Top Quotes: “Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed” — Larry Rohter

Introduction

“Brazil is larger than the continental United States, with some states that are bigger than any country in Europe.”

“Where is the largest population of Japanese descent outside Japan? In São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city and state. Where is the biggest concentration of people of Italian descent outside Italy? Also in São Paulo.”

“Brazil has without fanfare become an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Its leading exports now include planes and cars, its farms and ranches now feed much of the world, and downtown São Paulo is the center of the largest concentration of banks, wealth, trade, and industry in the Southern Hemisphere.”

History

“The Spanish conquistadors brutally destroyed three indigenous civilizations: the Aztecs in Mexico, the Incas in Peru, and the Mayas in Central America. In all of those civilizations the emperor was considered divine, and once he was eliminated, resistance crumbled. That was not the case in Brazil. Not only were the native tribes there less centralized and organized, but resistance was more diffuse. That made it harder to both overcome the armed opposition and govern the tribes once they were subdued.

Portugal was small and less wealthy than its European rivals, and the crown had to turn to private capital to harvest brazilwood and otherwise develop the new dominion. The king retained title to lands that had been claimed in Portugal’s name but granted monopoly licenses to favored investors or nobles who then formed partnerships with those financiers.”

“The new country evolved rapidly into a system of hereditary capitanias. These were essentially fiefdoms or private estates in which a single grantee was responsible for colonizing, at his own expense, the entirety of the territory. To attract settlers who would cultivate the new realms, the landowners had the authority to carve up their territory into huge estates, some of which were larger than entire provinces back in the motherland.

Nearly five hundred years later, the origins of two of the country’s enormous problems — glaring social imbalance and reckless exploitation of natural resources — are still visible. The owners of the fiefs were in essence sovereigns of their own domains, above the law and responsible only to a crown that was far away and had little capacity to enforce its will or even monitor what was going on. The mentality that this situation created has persisted into modern times. Especially in the northeast of Brazil, local political bosses and landowners defy the state’s authority with impunity in areas that they regard as their personal kingdoms.

In addition, the captaincy system created a preference for large estates that has made land distribution in Brazil extremely inequitable. Even today, a relatively small landed gentry controls the bulk of the country’s most productive terrain, while millions of peasants have no plots of their own and are forced to eke out a miserable living as sharecroppers or to migrate to the Amazon in search of a plot of land they can call their own.”

“Rather than replant what they cut, the Portuguese stripped the coastal forests teeming with exotic birds and beasts that seemed like fugitives from Noah’s ark and moved on. The Atlantic rainforest was quickly destroyed, and today the tree for which Brazil is named can scarcely be found outside of botanical gardens.”

“Many of the hereditary fiefs floundered. But two, Pernambuco in the north and So Vicente, site of the present-day state of São Paulo, much farther south, flourished. In large part this was because leaders of those settlements, where women colonists from Portugal were scarce and the sexual appeal of unabashedly naked native maidens was obvious, were canny enough to marry daughters of local chiefs. That helped seal the tribal alliances that guaranteed supplies, labor, and protection to the Portuguese newcomers.”

“The discovery around 1730 of diamonds in the same area, which came to be known as Minas Gerais, or General Mines, only accelerated all of those processes.

One almost immediate result was a permanent shift of Brazil’s center of gravity from the northeast to the south-central coast, a thousand miles away. In 1763, the capital was transferred from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro, formally ratifying the northeast’s political and economic decline, a problem that persists in our own era.”

“Two coffee-growing states dominated the politics of the First Republic, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo. They passed the presidency back and forth between them, advancing the often parochial interests of their leading families while ignoring those of other regions and classes.”

“Political repression in Brazil, bad as it as, was still milder than in either Argentina or Chile. With nearly five times Argentina’s population, Brazil had around four hundred political dissenters forcibly disappeared by state security forces during the 21-year period of rule by the armed forces, compared with estimates of up to 30,000 in Argentina in less than a decade.”

“To dilute the influence of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, the country’s two traditional centers of power, the military also created several new states and simultaneously increased the minimum size of the congressional delegations from each state. The main beneficiaries were smaller, poorer states where military control was easier to exercise. But the larger, more prosperous, and urbanized states that ended up being underrepresented could not protest. This perverse system remains in place even today and continues to distort the principle of “one man, one vote” and to force Brazilian presidents to horse-trade with political bosses from those more backward states in order to get legislation through Congress.”

Social Culture

“Then there is the widespread practice known as the filho de criacão, which has no precise translation to English. If a neighbor or an employee dies and leaves an orphaned child, or if the biological parents are unable to raise their offspring because of poverty or other difficulties, someone else steps in and raises that child as his own. No formal adoption needs to occur. Instead, the child simply joins another family. That’s how the internationally known black pop singer Milton Nascimento came to be reared by the white family that employed his birth mother. In this way, society compensates for the absence of an effective social welfare system and avoids having the child sent to an orphanage, where food, clothing, and affection would be lacking.”

“One of the ways in which the jeitinho has been formalized is through the institution of the despachante, or dispatcher, especially in dealings with government bureaucracies. Suppose you want to obtain a driver’s license without having to go through the normal procedures. You may simply be in a hurry and not want to wait. Or perhaps you haven’t studied for the written test or have failed it in the past. Or maybe you don’t know how to drive at all. The solution is to hire a despachante who has cultivated a personal relationship of some sort with key employees at the driver’s license bureau and can get you your license in record time.

Many who resort to the jeitinho know they are doing something that they really shouldn’t. But they shrug their shoulders and justify their actions with the phrase Não tem outro jito, “There’s no other way.””

“With a sufficient number of friends in high places and the possibility of employing the jeito, it is even possible to be exempted from obedience to the law. No matter what the statute books may say, an exception can always be arranged and a violation overlooked. Hence, the notion that the full force and vigor of the law is reserved only for the enemies of those who wield power or authority. If you’re a friend or relative of the mayor or a city council member, for example, you may not need to comply with zoning laws. Want to erect a building with more floors than those permitted in the construction code? Feel free. Would you like to open a store in a neighborhood zoned exclusively as residential? Go right ahead. But if a political opponent or commercial rival attempts the same thing, then the attitude is, “A lei neles!” or “Sic the law on them!”

Many Brazilians thus see the law as an instrument of power and coercion, and not of justice. It therefore becomes a point of pride, even an obligation of sorts, to try to avoid obeying the law and to attempt to get away with as much as possible.”

“There is a curious expression that one often hears in discussions about certain rules and regulations that are simply not observed. Aquela lei não pegou, Brazilians will say, which means, “That law didn’t catch on.” To a newcomer from an Anglo-Saxon society, that phrase may seem unfathomable. After all, the law is the law, so how can it possibly not “catch on”?

An atypical example from American history that comes to mind is that of Prohibition, which in the end was repealed in large part because continued mockery of the ban was undermining respect for the rule of law. But Brazilian life is full of instances large and small of laws that didn’t “catch on” and still exist on the books. There are giant corporations that fail to turn over to the government the social security and health care contributions for their employees that are mandated by law, and there are also motorists who routinely run red lights after dark in large cities. Disobedience of that latter law is so widespread that some cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, have simply caved in and had to pass laws that make stopping at a red light after 10 P.M. optional rather than mandatory.

At times, this tendency to defy laws and rules imbues daily life in Brazil with what seems to be a streak of either selfishness or anarchism. In either case, the result is a lack of civic solidarity. Every motorist on the road seems to think he is the only one with a car and drives accordingly, without regard for his fellow citizens. At the bank, a theater box office, the bus stop, or the grocery store, there is usually someone (or several someones) who believes he or she is much too important or in too much of a hurry to have to stand in line and pushes to the front. At a concert on the beach, latecomers think nothing of standing up to block the view of earlier arrivals sitting on the sand. When a movie is showing, people quite calmly answer calls on their cell phones and sometimes even argue with people who criticize them for their inconsiderate behavior.

The law is seen not as a binding code of conduct but merely as an expression of ideals and good intentions. The Brazilian constitution, for example, is one of the most generous and progressive in the world, guaranteeing citizens all sorts of rights that do not exist elsewhere. But many of those rights, promising benefits to the poor and other groups suffering from discrimination, exist only on paper. Despite the mandates, Congress has never appropriated the money to enforce those constitutional guarantees. It is as if the declaration of an intention to perform an act is the same thing as actually doing it, an attitude that spills over into many other areas of Brazilian life. Everyone knows the pledges will never be fulfilled, so no one takes them seriously, which is what allows them to be made in the first place.”

“Until recently, any person with a university degree who was accused of a crime was automatically kept out of cells holding “ordinary criminals” and placed in more comfortable surroundings. So when the wealthy young scion of a prominent business family in Rio was accused of getting drunk and beating a woman waiting in the predawn hours for the bus that would take her to her job as a maid, he was able to invoke the “special imprisonment” provision. So was a newspaper editor in São Paulo who, in a notorious case that began in 2000 and dragged on for years, murdered his girlfriend in a fit of rage.

Those in charge — whether in business, politics, law enforcement, education, religion, or sports — tend to take their position to the extreme and pull rank in ways that have a distinct air of arrogance and reveal a tendency to regard any challenge, reservation, or expression of doubt as a form of lèsemajesté.”

“On those occasions when someone in a position of power is not treated with the deference he believes he is due, when he is treated as just another citizen and held to the same standards as everyone else, the results are equally predictable. One of the most common phrases heard in those circumstances is “Você sabe com quem está falando?” which means, “Do you know who you are talking to?” If a big-wig finds his actions challenged — for example, if he wants to jump ahead of those patiently waiting in line for service at a bank or to buy tickets at the box office, or if he is stopped for a speeding violation — his response is likely to be “Você sabe com quem está falando?””

“The very manner in which Portuguese is spoken in Brazil reinforces the concepts of hierarchy and stratification. In English, we have simply one form of referring to someone in the second person: The word “you” is employed in all situations, whether one is talking to the president or a garbage collector. Other languages, such as Spanish and Chinese, have two separate words, one familiar and one formal. Brazilian Portuguese, in contrast, has four different forms of address. There are two words for “you,” both of which are relatively informal: tu, which is used in intimate settings, and você, which is used in ordinary settings with those one regards as one’s equals. Then there are two formal modes of address: the extremely formal o senhor, used when one wants to show deference or respect, and an intermediate level that involves the extensive use of honorifics such as doutor or seu, or its feminine equivalent dona, attached to the first name. Doutor literally means doctor, but it has become a title of respect that can be attached to the name of anyone who has a college degree — or looks prosperous enough to have one.”

“Only one in five of those declaring themselves to be Catholic actually attends mass. Women far outnumber men among this group: In small towns in the interior, where the local church is usually on the main square across from the mayor’s office and restaurants and bars, it’s not unusual for men to sit in the square playing dominoes or checkers or to be in a pool hall or tavern while their children and womenfolk are at religious services.”

“The most important of these are the Afro-Brazilian faiths known as macumba, candomblé, or umbanda, which are spiritual cousins of Haitian voodoo or Cuban Santería, sharing the same West African origins and a similar pantheon. Others describe themselves as “spiritists” and follow the teachings of the nineteenth-century French thinker Allan Kardec, who believed in reincarnation and thought it possible for the living to communicate with the dead, directly or through mediums.

Many of these believers, and they number in the millions, count in the census as Catholics and participate in many of the main Catholic rituals and rites. But when followers of candomblé or macumba attend mass or participate in religious festivals such as the Feast of the Annunciation, they do not really pay tribute to the Virgin Mary or seek the intercession of St. George or St. Barbara. Instead, they are praying to Afro-Brazilian deities such as Ogun, the god of iron and warfare, or Lemanja, the goddess of the sea. This practice is a carryover from the era of slavery, when Africans, in order to avoid the wrath of their masters or the local priest, had to disguise their beliefs and apply a jeito by giving Christian names to their divinities. Outwardly they may appear to accept a Christian worldview, but inside they adhere to a parallel cosmology with a very different belief system.

To believers in the various Afro-Brazilian faiths — for they are not cults, but fully fledged religions with their own clergy and places of worship, known as terreiros — the most secure way to venture through the world, which is full of spirits both malevolent and benevolent, is under the guidance and protection of an orixá, or deity, such as Oxum, the goddess of rivers, beauty, and art, or Xangô, the god of thunder, lightning, power, and justice. Each deity has a different personality and skill set, and every person is believed to be born with a patron deity, whose identity a priest usually determines in a divination ceremony by throwing shells. But one is expected to submit to that deity, who manifests his or her presence by “mounting” the protégé, who then falls into a trance state. To placate one’s personal deity, or thank him or her for protection or a favor granted, it is advisable to leave a gift, such as liquor, fruit, flowers, or cigars; throughout Brazil, “power spots” such as waterfalls and crossroads are often festooned with such offerings.

This tends to encourage fatalism: One cannot truly be the master of one’s own fate, since rivals or enemies can work magic or witchcraft against you through their own oriá or even force you to act against your own will. This can lead to the kind of passivity that has long frustrated social campaigners working among the poor in Brazil and an unwillingness to take responsibility for one’s own actions.”

“Government officials are usually wary of doing anything to offend the Church, and so Brazil’s laws against abortion are among the strictest in the world. Unless a pregnancy can be shown by a doctor to put the life of a woman in danger or can be proven to be the result of a rape, an abortion is illegal.”

“The general population, however, simply ignores both Church and state and has devised a way around their prohibitions. All across Brazil, women who are pregnant and do not want to carry their fetus to term resort to what are known in Brazilian slang as “angel factories.” These are clandestine clinics, the locations of which are widely know, where abortions can be obtained cheaply and with no questions asked. Though the illegality of this process makes it difficult to calculate how widespread it is, the ministry of health has estimated that as many as two million abortions are performed annually in Brazil. In 1991, a time when sexual matters were treated with more discretion than they are today, a World Bank report even estimated that the average lifetime abortion rate is over two per woman. Yet in 2007, a poll taken by the Folha de São Paulo newspaper found that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that Brazil’s current abortion laws “should not be modified.””

“One of the main symbols of having arrived is to hire domestic help. Almost no one in the American middle class has servants, whereas nearly everyone in the Brazilian middle class does.

This class stratification leads to any number of distortions in both values and behavior, in part because the middle class, rather than sympathizing with those below them, tends to emulate the conduct of the elite they aspire to join. In a household with servants, for instance, children rarely are required to pick up after themselves, much less make a bed or do laundry. Sometimes I’ve seen them loudly summon a servant all the way from the other end of the house rather than get up and get a glass of water for themselves from the next room. And when they become teenagers, they generally don’t get summer or after-school jobs waiting tables, delivering pizzas, washing cars, etc.”

“The members of the servant class are often treated as disposable or less than human — hence they are often called “João Ninguem,” or “John Nobody.” In the late 1970s, while living in a middle-class neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, I once found myself standing in line in a butcher shop, waiting with my wife to buy meat. A woman in line ahead of us, whose imperious bearing indicated clearly that she was what Brazilians call a “madame,” or person of means and airs, told the butcher she wanted two pounds of picanha, a prime and deliciously tender cut of beef, and one pound of carne de empregada, or “maid’s meat.” That she was there at all was odd; it must have been the maid’s day off. So I was puzzled at first, but as I watched the transaction unfold, it was clear that she was referring to a very inferior cut, just a step above the scraps that a person of her station might feed a dog.

Inevitably, these class prejudices creep into public policy. Until recently, investment in public education, health clinics, and low-cost housing lagged in comparison to projects that personally benefited the powerful. Those in power could not conceive of any advantage in bettering public schools because their own children were enrolled in private schools. Similarly, they saw little point in building roads or hospitals that they and their friends would never use. The road to the weekend house in the mountains above Rio that belongs to cousins of my wife, for example, is paved only as far as the mansion of a former governor; after that, it is a rutted dirt track because he was not going to use it.”

Gender and Sexuality

“When describing sexual intercourse, a man is said to “comer” a woman, meaning that he “eats” or consumes her; a woman, in contrast, is said to “dar,” which means to give or serve. These idioms assume that the man is active and the woman passive: He dominates and she submits; he directs and she follows.”

“A woman who violates the code of modesty by sleeping around — or even one who takes the intuitive in pursuing a man, dresses in a gaudy fashion, or frequents bars — is likely to be classified as a “slut.” A word often used in Portuguese for this type of woman is piranha, just like the flesh-eating fish.”

“The dominance of the male is reinforced, or perhaps it would be more apt to say exemplified, by a certain penchant for anal sex. This is a practice that Brazilians often try to hide from outsiders or deny, since many of them consider it shameful and embarrassing. But both research and popular anecdotes indicate that such a proclivity does exist.”

“It has also been argued that Brazilians have a built-in tolerance for homosexuality because of Carnival, which not only countenances cross-dressing and experimenting with sexual roles but actively encourages them. Behind the anonymity of the mask, anything goes, and within that framework, homosexuals have traditionally flourished and felt free to engage in the kind of transgressive dress and behavior that would be censured in another setting. Certainly Brazilian homosexuals have more options and occupy more public space than their counterparts in other countries in Latin America. In large cities such as Rio and São Paulo, gay couples, male or female, can live openly and frequent their own clubs and bars. Television soap operas now feature gay couples of both sexes who sometimes are allowed to kiss on screen. Even in some smaller cities in the interior the situation is similar: The annual Miss Gay Brazil beauty pageant for drag queens is held in Juiz de Fora, an industrial center of some five hundred thousand people in Minas Gerais, with the results broadcast nationally on television.

Nationally, though, a stigma is still attached to homosexuality. In many parts of the more conservative interior, it is still dangerous for gays to express affection or even meet in public, and newspapers regularly report cases of flamboyant homosexuals who are beaten up or even killed for violating local mores. In addition, Brazilian Portuguese continues to be rich in pejorative terms for homosexuals, the most common of which are veado, or “deer,” for men and sapatão, or “big shoe,” for lesbians. Men from the city of Pelotas in the far south of Brazil are constantly the target of jokes and derisive comments thanks to a folk belief, dating back to the nineteenth century, that all males there are homosexuals. Before becoming president, as the leader of a left-wing party that prides itself on being socially progressive and had sponsored gay rights legislation, Lula even described Pelotas as “a factory that manufactures queers.” The same superstition applies to women from the northern state of Paraíba.

In such a climate, many homosexuals prefer to remain in the closet: There is, for instance, a whole contingent of female singers who everyone knows to be lesbians but who prefer not to acknowledge their sexuality. The same goes for certain soccer players, whose careers in what is considered an extremely macho enclave would be ruined if they announced their homosexuality.

But the issue is even more complicated because definitions of what constitutes. homosexuality are often more fluid than in the Anglo-Saxon world. This is especially so among men: In the traditional, popular imagination, if two men are engaged in a sex act, only the passive or penetrated partner is regarded as a homosexual, a veado or bicha, which is probably the most pejorative term in the Brazilian vocabulary used to refer to gay men, corresponding to “fag” or “queer.” The active participant can even make a claim to macho status because he has subjugated another male and reduced him to the status of a woman.”

“Roberta Close, born in 1964, even posed for the Brazilian edition of Playboy magazine, modeled clothes, hosted a late-night talk show, and made films. She underwent a sex-reassignment operation in 1989, but, in a case that went all the way to the Brazilian Supreme Court, was prevented until 2005 from modifying her government documents to reflect the change of sex.”

Race

“IN 1996, A BLACK teenager named Luciano Soares Ribeiro was riding his bicycle in the southern city of Porto Alegre when he was struck by a BMW whose driver was white. Instead of coming to the young man’s aid, the motorist, Rogério Ferreira Pansera, told witnesses that he had deliberately run over a “black guy on a stolen bicycle” and left the scene. When Luciano’s mother arrived at the hospital four hours later, her son still had not been treated because, as a neurologist later told her, the medical staff “suspected he was a homeless person and didn’t know who would pay the bill.” Two days later, the young man died of cranial trauma — with the bicycle’s receipt, which his parents insisted he always carry with him in case police ever accused of stealing it, still in his pocket.

Brazilians like to think of their country as a “racial democracy,” and they have done a remarkable job of selling that idea to the rest of the world. Over the years, delegations from the United States, South Africa, Malaysia, and other nations with long histories of racial or ethnic tensions have gone to Brazil hoping to learn the secret of its success and to be able to transfer that formula to their own countries. An American sociologist who lived and worked in Brazil for many years even wrote a textbook, used for decades in universities around the world, concluding that racism did not exist in Brazil.”

“The image of the large and growing Asian population, predominantly Japanese, is that of academic overachievers who don’t have a sense of rhythm, so that at Carnival each year there are inevitably condescending stories in the news about some “japonga,” the slightly derogatory slang term for Brazilians of Japanese descent, trying to sing or dance samba. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been known to tell anti-Semitic jokes, and the World Social Forum his party sponsors each year openly displays anti-Semitic literature. Indigenous peoples are routinely mocked for their speech, dress, and culture; are sometimes referred to pejoratively as “burges,” a term that emerged in medieval Portugal to refer to any savage, primitive, pagan or uncouth group; and have been known to be targeted for hate crimes.”

“In Brazil, even those who seem unlikely to have African blood sometimes claim it so as to seem more authentically Brazilian and less isolated from the social mainstream.”

“Racism in Brazil, in contrast, was never institutionalized. There were never any laws that formally defined a black person as anyone with one-sixteenth African blood or established separate and inferior schools, drinking fountains, toilets, and waiting rooms for him or prohibited him from marrying across racial lines. Brazil’s reality is such that there has never been a need to formalize such exclusions because they are part of an unwritten social code that Brazilians of all colors understood and have traditionally lived by.

Nor is race the simple matter of black and white that it is in the United States. Because of its history, Brazil also has a large intermediate category that may actually be the country’s largest demographic group. and whose existence complicates racial classifications and makes race more of a continuum than a sharp divide.”

“In place of the simple black and white classification that has historically prevailed in the United States, Brazil has dozens of gradations. I once tried to do a tally and came up with a list of more than sixty different terms to designate shades of skin color, from preto for someone with African features and very dark skin to brancarão for a person with very light café au lait skin. But Brazilian friends who are sociologists or anthropologists have told me that a complete index would have to include at least three hundred terms.”

“Racial views that in the United States would ruin a career or drive a person from public life continue to flourish in Brazil, without negative consequences for those who express them. In 2006, when I was writing just before the World Cup about Brazil’s reputation as a “soccer factory” and its incredible capacity to keep churning out the world’s best players, I asked commentators, players, coaches, and team executives to explain the phenomenon. Most of Brazil’s best players are black or mulatto, and the most common response I heard was that since people with African blood are inherently “more athletic” than whites and Brazil has such a large black population to draw from, it is only natural that the country should dominate the sport.

Ask for an explanation of Brazil’s enormous musicality and the ability of its people to create new musical genres and dance styles, as I have, and you get a similar response: blacks innately have a “better sense of rhythm,” which allows Brazil to excel at music and dance. Indeed, sports and entertainment may be the only two areas of Brazilian life in which a black person’s success is considered normal and goes unquestioned. In almost any other endeavor, it is likely to be viewed as an oddity or aberration.

To cite another example of different cultural standards: Brazilian soccer players are usually given one-word nicknames that appear on their uniforms, and because the star striker Edinaldo Batista Libâno is extremely darkskinned, the name he was given is “Grafite,” or “Graphite,” as in pencil lead. Though that nickname makes many foreigners uncomfortable, Brazilians insist it is neither offensive nor racist, just amusingly tongue-in-cheek, and make fun of what they see as excessive political correctness. But I can’t think of a countervailing example of a white player with a name that references his skin color in such a blunt way, such as “Branquinho” or “Whitey.”

Even some of the regional stereotypes that Brazilians routinely express are, in all likelihood, based on race. In the popular mind, people from Bahia are considered to be slow to act, lazy, disorganized, and overly fond of partying. There is even a slang term, baianada, derived from the name of the state, which is applied to any task that is badly done, a grossly stupid mistake, or an abrupt and seemingly inexplicable maneuver in traffic.”

“By 1619, when the first African slaves arrived in the United States — Angolans aboard a Portuguese ship, perhaps originally bound for Brazil, that was captured by Dutch pirates and diverted northward — slavery had already existed in Brazil for more than 60 years. Slavery also endured longer in Brazil than in the United States, being outlawed by imperial decree only in 1888, a full 25 years after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

In addition, slavery in Brazil was not confined to a single region, as was the case in the United States. Though most common and crucial in the sugar-grow-ing areas of the northeast, it was a truly national phenomenon, stretching from the Argentine border in the south to the Amazon in the north.”

“In the United States, segregationists inveighed against “race-mixing” because they feared it would degrade the white race, which they saw as superior. In Brazil, members of the white elite endorsed miscegenation because they saw it as a means of “whitening” the predominantly black population they regarded as inferior.”

“Two years after abolition, Brazil prohibited black immigration, a ban that was strengthened in the 1920s and again in the 1930s as part of the campaign to give Brazil an “injection of civilization” and “purify the race.””

“In contrast to “a segregated society like America,” the book argues, Brazil is “completely open to people of all colors, our judicial and institutions framework is completely colorblind, and all forms of racial discrimination are combated by law.”

The book’s author, Ali Kamel, who comes from a Syrian immigrant family, also maintains that since “races do not exist,” Brazil cannot really be considered a country in which the majority of the population is black. Any effort to develop racial consciousness among black and brown Brazilians, therefore, will only lead to “racial hatred” and other problems like those in the United States, he argues. “When I see the Black Movement disparaging Gilberto Freyre, belittling him as if he were an enemy, it makes me crazy,” Kamel writes. “Our problem is not racism, but poverty and an economic model that over the years has only concentrated income.”

Not by coincidence, Kamel is the news director at Rede Globo, Brazil’s most powerful television network. Globo has often been a prime target for black activists, who complain that the casts of both its entertainment and news programs exclude blacks, failing to reflect Brazil’s racial composition. The heroes and heroines of the network’s popular telenovelas are almost always white and often blue-eyed and blond, as are the star reporters who appear on its nightly newscasts, including the married couple who are the anchors.

To change that situation, black groups have in the past tried everything from vowing boycotts to threatening to file discrimination suits, but to little effect. Brazil has a comprehensive antidiscrimination statute, which was passed in the mid-1990s. But the growing number of groups advocating equal rights for blacks point out that though offenders have occasionally had to pay fines or perform community service, no one has ever served jail time for violating the racial provisions of the law.

Under pressure, Globo and the newspapers and magazines it controls have conceded a bit of ground in the past couple of years. For the first time, black actors have been able to break out of the ghetto of racially stereotyped roles such as maids and drivers and be cast in the lead roles of prime-time soap operas. But so far, that status has been granted only to one actress, Thaís Araújo, and one actor, Lázaro Ramos. On the news side, the formula is much the same: One black male reporter, in Brasília, occasionally anchors weekend news broadcasts, and one black female reporter got the plum stories on the Sunday night show that is Brazil’s equivalent of 60 Minutes (until she decided to retire). That has not been enough to satisfy black advocacy groups, who want to see more black and brown faces in roles as teachers, businessmen, or scientists, as newscasters, and featured in television and magazine advertisements.”

“Over the past decade, a spate of complaints of racial discrimination against blacks, which have led to court cases and official investigations eliciting detailed testimony, have been filed against the private social clubs that are the focal point of the weeklong series of Carnival parties and parades in Salvador

In one case that caught my attention, two female college students, one white and one black, who were close friends went to sign up to parade in the costumed Carnival procession being organized by a well-known club. The white woman’s application was immediately accepted, while the black woman’s was summarily rejected. Afterward, the white woman told me, a leader of the club, one of the more than a hundred such associations that enroll revelers in return for membership fees of several hundred dollars, approached her and said: “Are you crazy? Blacks can’t join this club.” Another club member, whom she has known since childhood, scolded her, asking, “How many more darkies are you planning to bring around?”

From this system, practices that appear even more discriminatory have evolved. As the private clubs parade down the streets of Salvador during the Carnival festivities, they use giant cords, wielded by burly security guards, to prevent non-members from entering their parade space, dancing with members, or taking advantage of the free drinks and snacks that are offered to those who are members. Anyone who is black is almost always automatically assumed to be an outsider and blocked from participating.”

“Lula appointed three blacks to the cabinet that took office with him in 2003, as well as a fourth minister who is clearly of mixed racial descent but did not define herself as black until leaving the cabinet. Prior to Lula’s taking power, the highest ranking black government official had been Pelé, the world’s most famous soccer player, who served as state secretary of sport in the previous administration. Lula also named the first black justice to the Supreme Court and created a new ministry of racial equality to deal with problems of discrimination and ensure that Afro-Brazilians were given equal opportunities.”

“The clearest sign that race has become an issue that Brazilians can no longer ignore is the national debate about affirmative action, which in recent years has gone from being an issue on the fringes of Brazil’s national awareness to one that is endlessly discussed. The principal battleground has been college admissions, specifically a plan by Lula’s government to set aside 40 percent of admissions to some of the country’s most prestigious universities for high school graduates who qualify as “Afro-descendants.” Brazil has always had a shortage of spots in its colleges and universities. But that situation has worsened in the past 15 years, ironically because of an economic boom that has enabled children from poor families to stay in high school through graduation instead of dropping out to go to work. As a result, each year as many as 2.5 million students now take college admission qualifying exams, which are costly and often demand an entire year of cram courses to prepare, for barely a million openings. So any government policy that favors one group, such as blacks, at the expense of another is bound to provoke controversy.

An additional problem with such quotas is that racial categories are so much more flexible and ill defined in Brazil than in countries like the United States. As a result, it is hard to determine who is black and who is not, or to come up with a workable legal definition. That, in turn, means that deciding who is eligible to benefit from affirmative action and who is not can be extremely tricky.”

“According to a recent DNA study done by the Universily of Minas Gerais, 87 percent of Brazilians, or nearly 175 million people, have genes that are at least 10 percent African in origin.”

“The most notorious instance is the case of identical twin brothers, with a black father and white mother, who applied to different departments of the same public university in Brasilia in 2007, hoping to be admitted under the racial set-asides for “Afro-descendent” students. In order to qualify, though, their academic records had to be examined by a panel whose duties also required them to look at pictures of the teenagers to determine whether they were “black enough” to be eligible. One brother was ruled to be black and was admitted under the quota, but the other was declared not to be black and was rejected. After he threatened to take his case to the courts, which have final jurisdiction over the issue, the university reversed its decision. “There is no way to understand the criteria the university used,” complained the twin who had originally been ruled white. “How can they consider my brother black and not me?””

“In response to the clamor, Lula’s government tried to walk back its original support for a quota system that would specifically benefit blacks. During his second term, which ran from 2007 through 2010, the focus shifted from an explicitly race-based system to one that uses family income as its main criteria.”

“Television networks and advertising agencies, for example, have lobbied intensely against bills that would require them to choose more blacks for the casts of their programs and commercials. Those proposals do not aim to require producers of visual media to exactly match the composition of the Brazilian populations, but only to give black and mixedrace actors a larger and more representative share of roles, typically about 30 or 40 percent. The main result, however, has been to harden the opposition of television networks to affirmative action in general, with Globo and its allies portraying any kind of quota in any area as an assault on the Brazilian way of life.”

“The 1988 constitution even contains a provision that declares all beaches to be public land, held by the nation in trust for all Brazil’s people.”

“Rio de Janeiro has 59 different beaches, spread out along 110 miles of oceanfront sand. The most famous and elite of these beaches are Ipanema and its extension, known as Leblon, and Copacabana and its extension, called Leme. Both beaches are informally divided into sectors, which are demarcated by a dozen lifeguard stations, called postos, each about a half-mile from the next. The postos are numbered 1 through 12, and each has a culture of its own, which appeals to a different socio-economic “tribe,” and which can be unwelcoming to those who are considered outsiders.

One notorious video, widely viewed on YouTube, shows a group of New Year’s Eve revelers throwing raw eggs from the balcony of one of the most prestigious and expensive buildings directly overlooking Copacabana beach at pedestrians below. In the video you can hear that the egg throwers, many of whom were celebrities or children of wealthy or famous families, were deliberately targeting those whose appearance suggested they were poor.

Over the years, a hierarchy of prestige among the lifeguard stations has been delineated and is known to all regular beachgoers. Posto 9, in the heart of panema, is clearly at the top and has been since I first visited Brazil in the early 1970s. The military dictatorship was in power in those days, and this stretch of the beach, alongside a pier that has since vanished, was one of the few places hippies could congregate without fear of harassment by the police. Nowadays, it’s a magnet for celebrities, left-wing intellectuals (who signal their presence by flying the flag of the ruling Workers Party), and other bohemian types, including former hippies who have now aged into uppermiddle-class respectability. Slightly to the left of the lifeguard station itself, gays and lesbians mark their territory with a rainbow flag.

In contrast, Posto 7, at the eastern end of the beach, is the redoubt of outsiders, many of them dark-skinned, who have come from working-class suburbs that may be as far as three hours away by public transportation. This is especially the case on weekends, when entire families ride the bus to Posto 7, the first bus stop in Ipanema, and station themselves on the sand.”

“Compared to American beachgoers, fewer Brazilians go in the water, aside from surfers, even on a sunny day when the water is calm and the waves weak. A Brazilian beach is not just for recreation but is also a public, social space, much like a plaza or street corner. Brazilian courting rituals are on view, and candidates for political office know that the beachfront is a good place to campaign. So do advertisers: The skies above the most popular beaches are filled with airplanes trailing banners, and on the sidewalk, attractive young people offer samples of new products ranging from hand lotions to beverages. Musicians and comedians perform there, too, as if they were buskers at a subway station.

But just as elsewhere in Brazilian society, the beach cannot function without what can only be described as a servant class. When beachgoers arrive and select the spot where they intend to spend the day, operators of kiosks compete to rent them chairs and an umbrella; sometimes a proprietor will already have set things up for a regular, long-time customer. While they are sitting on the sand, they are served by strolling vendors, many of whom sing or chant the praises of the products they are selling, which include soft drinks, ice cream, sunglasses, T-shirts, and tanning lotion.”

“At the start of the last decade, the municipal government built a large swimming pool, quickly dubbed the Big Pool, in one of the poorest neighborhoods on the north side. Initially, the new attraction drew huge crowds, mostly people who were relieved not to have to spend the time and money to get to elite beaches of the Zona Sul, where they might feel unwelcome. Even some of the well-heeled residents of Ipanema and Le-blon made the trip — north-slumming, as it were — to see what all the fuss was about. For a while, it was a chic thing to do on weekends for members of the elite.

But eventually the realities of life began to intrude, and the glow faded. The pool was in an area being fought over by two gangs. The dominant group decreed that no one could wear beach attire with the colors of their rivals and began to harass and threaten those who defied or were not aware of that edict. Then, after the next election, a new, more conservative mayor took office, the money to maintain the project dried up, and eventually so did the Big Pool. Funds were poured into modernizing refreshment stands and lifeguard stations along the elite beaches of the Zona Sul.”

Carnaval

“Back in the early 1970s, the actress Leila Diniz, a leading sex symbol at the time, created enormous controversy because she dared, while quite visibly pregnant, to wear the tiniest of bikinis on the beach at Ipanema; in retrospect, that action is sometimes cited as the start of the feminist movement in Brazil. In 1980, after returning from exile in Sweden, the writer and social activist Fernando Gabeira – who had been given amnesty for his role in the kidnapping of an American ambassador – outraged both social conservatives and his former revolutionary comrades-in-arms by wearing a crocheted lilac thong to the beach. That act was seen by many as announcing the birth of the New Left in Brazil, less dogmatic, more pragmatic, and more tolerant on social issues.

A decade ago, a group of young women created a media sensation when they went topless at Ipanema on a summer weekend, when the beach was at its most crowded. They were protesting an incident a few weeks earlier in which a 20-member police squad, armed with machine guns, ordered a 34-year-old saleswoman at another Rio beach to put her top back on and then roughly hauled her off to the police station when she refused. Despite Rio de Janeiro’s reputation as a hub of licentiousness, and the presence of bare breasts on numerous telenovelas and other television programs, a municipal ordinance at that time prohibited women from going topless at local beaches. For their efforts, the demonstrators were rewarded with insults and showered with beer. But their protest, combined with the wave of public ridicule that followed the police action, led the mayor to sign a decree that permits women to shed their tops at the beach.”

“Beginning late on the Friday before Ash Wednesday and extending until noon of that Wednesday, which is the Roman Catholic day of fasting and abstinence marking the start of the penitential season of Lent, official formal life in Brazil shuts down and gives way to the people’s festival. Business, school, and other normal daily activities cease. Bands of ordinary people, many dressed in costume, take to the streets to dance, sing, and drink. At social clubs and community centers, fancy dress balls are held, each varying in opulence according to the wealth and social class of those involved. There is much casual or anonymous sex, which is why billboards go up in the weeks before the start of Carnival warning revelers to use condoms when they frolic.

But that is only a part of the picture; dig deeper, and other, seemingly contradictory aspects emerge. For Carnival is also a fierce competition, and as Brazil modernizes and becomes more prosperous, Carnival has become an industry. In Rio, large corporations that seek publicity and profit are pushing aside the shadowy underworld elements that have traditionally helped finance Carnival. There has also been a backlash in recent years against the industrialization of Carnival and a desire, at least among purists and the nostalgic, to return to the era when Carnival was a festival of, for, and by the people.

Carnival is something ancient, a “farewell to the flesh” that dates back to the Middle Ages and the Roman Catholic Church’s creation of Holy Week, but it also draws from even older European pagan sources. In its modern Brazilian form, however, Carnival is most closely linked to rites and practices that are African in origin. In 1930, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro sought for the first time to regulate longstanding Carnival activities, inadvertently creating a space for groups that had recently been formed in the city’s poor black neighborhoods to propagate a new style of music developed there, the samba. These “samba schools” took their rhythms, their songs with satirical lyrics, and their elaborate costumes to the streets and quickly found favor among the city’s other residents. As a result, other rhythms and other activities were pushed into the background, and the samba gradually became synonymous with Carnival.

Over the years, that tradition has evolved into two nights of fierce competition, held at a specially constructed “Sambodrome” on the outskirts of downtown Rio, near the city’s leading brewery, and televised live all over Brazil. Each night, before an exacting audience of seventy thousand sitting in a grandstand, seven samba schools parade for an hour, to be graded by four judges in ten categories ranging from the beauty of their costumes to the effectiveness of their percussion sections. The dancers and drummers are for the most part ordinary people, bus drivers and housewives and other members of Rio’s working class, who yearn all year long for this moment of glory and have devoted months of rehearsal to mastering their steps and rhythms. The results are announced on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday, after Carnival has officially ended, in a ceremony that is also broadcast live.

Just as in Olympic gymnastic and ice skating competitions, the difference between finishing in first place and being the runner-up is often tenths or even hundredths of a point. As a result, tension and nervousness mount as the results are tabulated, especially for supporters of those schools in danger of finishing last. The punishment for that failure is to be bumped down to the second division, while the winner of that category ascends to the glory of competing in the “special group.” For the next year, the special group winner basks in the contentment of being recognized all over Brazil as the best of the best; faithful fans of the last-place finisher, in contrast, must endure the constant gibes of others.”

“To achieve their varied goals, the samba schools draw from a small, exclusive, and well-paid group of professionals known as carnavalescos to organize, design, and direct their presentations.

Some of these carnvalescos, such as Fernando Pamplona and Joâozinho Trinta, have become national celebrities. Pamplona is an intellectual, a scenographer, and a lifelong student of Brazilian folklore who focuses on daily life or Brazilian history in his performance. Trinta has enjoyed his greatest successes leading the Beija-Flor group. He is most famous for his response in the 1970s to criticism that Carnival wasted money that could be used on education, housing, and medicine for the poor. “The poor like luxury” he said. “It’s intellectuals who like poverty.”

With so much at stake, the leading samba schools have in recent years opted for ever larger and more extravagant presentations. In part, they’re financed by the city government, which wants to support what has become a major tourist attraction. For many years, a good chunk of money also came from the city’s most prominent bicheiros, the bookies who run the flourishing illegal numbers game called the jogo do bicho, or “animal game.” In fact, it was almost a civic obligation for the game bosses to finance the sâmba schools in their neighborhoods, since much of their wealth came from the same local residents who participate in the Carnival competition.

But as their ambitions have gradually come to outstrip the capacity of the bicheiros to subsidize Carnival presentations, the samba schools have had to seek other sources of financing. Some nouveau riche residents of the slum alleged to be drug kingpins have stepped up to fill part of the need. Large corporations have also increased their donations, in return for samba schools’ putting the company’s logo on their musical instruments and costumes. Agencies of the federal government, such as Petrobras, the state oil company, have also supplied funding, with the understanding that the samba school it supports will choose for its presentation a theme that praises the benefactor.

Even Venezuela’s populist strongman Hugo Chávez, recognizing the importance of the competition as a public relations tool, has emerged as a patron of Carnival. In 2007, his government supplied a reported $1 million to the Vila Isabel samba school, the theme of whose presentation was “I’m Crazy About You, America: in Praise of Latinity.” After Vila Isabel unexpectedly and narrowly won the competition, amid speculation that Carnival judges may have been paid off.”

“Numerous samba schools have over the past decade also begun selling tickets to foreign tourists to take part in the parade down the Sambodrome. Although this practice helps raise the money the schools need to mount their presentations, it rankles traditionalists, and not just because most of the outsiders can’t dance the samba. Purists argue that the presence of outsiders devalues the Carnival experience, diluting the bond between the samba school and the members who work hard all year long to learn the dance steps, memorize the samba enredo or theme song, sew the costumes, and attend the rehearsals.

The ordinary people who have traditionally provided Carnival with its inspiration and character are also being squeezed out in other ways. Tickets to the Sambodrome competition are now beyond the price range of many knowledgeable samba fans, the result of increased interest by tourists. And since the two nights of samba competition are televised nationally, they provide a stage on which entertainers and other celebrities can reach a mass audience and promote their careers. As a result, Carnival has been inundated with armies of C-grade actresses and models who seem to view the event as an audition – a chance to strut their well-toned bodies for the television cameras and make their way into the gossip magazines.”

“By the start of the last decade, when some beauties were daring to parade completely naked in public, a backlash began. The offenders were criticized for vulgarizing the spectacle and diminishing its splendor and creativity, and Carnival organizers finally passed a resolution formally prohibiting complete nudity.”

“In the face of this growing glitziness and elitism, some Brazilians are taking Carnival back to its popular roots. In Rio, the blocos, the smaller semiorganized neighborhood groups that were all but moribund when I first arrived in the city in the 1970s, have been resurrected and injected with new life. There are not only more of them, but they are also more active, beginning their marches through the streets as early as two weeks before the formal competition at the Sambodrome. And true to Carnival’s irreverent origins and traditions, they march in the gaudiest and most absurd of costumes, singing songs that criticize authorities and celebrities in a hilariously irreverent manner. The result is a growing gulf between this popular, chaotic Carnival in the streets and the formal, structured event at the Sambodrome.

True fans of the event are also gravitating toward Carnival celebrations in other cities, especially Salvador, Olinda, which is just north of Recife, and other places where efforts are made to protect the original flavor of Carnival and retain public involvement. In Olinda, the musical foundation of Carnival is not the samba but the maracatu and the ciranda, two other traditional rhythms popular in the region. Similarly, the focus of the festivities there is not a competition among groups, with a single winner, but raucous street parades featuring giant papier-mâché puppets, some standing more than 20 feet high, that caricature local or national celebrities.”

Music

“Brazil is a musical superpower, and it has become so thanks mainly to the seemingly inexhaustible ability of its musicians and songwriters to invent new rhythms and harmonies and avoid the plodding predictability of the European song tradition.

The samba and its gentler offshoot, the bossa nova, are obviously the best known examples of the Brazilian popular music tradition. But while the casual listener may not be aware of it, lesser-known Brazilian styles, ranging from the maracatu and the maxixe to the frevo and forro, not to mention axe, baião, and pagode, have insinuated themselves into the work of some of the most influential international pop stars of recent decades, including (but not limited to) Paul Simon, Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Sting, Eric Clapton, Beck, Earth Wind & Fire, Nelly Furtado, and Devandra Banhart. And that’s just in the English-speaking world; in places such as France and Italy and Spanish-speaking Latin America, the impact probably runs even deeper.”

“Bossa nova was dominating the American charts and even looked like it might become the most popular form of pop music worldwide when it was abruptly pushed aside in the mid-60s by the British invasion of rock n roll.”

“That quirky harmonic inventiveness,he told me in an interview in 1991, was largely a by-product of growing up in a small and isolated town deep in the interior of Minas Gerais, where he was an avid listener to radio stations in Rio and São Paulo that played the latest Brazilian and foreign hits but had their signals partially blocked by a mountain range “You couldn’t hear the harmonies because the radio reception wasn’t strong enough,” he said. “Theyd play a song we liked and we’d copy the lyrics and the melody, but we had to invent the harmonies out of our own heads. Months later, we’d get to a big city to play the song and see that our harmonies were completely different from the original.””

Economics

“Even though more people speak Portuguese than French, German, or Arabic, Portuguese is not often regarded as a global language.”

“Nowadays, in contrast, Brazil is one of the IMF’s creditors, not a debtor. Punctuating that shift was Brazil’s 2009 offer to purchase $10 billion in bonds the IMF was issuing to help developing countries deal with the types of problems Brazil used to have. In addition, Brazil’s foreign currency reserves, the product of a growing trade surplus, now exceed $350 billion. Much of that money is held in U.S. Treasury notes, making Brazil, which during most of its history has been accustomed to sending delegations to Washington hat in hand to ask for bailouts, the fourth-largest creditor of the United States.”

“Over the past four decades, per capita annual income has zoomed from barely $1,000 in 1970 to nearly $11,000 in 2011.”

“Between 1940 and 1995, Brazil had to resort to eight different currencies, from the cruzeiro to the real. That in itself was a reflection of how badly inflation was eroding the value of money: Rather than print banknotes in astronomical denominations, as other countries sometimes did, governments would simply lop off three or more zeros when the situation got out of hand and adopt a currency with a new name. It was in part a psychological trick meant to convince Brazilians that the government was starting afresh, with new, more disciplined policies, but the result was always failure. Four of these eight different currencies were used between 1986 and 1990, when the problem was at its worst, generating distortions that threatened to sink the entire economy.

During that period, workers rushed to spend their entire paychecks as soon as they received them, knowing that if they did not, the value of their wages would erode so quickly that by the end of the month basic food staples such as rice, beans, or eggs could easily double in price. Some people even took to buying durable goods such as television sets or air conditioners as a form of investment, since those products would increase in price even as the value of a savings account would slide drastically. And though the law prohibited the practice, many professionals, such as doctors and architects, began charging for their services in dollars, payable in Brazilian currency at whatever exchange rate happened to prevail the day the bill was due.”

“Over the past 16 years, the stability brought by the Real Plan has transformed the Brazilian economy in ways both large and small. Perhaps the most important long-term achievement is that it turned millions of working- and lower-middle-class families into full-fledged consumers. In the past, those groups had been confined to the margins of the economy, living from one meager paycheck to another. They were unwilling to open bank accounts because inflation would only erode the value of their savings, and they were unable to buy on credit because they could never be sure how much their monthly payments would increase because of inflation.”

“In contrast to a country such as Chile, which has only fifteen million inhabitants and therefore must depend on exports to lead growth, producers in Brazil can find ways to prosper even without having to compete beyond their own borders. Since 1950, the country’s population has essentially quadrupled, jumping from fifty-one million people to just under two hundred million, offering vast new opportunities. So while foreign trade has grown rapidly, to more than $380 billion a year, it constitutes only 15 percent of gross domestic production.

And since a market of nearly two hundred million consumers is inherently interesting to almost any producer, the stability brought on by the Real Plan has also encouraged a surge of outside investment in Brazil. In recent years, foreign companies have poured as much as $45 billion annually into Brazil, making it in some years the second-largest recipient of foreign investments among developing countries.”

“Even allowing for all the advantages that Mexico enjoys from its proximity to the United States and its membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement, three-fifths of all of Latin America’s industrial production occurs in Brazil.”

“All of this was part of an import-substitution model meant to allow Brazilian industry to take root and diversify by protecting local producers from outside competition through high tariffs. That approach is very much out of fashion today, criticized as unfair and inefficient in a globalized world. But at the time, it seemed the most appropriate way for the government to give Brazilian industry, which obviously could not yet compete against wealthier and more experienced foreign companies, a chance to get on its feet and develop its own technology. And Brazil did not totally close its doors to those outside companies; rather, it encouraged them to come to Brazil and invest and build locally. One result was that Brazil eventually became the first country in the world in which every major automobile manufacturer built a plant.”

“With a population approaching 45 million, slightly larger than California’s, São Paulo accounts for 22 percent of Brazil’s population. But it generates more than one-third of Brazil’s economic output and accounts for nearly half the country’s tax base. If the state of São Paulo were an independent country rather than Brazil’s most prosperous and populous state, its population and GDP would surpass those of Argentina and Colombia, which are South America’s most populous countries and biggest economies after Brazil.”

“Though the interior of the state is dotted with thriving cities that produce a wide variety of industrial and agricultural products, São Paulo’s real center of gravity is the city of the same name, which over the past 140 years has had “the fastest long-term rate of big-city growth in human experience,” according to a paper published by the Fernand Braudel Institute of World Economics, a research group in São Paulo. With a population of just over 11 million and another nine million people in the industrial suburbs ringing the city, greater São Paulo is, according to United Nations figures, the third largest urban area in the world, after Tokyo and Mexico City. In 1870, by contrast, only thirty-one thousand people lived in São Paulo.

Like New York, modern São Paulo, both the city and the state, has been built largely by immigrants and owes its wealth and cosmopolitan character to them. That flow started in 1888 when Brazil abolished slavery and required new sources of labor. Paulistas like to boast that São Paulo has more people of Japanese descent than any city outside Japan, more people of Syrian-Lebanese descent than any city outside the Middle East, and more people of Italian descent than any city outside Italy. Millions more, like President Lula himself, who worked in auto plants before becoming a union leader, are peasants who have migrated from the poor and arid states of the northeast, just as poor blacks migrated en masse from the American South to the factories of Chicago.”

“I have met up with Brazilian cowboys taking herds of cattle all the way to Lebanon, where they are ritually laughtered according to Muslim custom so that the faithful there can consume the meat. Brazil has the largest commercial herd in the world, more than 185 million head of cattle, double the size of the American herd. It also exports more beef than any other country, earning more than $5 billion a year, with Russia as its largest single customer.”

“Brazil never fell into the trap of believing the mantra repeated in the United States during the Bush years: that an all-knowing market always makes the best choices and therefore does not need regulation. All but one of the country’s main political parties endorse the notion of a significant state role, and the state has often actively guided economic policy. That role is not as intrusive as in China, or even Japan, or India, but there is a consensus in Brazil that the profit motive does not always guarantee the best outcome for society as a whole and that some supervision is therefore necessary.”

“According to a World Bank survey from 2009, for example, on average it takes five months to complete all of the paperwork required to set up a business in Brazil. Of the 181 countries measured in the survey, Brazil ranked 125th, far below most of the countries it sees as its rivals or which it aspires to surpass.

This bottleneck has led to a complex system in which veritable armies of so-called despachantes, or “dispatchers,” are hired to speed things along. As mentioned earlier, it is the dispatcher’s job to “agilize” the paperwork process and prevent forms from languishing for months in dusty corners of government offices. That, more often than not, is achieved through bribes to low-level public servants, who come to expect them as a matter of course for allowing a petitioner’s request to jump to the head of the line. At a higher level, officials who have the power to award contracts have been known to demand kickbacks or even percentages of the total.”

“Specialists at the World Bank and other international organizations have criticized the quality of instruction in Brazil, noting that, among other shortcomings, teachers are inadequately trained, the school curriculum is not sufficiently rigorous, and the university system is both too small to meet the country’s needs and includes too many substandard institutions that are not sufficiently supervised. In addition, nearly 10 percent of the population remains functionally illiterate.

The principal challenge for the government that succeeds Lula’s will be to continue the process of bringing those who have been excluded from growth into the economy, creating jobs for them that pay decent wages so that they too can become consumers. One-quarter of Brazil’s population remains below the poverty line: The minimum wage, by law adjusted only once a year, was $258 a month in 2009, and millions of people subsist on that salary or even less, since it is still commonplace for many workers to be employed off the books. Millions more may officially be above the poverty line, but they, too, struggle to get by.”

The Environment

“By the mid-1980s, though, more than three-quarters of the eight hundred thousand cars then manufactured annually in Brazil ran on ethanol manufactured from sugarcane, grown mostly in the state of São Paulo.

At that point, Brazil seemed well on its way to weaning its motorists from their dependence on costly imported gasoline. But when sugar prices rose sharply in 1989 because of a global surge in demand, owners of sugar mills stopped making their cane available for processing into alcohol and jumped at the chance to profit from the hard currency premium that international markets were willing to pay for sugar. As a result, Brazilian motorists were left in the lurch, as were the automakers that had retooled their production lines to make ethanol-powered cars. Ethanol fell into discredit for reasons that were purely economic, not technical. It continued to be an efficient fuel source, but if a reliable supply could not be guaranteed, consumers preferred to protect themselves by returning to gasoline, supplies of which were never interrupted.

That situation persisted throughout the 1990s. Even after sugar prices returned to their historically low levels, motorists were wary of being tricked again, and sales of ethanol-fueled cars continued to lag. What changed the equation, beginning in 2003, was a technological advance: the development of what came to be known as the “flex fuel” engine, which runs on gasoline or ethanol or any combination of the two. Flex fuel motors give consumers the autonomy to buy the cheapest fuel available, thereby freeing them from both potential shortages in the supply of ethanol or any sharp increase in the price of gasoline. And since ethanol-only engines can be slow to start in colder weather, the flex fuel engine also offered a practical advantage.

Volkswagen was the first automobile manufacturer to introduce the flex fuel engine, but competitive pressures soon forced all of the others, including Brazilian affiliates of the American Big Three, to follow suit. Within three years, three-quarters of the automobiles sold in Brazil were models with flex fuel engines, generally sold without a price increase that would have forced consumers to absorb the cost for the new technology. Today, virtually all of the more than three million passenger vehicles manufactured annually in Brazil, some of which are destined for export to Latin America and Asia, are equipped with flex fuel engines.

As a result, sales of ethanol in Brazil now exceed those of gasoline. In fact, even the gasoline sold in Brazil contains a 25 percent admixture of ethanol.”

“More than 80 percent of the electricity consumed in Brazil comes from hydropower, which has been the case since the 1980s, when construction of the Itaipu project on the Paraná River in the south, along the border with Paraguay, concluded.”

“Itaipu is one of the five largest sources of electricity in the world and enables it to provide nearly 20 percent of the electricity Brazil consumes.”

“The Amazon is larger than all of Europe, and during the past 40 years, one-fifth of it has been burned, cut, chopped, or razed.”

“Brazil is now the world’s fourth-largest producer of key greenhouse gases. Only China, the United States, and Indonesia spew more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than Brazil, and if present trends continue, Brazil could soon surpass Indonesia. In contrast to the United States and China, though, Brazil’s emissions are neither a product of the wasteful lifestyle of its people nor attributable mainly to a rapidly expanding industrial base that is excessively dependent on fossil fuels. More than three-quarters of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions stem from cutting down the Amazon rainforest.”

“No one knows how many Indians lived in the Amazon when the first Spanish and Portuguese explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, but the estimates range as high as six million people, and contemporary reports talked of large and flourishing communities lining the banks of the main rivers. By 1970, however, Brazil’s indigenous population had dropped to just over two hundred thousand people, and some advocates of the indigenous cause forecast the complete disappearance of tribal groups. Yet by the time of the 2000 census, that figure had tripled, to more than six hundred thousand, and in the 2010 census, the number swelled further, to more than 750,000 people.

Many of these tribal groups are nomadic, living in relatively small groups of just a few dozen people. To maintain the traditional way of life they do not want to relinquish, they need large spaces in which to circulate. As their numbers grow, new settlements have been created to accommodate newly formed communities and family groups. This has created some competition for the best land within the areas designated as reservations, which in turn has led some tribes to petition the government to expand the borders of their reservations and cede more land.

Such a demand only enrages the groups most interested in stepping up development of the Amazon. It ends up pitting the Indians against the ranchers, soy growers, and other commercial interests who want to develop parts of the Amazon that are fertile and rich in resources. Many Brazilians with no personal stake in the dispute seem inclined to agree with developers. About 10 percent of Brazil’s territory has now been designated as reservations for indigenous peoples, who even with their increased numbers still constitute less than 1 percent of the population.”

“The National Indian Foundation, the government agency charged with dealing with indigenous peoples and known by the Portuguese acronym FUNAI, used to have a corps of agents, known as sertanistas and celebrated for their bravery, who specialized in first contacts with such tribal peoples. Going back more than a century, their creed has always been “die if necessary, but never kill.” But they are aware that the remaining tribal groups are reluctant to engage the outside world, and so the age of the sertanista now appears to be ending. The most famous of these intrepid adventurers, Sydney Possuelo, has said publicly that he regrets the damage that has been inflicted on many of the tribes he contacted and has retired from field work.”

“In any given year, at least twenty-five thousand workers are forced to work in ‘such industries’ as slaves, and government-led raids have in recent years have freed more than a thousand slaves during each dry season.

Slavery in the Amazon does not follow the classic model in which people are directly bought and sold. Instead, peasants from poor states of the northeast sign labor contracts and are transported to work sites deep in the jungle, often hundreds of miles from roads, settlements, or telephones. Once there, they find that they will not receive the wages they have been promised and in addition will be charged exorbitant prices for food, lodging, and the tools and equipment they need to do their work. Since these items can be bought only at an on-site company-owned store, the workers quickly fall into arrears and are prohibited, often at gunpoint, from leaving until they repay their debts, which, of course, grow larger the longer they remain.”

Politics

“Lula, in contrast, is what Brazilians call povdo, of the people. Born in October 1945 into a peasant family in the parched, poverty-stricken northeastern state of Pernambuco, as a child he migrated fifteen hundred miles on the back of a truck to São Paulo, where he ended up selling oranges on the street and working as a lathe operator in factories. He dropped out after the fifth grade, and in public even today he often butchers the Portuguese language so badly that there are websites devoted to his gaffes.”

“Instead of a winner-take-all system, like that of the United States, Brazil allots representation in its legislative bodies on a percentage basis corresponding to the overall vote. In congressional elections, there are thus no districts: Parties draw up statewide slates, and candidates from the same party jockey to be placed as high as possible on their party’s list to improve their chances of winning a seat. What this means is very little competition between parties during campaigns and a great deal of conflict within parties, with an obvious edge going to those candidates who have access to the most money. This leads not just to a lack of loyalty but also to parties that are chronically weak and undisciplined.

One consequence is that politicians often hop from one party to another, looking for the best deal for themselves and their followers. It is not uncommon for a legislator to be elected as the candidate of one party, shift to another once he arrives in Congress, and conclude his term as the member of a third. In the most notorious case, often cited as an example of why Brazil urgently needs political reform, one congressional deputy changed parties eight times during his legislative career, including three separate but brief stays in the same party.

Opportunities to play the system abound because Brazil has more than 20 different political parties.”

“Since the return of democracy a quarter century ago, no president has ever enjoyed the luxury of having his or her party hold an absolute majority in Congress, except for José Sarney during the convention that wrote the 1988 constitution.

As a result, getting any legislation passed requires constant negotiations to achieve the necessity majority, with shifting, unstable alliances whose composition changes from one bill to the next.”

“This situation lends itself to widespread corruption, which unfortunately has become one of the hallmarks of the Brazilian political system, deforming the legislative process. It’s one thing for a president — or his aides and the leaders of his party’s congressional delegation — to support the pet project of a legislator from another party in return for his vote on a bill the president wants passed. That kind of horse-trading and pork-barrel politics occurs in every democracy. But in modern-day Brazil, efforts to woo legislators often go far beyond that. They also embrace practices such as guaranteeing a cushy no-show job to a close family member or mistress of a legislator, the de facto auctioning off of ministries and regulatory agencies that supervise money-making activities such as communications and transportation, and even the outright buying of votes.

Indications abound that these methods have been used in every administration since the end of the military dictatorship. But the most notorious and public example is the so-called mensalão (“big monthly payoff”) scandal, which came to light toward the end of Lula’s first term and may have indirectly influenced the presidential succession in 2010 by forcing the resignation of some of the president’s closest advisers, who were seen as possible successors. In public testimony in 2005, the leader of a small party allied with the president said Workers Party operatives had offered some members of Congress up to $400,000 each to join allied parties and then paid monthly stipends of $12,500 to those who switched. A formal inquiry was ordered, and it named nearly a score of legislators as having been involved in the scheme.”

“LIKE JOSÉ SERRA, Dilma Rousseff is an economist and the child of an immigrant father. Petar Rousseff came to Brazil in the 1930s from Bulgaria, where relatives say he left behind a struggling textile business, debts, and a pregnant wife. He settled in Minas Gerais and became a prosperous businessman.”

“Encouraged by her parents, Dilma also became (and remains) a voracious reader, which led to her developing a strong sense of indignation at the social injustices she saw around her. By the time she finished high school, shortly after the military coup of 1964, she had already been radicalized and plunged deeply into student politics. From there, it was only a short step to involvement in the clandestine Marxist-Leninist movement dedicated to overthrowing the dictatorship, and before she turned 21, Dilma had already joined an outlawed guerrilla group, the National Liberation Command.

A year later, after police and intelligence agents tracked down and arrested members of her organization who had carried out a bank robbery to raise funds for their cause, Dilma was forced to drop her university studies, go underground, and adopt a disguise and a new name. Her organization merged shortly afterward with another called the Revolutionary Armed Vanguard, which moved her from one safe house to another in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo while she helped obtain and hide arms and money, gave classes in Marxist theory, and helped oversee the organization’s finances.”

“Whatever her role in the guerrilla underground, Dilma was in fact captured in São Paulo in mid-January 1970. In jail she was severely tortured. In judicial complaints she later filed, she complained of being beaten, punched, subjected to electric shock, and tied for hours to poles that were suspended horizontally. Convicted of some charges and absolved of others, she was freed at the end of 1972.”

“Dilma was an obscure figure when she arrived in Brasilia in 2003, and she emerged as Lula’s successor, handpicked rather than through primaries, almost by default thanks in no small part to her distance from the cavalcade of corruption scandals that had tarnished Lula’s rule.”

“To fill the vacuum left by the fall of José Dirceu, who had functioned as a sort of prime minister, attending to all the routine details of daily governance that Lula found boring or disagreeable, the president turned to Dilma. By mid-2005 she had quickly proved herself to be one of the most capable and disciplined members of Lula’s cabinet. Since those qualities were sorely lacking in the presidential palace, she was the logical choice to become Lula’s new chief of staff. As she solved one administrative problem after another, Lula’s admiration for her grew, and by 2008, despite the ambitions of a handful of governors and members of Congress, there was little doubt that she had become his heir apparent.

As Lula’s go-to person and troubleshooter, Dilma met with him almost daily and often traveled with him abroad and within Brazil. Although separated in age by only two years, “they have a father-daughter relationship, Lula’s press secretary said in 2009. That is not to say there was no grumbling within the Workers Party, and not just because Dilma’s rapid rise trampled the aspirations of others. For all her vaunted ‘administrative experience and capacity,’ Dilma had never run for public office until Lula anointed her.

“In 2008, Dilma had plastic surgery, which softened her appearance and made her seem less dour.”

“Brazil’s charter permits a former president to run for a third term, so long as at least one term has elapsed since he left office.”

“As things now stand, neither candidates nor political parties declare all of the donations they receive, a state of affairs that encourages clandestine contributions and widespread abuses and corruption. All the major parties are believed to operate secret slush funds, known in Brazilian political slang as Box Two, to supplement amounts that candidates publicly acknowledge spending on their campaigns. Much of this money is the result of under-the-table donations from companies that want either government contracts, such as construction firms, or legislation that favors their interests. The money, often given in cash, finds it way to overseas bank accounts and then is recycled back to Brazil, providing the bulk of the financing for campaign expenses and political advertising.”