The Road To Brazil

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[roadtobrazil]

The Challenge of Filming Football

Today's Veja article on the imminent release of Heleno examines the difficulty director Jose Henrique Fonseca had shooting the football scenes in a realistic manner (in pt). I have only seen a few football-focused films, since I'm an American and the films don't usually sell here. One I have seen, many times, is Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine's Victory. Which, if you've seen it you will know, has hilariously awful game scenes. 

Veja did not miss this little fact either, and subsequently takes a shot Sly:

[A]ttempts to shoot the best football so far relied on a formula simple and effective: putting actors in the midst of professional athletes, making the pace and details of the plays more natural and film them within the field, not as far [away] as a TV broadcast. These are the cases of The Miracle of Bern (2003) and Goal! The Impossible Dream (2005). The technique, however, is no guarantee of success -Escape to Victory (1982) was directed by John Huston and had none other than Pele in the cast. But the quality of the scenes of the game could not resist the participation of Sylvester Stallone, who appears as a goalkeeper ...

The article then goes on to list it's choices as 9 realistic depictions of the sports on screen (which then inexplicably shows Victory first).

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On Distant Fandom

On April 2, 2011, India won its second Cricket World Cup. But unlike most other cricket fans, I didn’t watch the final in its entirety. For a ninety-minute stretch, I was watching Manchester United produce a typically wondrous comeback against West Ham United. It was a significant win without which any joy at India’s triumph would have been unmistakably sullied. Even though I was born and raised in India my attachment to a soccer club — one that I’ve never seen play in the flesh — was stronger. When, a few weeks later, on May 14, Manchester United clinched its 19th league title and surpassed Liverpool’s long-held record, I felt transcendent joy.

My love for Manchester United is intangible, unearthly, and distant, yet also somehow intimate. Fandom is, no doubt, an innately groundless phenomenon, but to experience adoration for a soccer club that is more than 5,000 miles away appears particularly irrational. Yet it is a phenomenon that hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S., India, and around the world, are experiencing. Why would someone in New York City, or Sydney, be so inextricably linked to a club in Europe, a team to which he or she has no geographical or physical connection? 

Read More

[roadtobrazil]

Brazilian Consumers Come to US

Perhaps all you really need to know:

In fact, Brazilians are spending so much that flights with Brazil's top airline TAM originating in the U.S. have had to carry more fuel to accommodate the dramatically overweight baggage.

The whole thing here.

[roadtobrazil]

An Article on Botafogo's Heleno de Freitas

I wrote this for Sounds and Colours, a South America music and culture site. If you like my Tumblr, perhaps you'll like some longer form writing.

Heleno hits theaters in Brazil this month, telling the story of outsized 1940s Botafogo striker Heleno de Freitas. The film, starring Rodrigo Santoro, is based on Marcos Eduardo Neves’ book Nunca Houve um Homem Como Heleno. The subject and his tragic tale set a high bar for the film, for as his biographer has noted, there is not, nor has there ever been, quite a man like Heleno. Read More ...

[roadtobrazil]

Twitter Play-by-Play of Brazil's 2-1 Victory Over Bosnia-Herzegovina

[roadtobrazil]

Rio's Infrastructure Woes

Andrew Downie's Time piece on Rio's recent infrastructure issues on the run-up to the Copa and Olympics briefly highlights part of the cause for the city's dilapidation in the first place.

The decay in Rio's infrastructure is partly attributable to Rio's losing its status as Brazil's capital in 1960 — Brasília has been the nation's capital since then — and with the demotion came a loss of jobs, investment and attention. For decades the city was on the skids. As investment dried up, huge slums known as favelas sprouted, crime worsened, and a general malaise set in that was halted only with the successful Olympic bid in October 2009. As the recent tragedies show, that lack of investment eventually takes its toll. As with a once gorgeous Copacabana beauty queen who has spent too long in the sun, the wrinkles are showing.

This is intuitive and most likely quite true, but it stuck out to me because it cannot possibly be the whole story.

I live in Washington DC, the capital of the US. And during pretty much the exact same period that Rio's infrastructure began to decline, so did DCs. Throughout the 70s, 80s and 90s, the city devolved into a cesspool of corruption, crime, and malaise. The only development that occurred took place in the chic Northwest sections city-burbs, while anything east of Rock Creek Park was left to rot. When I moved here at the end of 2000 for undergrad the city was just beginning to climb out of this hole. Eleven years later it is a completely different city, and I live in a neighborhood well east of the park (though still Northwest) that belonged to a mysterious blog of just-don't-go-there when I first arrived.

So, if DC was the capital and still underwent such decline, what else other than Brazil's turn toward Brasilia accounts for Rio's similar neglect?

[roadtobrazil]

I don't know what this Globo ad is selling, but I'm buying. (via)

[roadtobrazil]

In 2008 Brazil enacted a policy mandating Philosophy be taught to each high school student. Teaching Philosophy had previously been banned, from 1964 to 1985, by the military dictatorship. The 2008 law was designed to fight back against it's previous repression, and as such, was largely a political move designed to create an engaged citizenry excited to participate in the democratic process.

Canadian Philosopher Carlos Fraenkle checks in on the program' progress:

One UFBA student pointed out, though, “Nobody really thinks that high school students can get through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. This helps to explain the ubiquitous use of didactic manuals.” The idea seems to be that if you can’t read Kant, the next-best choice is to read a Kant digest by a recognized authority. After a précis of the history of Western philosophy, these manuals usually summarize what the author takes to be the principal areas of philosophy. In the most popular manual I saw, each chapter is followed by questions for the students. The teacher’s version includes an appendix with the correct answers. In the worst case this will lead to rote learning—one teacher goes so far as to give students multiple-choice assessments which include the question whether Sartre’s nationality is German, Swedish, French, or Russian. But that approach fits the general teaching culture in Brazil. Another UFBA student explained, “Since the goal is to get students into university, teachers must put everything into their heads on which they will be tested in the vestibular, the entrance exam.”

There are plenty of real-life experiences, though, that could be addressed in a philosophy class. Consider the myth of racial equality in Brazil, the idea that Brazil is a “racial democracy.” Following the Socratic call to self-knowledge, João Belmiro asks his students to sketch their biography and family background. “They always know much more about the white part of their family than about the black part,” he observed. One white colleague told me that his black wife doesn’t like to go with him to the beach. “People think she’s a prostitute going out with a gringo.” Another white colleague can’t bring his black wife to his parents’ house. “They’re poor and uneducated; she has a master’s in history and directs an archive of rare manuscripts from the colonial period.” In a country where races are so thoroughly mixed, what does it mean that skin color remains important?

Or consider the gap between rich and poor in Brazil, one of the world’s widest. Many here don’t perceive it as unjust. In an elite private school in Salvador, philosophy teacher Luis Rusmando told me, “You’ve come to the most expensive and bourgeois school in town.” An Argentinian Marxist who once wanted to be a guerrilla combatant (two relatives, he told me, were killed by Argentina’s military dictatorship) and joined the fight for agricultural land redistribution when he first got to Brazil, he doesn’t quite know how he ended up at this school. Although about 80 percent of Salvador’s population are Afro-descendants, the only black people I saw in Rusmando’s school are cleaners and kitchen personnel. “Most of my students think that inequality is a law of nature,” he explained. That’s why they find nothing wrong with the social hierarchy that Plato proposes in The Republic. “Only when I tell them that wisdom, not money, rules, according to Plato, they’re confused.” Rusmando is also in charge of the students’ voluntary community service program. Every few months he drives out to a farm owned by one student’s family. “It’s amazing how naturally a sixteen-year-old takes charge of the twenty servants who work there,” he told me. The students bring donations to a local daycare and spend a few hours with the poor kids. “For most of them it’s an opportunity to party.” But he also notices the students who haven’t yet lost the ability to be surprised, and to question their narrow world of privilege. “Perhaps that’s why I paradoxically feel close to my students,” he said.

[roadtobrazil]

Queijo do Serro from Minas Gerais

Quiejo do Serro is a unique fresh cheese from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais - similar to the queso fresco popular throughout Latin America ... but better! "Flavors of Brazil," an amazing blog on the gastronomy of the country (and recipes) has a post on the products unusual "protected status" and what that means:

Currently there are 80 small chese producers scattered among 11 municipalities whose cheeses meet the geographical and technical standards required by the IG program. Only the cheeses made by these 80 producers are now entitled to call their cheese Queijo do Serro. (Queijo is the Portuguese word for cheese). According to the leader of the Seroo region cheese producers' association, the granting of IG status is important for his group because it means that the name is protected nationally and that cheese manufacturers from other states will not be entitled to use the name Queijo do Serro for their products. If a cheese bears that name, it will mean that it was produced in the Serro region and nowhere else.

This is all very good news for cheese producers, but it does mean that for many Brazilians they will not have access to Queijo do Serro at all. Interstate shipping of raw-milk cheeses is currently prohibited in Brazil.

[roadtobrazil]

Pele vs Maradona; Authenticity and the Loss of Identity

In the most recent edition of the amazing football magazine The Blizzard, Brazil-based writer Tim Vickery conducts a wonderful set of interviews with Brazil legends Mario Zagallo and Tostao on the topic of the national team and their 1970 World Cup victory in Mexico.

At one point, the conversation with Tostao turns to Pele's public image. Tostao draws a contrast with another football immortal, Argentina's 1986 hero Diego Maradona:

Vickery: One of the curious things about Brazilian football is the fact that many players - like you, like Pele - play using nicknames. This must have some use in separating the public from the private. In your case, for example, when you wanted to withdraw from the limelight you could stop being Tostao, and instead be Dr Eduardo Goncalves de Adrade. How do you think Pele has administered the separation of Edson Arantes do Nascimento and Pele?

Tostao: He says that Edson is separate from Pele, but I don't see it. The only one that exists is the public Pele. He doesn't suffer the anguish of living the conflict between the man and the myth. It's one of the reasons he can adapt so well to the world of conferences and so on. The great idols often lead a life of big conflicts, they suffer from a loss of identity, and Pele - this is my construction - doesn't have this loss of identity. He adapted from the age of 15 to becoming a public figure. He passes the impression of never going through depression, anxiety, anguish, sadness as a consequence of loss of identity. He's happy, well adapted. He's always smiling and upbeat. You never see him bad tempered. He loves being Pele.

I think this loss of identity was one of the reasons for Diego Maradona's drug problem. Deep down his problem was depression, of being unable to be Maradona. It opened thousands of doors, but it was a burden for him. Maradona is much more emotional than Pele. Pele is more rational, everything is measured, planned. When he makes a statement it's usually designed to have an effect. Maradona creates confusion because he doesn't measure anything. When Pele is 80 he'll be worried about his image. Maradona doesn't care about that. He wants to be himself. If he wants to take his shirt off, it comes off. He's more human and true to himself in this aspect. Pele is more calculating. Not in the Machiavellian sense - he's a good person, but he's very rational about everything.

The Blizzard is not available online, but a digital edition can be fetched for the downright scandalous deal of $5 on their website. I highly recommend a subscription.

[roadtobrazil]

Presiding Over a Fragmented Party System

Brazil's democratic model is a clear contrast to America's in one obvious aspect: Brazil's lacks the two-party bicameral system, and is instead composed of a number of fragmented and independent parties. These parties are constantly changing, as members move to and from them based on political identity, political motive, or idle whim. As such, it takes coalition agreements and a strong presidency for the government to function with any effectiveness.

On this unique arrangement, Carlos Pereira of the Getulio Vargas Foundation notes three particular elements that are necessary for this relationship to work:

First, the president needs to consolidate the legislative powers delegated to him by the Congress. Here, though, a distinction is necessary: where presidents consolidate power unilaterally, there is no legitimate delegation of constitutional powers, but the usurpation of civil rights and the abuse of power (think Venezuela). In Brazil, however, the majority of legislators understand that a weak president would be unable to govern in a highly fragmented political environment. The solution was to delegate a series of powers to allow the president to function as a kind of coordinator of the legislative game.

Second, the system needs political currency - ministerial appointments, budget line items, bureaucratic jobs and political concessions - that presidents can "spend" to negotiate support for building a governing coalition and forwarding the executive agenda in the legislature. In a fragmented institutional environment, party loyalty, ideology, and even the power to set the political agenda are not enough to guarantee the support of lawmakers. Such political currencies are crucial to the smooth functioning of ruling coalitions which often are ideologically heterogeneous and involve many parties.

The third element is a network of institutions to deliver independent checks and balances - institutions such as the judiciary, the Ministério Público (public prosecutors), the audit courts, the federal police, the media - capable of curbing excesses and holding the executive branch accountable. In Brazil, therefore, a powerful executive doesn't get a blank check. Rather in order for a strong president to carry out his public mandate to coordinate policy in a fragmented and competitive democracy, independent and robust institutions must be in place to keep the executive in line and publicly accountable. Political competition and the diversity of political parties also serve to restrain presidential action. This is why reducing the number of parties in the political arena would actually be counter-productive, potentially enhancing executive dominance.

[roadtobrazil]

File Sharing in Brazil

Apparently accessing "illegal" video is a growing trend in Brazil. FT's Beyond Brics blog reports that the country made up 8.4% of the traffic to the recently shuttered MegaUpload.com (second only to France). 

From the Brazilian end, Megaupload is even bigger. Sandvine, an internet analysis site, says the file sharing site accounted for an extraordinary 11.39 per cent of all internet traffic in Brazil before its abrupt end.

Part of a broader problem of copyright infringement? Brazil has been criticised for years for failing to protect intellectual property. In spite of some recent crackdowns, pirated CDs and DVDs are readily available at street markets around the country. File sharing sites – and there are plenty of others apart from Megaupload – have spread like forest fires.

It may also reflect the fact that Brazil faces its own version of SOPA, the US anti-piracy bill delayed last week by vigorous internet-based lobbying. Brazil’s bill has been before Congress since 2003 but the debate over SOPA and the related bill PIPA has brought it back under public attention.

[roadtobrazil]

Rivaldo Moves to Angola

In 1999 Brazilian footballer Rivaldo won FIFA's Player of the Year, the Ballon d'Or, and the European Player of the Year award while playing for Barcelona. Last year, he played 37 games back home, for Sao Paulo. This weekend, at 40 years old, Rivaldo signed a one-year contract with Kanuscorp, an Angola-based club. Why?

"God has a plan for me in Angola," Rivaldo tweeted. "Five months ago I invested in a piece of land here, without imagining that I would ever play here. My spiritual guide Victor [Adewole] and I are opening a church here. My time belongs to God now... my life in Angola is about more than soccer. God is here." He also added a photograph of the land where he plans to erect his church.

This Angolan saga is the latest twist in a career of an immensely gifted player who—despite his achievements: winning league titles on three different continents, plus the 2003 Champions League with A.C. Milan and the 2002 World Cup with Brazil—never quite captured the imagination his talents warranted. Part of it may have been timing. He was overshadowed by his fellow Brazilians Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, both of whom were flashier stars with outsized personalities, unlike Rivaldo, who tended to be more understated.

Yet at his best, Rivaldo packed power and speed in a 6-foot-1 frame and combined those traits with creativity and sublime skill. There is little question that he was the best player on the planet at the turn of the millennium, alongside France's Zinedine Zidane. Injuries slowed him down in 2002, his final year at Barcelona, and in the following season at Milan. Suddenly, he was out of the mainstream. He spent four years in Greece—first at Olympiacos, then at AEK Athens—and slowly faded from view before moving to Uzbekistan and, later, back to Brazil.

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The Economist weigh's in on Brazil's deindustrialization strategy and the increasing role played by China as a trading partner (pay special attention to the chart and Brazil's unhealthy reliance on raw materials):

With extraordinary speed, China has become Brazil’s most important economic partner: total trade between the two countries has risen 17-fold since 2002. But frictions are increasing almost as fast. Although Brazil enjoys a big overall trade surplus with China, most of its exports are of commodities (mainly iron ore, soya beans and crude oil). It has a big deficit in manufactures (see chart).

The reasons are not hard to spot. In recent years Brazil’s manufacturers have been hobbled by a strong currency, high interest rates, high taxes, poor infrastructure and a poorly educated workforce. “Brazil faces a big competitive challenge, and the relationship with China only dramatises that,” says Sérgio Amaral, a former industry minister who chairs the Brazil-China Business Council.

The government’s response is a mix of short-term protectionist measures combined with modest steps towards more constructive longer-term policy changes. The tax rise on cars was announced last September, as part of a new industrial policy. The aim was to bully carmakers without plants in Brazil to hurry up and build them. This seems to be working: JAC Motors, BMW, and Jaguar Land Rover, a unit of India’s Tata Motors, have all announced plans to build factories in Brazil since the import tax was unveiled.

[roadtobrazil]

Brazil's Import Substitution Industrialization Strategy

Columbia University's Marco Troyjo has an excellent piece of analysis on Brazil's import substitution industrialization strategy, and what that could mean for the country's economy going further. It is by no means comprehensive, but give a solid, brief look at what makes Brazil tick.

Present day ISI 2.0 [ed: Import Substitution Industrialization Version Two] has two faces. It continues to apply high import taxes and other barriers to protect national groups and foster Brazil’s chosen industrial priorities (semiconductors, software, electronics, automobiles and others). As the country’s currency is clearly overvalued, its trade deficit in manufactured goods would be even larger if it were not for tariff shields – which contribute to the outrageous prices paid by Brazilian consumers for many foreign goods.

Much like its 1950s prototype, ISI 2.0 is clearly “nationalistic”. It nonetheless updates the concept of “economic nationalism”. Rather than merely sheltering Brazilian entrepreneurs, ISI 2.0 calls for the “Brazilianisation” of companies wishing to harness the potential of Brazil’s domestic market. An entire set of incentives is put to the service of those who decide to create jobs in Brazil. Its most powerful tool is the robust policy of government procurement which has found expression in the Lula-Dilma administrations (of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president from 2003 to 2010, and Dilma Rousseff, president since January 2011).

What this means is that the country is vulnerable; heavily dependent on the growth of its oil industry and reliant on foreign direct investment. If one of those should go off-track - or more likely, if one, then the other - the economy loses its anchor and goes into a tailspin.

Brazilian economist Luis Carlos Bresser-Pereira, in commentary that originally appeared in Folha de Sao Paulo, points out the risk involved in this strategy. While import substitution industrialization backed by the oil industry led to very fast GDP growth, it also led to the risk of inflation and an overvalued Real. To combat inflation, the government continually increasing the minimum wage, which led to real wage increases across the board, lifting millions into the middle-class, of course, but also limiting any national surplus from the increase in commodity prices.

In the medium term, a growth policy oriented to the domestic market is as unfeasible as the alternative of an export-oriented economy.  The domestic market and exports need to grow concurrently.  A policy that combines exchange rate appreciation with nominal wage increases is suicidal in the medium term, because industrial corporations less efficient than ours will soon occupy our domestic market.  This is what is happening today.

Brazil will have grown less than 3% [in 2011*], and it is unlikely that it will have a better performance next year.  Investors are not being stimulated to invest, either by the domestic or by the foreign market.  The foreign market is plummeting, pulled down by Europe, and followed by China and India, which have already reduced their growth rates.  In this adverse international setting, and without internal room for the government's preferred economic policy, it is most probable that the Brazilian economy will continue to show poor growth.  And there is always the risk of a significant drop in commodity prices, which will have a catastrophic effect on the economy.

It's worth noting,however, that not all are as pessimistic.

*Actually it's expected to be closer to 3.5%

[roadtobrazil]

A Energia de Todas as Torcidas. Via Deep Brazil

[roadtobrazil]

A Town Without Billboards

In 2006 Sao Paulo banned billboards in an attempt to curb pollution. How did it work out:

Five years later, have all the businesses in São Paulo gone under? Hardly. In fact, most citizens and some advertising entities report being quite pleased with the now billboard-less city. A survey this year found that a 70 percent of residents say the Clean City Law has been "beneficial." "São Paulo’s a very vertical city," Vinicius Galvao, a journalist, said in an interview with NPR. "That makes it very frenetic. You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because they were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria."

Where businesses are concerned, it turns out some advertisers are actually thankful for the ban, as it's forced them to reevaluate and improve. "Companies had to find their own ways to promote products and brands on the streets," Lalai Luna, co-founder of ad agency Remix,told the Financial Times last year. "São Paulo started having a lot more guerilla marketing [unconventional strategies, such as public stunts and viral campaigns] and it gave a lot of power to online and social media campaigns as a new way to interact with people."

In two trips to Sao Paulo I've never even noticed the lack of billboards. Very cool