who attended the festival downtown, the papers seemed to be talking about a parallel event. Not that the robberies, injuries, and even the shooting and death of a young man who ran after the thief who had taken his phone, didn’t take place.

They did; and there was definite tension in the air at times, especially in the early hours, when the mix of thousands of revelers, untold gallons of alcohol, and the carnavalesque all-night party – not to mention the smouldering social tensions that are the mark of every major city, not least São Paulo – took their toll.

But alongside the undoubtedly bad news, there was precious little good news to be read about the Virada Cultural (‘Cultural All-Nighter’), an event that brought an estimated total of 4 million people onto the streets over the course of 24 hours, starting at 6pm on the night of Saturday 20 May. Filling the streets of SP’s dilapidated, occasionally lovely Centro with music, art, dance and theatre, and with hundreds of official food stalls and unofficial beer-sellers, the ninth annual Virada set audiences washing up and down the town to watch shows by thousands of musicians – there were some 900 acts spread across 120 locations – and dancing through the night to everything from techno to samba, lambada and funk carioca.

Art projections filled the Vale de Anhangabaú, where artists and collectives had created 15 installations, including a bridge by BijaRi whose LED lighting glowed in response to the people crossing the valley on it. An art/activist installation Conjunto Vazio, by the collective CoLaboratório, projected Batcave-like lightning flashes onto empty buildings all over town, and under the Viaduto do Chá, grown men and women screamed in excitement as they flew through the air on immense swings attached to the viaduct overhead. Street performers, dancers and theatre companies attracted unlikely, ragtag audiences to their pop-up shows, roping in bystanders and parading them up and down the valley; and George Clinton and P. Funk played to a rapt crowd at 3am, as a tango orchestra struck up 500 metres away at a lonely Estação da Luz. The mesmerizing Gal Costa played a difficult, moving set of new music from her album Recanto; and as Sunday wore on, Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most powerful, important rap group, played a cathartic, euphoric, packed set, also featuring an impassioned speech by the group’s much revered leader, Mano Brown, in which he criticized crime during the event. The band’s previous appearance at the Virada, in 2007, had ended in confrontations between military police and fans that turned to rioting.

We walked the streets for most of the night and again on Sunday afternoon, joining audiences at stages all over the region, home to some of São Paulo’s most historic buildings, and criss-crossing the streets from one show to another, aided (if the light was good enough, and shining at the right angle), by the black, hard-to-read Virada maps and programmes, distributed in their thousands and displayed on structures erected at street corners. The city’s ubiquitous columns of cars were nowhere to be seen, and even some of the roughest of Centro’s troubled streets, which are also home to Cracolândia, an itinerant, crack-riddled no-man’s land, were busy with people strolling from place to place.

None of this is to pretend that all was well with the world at the Virada: it wasn’t. São Paulo is an immense, pressurised megacity with more social injustice and indeed, more rigidly delineated class segregation, than most. It also has a chronic crime and violence problem every night of the week. There’s no doubt about it: assorted pickpockets and muggers were having their own mini-festival of crime at the Virada, while at least one immense band of forty thieves organized a series of arrastões – mass muggings in which individuals or sections of the crowd are surrounded, robbed, and attacked if they resist. I saw a scuffle break out as we passed along Avenida Rio Branco around 3am; and I heard a pop-pop-pop, and saw people running, at what might or might not have been gunshots around the same time, a hundred yards on. (I don’t think it was gunshot, despite the stampede, but I note it here as a possibility.)

And yet as frightening as the contact with crime, violence and sheer drunken disorderliness must have been for anyone on the receiving end of it, it’s what sometimes happens at mass events, especially when mixed with alcohol – and especially when they bring haves and have-nots together in such a sudden, unaccustomed manner.

Super-sized street events always attract the kind of people who disrupt, fight and rob, even in much safer cities. It happens at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and even, as Vincent Bevins, editor of this blog, points out, at San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade.São Paulo, arguably, needs more Viradas, and more events like it – it’s what a new surge of street festivals is all about, most recently the Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival that took place in May, as a kind of mini-precursor to the Virada. For every citizen who lost a phone to the thieves (even Senator Eduardo Suplicy wasn’t immune, taking to the stage before Saturday’s opening show by MPB queen Daniela Mercury to ask for his stolen credit cards and ID cards back – then patting his pockets to find his phone also missing) there were hundreds of thousands whose Viradas went off without incident.

I was struck by the overwhelmingly negative press coverage of what was in many ways, and for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, a successful, enjoyable event. In a telling example of the press’s choice of focus, one headline in the newspaper Agora, a populist broadsheet, read MAYOR HADDAD ADMITS HE NEVER EXPECTED SO MUCH VIOLENCE, over a story in which the mayor, in office since January, also said, ‘From Friday through to Saturday the register of violent crime was identical to that from Saturday to Sunday’. Hardly inspiring words on the city’s problems, but a dash of perspective, albeit a sobering one, on Monday morning’s seemingly hysterical headlines. Describing the smooth running of the Virada’s 900 shows, with just two delayed or with other problems, the mayor went on, ‘What were of most concern was the question of [public] safety and the incidents that occurred above all between 2am and 6am. We had more reports than we’d predicted, but nothing out of the ordinary in an event with almost 4 million people.’

It’s tough to know what the media coverage means. Some have suggested the media may have been especially hard on the new PT mayor. Infographics showing levels of crime and violence at previous editions of the Virada seem to show more or less similar results. But beyond that, a whole tier of the city’s society (the same tier, in the main, who would never dream of attending a mass event attracting huge swathes of people from the city’s poor periphery, as the Virada does) may well have been  put off attending not only the Virada, but all manner of street celebrations and festivals – a growing and much celebrated tendency in São Paulo. Violence and crime are chronic problems. But they’re not a reason to abandon the streets any more than SP’s wealthy already have done. Events or even venues at which the classes mix are extremely few and far between in SP, as the city’s affluent areas and the vast periphery that surrounds them run on parallel tracks, in parallel realities. Moments like the Virada, filing the streets with people, huddled at the crossroads in the patchy streetlight, trying to make out what it says on the map, ought to be celebrated.

Unfortunately, I spent much of last week in Santa Maria, covering the nightclub fire that took the lives of so many young people. I say unfortunately not only because of the deeply horrific nature of the ordeal for everyone involved, but also because this is the worst kind of journalism, both to practice and to observe. In a tragic, singular event like this one, there is little for the media to do but react, and some of its ugliest characteristics spring to life.

Personally, I wrote four stories on the fire for the Los Angeles Times. One quick post for the website on the breaking story and what may have caused the fire, then a next-day front page piece telling the story of the tragedy:

Fire survivors recall deadly chaos in Brazil club

Then a story on the arrests of two club owners and two band members, and a final feature on the lessons many in the country were choosing to draw from the tragedy:

Brazil rethinks its rule-breaking attitude after club fire

It was a lot. I think we did a good job, and those articles, I think, give a good overview of the week.

But I was extremely lucky to be able to do it how I wanted. More generally, a problem with this kind of an event is that there is so much interest, but so little to say. This predicament is especially stark for the huge swarm of international journalists who parachuted into the small, devastated college and military town with vans and camera crews.

At first, like many in the small town, I was taken aback at the scale of the reaction around the world. Later, it made sense, but more on that later.

So once all these journalists were in Santa Maria, what were these people supposed to do?

I think in many ways, this event was similar to the Newtown massacre, especially as it relates to media coverage. And that goes for all tragic events that take place in the span of a few minutes. A few hours after the fire stopped, the story was over. The event took place, and there was nothing more.

Accounts of what happened were inevitably going to come out, as the survivors gradually told their stories to authorities and the press, when they were ready, and as the authorities shared the details of the investigation. There is not much space for aggressive journalism here, and it can indeed be quite harmful.

But you have all these people in town, and all this demand back at the editorial offices around the world. So they need to find something to shoot, to report, to say, and they have an incentive to make the story as “good” (read: sensational and emotional) as possible, as soon as possible. And as a result, many ended up getting things wrong.

So, three things to clean up:

1. Don’t blame security

I saw no evidence that the security guards stopped people from leaving for more than the few seconds it took them to realize there was a fire. With the pay-as-you-leave comanda system that is ubiquitous in Brazilian clubs, this was inevitable. Of the many, many errors that led to the tragedy, there is probably no reason to believe the staff committed one more. Survivors who were helped by security guards to escape to safety said they were bothered by the way the men had been painted in the media.

2. Much of the media is aggressive and exploitative

It’s indescribably heartbreaking to watch people shoving a camera into the face of a mother who has just found out she has lost a child. It’s irresponsible harassment to repeatedly call teenage survivors and grieving relatives, over and over, day after day, demanding they give an interview. But that’s exactly what students were saying happened to them. Does the world really need to know how sad they are, right now?

And to aggressive and exploitative, add ridiculous.

One could not create a more farcical scene than a queue of camera crews standing in front of the scene of the fire, waiting to put their man or woman with a microphone in front of it to shoot a 90 second clip. “I’m here at the scene of the…” etc. Some crews flew all the way across the world just to get that shot – their very own semi-famous news personality standing in front of the charred, stinking nightclub, reading a quick description of what happened. That was the only thing they did.

A friend of mine who is a freelance cameraman in São Paulo was contracted by an international TV station, and he told me how extremely disillusioned he was with the process. “It’s just very bad taste,” he says, referring to trying to get as much pain on camera as possible. And then the shot in front of the club. And that’s it.

3. It’s not primarily a story about Brazil

Then, the media needed a lesson. My fourth and final article was on the way the country came together to try to turn the horrible loss into something positive in the future, to find lessons to be learned to improve Brazil and turn it into a more civil society. I am very glad this discussion has come about, and I really do think things will improve here.

But you can’t work backwards from this. The inverse is not true. This fire will change Brazil, yes, but you can’t in any meaningful way say that anything about Brazil really caused this fire. It was not a national event. It was local and global.

In my time, I’ve been in bars in clubs in LA, London, and Berlin where the safety precautions were just as bad or worse as anything in Santa Maria.

Yes. Many, many, small and avoidable and tragically stupid errors led to wholesale loss of life.  And yes. Most should never have been allowed to happen, and should not be allowed to in the future.

But is that what caught the world’s attention? Did the world care about the rules broken? I would argue not. What captured the world’s imagination, in the worst way possible, is the scene.

A room full of young people, drinking at some silly college party with some silly band, and all of a sudden, because of some (it seems) totally unforeseen mix-up, there is worry, then panic and desperation, then death everywhere. That is a horribly, deeply terrifying story – and not because it could have been avoided, but because these kinds of things could happen at any time. It’s a reminder of the fact that we humans are not around forever and are very rarely fully aware of the risks around us.

Yes. Horrible mistakes led to this accident. But if you were to try to make a list of the main threats to the safety of those students a week before the accident, no one would have put this in the top ten.

And if you and I try to make a list, right now, of all the unknown and unseen dangers around us, we will of course fail miserably. That’s just the mystery and tragedy of the human situation. And there’s not much more to say.

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Images above: The night vigil march in Santa Maria, one of the most intense and difficult scenes I’ve ever seen.

In Brazil, a ban on practicing journalism without a government-approved diploma is on its way back. Not only is this baffling to foreigners, it may become part of the constitution.

by Claire Rigby

For anyone who has ever read Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on news journalism, or Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning, the figure of the shifty, sordid or dishevelled hack* is a well-loved totem of the journalistic profession.

‘This world of callousness and vulgarity and philistinism,’ as Christopher Hitchens fondly called it in his introduction to a 2000 edition of Scoop, later expanding on the theme in a Guardian Books article to round up all the best hacks and muckrakers in the genre, from Brighton Rock’s jaded, doomed newspaperman Hale to Scoop’s hapless Boot, hurtling from rural obscurity to the scoop of his life in a byzantine African war. ‘He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York,’ writes Waugh, ‘where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor.’

Here in Brazil, as in the UK, the reality of newsrooms today is rather different, much as many old-school journalists might wish to imagine it otherwise. Here, as there, 21st-century newsrooms feature fewer thrusting young chancers from poor backgrounds, like Boot’s, and more shiny-haired graduates with well developed senses of entitlement.

The difference is that here in Brazil, that social balance has, over the past few decades, been imposed by law.

Licence to write

The question of who may and may not work as a journalist here is the subject of an ongoing battle in Brasília, in which journalism has since the 1960s been ranked with medicine, law, engineering and architecture as a profession for which specialised university training is compulsory.

The esteem in which journalists are subsequently held, and my slowness to pick up on it, led to more than one surreal ‘what-do-you-do?’ conversation when I first came to São Paulo. I’d describe my job as a magazine editor, and my work as a freelance writer for newspapers and magazines. The other person would listen carefully, and then ask, ‘Are you a journalist?’ It took me a while to understand that they meant ‘Journalist’ with a capital ‘J’ and that to my surprise, despite years of writing and editing, a degree in English, and my membership of the UK national journalists’ union, I wasn’t.

Fortunately for me, the legal requirement for a university diploma in journalism, originally imposed in 1969 during Brazil’s military dictatorship, was overturned in 2009 by the Supreme Court, on the grounds that it was an unconstitutional violation of the right to freedom of speech.

And yet this week, in an almost unanimous vote on Tuesday night (7 August), the Brazilian Senate voted to not only reinstate the requirement for a journalism diploma, but also to embed it in the Constitution.

Through the looking glass

Seen as a bare-bones set of facts, it’s a rum state of affairs. A military junta imposes restrictions on who can and cannot practice journalism. A Supreme Court rules the restriction unconstitutional. Journalism unions and educational establishments mass to overturn that ruling, seeking to create an amendment instead enshrining the protected status of qualified journalists in the Brazilian Constitution – the only profession to be thus protected.

The actions of the union, led by the National Federation of Journalists, FENAJ, make sense in the context of fears that the opening up of journalism might be a ploy on the parts of newspaper proprietors to employ cheaper labour. They also make sense if you consider that the unions, despite having little in common with the aims of the military junta that imposed the restriction, came to rely on what was a form of closed shop for protecting rates of pay and the rights of their members.

And yet, despite journalists’ usual command of the art of persuasion, much as you search in the arguments in favour of the constitutional amendment, in the thousands of words that have been written on the subject, it’s strangely difficult to find much that’s compelling or conclusive in terms of an argument. ‘Journalistic information is a strategic element of contemporary societies,’ ponders Beth Costa, a former president of FENAJ, in a long document, ‘The journalism diploma: A requirement in the interests of society’, that fails to persuade with any urgency.

Even the Bill itself (Proposta de Emenda à Constituição, Nº 33 de 2009) reads unconvincingly, stating, ‘Journalism is a form of narrative that presupposes analysis, knowledge of history, impression [impressão], narrative focus, context, knowledge of language, signs, etc.’, and asserting that these are ‘things that people need to learn in the context of formal educational relations’.

No mention of the utility or otherwise of university degrees in other disciplines, common in newspapers and magazines elsewhere in the world; or of the fact that these skills are also self-evidently possible to acquire via less formal methods.

Lobby bar

Many senators applauded the results of Tuesday’s vote: ‘Without a free press,’ said Senator Paulo Davim, ‘and without qualified journalists committed to truth and ethics, no consolidation of democracy can be possible’. Senator Aloysio Nunes, one of the few dissenters – the amendment was approved by a majority of 60 to 4 – said, ‘There is no public interest involved in this,’ referring to the lobby for the amendment.

That lobbying group includes, perhaps naturally, members of the educational establishment involved in producing qualified journalists. And yet for every Metodista, PUC or Cásper Líbero – the three most prestigious private universities offering the degree – there’s a dozen lesser colleges, public or private, churning out less carefully prepared graduates.

In a blog post from 2009, when the amendment was first proposed, which he republished yesterday, the journalist André Forastieri wrote: ‘Even if the colleges were good, which they are not, which I witness every day working in close contact with recent graduates who know nothing about anything, I would be against this.’

And yesterday, an editorial in this newspaper, Folha de S.Paulo, railed against the Senate’s decision, calling on Congress to reverse the ‘grave mistake’. Folha’s stance goes back to the 1980s, when the current editorial director, Otavio Frias Filho, took charge, taking on the unions and university departments by contracting some staff without specialist diplomas. Folha’s occasionally defiant approach has been matched in other newsrooms by more circumspect methods – the contracting of editors with inventive titles such as ‘communications assistant’, for example.

‘Journalism is not a science,’ reads yesterday’s editorial, ‘but a technique for uncovering and reporting on matters of public interest. It is not a speciality, but a wide collection of specialities.’ Reflecting the kind of newsroom more common outside of Brazil, it goes on, ‘Since almost any topic can be the subject of journalistic coverage, its collective exercise calls for contributions from professionals with very diverse training and experiences.’

‘Is journalism going to end?’ writes André Forastieri in his resurrected post from 2009. ‘Won’t there be people in the future who know how to research, interview and organize information in a way that’s coherent and seductive, with a unique point of view and the ability to electrify the reader/listener/viewer? Of course there will. The internet is full of them. But having studied for a degree in journalism or not has nothing to do with it.’

Either way, the process isn’t over yet, and potentially not by a long chalk – the Bill, already three years in the making, has yet to be passed by Congress.

Follow @claire_rigby

[Editor’s note: I did two undergrad degrees, one in political economy and one in philosophy/literary theory, so I am not a “Journalist” either. Before I did a master’s degree, a well-known journalist from a very well-known American newspaper advised me that I should not, under any circumstances, study ‘journalism’ – Vincent]

* ‘Hack’, a derogatory term meaning ‘journalist’ that is nevertheless sometimes used by British journalists themselves. Not to be confused, though often implicated, with epidemics of phone-‘hacking’.

Photo: The Folha newsroom, as seen from Vincent’s phone 10 minutes ago.

It depends where you’re from.

An article by Simon Romero at the New York Times offers an insight into the way we foreigners tend to see Brazil differently, and the way Brazil’s story is repeatedly told differently outside the country.

Rather than concentrating on who was right or wrong – of course, we don’t know – Romero’s piece concentrated on the circumstances that led to the collision:

Two Brazils also met head-on: one in which a small elite live with almost unfathomable wealth, and another in which millions eke out an existence on the margins of that abundance.

To put it simply, we gringos tend to see this all the time, and this is not exactly what Brazilians constantly see, if I am to judge by comparing English and Portuguese-language media coverage, or by how unwelcome our observations on the subject tend to be here. Much to the annoyance of many locals, many of those of us who grew up outside Brazil tend to view the country through the prism of social inequality.

I may be wrong. but I have a hard time seeing an article with this focus come out in the Brazilian press without being considered quite radical.

Of course Romero is right that some class dynamics led to the collision. Why did Wanderson need to be on a high-speed freeway to pick up milk? It’s remarkable to see the way that highways are often thrown across communities here, without offering residents any safe way to get around them.

And as for Thor, would he have been driving differently if he wasn’t in a million-dollar car? Who knows. But it appears that due to the number of violations he’d already racked up, he shouldn’t have been driving at all.

It’s worth checking out the whole piece to see truly the remarkable way Eike and Thor acted in public after a man lost his life. Do they know how that looks, given the circumstances?

Of course, it is natural that foreigners will tell the story of Brazil differently than Brazilians do. The inverse is also true. As jarring as Brazilian class divisions are to North Americans or Western Europeans, there are countless things we don’t focus on so much in our own societies that are just as striking to Brazilians, the Japanese, or Nigerians.

It’s not obvious for those of us from the US, for example, what it sometimes can be like to be a foreigner in our country. For the amount of power Washington has around the world, it tends to shock foreigners how little we know about much of it. And on inequality, we are not really too much better than Brazil.

Who is right? Is Brazil too used to some problems, or are we foreigners self-righteous, naive and sanctimonious? Maybe neither, maybe both.

But it seems clear that when we tell the story of Brazil outside the country, it will make sense to focus on what is noticeably different for us. And despite all the progress made, one of Brazil’s most obvious characteristics is still inequality.

Links (or, a list of times we foreigners took the equality angle):

New York Times: At War With São Paulo’s Establishment, Black Paint in Hand
Los Angeles Times: Brazil’s poor seem left behind in growth spurt
Financial Times: Sway of the wealthy remains strong in Brazil’s cities
New York Times: Slum Dwellers Are Defying Brazil’s Grand Design for Olympics
Financial Times: 2010 census shows Brazil’s inequalities remain

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