As carnival kicks off this weekend, millions of people are will likely take to the streets and forget Brazil’s political and economic woes for a few days. During the country’s 21 year military dictatorship, however, censorship and intimidation meant carnival and politics were too closely linked for comfort.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

The giddy souls who called for intervenção militar já (military intervention now) at Brazil’s anti-government rallies in 2015 should perhaps be careful for what they wish. For as the country prepares to swivel its hips at Recife’s Galo da Madrugada, Rio de Janeiro’s Cordão da Bola Preta and thousands of other blocos (street parties), big and small, it is worth remembering how carnaval suffered during Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship.

“During the military dictatorship, just as with song lyrics, plays and films, carnaval did not escape the scissors of the censors,” wrote journalist Mariana Filgueiras in O Globo newspaper last year, in an article about the digitization by Brazil’s National Archive of thousands of historical documents from escolas de samba (samba schools).

While the dictatorship began in 1964, the military censors’ grip tightened considerably at the end of 1968 following the signing of ato institutional no. 5, better known as AI-5. According to this essay by Wellington Kirmeliene, writing in the History magazine of the Brazilian National Library, this presidential decree allowed the authorities “total and unrestricted powers of censorship, as well as practically legalizing persecution and torture, and, as a consequence of those acts, disappearances and deaths.”

During the period, Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools were forced to provide a detailed dossier of their carnaval projects, explaining and justifying the meaning behind their costumes, floats and song lyrics.

In their book “Pra tudo começar na quinta-feira: o enredo dos enredos” (“Everything starts on Thursday: a history of samba themes”, in loose translation) journalists and historians Fábio Fabato and Antônio Simas describe three episodes of government meddling in the country’s carnaval celebrations.

In 1967, the rehearsals of the Salgueiro samba school were monitored by DOPS (Departamento de Ordem Política e Social) officers, while in 1969, the Império Serrano school was forced to switch the word “revolução” (“revolution”) for “evolução” (“evolution”) in a song glorifying the 18^th century Inconfidência Mineira rebellion and the abolition of slavery.

And in 1974, the Unidos de Vila Isabel escola was pressurized into including a reference to the government’s Trans-Amazonian highway in a song about the rights of Brazil’s indigenous people.

In such a climate, it, was hardly surprising that, according to Wellington Kirmeliene, all the “elements of “planet carnaval” followed the jingoist message of the military regime”, with the majority of carnaval samba tunes adopting a highly nationalistic tone.

The chorus of one song by the Imperatriz Leopoldinense samba school in the 1970s, for example, described Brazil as a “a giant evolving and moving forward”, while another group, G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira de Mangueira, used nature to proclaim the country’s greatness “Oh, what a place!/Oh, what a place!/Everything you plant here grows/There’s no place like this”, before ending with the cry “This is Brazil!/This is Brazil!!/This is Brazil!!!”.

At the same time, many Brazilian artists used carnaval as a way of expressing their opposition to the military government, such as in “Marcha da Quarta-Feira de Cinzas” (“the Ash Wednesday Song”) by Vinícius de Moraes and Carlos Lyra. “Our carnaval is over/no one will hear the songs/no one will dance happily in the street/and in our hearts/there are only ashes and longing for what has gone,” ran the lyrics of the song, which was written in 1963 but gained added significance once the dictatorship took control.

And in 1965 Chico Buarque released “Sonho de um Carnaval” (“A Carnaval Dream”): “At carnaval there is hope/that those who are far away can remember/that those who are sad can dance/that those who are grown-up can be like children.”

As the dictatorship’s grip finally loosened in the 1980s, the carnaval sambas became more openly critical of the regime and the censorship that accompanied it: “I dreamt that I was dreaming a dream/a dream of a mesmerizing dream/of open minds/and no silenced mouths,” ran the words to one song by G.R.E.S. Unidos de Vila Isabel (again, loose translation).

This year’s carnaval, like others in recent years, is sure to be awash with satirical tunes criticising the country’s disastrous political and economic state. “Criticism through humour has been used for a long time in Brazil, even though it lost strength during the years of repression, with the (former president Getúlio) Vargas and military dictatorships, when there was less freedom…but in the last ten years it has been reborn,” the researcher Weydson Barros Leal explained in this interview with the Diário de Pernambuco newspaper from Recife, one of Brazil’s great carnaval capitals.

President Dilma Rousseff is likely to be the target of many of the jibes, as is the under-fire Speaker of Brazil’s Lower House, Eduardo Cunha, whose home was recently searched as part of the Operation Carwash investigation into the enormous bribes scandal at state run oil giant Petrobras.

One song that is already on its way to becoming a carnaval smash pays tribute to Newton Ishii, the Asian-Brazilian federal police officer who has appeared in TV news footage of many of the Operation Carwash arrests. “Oh my God, now I’m in trouble, the Japanese from the Feds is knocking on my door,” runs the chorus.

Other carnaval tunes, meanwhile, mock the paean to unrequited love that was the letter sent by Brazilian Vice-President Michel Temer to Rousseff in December, and in “Tia Wilma e a Bicicleta” (“Auntie Wilma and the Bicycle”), the President’s love of riding her bike. The latter is built around a play on words based on “pedalling” and the “pedaladas fiscais” (financial manoeuvres) on which the impeachment campaign against Rousseff is based.

While many younger revellers will give no more thought to what it means to have the freedom to criticise their politicians in this way than they will to popping open their first carnaval beer, it is worth remembering that not so long ago, speaking out in public was a much more dangerous affair indeed.

River transport in Brazil’s Amazon region is both an essential means of getting around for locals and an unforgettable experience for travellers. And with a unique sense of river camaraderie, it’s hard to feel lonely. In search of adventure, Sam Cowie took the slow boat from Manaus to Porto Velho.   

By Sam Cowie
Manaus

Spending four days on a boat slowly chugging its way down the Amazon is probably not for everyone. For some, sharing a relatively small space with 100 strangers – a fair few of whom are young children – in humid heat, with only two bathrooms, set meals, limited electricity and zero privacy would be a nightmare.

For many Amazonians, however, long distance river transport is unavoidable, as much of the region is unreachable by road and air travel is often prohibitively expensive. Around 14 million passengers used Amazon river transport in 2012, many travelling distances of up to 1600km. Thirty per cent of them earned between R$450 and R$720 a month.

Personally, I found lying in a hammock with no internet and little more to do than read a book or stare at the scenery rolling by an extremely pleasant break from Brazil’s wonderful, but at times stuffy and hectic, metropolises.

After being on assignment in Manaus one of my few ways out of the city without catching a plane was to take a boat to Porto Velho in neighbouring Rondônia, which has the dubious honour of being Brazil’s most deforested state. A highway connecting the two cities was built in 1973 by the then military government, but fell into disrepair shortly afterwards. Today all that remains is a dirt road.

A four day ticket to Porto Velho, including drinking water and three meals a day, costs R$200 (U$52), about three times cheaper than the one hour plane flight. I arrived at the boat a few hours before we set sail and, finding few remaining spaces, set up my hammock in a corner next to a cheerful 70-year-old Afro-Brazilian woman, travelling to Porto Velho to collect her older sister who had fallen ill while visiting relatives.

Sometime after sunset the engine roared to life and, with the sky lit up by lightning from a dry tropical storm, we made way our way down the Rio Negro towards the Amazon, passing flaming gas refineries and the bright lights of the famous Manaus free trade zone.

Lights on the boat go out around 10pm, perhaps because the day begins at 6am when the crew, a surly bunch of few words and even fewer smiles, serve up sickeningly sweet coffee and buttery crackers for breakfast. The lunches and dinners are, perhaps surprisingly, tasty and satisfying, roughly equivalent to what you’d expect to find at a decent worker’s restaurant in down São Paulo or Rio.

The landscape is green and lush, and towering trees and muddy banks slide by as the boat slowly makes its way down river, passing small villages, hut-sized Evangelical churches, herds of horned Amazon buffalo, and fishermen waving from rickety canoes as they pull in their catch.

It doesn’t take long to make friends and very quickly I met a bunch of good-natured, larger than life characters. One of my favourites was “Repeteco”, an 80-year-old forró (traditional folk music from the north east of Brazil) composer from Pernambuco travelling to Porto Velho with 800 copies of his latest CD to sell. Under the circumstances, I could hardly refuse to buy one.

As the days drift by, living with people in such close quarters allows me to witness first-hand the famous, if somewhat cliched, “Brazilian warmth” that one hears so much about. Almost everyone is open, friendly and generous – sharing things like fruit and sweets – as well as respectful of what minuscule privacy their fellow passengers have.

Alongside the Brazilians there was a relatively large contingent of passengers from other Latin American nations on board, including an Ecuadorian juggler, a Paraguayan missionary and Felipe, a 26-year-old Venezuelan history teacher, who was leaving home to start a new life in Uruguay. There were also groups of backpackers from Mexico and Peru. The only other “authentic” gringo on board was Giles, a Canadian in his late sixties who was on a long distance motorcycle trip.

Further down river, the landscape becomes more arid, the brown banks turn golden and there are more sightings – or rather blink and you miss it glimpses – of leaping river dolphins and alligators.

While the largely unvarying scenery is not perhaps truly breathtaking, there is something about the sheer degree of isolation, combined with the relentless flow of the river, that carries the mind to a place far removed from city life. As I sit and stare and at the passing villages, I try to figure out what it would be like to live in the region, a feeling summed up nicely in this article in The New York Times.

At night, the top deck fills up with people, some enjoying an evening beer as the forró and brega (cheesy Brazilian pop) music pumps from a loudspeaker. Most nights I play cards with a pair of factory workers from the Manaus free trade zone.

Among the other passengers was Kelly, 21, who was taking a two month holiday with her young daughter to see an aunt in Minas Gerais. Gilberto, 34, meanwhile, lived in Manaus in free lodgings provided by the soft drink factory where he worked, and was returning home to Porto Velho for a three week holiday, something he did every three months.

Each night the lone TV showed novelas, Brazil club football or DVD films. Most passengers though, were content to simply sit on plastic stools, talking and gazing out into the darkness or up at the piercingly bright stars.

“It’s as if you could reach out and grab one,” said Claudio, a carioca in his mid-forties, who was sleeping in a tent on the top deck, on his way home after a cycling tour of South America. He had caught dengue fever in Colombia and now, with no money and too sick to cycle back, had to present his medical certificate at the council offices of each town we stopped in to have his transport paid.

Word spread that the boat would be docking for three hours at Humaitá, where we would have the option of disembarking and taking a two hour drive to Porto Velho, or staying on the boat for another twenty four hours until we reached our final destination. Due to previous commitments rather than any frustrations with the trip, I decided to take the first option.

To say there was a party on the final night would be a considerable overstatement, but there were more people than usual out on the top deck, and something of a “grand finale” atmosphere. Some of the passengers even seemed to have dressed up for the occasion.

I sat with a pair of cable TV technicians who were traveling between cities looking for work. As we chatted they sipped on cachaça mixed with Fanta and played pagode (another type of Brazilian pop music) tracks on their cell phones. Eventually, exhausted, I crept downstairs to negotiate the dark maze of hammocks before falling into my own bed, the engine throbbing loudly in the background.

We finally arrived in Humaitá at 3am on Saturday morning, where I bid farewell to my newfound friends. The sense of river camaraderie wasn’t over yet, however, as I jumped in a taxi to Porto Velho – shared, of course, with a group of my fellow passengers.

As is the case in many countries of this size, the citizens of Brazil don’t know their own nation very well. I mean that geographically – someone from the Southeast may have visited the Northeast, but is unlikely to have been to the Center-West or the North, too. Someone from Recife may have visited Rio, but Paraná? Roraima? Amapá?

Brazilians are travelling more than ever, but they often look to visiting the US or Europe as quickly as they do to diving deep into the Amazon jungle. This is understandable – the prices are often almost as high within Brazil – and things are quite similar in the US, for example. But for this reason, and because basically all media in Brazil comes from Rio or São Paulo, perceptions about life in certain regions can be very far from reality.

As a correspondent, I suppose I could say that travelling by bus allows me to escape the trails tread by Brazil’s traditionally over-represented elites, and that’s it a professional duty. But the truth is that I actually just like it. People in Brazil’s small or far-flung towns have a remarkable amount in common, no matter where they are, and the country’s reputation for warmth holds up everywhere. I’ve done most of the country by road – from São Paulo to Salvador, to Recife to Belem, or from Porto Alegre up to Rio. Last year, to do a story on the “Mais Medicos” Cuban doctor program, I went from São Paulo to Acre, and then to the Bolivian border. It was about 100 hours in total, and took me through the major communities of Cuiabá, Ji-Paraná, Rondônia, and Rio Branco. So here’s some pictures with some captions.

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.

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.

Claire Rigby takes us behind the televised spectacle and into the free and fluid world of the street party – Rio’s true Carnaval. Above: The outskirts of a bloco in Leblon, on Tuesday morning.

By Claire Rigby

From the world-class razzle-dazzle of the sambadrome to the endless, hedonistic celebration that takes place in its streets, Brazil is more compelling than ever during Carnival. I spent it in Rio de Janeiro, where the sambadrome reigns supreme – if you’re looking from outside Brazil, that is, where images of the floodlit parade ground, the Marquês de Sapucaí, have become synonymous not only with Carnival, but sometimes with Brazil itself.

But there’s way more to Carnival, and Brazil, than that.

Growing in popularity over the past ten years or so, the street carnival has seen a huge resurgence in Rio, where millions this year took to what seemed like a never-ending festival over four full days. ‘Blocos de rua‘ (street Carnival groups) are the heart and soul of Carnival in places like Olinda, in North-East Brazil, but have become a much-loved fixture in Rio too – and in São Paulo, where they go hand-in-hand with a wave of new, politicized interest in street life and street culture.

In Rio this year, hundreds of blocos comprised an endless, rolling, moving party, from young pretenders like Toca Rauuul and Boa Noite Cinderella, and favourites like Sargento Pimenta and Santa Teresa’s Céu na Terra, to the gigantic Monobloco, and 95-year-old Bola Preta – the latter took place in Rio’s Centro on Saturday morning and is said to have pulled a crowd of more than a million.

What goes on in a bloco? Music, dancing, drinking and general carousing in the style that Brazilians were apparently born to do best. (For a glimpse of one particularly musical bloco in action, see video: A street bloco during Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, 2013, on Vimeo.) Dressing up is de rigueur, and some go all out with their costumes, often in teams of uber-coordinated friends. One of the best this year in Olinda, in North-East Brazil, was a group dressed as a rollercoaster, rolling down the street in a long train, two by two, each dressed as one of the cabs. A favourite of mine from Olinda another year was a platoon of fruity soldiers with hollowed-out half watermelons for helmets. But not everyone goes full melon jacket: as Rio resident Dom Phillips noted in his expert Pre-Carnaval post before the event – just a sequinned tie, a sparkly eye mask or a sprouting of feathers are enough to mark you out as one of the gang –

— or one of the gangs, plural, since there are blocos kicking off throughout the day, with some of the best starting out as early as 6am. People carouse from bloco to bloco as the day wears on, stopping off for a dip in the sea, a break on the beach or a mid-afternoon disco nap before heading out again. And despite complaints from local residents about blocked roads and litter, drunkenness and noise, there’s very little of the bad behaviour you’d associate with no-holds-barred drinking and frolicking elsewhere. Naming no names but staring guiltily at Northern Europe. 

Roaming the streets and the beaches since the early morning, we encountered the true spirit of Carnival on Saturday night, under a small clutch of trees just up from Copacabana beach. A motley crew of musicians, refugees from some bloco or other, were playing a ramshackle set of sambas under the trees on drums alone, while an equally ramshackle, eclectic set of people, drawn like moths to the samba as they passed along the road, swayed and sang or simply gathered round.

It’s a long way from the excess, the precision, the sheer spectacle of the sambadrome – and at the opposite end of the commercial spectrum. Street Carnival is by its nature free – open to all and free to join, whereas the institutionalised form of Carnival – the sambódromo – is a hyper-commercialised sugar rush of grandiose, magnificently gaudy floats, casts of thousands singing their hearts out, and goddess-like, gold-dusted Carnival queens.

The sambadrome has to be seen to be believed; but for good old-fashioned fun it’s hard to beat the big-hearted bagunça (mess) of Brazil’s street blocos, with their fancy-dress gangs of teddy bears, tipsy girls in day-glo wigs in the early morning light, the just-met couples up to who knows what on the beach in the darkness, and the thousands upon thousands of men dressed as women. Carnivalesque.

All images (c) Claire Rigby.

Fireworks blast over closely packed crowds on Copacabana Beach on New Year’s Eve, and this year, things turned out much like most mega-events in Rio.

By Dom Phillips

New Year’s Eve in Rio: it has a certain ring to it. This is the city that specialises in giant set-piece events that draw enormous crowds – be that Carnival, the Rock In Rio music festival, or looking forward, 2014’s World Cup Final and the 2016 Olympic Games.

For Réveillon, as the turning of the year is known in Brazil, more than two million people dress in white, carry flowers, and swarm onto the beaches of Copacabana to watch an elaborate firework display that takes place over the sea. It gets so crowded that for weeks beforehand cariocas – Rio residents – were planning their party manoeuvres with military efficiency.

This would be my first New Year’s Eve-proper in Rio, and I approached it with a certain amount of trepidation, having been through both the best and the worst of carnival and its uncontrollable crowds.

There was, legend had it, no way out of the melee once you were in, so the only reliable plan was to head to the after-parties on the beach near the rocky outcrop of Arpoador and hang out until morning. It would be chaos. It would be an unbearable crush of humanity. It would be deeply moving as the multitude ooh-ed and aah-ed at the fireworks. It would be neither of these scenarios. It would be both. And what if it rained?

Rio had arranged a dress rehearsal on Christmas Day evening: a free concert on Copacabana Beach with Gilberto Gil and Stevie Wonder. As it happened, the crowd, while some 500,000 strong, was manageable, the night was warm and dry, and everything was set for one of America’s greatest soul artists to seal the night with a magical performance, much as he had done months earlier at Rock In Rio. Instead, he fluffed it by making a basic error.

Just like American rapper Missy Elliott had done at the Back 2 Black festival in Rio in November, Stevie Wonder began his show by trying to get the audience to take part in a mass singalong. This is something that deeply irritates me at the best of times. I don’t want to hear the crowd singing and clapping out of tune and out of time. I want to hear the artist. It’s even worse when it’s the very first thing that happens.

Nor had anybody in Stevie’s team bothered to explain to him that in Brazil, people speak Brazilianish and not English. It didn’t matter how much oomph he put into his exhortations that “all the fellas go ‘uh-huh’” and “all the ladies go, ‘eeh-ah,’”. Because the vast majority of this crowd couldn’t understand what he was saying and nobody bothered to translate. Much of his show was met with incomprehension, rather than enthusiasm. People simply talked through the bits they didn’t get.

When Wonder played his classics – ‘Hotter Than July’; ‘Superstition’ – he was fantastic. When he laboured on with his audience participation, having failed to grasp that actually, nobody was singing along, or warbled through an interminable ballad, he was tedious. When he tried to hush the crowd – a brave move when you’re in front of half a million garrulous Brazilians – it simply ignored him and carried on chatting.

But New Year’s Eve was a much simpler proposition – better suited to such a vast crowd. Find a spot on the beach, survive the crowds, and watch the fireworks. No language barriers involved.

The gang of friends I was with gathered at an apartment in Catete to warm up, rode a subway train to Copacabana (we even got seats), then ambled up to the beach at Leme, where the crowds were less jammed-together and there was room to spread out sarongs on the sand. Someone had even brought a polystyrene cool box to keep the fizz on ice.

The fireworks were fantastic – brash explosions of every colour in the rainbow, supernovas of light over the ocean that had the white-clad crowd wowing in wonder. The walk to Arpoador afterwards took an hour and a half, but despite the crowds on the streets, it was noticeable how calm, peaceful and happy people seemed.

The scenes on the beach at Arpoador, where traditionally DJs entertain what had been described as a “more alternative” audience, encapsulated Rio at its best and worst. A huge crowd milled around a tiny tent on the beach, in which a DJ sweated over a sound system that nobody could hear. The beer was warm – and then it ran out. Overloaded cell-phone networks simply stopped working. Nobody could find anybody else. It felt like a mass gathering that had only come about because nobody could get a taxi home.

But as the night became dawn, the crowd thinned a little, and somebody – as ever in Rio – delivered more cold beer, Arpoador’s chaotic gathering seemed to form itself into a relatively coherent party. And the best of Rio, the city that needs little more than a warm evening, some music, and a few drinks to have a party, showed itself.

Somebody set up a barbeque stall in the middle and began to give away free meat. Revellers jumped in the sea – men in their underpants, girls in their white party dresses. Everybody took photos and wowed at the view. People turned chaos and disorganization into fun and celebration, focusing on the fact that they were on a beautiful beach at dawn with their friends, rather than complaining about the tiny sound system.

Perhaps it is this positive, can-do attitude that makes Rio such a good place for giant, set-piece events. Where all that is required is enthusiasm and a smile, rather than complicated audience participation routines delivered in another language. Stevie Wonder should have hung around, he might have learnt something about non-verbal communication.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bad

Corruption –

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

Violence –

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

The economy –

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

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

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

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

Infrastructure –

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

The environment –

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

The good

Politics –

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

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

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

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

The real economy –

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

Justice –

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

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

World Cup preparations –

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

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

Cost of living –

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

Corinthians –

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

The unexpected and interesting

Lula back on the scene –

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

Music –

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

Eike Batista –

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

Race –

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

Tourism –

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

The rebirth of the center –

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

Evangelical power –

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

Exhibitionist turn –

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

Petrobras – Graça Foster –

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

Niemeyer –

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

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

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By Dom Phillips

Wobbling atop a stand-up paddle board may not be the most conventional way to view a literary festival. But it’s certainly the most scenic. I attempted to paddle genteelly, determinedly banishing mortifying images of me toppling into the river as we headed down the river beside which FLIP – the International Paraty Literature (Festival Literária Internacional de Paraty) – is staged.

My host Michael Smyth, an adventure tour guide in this beautiful, costal town of Paraty where FLIP is staged would argue that boats and beaches are what most people come here for. Apart from the 25,000 FLIP had brought in for its annual five-day festival, which ended Sunday.

He’d tricked me into taking an alternative route up a river on our Sunday afternoon stand-up paddle trip, and suddenly we were heading past the festival’s riverside marquee, cafes and bookshops and out to sea, in front of thousands of erudite Brazilian literary buffs, hanging out in the sun with their cameras, and suddenly brightening at the sight of two skinny, aging gringos in grubby lycra T-shirts and swimming trunks, grimly paddling towards them.

Paraty is the sort of bucolic Brazilian beach town for which words like ‘picturesque’, ‘colonial’, ‘charming’ and ‘ambling’ could have been invented. But it buzzes with life, ideas and conversation for FLIP when writers are the stars and Brazilian names like Luís Fernando Veríssimo get stopped on the street for photographs. It’s awfully civilized and more than a little posh, but it’s also a lot of fun.

And by Sunday, the last of FLIP’s five days, I’d seen it from every other angle bar the stand-up paddle board, so what the hell. I’d seen it from inside the main authors’ tent, with a couple of thousand literary buffs chuckling at the wry witticisms of English novelist Ian McEwan, or the acute observations on the nature of family from Portuguese writer Dulce Maria Cardoso – a star of new-generation Portuguese literature.

From outside on the grass by the port, watching men in medieval costume on stilts perform an inexplicable theatrical routine. And from the town’s main square, where the words of great Brazilian writer Carlos Drummond de Andrade were being projected onto the side of an old church, along with photos and his old identity cards, while a group played chorinho, the sweetly melancholy pre-samba music and a crowd around them smiled, swayed and sang along.

There were films, art exhibitions, shows and children’s events spread around the town. But the real action was in the authors’ tent, where during mesas, or ‘tables’, in TV chat show style, a mediator tries to get writers to open up and spill their deepest creative secrets. Novelists by nature not being the most exhibitionist of creatures, this can be a hit and miss affair. A little like balancing on a stand-up paddle board.

But the mesas also fill your head with the ideas, revelations and the words of extremely clever and interesting people who spend their lives inventing other worlds for a living, which can frequently be a richly rewarding experience. As John Freeman, editor of British literary magazine Granta, in town to launch its first collection of New Young Brazilian Writers, observed: “Here the ideas are the entertainment.” FLIP, in short, is for anyone who loves books. “The bookstore is insane,” Freeman added. “It’s like a beehive.”

For instance American novelist Jonathan Franzen revealed during his session that for him, writing was the mental equivalent of the Greek Myth of Prometheus (you remember, Prometheus is chained to a rock while an eagle eats his liver on a daily basis). But Franzen also flummoxed both mediator and audience with his endless pauses and oblique flights of imaginative fancy.

Asked about how characters dealt with freedom in his books, Franzen awwwwed for an awfully long time then observed that there were many different types of freedom. For instance, a visitor to American department store Bed Bathroom & Beyond would find so many varieties of shower curtain it would be impossible to settle on one. That’s a kind of freedom too. I thought he was hilarious, honest and profound. But many complained afterwards that he was chatíssimo – dull as death.

This is perhaps where FLIP’s laudable internationalism ran aground. Heard delivered laconically in English, in Franzen’s dry mid-West tones, the shower curtain thing is funny. But Anglo-Saxon irony does not translate well to Portuguese – trust me, I’ve researched this thoroughly on innumerable disastrous dinner dates with Brazilian women. It just sounds rude or, worse, irreverent. And Brazil is a conservative society where great writers and a sort of esoteric intellectualism are revered, and pithy irreverent jokes are not.

As was illustrated last year when a young Brazilian woman complained to me after a mesa by American novelist James Ellroy. Ellroy had got a laugh when he said he had never read the great Russian novelists like Tolstoy and shrugged. Like, so what? How dare he joke about not having read the greats? That, essentially, was her beef. He’s James Ellroy, he can say whatever he likes, was my reply. It didn’t go down very well either.

Brit Ian McEwan and American Jennifer Egan, who were on together, did go down well though: they were funny, honest and intelligent. Charming. Humble. And they avoided long pauses. The crowd gave them a standing ovation afterwards.

A mesa with Dulce Maria Cardoso and Brazilian writers João Anzenello Carrascoza and Zuenir Ventura began slowly, but finished with a bang when Ventura read out a passage from his new book in which a shocked child inadvertently stumbles in on his aunt having sex in a pharmacy. Sex. Now there’s one subject all Brazilians love to have a good laugh about – even the posh, intellectual ones.

As well as, obviously, the site of two bony, graying foreigners edging past them on the river, heading out to the sea, precariously balanced on two stand-up paddle boards, eyes fixed firmly to the front, like models on a catwalk. Pleading silently with every God in the universe: ‘Please, please, please don’t let me fall off…’

The Gods answered my prayers. We did not fall off, and headed serenely out to sea and out of sight. Only problem is now I have to spend the rest of eternity chained to a rock while an eagle eats my liver on a daily basis.

(Note to Brazilian readers, that’s a joke. Seriously, I love Greek mythology, I’ve read all of them… I just can’t remember the names right now, cause I’m balanced on a stand-up paddle board.)

When I moved here two years ago from London, I was shocked by the big increase in cost. Brazil is now an extremely expensive country, and it has been for a few years now. Numbers that came out last week ranking São Paulo the world’s 12th-most expensive city – above London, Paris, and New York – will come as no surprise to the embattled Paulista who must deal with the threats of $40 pizzas and menacing cell phone bills on a daily basis.

But around the world, old stereotypes die hard. Few gringos living abroad actually believe us. Brazil must be like Tijuana or Peru, they think. You know, Latin America. Wrong. Very wrong, as I explain today in the Los Angeles Times.

For those still clinging to the notion that South America provides cheap, exotic experiences for foreign visitors, arriving in Brazil these days can be a bit of shock.

Continue reading “Brazil may offer visitors thrills, but there’s nothing cheap about it” at LA Times

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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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The good news is that Brazil has unveiled a site that allows potential visitors to get to know the host cities for the 2014 World Cup. The bad news is that you must learn another language. No, not Portuguese, but some kind of bizarre English-Portuguese hybrid.

There are some real gems here:

São Paulo: “One of the players that master the halfway line. Leading the main moves of the team”

Brasília: “Headquarter to the Government of Brazil, Brasília leaves nothing to desire when compared to the main metropolises of the world. And if you are seeking for a true great game, there is no better place.”

Salvador: “Cheers the fans with brilliant moves full of swing, typical to its people.”

Cuiabá: “Known for the gold extraction in past centuries, it is now rich in diversity of the Amazonian fauna and flora, and that of Pantanal.”

It goes on like this.

It is a bit too easy for foreign journalists to continually beat up on Brazil for supposedly not being prepared to host either the 2014 World Cup or the 2016 Olympics. With so much time before the events, I think this question often dominates international coverage much more than it should, and I have little doubt that despite whatever problems may arise, both will be great experiences for most everyone involved.

But, as Andrew Downie points out:

Brazil’s Tourism Ministry has a reported annual budget of 180 million reais (around $100 million) to spend on enticing visitors to come to Brazil.

Would it really be that difficult to hire a native English speaker to do the translations?

No. Brazil is not a poor country, nor is it lacking in expertise.

Note to the Brazilian Ministry of Tourism: If you’re looking for an official translator, I’m available. I’m not joking.

Thanks to Andrew Downie’s Brazil Blog for spotting this.

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