Brasil Observer #30

B R A S I L O B S E R V E R LONDON EDITION

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ISSN 2055-4826

AUGUST/2015

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

SUMMARY 4 5 6 8 10 12 14 16 20 23 26 28 30

EDITORIAL What’s the problem with Brazil?

LONDON EDITION

IN FOCUS Ambassadors defend the BRICS in joint article Is a montlhy publication of ANAGU UK UM LIMITED funded by

GUEST COLUMNIST S. Costa, B. Fritz and M. Sproll on inequality in Brazil GUEST COLUMNIST Anthony Pereira on the consequences of Operation Car Wash

ANA TOLEDO Operational Director ana@brasilobserver.co.uk

PROFILE The look of Maria Luiza Abbott on Brazil’s image abroad

GUILHERME REIS Editorial Director guilherme@brasilobserver.co.uk

GLOBAL BRAZIL How the government of Dilma Rousseff fell into the austerity trap BR-UK CONNECTION Rio 2016: A year of the Games, the goals of Brazil and Great Britain

ROBERTA SCHWAMBACH Financial Director roberta@brasilobserver.co.uk

BRASILIANCE An investigation into the formation of the Brazilian Military Police

ENGLISH EDITOR Shaun Cumming shaun@investwrite.co.uk

CONECTANDO The history of resistance of women affected by dams

LAYOUT AND GRAPHIC DESIGN Jean Peixe peixe@brasilobserver.co.uk

GUIDE Brazilian movie The Second Mother debuts in the UK CULTURAL TIPS Marcelo D2 comes to London for presentation in Brixton Latin American Theatre Festival is back for a new edition Brazilian Bilingual Book Club: Canaan, by Graça Aranha

CONTRIBUTORS Ana Beatriz Freccia Rosa, Aquiles Rique Reis, Franko Figueiredo, Gabriela Lobianco, Nadia Kerecuk, Ricardo Somera, Wagner de Alcântara Aragão

COLUMNISTS Franko Figueiredo on ‘Nurturing a new generation’ Aquiles Reis on ‘Old musical friends’ Ricardo Somera on ‘New voices from Brazil’

PRINTER St Clements press (1988 ) Ltd, Stratford, London mohammed.faqir@stclementspress.com 10.000 copies

TRAVEL Florianopolis, the paradise in the south of Brazil COVER ART

Onesto

alexhornest.com Onesto (Alex Hornest) is a sculptor, painter and multimedia artist.

Known for his ironic characters, his work attempts to “discuss the relationship between cities and their inhabitants”, observing common moments of everyday life and drawing those moments wherever he is. His works are sold and collected by galleries such as Jonathan Levine Gallery in New York, Afro Brazil Museum and the MAC in São Paulo. One of the most consistent performers of Brazilian street art, he participated in London at the LATA Street Culture Festival.

DISTRIBUTION Emblem Group Ltd. TO ADVERTISE comercial@brasilobserver.co.uk 020 3015 5043 TO SUBSCRIBE contato@brasiloberver.co.uk TO SUGGEST AN ARTICLE AND CONTRIBUTE editor@brasilobserver.co.uk ONLINE brasilobserver.co.uk issuu.com/brasilobserver facebook.com/brasilobserver twitter.com/brasilobserver

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015 E D I T O R I A L

WHAT’S THE PROBLEM WITH BRAZIL?

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An unsuspecting foreign observer who wishes to understand what is happening in Brazil today through traditional Brazilian media is very likely to go into a tailspin. According to the dominant narrative, the country is going through a triple crisis: economic, political and moral.

Every day, to the flavour of carefully selected information, one of these three options is highlighted in a roulette pointed at nothing less than the future of the country.

So it is worth understanding the reasons of the breakdown. In the economic sphere, a new study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) is very enlightening. It concludes what government supporters and opponents should minimally agree: the economic slowdown in Brazil, more than a result of external factors, although they have some influence, is the result of policy choices made by the government (read pages 12 and 13). Choices that threaten the achievements of recent years in reducing poverty, increasing income and a certain reduction of inequality (read pages 6 and 7).

The paper, “Aggregate Demand and the Slowdown of Brazilian Economic Growth from 2011-2014,” by CEPR Senior Research Associate Franklin Serrano and economist Ricardo Summa, looks in detail at the sharp slowdown in the Brazilian economy for the years 2011-2014, in which economic growth averaged only 2.1 percent annually, as compared with 4.4 percent in the 2004-2010 period. The authors argue that the slowdown overwhelmingly results from a sharp decline in domestic demand led by government policy, rather than from a fall in exports or from any change in external conditions.

The Brazilian economy had room to expand after 2010, but the government chose to reduce aggregate demand through changes in monetary, fiscal and macro-prudential policies.

Namely: 1) The Central Bank started one after February 2010 interest increase cycle that lasted until August 2011, raising the Selic rate from 7.5% to 13.5%. Rising interest rates and macro-prudential measures have reduced credit growth, which helped end the boom in consumption; 2) In late 2010 the government promoted through a sharp reduction in public spending growth, a strong fiscal adjustment to increase the primary surplus and reach the target of 3.1% of GDP in 2011; 3) In 2011 public investment from both the federal government and public enterprises, fell dramatically, decreasing 17.9% and 7.8% in real terms, respectively.

Government’s contractionary policies led to a sharp decline in private investment, so the total investment (public and private) fell dramatically. In the words of Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of CEPR: “It is clear that efforts to convince the private sector to lead economic growth, while cutting public investment and taking other measures that reduced aggregate demand, have not worked in Brazil.”

But there is another key issue that is virtually non-existent in analysis produced by traditional media: the debt system. Fiscal adjustment underway in the country aims to ensure a primary surplus able to pay the interest on public debt.

Such debt is common tool used by governments to fund investments or increase resources. For this, the National Treasury issues government bonds and the Central Bank sells at auction.

It turns out that the basic interest rate, the Selic, is used, among other things, to compensate investments made in such bonds. From December 2014 to June 2015, this rate rose from 11.75% to 13.75% per annum. On a public debt of 2.451 trillion reais, this increase led to an extra payment of 49 billion reais.

How to understand, then, that the federal government make a fiscal adjustment that cuts the budget by almost 80 billion reais and at the same time, increases government spending by increasing the Selic?

The money used to pay debt service is the same missing to invest in the country. And this is essentially a political choice. Was the government committed to overcoming this obstacle, would condition the necessary fiscal adjustment to an audit of public debt, provided in the Constitution, to expose possible fraud in bonds that are held by banks and large companies, as well as the practice of interest on interest which is illegal. Any mention of this possibility, however, is labelled as “default” by agents of the financial market and the dominant narrative.

SELECTIVE ANGER In the wake of the economic recession, the political and moral crises. When President Dilma Rousseff, newly re-elected for the fourth term of the Workers Party in the federal government, chose to do what she fought during the campaign, she lost her political capital. The reprove of her government, of course, is not only by those who did not vote for her. Dissatisfaction is widespread and the reasons, different.

In Congress, a hostile Brazilian Democratic Movement Party went on to command the agenda and to hinder the adoption of measures of fiscal adjustment, in addition to approving others that raise public spending, with the support of the opposition – which advocated the adjustment before the election, but went on to play the weakening of Rousseff government, without much worry about the fate of the country. After all, if the government is not consistent, how to expect the opposition to be consistent? If even Worker Party politicians voted against Rousseff adjustment, why the opposition must be united?

Ironies aside, any project of Brazil, if we had one, is now under the shadow of the private interests of power owners. And as icing on the cake, the moral crisis represented by the corruption scandal of the moment under investigation by Operation Lava Jato (read on page 8). Maximum proof that the Workers Party, once in power, behaved like the others, the excesses in Petrobras show not only an obscure project of Workers Party power, as many want to believe, but the modus operandi of political and economic oligarchy in Brazil. And here comes the obvious selective indignation that see the demon only where it is convenient to its eyes.

Those who believe in impeachment as a solution to the crisis are wrong. This newspaper is not shy to criticize the paths chosen by the government, but hopes that for the sake of democracy and institutional stability, Dilma Rousseff can complete her mandate.

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

IN FOCUS MARCELO CAMARGO/ AGÊNCIA BRASIL

UK AMBASSADORS:

BRICS NATIONS OFFER GENUINE ECONOMIC PARTNERSHIP

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The BRICS countries aim to enhance the global common space in pursuit of peace, security, stability, development and co-operation, “issues of common interest internationally”, wrote their ambassadors to the UK in an article published by the Daily Telegraph on 3 August.

The article “BRICS nations offer the world a taste of genuine economic partnership” has analysis on the group’s seventh summit, held in July in Ufa, Russia. The authors are Brazilian ambassador Roberto Jaguaribe, Chinese Ambassador Liu Xiaoming, Indian High Commissioner Ranjan Mathai, Russian Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko and South African High Commissioner Obed Mlaba.

Welcoming the Ufa summit as a “major milestone” for the group, the article highlights “two major economic projects” of BRICS agreed at the previous summit in Fortaleza, Brazil. They are the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserves Arrangement, which came to fruition after a year of discussions between governments.

“Among other things,” says the article, “the new bank will fund infrastructure in the developing world, as well as sustainable development projects.” For the ambassadors, the cooperation that has been practiced by

BRICS “reflected an objective need for co-ordination between new emerging centres in a fast-changing world.”

Pointing G20 as the “premier forum of international financial and economic co-operation,” the article reveals concern of BRICS nations over the “lack of action on further reform of the Bretton-Woods institutions, despite decisions made five years ago to adapt them.”

“Given the experience of Europe, Africa, Latin America and other regions, we have been steadily enhancing our co-operation,” the article says. “These include finance, economy and innovation, science and technology, fiscal and social policies, statistics, agriculture, health, emergencies management, education and culture,” it adds.

Regarding speculation that the BRICS wants to create mechanisms that counter the financial institutions created by the developed countries such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the article points the “forum is not aimed against any parties, but rather stands for win-win co-operation through joint action.”

It continues: “Our co-operation is based on the principles of the United Nations, including sovereign equality. No one dictates to anyone or imposes their will, and decision-making

is based on consensus. That is why we truly believe that our partnership, representing 43% of the world population and almost 30% of global GDP, provides a sustainable model of international co-operation.”

The article also mentions the importance of addressing new security challenges such as terrorism, drug trafficking, new diseases and climate change. “They are transnational and can be effectively dealt with only through genuine international efforts at global and regional levels. While co -operating between ourselves, we are open to engagement with other partners on issues of mutual concern”.

Despite the optimism of the ambassadors, international observers estimate that in spite of the New Development Bank advances, the BRICS is going through a period of weakness.

Russia and Brazil may have recession this year. China is slowing down and the South African economy is expected to grow about 2%. The only one that still excites investors is India, with an expected growth of 8% in 2015.

Anyway, even in an unfavourable economic cycle, there is now less doubt about the strength of the group and the determination of the BRICS countries in building a multi-polar world that offers the emerging countries more affordable options for development.

SÃO PAULO TURNS LONDON FOR A DAY IN HONOUR OF BRAZILIAN COMPANIES On 11 August, the British Diplomatic Mission in Brazil recreated the British capital during the event “Brasileiras Globais”, or “Global Brazilians”. The celebration took place with the participation of Brazilian companies doing business in the UK, and 18 of them were honoured by the British Ambassador in Brazil, Alex Ellis. The honourees are companies that were internationalized or expanded their pre-existing business in the UK in 2014. They were: Grendene, BTG Pactual, Intelipark, Code Hub, Alcor, Santosocial, Bacco, Toys Talk, ISPM, Banco Votorantim, Bliive, Banco Bradesco, BR101 Sports, Up Trade, Marfrig, G4 Americas, DirijaJa! and Grupo Tristão.

OPEN CALL FOR CONFERENCE ON BRAZIL AND BRITAIN RELATIONS The Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London invites for contributions to the conference “Britain and Brazil: Political, Economic, Social, Cultural and Intellectual Relations, 1808 to the present”, to be held on 10 and 11 March 2016. It will be the second edition of the event, which had its debut in May 2014. Among the potential topics are: “Britain and the independence of Brazil”, “Britain and the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in Brazil”, “British communities in Brazil”, “Britain and the Brazilian navy” and “Brazilians in the UK”. The deadline for submission of papers is 15 September.

For more information visit the link http://goo.gl/YRenUm

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

GUEST COLUMNIST

DILMA 2.0: B

This article was originally published by LASA Forum, a publication of Latin American Studies Association. To check out the bibliographic references, access http://goo.gl/4RpjMh g

Brazil seems to have experienced a “moment of equality” (Therborn 2015) during the last decade.

Income inequality, as measured by the Gini index, was reduced from 0.60 to 0.53 between 2000 and 2012. There have also been changes on other dimensions, for example in terms of race and gender inequalities. On the one hand, Brazil is following the trend of almost all Latin American countries.

On the other hand, its inequality remains astronomically high in comparative perspective; the average Gini of the OECD world stands at 0.31 (World Bank data from 2012).

The jumping-off point of our analysis is the concept of “entangled inequalities.” This concept focuses on both the multidimensionality of inequalities, including socioeconomic, ecological, and power asymmetries, and on their historical and transnational character, that is, the interdependencies between domestic and exogenous and between past and present inequality structures (www.desigualdades.net; see Braig, Costa, and Göbel 2015). Against the background of this broad concept, we ask in this brief article: Which have been the driving forces of this moment of equality? Is it simply a parenthesis or a historical breakthrough in Brazil, a country once dubbed as “Belindia” for its coexistence of industrial diversification and historically rooted inequality since colonial and slavery times? How will the expected low economic growth in Dilma’s second term affect social inequalities?

Starting gradually from 2006, but especially during and in the aftermath of the so-called global financial crisis, Brazil gained an international reputation for combining an anticyclical fiscal policy, capital inflow controls to dampen the upward trend of the currency, and an expansion of the social safety net.

However, the main drivers of growth have not resulted in productivity gains nor in an increase in the technology content of products made in Brazil. Much to the contrary: consumption spurred the massive import of consumer goods – made cheap by the high level of the Brazilian real against the US dollar – and a boom in the domestic service sector. The trade balance dramatically reflects this process of deindustrialization, pushed by a domestic consumption boom and a massively overvalued exchange rate. Still, in 2006, Brazil not only enjoyed a net trade surplus, but about two-thirds of this surplus was composed of intermediate or final consumer goods. In 2013, the country had a net trade deficit of manufactured or semimanufactured goods of some 60 billion US dollars, mirrored by an export surplus almost exclusively concentrated on commodities (IEDI 2014). As historical experience shows and the early months of 2015 have demonstrated once again, commodity prices do not remain high forever.

Also at the level of domestic politics, Dilma’s nomination of the new finance minister, Joaquim Levy, as well as other economic policy makers known for their links with financial markets, have dimmed the perspectives for economic heterodoxy and renewed economic growth.

GLORY AND MISERY

LABOUR MARKET DYNAMICS

Redistributive policies and their effects in Brazil by the PT-led government during the last decade have been shaped by a complex interplay of international and domestic factors. At the international level, despite huge swings, commodity prices remained high most of the time, pushing an expansion of mining and export agriculture activities in the country. Global capital flows were mostly abundant, even if highly short-term and unstable. Both terms of trade and financial inflows pressed for an appreciation of the dollar exchange rate in real terms of around 40 percent between 2004 and 2012.

At the domestic level, within the so-called macroeconomic “tripod,” priority has been given since the first Lula administration to inflation control, pursuing a policy of high floating interest rates and primary fiscal surpluses. The favourable terms of trade for Brazilian commodities such as soya and iron ore strongly added to growth, despite rather austerity-oriented monetary and fiscal policies. Here, the revaluation of the currency gave a helping hand to keep domestic prices under control. This harsh policy came in combination with active industrial policies, such as a public investment program and generous public credit, combined with wide-ranging social policies.

Economic orthodoxy then gave way, at least for several years, to a more developmentalist approach, during which strong growth, trade surpluses, and low inflation allowed a relaxation of orthodox policies.

There is a broad consensus that the dynamic forces behind the recent decline of income inequality in Brazil since 2000 derive from favourable economic conditions with their positive effects for the labour market, improvement in average schooling as well as from a variety of social policies (UNDP 2013; Lustig, Pessino, and Scott 2013). Nonetheless, a closer look at current trends in labour and social policy reveals contradictory developments threatening the sustainability of recent redistribution effects.

At first sight, a real turnaround can be ascertained compared to the dramatic deterioration of the labour market in the 1990s. No less than 20 million new jobs have been created since 2003 (Ministério da Fazenda 2014) and it is worth pointing out that many of these are in the formal labour market. This implies significant social changes as the mainly young and recently formalized workforce thus benefits from labour law and social provisions. Attempts at further inclusion have been reinforced by measures of the Lula-Dilma governments targeting formalization through programs for small and microenterprises and for domestic workers, and via stronger enforcement of labour legislation by the Ministry of Work and Employment.

Still, there is a controversy about the quality, qualification, and sustainability of the new formalsector jobs. What kind of jobs have been created for which kind of workforce, and what are the underlying contradictory dynamics in the labour market?

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

FROM ECONOMIC GROWTH WITH DISTRIBUTION TO STAGNATION AND INCREASING INEQUALITIES?

By Sérgio Costa, Barbara Fritz, and Martina Sproll | Free University of Berlin

(See the debate in Sproll and Wehr 2014). Again, complex entanglements with transnational processes have to be taken into account. First of all, in the wake of a flexible and financialized capitalist regime of accumulation, comprehensive restructuring of work and production processes as well as a marked deregulation and flexibilization of labour relations can be noted globally, also in Brazil. The degree of flexibilization of labour in the Brazilian labour market is extremely high, as for example revealed by a turnover rate of 43.1 percent in 2012 (against 41.8 percent in 2002); most employment situations had a duration of less than one year (45 percent lasted even less than six months), demonstrating insecurity and lack of stability of the newly created jobs (Druck 2014). Hence there is a contradictory situation of simultaneous formalization and precarization which also debilitates traditional social protection schemes linked to the period of employment.

Outsourcing can definitely be considered one of the main drivers of precarization as it has become a generalized strategy in all economic sectors, including the public sector and state companies. This indicates a major transition even within the state apparatus itself. Outsourced work in 2011 corresponded to 25.5 percent of formal employment in Brazil (CUT 2011). Usually, outsourced work is more precarious in terms of payment, working time, working conditions, turnover rates, and health risks. There are diverse forms of outsourcing: among others, the number of self-employed has grown at great pace.

These forms of precarization also clearly indicate a deterioration of the organizational capacities of trade unions. At the same time, a considerable inclusion of new segments of the population into formal employment can be noted, particularly young, black, and female workers whose employment conditions had formerly been limited to the informal sector. Recent changes in the labour market thus also point to new segmentations concerning class, race, and gender. However, the depicted processes of precarization impact on the reproduction of gendered and racialized structures of the labour market.

SOCIAL POLICIES AND TAX REFORM Since 2003, the federal government has implemented a broad range of social policies including both pro-poor measures and targeted programs for particular groups such as Afro-descendants, women, “traditional populations,” and so forth.

The corresponding social outcomes are auspicious: between 2002 and 2013, the poverty rate (including extreme poverty) declined from 48.4 percent to 21.1 percent of Brazil’s population. In the same period expenditures on social policies jumped from 12.7 percent to 16.8 percent of GDP. Cash transfer programs in favour of poor families have occupied a prominent role during this phase. While a previous program benefited some 3.6 million families as of 2002, the Bolsa Família program in 2013 was transferring average benefits of about R$ 142 to 14.1 million families (see CEPAL 2014 and Bielschowsky 2014). Among nominal re-

cipients of Bolsa Família stipends, 93 percent are women and 73 percent are persons of colour. Despite their crucial importance in reducing poverty, Bolsa Família and other cash transfer programs have only a negligible effect on mitigating income inequality: these programs can explain only a small fraction of the reduction in the Gini coefficient (Medeiros and Souza 2013; Lavinas 2013).

Among the focal policies implemented since 2003, the quotas law passed in 2012 is probably the most comprehensive measure. According to the new law, 50 percent of all places to study at federal institutions of higher education are reserved for students coming from public schools in proportion to the share of black and indigenous population living in the respective region. Since about 1.1 million of 7.3 million enrolled undergraduate students in 2013 in Brazil studied at federal institutions (INEP 2014), and blacks and indigenous represent about 51 percent and 0.5 percent of Brazilian population, the federal quotas program, if fully implemented, will distribute about 283,000 study places according to racial and ethnic criteria.

In recent times, income inequalities between women and men and in a slighter magnitude between blacks and whites have decreased. In 2002 women’s average income stood at 49.9 percent of the male average, rising to 58.4 percent in 2012; average Afro-descendant income in 2002 corresponded to 47.2 percent of the average for whites, increasing to 54.6 percent in 2012 (IPEA 2013). This reduction of socioeconomic distance between women and men as well as between blacks and whites cannot be explained, at last not solely, by gender- and race-related policies. While these polices improve blacks’ and women’s agency, these policies contain crucial relevance for mitigating power asymmetries à la longue, but the measures have reached so far only a small fraction of Brazil’s total female and black population, producing minimal socioeconomic effects at the aggregate level.

Much more relevant here is the national minimum wage. By law, annual adjustments are equal to the sum of inflation in the last 12 months plus the economic growth rate from two years earlier. This policy has led to a real increase of the minimum wage of some 75 percent between 2002 and 2013.

Since women and blacks are still overrepresented in low-wage labour sectors, they benefit more from the increasing minimum wage than do men and whites.

The aggregate impact of current minimum wage policy is also expressive in terms of general redistribution, as detected by various econometric simulations which show that the rising minimum wage is the most important driver of recent decline of inequalities in Brazil (Saboia 2014). Although the new cabinet of Dilma Rousseff decided to extend the current adjustment policy, recent (and expected) very low economic growth rates will necessarily lead to a stabilization of real minimum wages with negative consequences for redistribution in terms of both class and gender- and race-related inequalities.

Finally, tax policies, as a decisive instrument for promoting redistribution, have substantially

changed since Lula came to power in 2003. Tax revenues encompassing about 36 percent of GDP are comparable with numbers found in various OECD countries. However, the disproportionate participation of indirect taxes, responsible for about half of revenue, the modest taxation of income (the highest income rate is 27.5 percent; in Sweden, it is 56.6 percent), and the mild burden of capital and finance profits lead to a regressive impact of taxes in Brazil’s final income structure. In Brazil, taxation policies do not decrease but rather increase the Gini coefficient.

The concentration of wealth is also impressive.

Based on analysis of 25 million tax declarations, Castro (2014) concludes that only about 406,000 taxpayers (about 0.2 percent of the national population) possess about 47 percent of all declared properties and titles. According to his simulations, a “simple” introduction of a tax rate of 15 percent for capital and financial profit combined with brackets of 35 percent and 40 percent for high salaries could reduce the Gini coefficient by about 20 percent.

Since 2003, the PT has never felt strong enough to promote major tax reforms. In the current political coalition directed by Dilma Rousseff, seen by critical voices within the PT as a “neoliberal backlash,” a progressive reform of the Brazilian tax system is not visible on the horizon.

CONCLUSION During the party’s 12 years in power, the two PT presidents have achieved impressive economic and social results. In this period, GDP per capita grew about 64 percent, poverty was drastically reduced, and income distribution became notably less unequal. These triumphs derive more from specific sectoral policies and a favourable external economic conjuncture than from structural change induced by a coherent political project. Economically, persistent low productivity in the industrial and service sector combined with a “reprimarization” of exports in a context marked by falling commodities prices have stifled growth.

Socially, existing drivers of redistribution seem to have reached their limit. In this context, reviving economic growth and continuing to promote social redistribution require structural reforms in both fields. By this, we mean countercyclical public investments in order to promote productivity and kick-start the economy, and also the introduction of comprehensive redistributive policies such as progressive taxes and structural labor market reforms that can curb precarization.

Since January of this year, the embattled Dilma Rousseff has opted essentially for the opposite strategy: cuts in public expenditures, a proposed tax reform with no progressive redistribution, and concentration on social policies that have low redistributive impact. For this she was rewarded with a contraction of 0.2 percent in GDP growth in the first quarter of 2015. The most likely results of this strategy are continued economic stagnation and rising social tensions.

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

HOW THE MASSIVE PETROBRAS CORRUPTION SCANDAL IS UPENDING BRAZILIAN POLITICS

By Anthony Pereira | King’s College London

This article was originally published by The Conversation (www.theconversation.com) and edited by Brasil Observer; to access the original article visit https://goo.gl/tcyJfP g

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Operation Car Wash, the investigation into the misuse of funds within Brazil’s partially state-owned oil company Petrobras, is little over a year old – but it has already taken as many twists and turns as a Brazilian telenovela.

Federal judge, Sergio Moro, and federal prosecutors are investigating a complicated scheme in which construction companies allegedly bribed Petrobras executives in return for contracts. These contracts were said to have been inflated in order for kickbacks to go to politicians and political parties.

On August 3, Operation Car Wash entered into its 17th phase with the arrest of José Dirceu, who served the former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as chief of staff from 2003 to 2005 and was under home detention for his role in a separate vote-buying scheme that erupted during Mr. da Silva’s administration, the so-called “mensalão”.

According to authorities, Dirceu was one of the principle architects of the corruption scheme at Petrobras.

Before that, 12 executives from the construction companies Odebrecht and Andrade Gutierrez had already been arrested. These arrests involved the alleged payers of bribes, not just the recipients, and led to the imprisonment of some big fish – among them Marcelo Odebrecht, the CEO of Brazil’s fifth-largest company and a conglomerate with an international presence.

Billions of dollars were involved.

The first Petrobras executive to testify in return for a reduced sentence, Paulo Roberto Costa, had $23m stored in Swiss bank accounts; he says that this money was a bribe from Odebrecht.

In a recent twist, Moro ordered the arrest of Bernardo Freiburghaus, a Brazilian-Swiss dual national who is believed to have organised Odebrecht payments to Petrobras through overseas bank accounts, and who has fled to Geneva. In addition, Moro and his prosecutors have called in the US Department of Justice to investigate Odebrecht’s use of offshore accounts.

It’s easy to get lost in the staggering sums and arcane detail of the Operation Car Wash saga and to miss its enormous implications for Brazil. It threatens to upend the corrupt way Brazilian politics is funded and to shatter the political hegemony of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) and the whole structure of Brazil’s political economy.

CHILLING EFFECT Operation Car Wash will have a serious chilling effect on campaign finance – and the consequences could be perverse. In the 2014 elections, ten large companies (including Odebrecht) donated massive sums to members of the Camara, the lower house of the national Congress.

It’s unlikely that these same firms will be making donations to candidates in the 2016 mayoral and city council elections.

Although such donations are legal, they throw up major conflicts of interest, since most large firms that donated to political campaigns in the past received government contracts and/or subsidised credit from state banks. With all the pressure to implement the lessons of Operation Car Wash, future donations could fall foul of Brazil’s strict new anti-corruption law, passed in 2013 and implemented via presidential decree in March 2015.

With no public financing for campaigns, and in the absence of other political reforms, Brazil’s politicians may increasingly resort to illicit sources of money. Illegal campaign funding, already endemic, could well get worse.

Holders of cash in need of money laundering will be tempted to fill the breach left by the withdrawal of corporate donations to finance politicians and parties who favour their interests. So in the short term, Operation Car Wash might actually make Brazilian elections less transparent and more corrupt.

The corruption investigation could also have a significant impact on the rule of the Workers’ Party at the federal level, now in its fourth consecutive presidential term.

Although the government of Brazilian president, Dilma Rousseff, has been badly weakened by the economic slowdown and the corruption scandal, she is fighting resolutely to see out her term.

Protests to have her impeached have so far come to nothing. Nonetheless, the opposition is hoping that the 2018 presidential election could definitively end PT rule at the national level.

Even though there is evidence that the pattern of corruption in Petrobras predates PT rule, many in the opposition still believe that the PT’s corruption is somehow more insidious than that of other parties because it is party-political, not personal. Rather than being motivated solely by greed, the argument goes, this corruption is a strategy to perpetuate the PT’s power.

Sure enough, there are signs that PT

power is waning. The scandal is even threatening to engulf the PT’s previous president, the highly popular Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, who served two terms between 2003 and 2010 and may well run again in 2018. Some observers think that by arresting Marcelo Odebrecht, Moro is hoping to induce him to give evidence against Lula – a nightmare for the struggling Rousseff administration.

‘CAPITALISMO DO COMPADRIO’ Some involved in Operation Car Wash think that the investigation is aimed at nothing less than the reform of the commanding heights of Brazil’s political economy.

In Brazil’s current system, state institutions and private corporate interests are closely entwined. Politicians and government agencies use power to promote “national champions” by granting them large government contracts, lending them subsidised credit and helping them to win bids for large projects overseas.

Odebrecht is one of these champions and is a household name to Brazilians, having completed highly visible projects such as the building of the international airport and the Petrobras headquarters in Rio, the restoration of the opera house in Manaus, and the new stadium for the Corinthians football team (of which former president is a loyal follower) in São Paulo.

Patience with the excesses of this system is running out. Prosecutor Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima, for example, claimed in a recent interview that Brazil’s honest and silent majority should no longer put up with being taken advantage of “by structures of power that block real competition between economic agents and (…) are responsible for the cyclical crises of our crony capitalism” (“capitalismo do compadrio”).

Despite the likely impact of Operation Car Wash on campaign finance and the electoral prospects of the Workers’ Party, it is hard to imagine dos Santos Lima’s lofty vision becoming reality. Many large firms around the world are highly dependent on government favours, in a global capitalist system that is more unequal and perhaps more competitive and predatory than ever.

Fighting for stronger laws and better enforcement is all very well, but it’s hard not to see the prosecutor’s words as a middle-class morality tale about a scandal in which – as in corruption scandals of the past – some private and party interests will prevail over others.

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

PROFILE PERSONAL ARQUIVE

Attentive observer of Brazilian public relations, founding partner of AJA Media Solutions speaks to Brasil Observer about his career and communication strategies

By Ana Toledo

MARIA LUIZA ABBOTT

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A LOOK AT THE IMAGE OF BRAZIL ABROAD

Working as a communications professional in the city of London presents a major challenge. After all, here are some of the most influential publications in the world, the oldest and largest network of radio and television, the BBC, and no less than 1,700 foreign correspondents. Still, Maria Luiza Abbott has excelled.

Passing through important media companies in Brazil and winning the coveted Esso award in 1998, the journalist arrived in London 15 years ago as a correspondent of the newspaper Valor Econômico.

Then she worked in other outlets in the British capital, including the BBC, where, ironically, after a voluntary resignation program, had the opportunity – as she says – to create her own job. The result was AJA

Media Solutions, a company dedicated to establishing public relations bridges to Brazilian companies abroad.

Apart from her practical experience, Maria Luiza has an MA in International Journalism from Cardiff University and speaks four languages other than Portuguese: English, Spanish, Turkish and French. With this background, she is an attentive observer of the perception of Brazil abroad, particularly in Europe. In an interview with Brasil Observer, she speaks about her career, the challenges of operating in this market and analyses the consequences of the lack of a unified policy of the Brazilian government’s communication to underpin competitiveness for businesses and products from Brazil.

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

How was the process of creating AJA? I was working at the BBC and they offered a voluntary redundancy package, which was very generous. So two colleagues and I decided to take the opportunity to create our own jobs. But the two were gone in the first six months of AJA. We felt there was a need, because Brazilian companies began to internationalize. We realized that there was room to do an outreach work in Brazil. We’re talking nine years ago, Brazilian companies were unknown. I remember calling journalists and they did not have an idea about the companies we were talking about, and for us they were giant companies.

Brazil has advanced greatly in recent years and this has given a much larger array. At the same time, Brazilian companies started to look for more international participation. We are no longer seen only as the country of football, the stereotypes. But it’s still a concentrated thing in large companies and in the financial pages.

What is most difficult for a Brazilian company to enter the European market and the role of communications?

The ignorance that the world still has about Brazil. There is no work in Brazil to strengthen the brand, something more focused. The brand is for when you go to buy something, you pay a premium for it because you trust it. And countries build their brands with different characteristics, according to what they have. It is not clear to Brazilian companies, which have no way to separate the company from the country where it was founded.

The communication strategy has to be done in order to give value to the brand. The company will choose the market that it wants to enter, and from there you need a strategy that is able to communicate and make a cultural bridge. It is not enough to speak English, French or German. You need to speak the language of your market. You have to give your values, what is your marketing strategy and adapt to the language and local culture of your potential customer.

Moreover, anticipate the vision that people have of your company, starting from the image of your country of origin. So you can make a cleaner image. And also value the Brazilian qualities, because there’s no use to sell something we are not. The company or the product is Brazilian. And we have many good things.

How do you evaluate Brazil’s image today?

Perception is what we generate. A very influential thing in image formation is that the correspondents that are based in Brazil are informed by the Brazilian media and coverage is always negative. This is not to say that the media is right or wrong, only that the media is focused on pessimism. Correspondents who are there will read this and reproduce, which reinforces the negative image.

In the financial markets we have a very clear issue that are the undeniable difficulties of the Brazilian economy. The market follows it closely, the rating agencies. This adds more to the negative image, but is given due the concrete and objective reality. When

you have this problem of the economy, is not enough to have a communication policy that says that is not dysfunctional. It is necessary to explain what is happening, what is being done, talk to investors and opinion leaders.

Brazil don’t do it.

South Africa is a good example. Jim O’Neill, creator of the acronym BRICS, didn’t put South Africa at the beginning. How did South Africa get in? Because of a communication policy that gave an extra dimension to the country. The economy there is minimal when compared to other countries in the group, has no impact. However, they were so insistently willing to enter, to participate, to be part of this group that the country today is there. They have concrete goals, such as the Brand South Africa campaign. They want to move up the rankings of the World Economic Forum, the countries where it is best to do business. And that is to follow. Brazil does not have a communication policy out here, both for the financial market and in relation to the media. We cannot forget that what the media reproduces, the market reads and absorbs, is a two-way street.

How not to be at the mercy of the markets?

The market is an institution, but an institution made of people. If you can have a dialogue and tell them what is being done, it will be understood. You cannot allow that companies perceive reality through the lens of other people. You should be in front to tell what’s going on. Brazil depends on investors to run the economy, to develop, create jobs.

And the point of view of exports, this is what will allow Brazil to grow, generate foreign exchange, allow healthy growth. Companies and the government had to have some joint action to sell what we do with quality, we have many creative things.

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How to create a positive agenda?

The Great Britain campaign, for example, is one of the most successful ones. The person who coordinates is directly subordinate to the Prime Minister, has the power to impose the policy to others. I think that the fundamental command is unitary; it is not good each one speaking a different thing and wanting to spend a different speech.

One of the things the coordinator of Great Britain, Conrad Bird, draws attention is that Brazil in terms of advertising and creativity is one of the best. We have a tradition of winning awards in the area. But for some reason we cannot do this when it is a campaign for the country. Recent campaigns we have seen from different Brazilian government agencies do not reflect that quality. There needs to be a separation between what is a project for the country and what is project for the government in power. In the case of Great Britain, it is not a campaign of the British government.

It is a campaign of the country. This shows a clear difference, as with the BBC, which is not a government station, but a public network.

Brazil has to find a model, not adapt.

Each country has its characteristic. It’s time to do something, to talk to people here from outside, but who understand Brazil as well.

No use hiring a person who knows how the world works, but has no knowledge of Brazil.

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

GLOBAL BRAZIL

THE ECONOMY IS HOSTAGE TO AUSTERITY Brazilian government falls into the trap it created: recession caused by the austerity measures prevents that the goals of this same austerity from being met MARCELLO CASAL JR/AGÊNCIA BRASIL

T

By Wagner de Alcantara Aragao

The second semester begins in Brazil with the federal government making changes in its macroeconomic policy, which must therefore bring more impacts to the real economy and public services offered to the population.

The fiscal adjustment implemented since the beginning of the year caused side effects that did crumble the very raison d’être of monetary tightening, which is the search for a primary surplus that would leave the country well regarded in the international financial markets. The ministers of Finance, Joaquim Levy, and Planning, Nelson Barbosa, announced the changes on 22 July 22, which is being called “the adjustment of the adjustment” The changes were seen by analysts who are critics of the austerity path taken by President Dilma Rousseff in the second term as a retreat and at the same, a sign of some disorientation of the economic team. That’s the evaluation, for example, of the Professor Pedro Henrique Evangelista Duarte, Doctor of Economic Development and Lecturer at the Federal University of Goias (UFG). “What we have is a schizophrenic economic policy,” said the professor to Brasil Observer. “A policy aimed at a particular class, the investors, who do not give ‘response’ to any government measure, given that the expected results – the return of private investment – remains low”.

PRIMARY SURPLUS TARGET The most substantial decline announced by Levy and Barbosa ministers was the reduction in the primary surplus target for 2015. The target set in January was R$ 66.3 billion, equivalent to 1.1% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Now, the economic team lowered that target to R$ 8.75 billion – or 0.15% of GDP. Primary surplus is the amount the government saves for the payment of public debt. The primary surplus target includes savings for the Union (federal government), state companies, states and municipalities.

Ministers of Planning, Nelson Barbosa, and Finance, Joaquim Levy, before talking to reduce the primary surplus target

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

And why is that goal being reduced?

Because of the sequels of the fiscal adjustment itself. A monetary policy based on austerity makes the economy retracts.

For the government to reach a surplus, it must cut spending and investments. Thus, fewer public funds are intended for public works and services, for the lines of credit that finance the purchase of real estate, for the purchase of equipment for the industry, or to other forms of consumption by households. With less money circulating, the wheel of the economy stops spinning.

When the economy stops growing, the tax collection is also impaired. If less money enters, it becomes harder for the government to save. And that is precisely what happened in the first half of this year. Even with the government having cut R$ 69 billion of the 2015 budget, achieve the initial goal of primary surplus became impossible. “This whole process is a result of the government’s confusion about what exactly needed to be done,” said Professor Duarte.

electricity, sanitation, urban mobility) essential to provide the country with infrastructure necessary to economically expand and develop socially. There were also cuts of the civil service (1.3%), reflecting flattening salary of civil servants and stagnation of the payroll – by extension, it damages the quality of services.

Besides all the negative consequences – stagnation or recession of the economy, scrapping of public services, brake on infrastructure projects and other investments – fiscal adjustment has cost politically to President Dilma Rousseff. The monetary tightening was the opposition candidacy government program. Dilma managed to down the stretch of last year’s election with decisive support exactly for representing an obstacle to the threat of austerity. There is a widespread sense of betrayal of campaign promises. The current unpopularity of the president owes much to the economic recession, and this has been worsened by the very fiscal adjustment.

BALANCE

CONFIDENCE

After Levy and Barbosa’s announcement, the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank confirmed that achieve that primary surplus became unfeasible.

In the first half of the year, the consolidated public sector (federal, state, municipal governments and state companies) managed a surplus of R$ 16.2 billion.

The amount, however, is lower than the R$ 29.4 billion from the same period in 2014. In 12 months to June 2015, the result is a primary deficit: R$ 45.7 billion.

When analysing the performance of the federal government (National Treasury, Social Security and Central Bank), the balance was also deficit in the first half: R$ 1.9 billion. For the federal, state and local state-owned enterprises (excluding Petrobras and Eletrobras) the primary deficit was R$ 1.159 billion. The primary surplus of the consolidated public sector was only achieved thanks to the positive balance obtained by state governments (R$ 16.426 billion in the first half) and municipalities (R$ 2.868 billion), according to Central Bank.

But the Ministry of Finance report noted a primary deficit in the accounts of the Federal Government of R$ 1.6 billion in the first half of this year. In real terms, after adjusted for inflation, the result is the worst for the first six months of the year since the inception of the series in 1997. The problem was no increase in government spending – virtually the same level (it grew by 0.5%). Total revenue (tax revenue, fees and contributions), however, fell 3.5%.

Dilma and her economic team defend the fiscal adjustment arguing that Brazil cannot lose credibility in the international markets. Confidence in the country would be maintained if investors realize the effort to keep public accounts in order. Such confidence would be essential so that investors continue to bet their chips in Brazil, investing in works of Logistics Infrastructure Program (PIL), for instance, designed on the model of public-private partnerships.

Attracting investors that are secure about the fiscal robustness of Brazil, the national economy would overcome the “transitory” difficulties, as the president has said, and resume the path of growth.

The adjustment would therefore be a clear government signal to the market that unconditional willingness to ensure surplus to pay the public debt. The reduction of the primary surplus target would not mean a fiscal loosening, just an adaptation to real values.

DEEP CUTS For government spending does not grow, the budget cuts represented crucial reductions in important works and investments for the country. The investments of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), for example, decreased by 36%, amounting to less than R$ 20 billion. The PAC, as it is known, is a set of works (roads, railways, ports, airports,

SCENARIOS For Professor Pedro Henrique Evangelista Duarte, there is a situation of diagnostic error by Dilma’s government, which seems to understand the current scenario similar to 2003, when Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was first elected. As by then Lula could represent, in the eyes of the market, a “threat”, fiscal austerity was seen as a necessary evil, as the remedy to ensure political and economic stability, and then the very governance. It worked at the time.

Now, after an extremely polarized election, with narrow victory of Dilma, it was decided to do a fiscal adjustment as a way to calm the market mood and reverse political instability. It did not work. The tightening brought recession, dissatisfaction at the base of the president and thus become an even more fragile government.

“There is a belief that the current scenario is similar to 2003, and that a recessive adjustment policy could organize the way for years to come. We have

a very different scenario, especially if we look at what is happening with the world economy. For example, China, an important partner of Brazil, has shown decline in their growth, and this has a significant impact in the context of the external economy. Not to mention the crisis in Europe, which also has internal reflections,” argued Professor Duarte.

INVESTMENT GRADE Only concrete success so far, the fiscal adjustment could prevent Brazil had its investment grade lowered by the rating agencies. The Standard & Poor’s, in its latest statement on 28 July, continued to keep the country classified as safe for investors.

There was a policy of significant correction during the second term of President Dilma Rousseff, says the agency, pointing out that Brazil is facing challenging political and economic circumstances.

The difficulty for the government to approve the fiscal adjustment measures in Congress; the approval, by the same Congress, of projects that impact the costs of the Union (such as applying the same minimum wage adjustment index to retirement); and corruption scandals involving politicians from different parties and large companies and entrepreneurs have made the agency, on the other hand, review for “negative” the outlook for future ratings.

NARRATIVE OF CRISIS Although the credibility of these rating agencies are questionable – they essentially represent the interests of the financial market, and not properly investors in the productive sector – the Brazilian government, politics and national media still take a lot into account of their ratings. The signs of these agencies are widely reflected in newscasts, websites and commentators of the major radio networks, fitting to the alarmist discourse of major media outlets.

For at least three years, even if often belied by the facts, the media sings the word “crisis” almost like a mantra.

It rarely makes an inference with other periods of difficulty, comparisons with the external environment in order to contextualize and transmit the real scale of the problem. A recent text by cinema critics Pablo Villaça went viral just by throwing open the discrepancy between the facts and the versions of the facts.

The text opposed the “discouraging” tone of the news to the satisfactory results of investments from large companies, domestic and foreign, that link Brazil as a good investment destination, despite the turbulent situation.

“I’m really impressed how political columnists of the mainstream media take pleasure in painting the country in sombre colours (...) one thing is to say that the country is in wonderful condition, because it is not; another is to invent a chaos that does not correspond to reality. The truth, as usual, lies in the middle: the country faces serious problems, but is far from living ‘in crisis’. It would be easier to avoid it if the media

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did not insist on sow panic in the population – which, then, yes, has the potential to cause a real crisis,” he wrote.

MORE CUTS It is true also that the government itself, to choose the path of the recessive fiscal adjustment contributes to thicken the media chorus and become the fertile ground where it forges a scorched earth scenario. On the one hand the economic team decided to lower the surplus target, will not save the budget further cuts. Until the time of writing, the Treasury confirmed an R$ 8.6 billion block.

More than half (55%) would be PAC resources (R$ 4.66 billion). The scissors would spare no ministry, according to the Secretary of the Treasury, Marcelo Saintive. “All ministries will be affected with cuts, but we will preserve priority areas in the ministries of education and health,” he pondered. With this lock of R$ 8.6 billion, the cuts in the 2015 budget reached R$ 78.5 billion – in May, R$ 69.9 billion had already been removed.

Not only that, the Monetary Policy Committee decided in July rise for the seventh time in a row the basic interest rate of the economy (Selic), which rose from 13.75% to 14.25% per annum, one of the highest of the world. The raising makes more expensive the credit, both for the productive sector as for consumption, establishing itself as one more element to constrain economic growth. Unions and industry representatives strongly criticized the new addition.

The need to control inflation is the justification given by the Monetary Policy Committee to promote high Selic. The high interest rates also attract investors in the financial market, says the committee. For Professor Duarte, the focus of the current economic policy is what is wrong.

“While the government cares about [back economic policy for] investors who no one knows where they are, the population has suffered the effects. I think what is missing is the government reorient economic policy for the care of the population.”

INDICATORS *VARIATION COMPARED TO THE SAME PERIOD LAST YEAR SOURCE: IBGE

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT

January-March 2015: R$ 1.4 trillion (-1.6%)

RETAIL SALES

January-May 2015: +4.1% (nominal revenue); -2.0% (sales volume)

SERVICE

January-May 2015: +2.3% (nominal revenue)

INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION January-May 2015: -6.9%

UNEMPLOYMENT 6.9% (June 2015)

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

BR-UK CONNECTION

RIO 2016: ONE YEAR TO GO RIO 2016/DANIEL RAMALHO

I

In August next year, the ‘Cidade Maravilhoso’ will be host to the world for the first Olympic Games in South America.

Marcus Vinicius Freire, executive director for sports at the Brazilian Olympic Committee, and Mark England, Team GB chef de mission, respond to five questions from the Brasil Observer

What is the target of medals for Rio 2016 and what is being done during this Olympic cycle for it to be achieved? g

g

Marcus Vinicius | The goal is to place the country - for the first time - in the Top 10 of the medal table. To reach this goal, the COB (Brazilian Olympic Committee) studied the scene of the latest editions of the Olympic Games and set up a strategic map in 2009 to guide our actions. We identified the need to win medals in about 13 disciplines in 2016, so we focus on investment in 18 or 19 to have a greater range. The COB monitors key athletes from Brazil throughout this Olympic cycle. From this monitoring, the COB defines the support strategy to increase the chances that one athlete or team achieve their best performance during the Olympics.

This strategy involves investments in order to meet all the details of preparation in various fields such as sports science; exchange of training and competition; training of coaches; support for multidisciplinary teams; equipment purchase; management of the training centre; and others.

Mark England | We had an extremely successful Olympics in the last couple of cycles with the fourth place in Beijing and now third place in London. I have always found that before the Games we don’t set medal targets; we will set medal targets a little bit closer. We do our job to the best of our ability, and by that I mean if we do all the preparations, all the planning, all the familiarization in the host city, then we hope that in the moment the medal table will take care of itself. There are two areas. The first is education piece with athletes, making sure they are what we call “Rio Ready”, so educating them for Rio’s environment, the venues, the competition structure, the Olympic village. And secondly, the other events programme that is going on at the moment and are key to that, so we have athletes competing in triathlon, equestrian... We are getting our athletes very familiar with Rio de Janeiro but our team focus in terms of preparation also has been to conclude and secure Belo Horizonte as our pre-Games training centre, we have two fantastic bases there.

What have been the main challenges during the preparation?

Marcus Vinicius | The main challenge is time. We have resources and trained staff to change the level of the Brazilian Olympic sport. But time is short. We’re working very hard to achieving our goals. g Mark England | The biggest challenge for us has been the search for the best pre-Games training site. We have good interaction with key sports’ leaders in both the Rio Organising Committee and the Brazilian Olympic Committee. So we haven’t found that challenging, we’ve found it to be a terrific journey so far and very enjoyable too.

canoeing, equestrian... So that sports typically have one medal scores but what we’ve found in the last four or five years is that these sports contributing for the medal table is growing year on year so we looking for boxing and judo... We have a wider range of sports that can contribute for Great Britain’s position on the medal table.

g

What are the advantages and disadvantages of competing in Rio? g

Which disciplines are better prepared to win medals? g

g

Marcus Vinicius | The COB does not indicate this or that discipline, and does not speak on behalf of athletes.

It belittles the work of those listed and puts unnecessary pressure on the indicated ones. Today we are sure that Brazilian athletes have the best possible preparation and this is being reflected in the results we are getting through the cycle. Toronto 2015 and the World Championships of 2013, 2014 and 2015 are confirming a number of athletes and disciplines in a position to reach the podium in Rio. That’s no guarantee, but we are on track.

Mark England | We have always had very strong sports delivering medals on the world stage and Olympic Games like cycling, athletics, rowing,

g

Marcus Vinicius | It is the realization of a dream for many athletes.

We have a motivating factor for having the home crowd. This, at the same time, can put more pressure on some athletes. It’s a big challenge, but the important thing is to have Team Brazil well prepared technically and mentally and we provided the best possible preparation for our athletes to focus only on competition. Our support is not geared only to those who will contest medals, but for the 400 athletes to have the best results of their careers in the Olympics.

Mark England | It’s the first time that South America is hosting an Olympic Games so it is a continent that typically we are not familiar with and it is a city that typically our athletes don’t train or compete in. And it has brought different challenges for us like the completely different time zone, and also some operational challenges. The advantage is the network of support for our preparation in Belo Horizonte, the network of support we have with the Brazilian Olympic Committee, we are very friendly especially with Marcus Vinicius who,

when the Brazil’s team trained in London, was very supportive. So although their are cultural differences, we have a common goal between the two nations for collaboration, it is the greatest advantage I think.

Which legacies the Games can leave for Brazilian sport? g

g

Marcus Vinicius | The Brazilian Olympic sport will never be the same.

In terms of structure, we will gain modern facilities that will be used in the preparation of future athletes of Brazil. In terms of training of professionals who work with sport, coaches, trainers, sports marketing, we are gaining a very great knowledge, which will not be lost. But, in my opinion, the greatest legacy will be the inspiration that millions of young Brazilians will have to experience the Olympic atmosphere. I really believe that, once touched by Olympic spirit, young people enchant the values of excellence, friendship and respect and use sport to improve their lives.

Mark England | First of all it’s one of the greatest opportunities to build infrastructure for sports, to really support national federations, to make Brazil a powerhouse for Olympic sports. It’s an opportunity to build a sustainable performance system. And secondly is a great opportunity to have a legacy of high quality training facilities and competition venues. The third is the opportunity to inspire young people take up sport and become active within the community and to really become the stars of the future, to support a healthy nation.

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

BRASILIANCE

TRAINED FOR STREET COCKFIGHT Brazil’s Military Police soldiers criticize training focused on servitude to officials, lived in an environment where psychological, physical and disciplinary abuse is routine

By Ciro Barros, from Agência Pública

C

“

“Come on, come on, you’re an animal.

You’re an ass, you’re fat!” Former soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes mimics the speech of the officials that trained him at the gym when he joined the Military Police of Ceará, in February 2001. “Sometimes it was lunchtime and the superiors were screaming in my ear that I was a monster, a parasite. It seemed that they were training a dog. The soldier is trained to be afraid of officials and that’s it. The training was just messing with emotions; one is trained to leave the barracks like a pit bull, crazy to bite people. How am I going to serve society like that? It’s ridiculous. The police have to train quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. Today policemen seem to be training like a cock to go street fighting,” he reflects.

Darlan remembers without nostalgia the seven months in the defunct Training Course and Enhancement of the Military Police in Brazil’s North-eastern state of Ceará. “Whenever a teacher was missing, we were forced to do cleaning around the barracks. And worse: those who complained could get imprisoned the whole weekend. The hierarchy is above everything else in the military scheme. Training was only that thing of united order and stay all day marching under the hot sun. There is a feudal system; you have officials who can do whatever they want and soldiers who put their heads down. You’re just trained to be afraid. The soldier who sees the official trembles in fear,” he says.

While he worked as a cop, Darlan was studying theology at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Ceará and Philosophy at UECE (State University of Ceará). The former soldier says that he began to question some orders and

instructions while attending the academy and soon earned a nickname: “Mazela”, a common slang in north-eastern Brazil for a lazy person. Gradually spread among the troops the idea that the questions of “Mazela” were the result of a pure laziness with respect to military exercises.

“I got this reputation in the barracks,” he says. “It’s a brainwash. Militarism is a kind of religion that creates fanatics. United order, military laws, regulations, battle songs... These little stupid things that policemen will learn: how to fix the right uniform. You can be arrested if you are not with a cap. These things only disrupt the lives of police officers. Sometimes I took a crowded bus, arrived with a crumpled uniform and was arrested for Friday, Saturday and Sunday. That’s ridiculous,” he exclaims.

“And that’s before and after training: if you go today to Fortaleza’s Military Police Cavalry you will see policemen weeding, picking up horse shit, sweeping the floor, washing the colonel’s car, opening the door to the demigods [officials]. I never agreed with that and got this ‘lazy’ fame,” he says.

Bullying is the rule in the formation of military policemen in short courses whose main concern is to reinforce the military culture in the future soldier; with little theoretical learning in subjects such as criminal law, constitutional and human rights; addition to being subject to strict disciplinary regulations. That’s what the survey “Opinion of Brazilian Policemen on Reform and Modernization of Public Security” published in 2014 found. More than 21,000 public safety professionals were heard (between civilian, military, fede-

ral policemen, agents of scientific police, forensic experts and fire-fighters) of all units of the federation, more than half of them military police, especially “Praças” (lower patent). Of these, 82.7% said they had full training of one year before exercising the function, 38.8% said they have been victims of physical or psychological torture in training and 64.4% said they had been humiliated or disrespected by superiors. 98.2% of all professionals (including professionals from other areas) survey respondents said that inadequate training is a very important factor to understand the difficulty of police work.

Despite the alarming figures, the theme is still little discussed within corporations and beyond. In several states, the internal regulations of the Military Police explicitly prohibit cops to speak about the profession. They also say they have little room to denounce the violations suffered by them on a daily basis – the closed and hierarchical structure of militarism gives few loopholes to complaints or criticism of the police in relation to their own training, mainly outside the barracks. Even if those complaints relate to non-compliance with primordial human rights.

TORTURE LESSONS The institutionalization of human rights violations within the Military Police in the formation and training of its members is reflected directly in the way they react in everyday life with the population. A crucial example is the final report of the Truth Commission of the State of São Paulo, where the sociologist and former Secretary of Public Security

of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Luiz Eduardo Soares, said in testimony given on 28 November, 2013 “The BOPE [an elite squad of Rio’s Military Police] offered by 2006, torture classes. 2006! Torture classes! I am not referring to ideological inclinations (...), we are talking about institutional procedures,” he said.

It was this reality that then recruit Rodrigo Nogueira Batista, coming from the Navy, was presented to participate in the Summer Operations at Beaches two months after joining the Military Police, described by him as a kind of internship that recruits do with older police officers in noble beaches of Rio – Ipanema, Copacabana, Barra da Tijuca, Botafogo, Recreio.

“My class went to this internship after two months of training, two months taking part-time lessons and then to the street. There we were with truncheon, shorts and Military Police shirt, so the population see that and feel what they call ‘sense of security’,” he recalls.

“They put an armed older policeman and two or three ‘iron balls’, as they call the recruits, exactly because they make difficult the movement of the older policemen. We arrived and the older was distressed about our presence because he wanted to get money from the guy who sells mate, from the small shops”, he recalls. On the street: “barbarism prevailed: young people stealing, smoking marijuana... Everything you imagine. When falling in our hands was only beating, beating, beating, pepper spray, much pepper gas. It was there that I had contact with the torture techniques that the Military Police does on several occasions,” he says.

“You now see the case of Amarildo,”

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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CLARICE CASTRO/GERJ

Graduation of Rio’s Military Police soldiers in 2014

he says. “Those officers who participated in the Amarildo case, at least according to the investigation, are doing the same practices I did, what others had done well before me and that comes from many years. It comes from a culture,” he added.

YES SIR, NO SIR The culture of violence born with the dehumanization of the Military Police training, the soldiers report. “Military Police soldiers have no rights. We have to sleep in dirty quarters, falling apart. Each of us had to bring hammocks to sleep. Married colleagues who did the training had many difficulties because we spent three months without pay. The soldier only has the right to say yes sir and no sir and marching all the time,” says the former soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes. “How can an undemocratic police take care of a democratic society?” he asks.

Author of a book entitled “Militarismo: um sistema arcaico de segurança pública” (or “Militarism: an archaic system of public security”), Darlan was expelled from Ceará’s Military Police in January 2014, after 13 years of service.

What caused the expulsion, he said, was the book. “I went to some universities here in Fortaleza to distribute the book and I was outside the Academy [State Academy of Public Security of Ceará] at lunchtime. Then the students came, took the book and carried inside. During one of the classes, some students asked a teacher why here in Brazil we had military police while in most countries of the world it was not militarized.

Students told us that they had seen it in

my book. It was enough. They began to investigate my life, opened a Military Police Inquiry, and I was prevented from working on the street,” he says.

In Chapter 11 of Darlan’s book, there are some anonymous phrases spoken by his colleagues about the Military Police. “The officials are leeches,” says one of the sentences; “Military Police is the most cowardly police that exists – it only arrests poor people,” says another. “In my interrogation they wanted me to say the name of each officer who spoke the sentences for each officer to be punished. My lawyer claimed confidential source, like you journalists have.

In another session, this time that I was answering the process, I tried to argue with a captain. ‘No, captain, it is my right to write the book.’ He ironically took a blank sheet of paper and threw in front of me, saying, ‘Here, your rights’,” he says.

The Military Police of Ceará claimed that the expulsion was based on several articles of the Disciplinary Code and the Military Penal Code and that the conduct of the former soldier went against modesty and decency of the class. In São Paulo and Ceará, it is forbidden for policemen to “publish, disseminate or contribute to full disclosure of facts, documents or administrative matters or technical police, military or judiciary that can compete for the prestige of the Military Corporation”. Darlan denounced his expulsion to the prosecutor of Ceará and filed a reinstatement of lawsuit which has not yet been heard. Sought by the Agência Pública, Ceará’s Military Police did not explain the reason for Darlan’s expulsion or comment on his statements.

‘ANTIDEMOCRATIC’

“Imagine a teacher who cannot speak of education or a doctor who cannot speak of health. In many states, the police cannot talk about public safety,” says sociologist Ignacio Cano, from the Violence Analysis Laboratory of UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro). He has authored a study that analyzed the “conduct manuals” of military police in order to compare the disciplinary codes and laws of public security corporations in Brazil.

“The Military Police disciplinary regulations are outdated, antidemocratic, many of them pre-constitutional”, defines the sociologist. “They were created to ensure the hierarchy and discipline within the corporation and the corporation’s image, and are not meant to protect the people nor the police,” he argues. “Most of the training is for the police to learn rules, both laws and the internal rules of the corporation, and to run up and down to stay in shape. Physical education is not given with a health purpose; it is also in this logic of discipline. What some experts and police officers say is that implicitly these abusive articles were overturned with the Constitution. The fact is that the statute is still in force,” he says.

According to his study, at least 10 federation units have regulations dating previous to the Constitution, inspired by the Army Disciplinary Regulations.

Some states adopt exactly these regulations in the Military Police. This was determined from a decree of the dictatorship, Decree-Law 667 of 2 July 1969.

Article 18 of the decree states: “The Mi-

litary Police shall be governed by Disciplinary Regulations drafted along the lines of the Army Disciplinary Regulations and adapted to the special conditions of each corporation.”

“In the regulations we have reviewed, we saw extreme cases in this study, as regulations stipulate that if a police officer in a top position beating a lower level police officer to force and fulfil an order, then it’s okay, it’s a normal thing. This is one of the most extreme cases,” says Ignacio Cano. He cites other abuses arising from over-regulation. “There’s a whole special moralist regulations that applies to private life.

Policeman cannot do things that most mortals do: get drunk, tell a lie, and go into debt. He may be punished for these things. This creates a moral superman vision that does not exist; these subject officers to permanent risks of punishment for conduct that most Brazilians do,” he explains.

There are several examples of this regulation of police officers private lives. In Espírito Santo state, according to the regulation, it is forbidden for officers to “keep close relationships not recommended or socially reprehensible, with superiors, peers, subordinates or civilians.” In the Amazon, it is forbidden for police to “talk foreign language, except when the position held by the military police so requires.” In nine states, constitutes a disciplinary offense for the police to enter “into debt or take on higher commitments to their possibilities compromising the good name of the class.”

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The hierarchy is the supreme value in the manuals of Military Police. The disciplinary regulations of the police in Alagoas and Mato Grosso prohibit: “to sit where officials are or vice versa, except in ceremonies, festivals, or social gatherings.” In seven states, it is a disciplinary offense for the officer who does not offer a place to a superior. Only nine states classify transgressions typified in public categories (Light, Medium, Severe and Very Serious); in the other it is left to the top command to stipulate the severity of the transgression.

“The human rights of police officers are often harmed by these regulations. And then we want them to respect the human rights of citizens when they as human being and workers do not have their rights respected,” says Cano. “When you deal with the police in an authoritarian and arbitrary way, what you are promoting is that they treat citizens equally. They tend to discount on citizen the repression suffered in the barracks. They tend to be authoritarian, arbitrary, and authoritative. They have no dialogue in the barracks, so why will they dialogue with the citizen? They tend to expect from the citizen the same moral they have,” says the sociologist.

Main name ahead of the website “Rede Democrática PM BM”, the first sergeant of Federal District’s Military Police Roner Gama is an example of corporate restriction on freedom of expression of its members. “This negative charge from the dictatorship is reflected in punitive procedures that still exist today. The policemen, for example, cannot manifest on social networks on certain internal aspects of the corporation. I myself am responding to various inquiries and investigations by expressing myself here in this website. Today I’ll answer in internal affairs by a comment someone made on the website. It’s a boring, embarrassing thing. The Military Police is the only institution in the country in which the agent cannot question the superior. A public servant cannot question procedures? It’s something out of context we live in. It is totally absurd,” he says.

With over 20 years of experience within the Brazilian and Latin American police academies, anthropologist and professor of the Department of Public Security of the Fluminense Federal University (UFF), Jacqueline Muniz says: “In Brazil, we have an aristocratic logic guided by privileges that perverts the sense of hierarchy and discipline. It is a continued abuse of power, as with obsolete and unconstitutional disciplinary regulations,” she says.

“Even the policemen say on the streets and in my research that their motivation is punishment. This reflects environments of little citizenship, transparency, few acknowledgments of constitutional rights of one of the main players in a democracy.

The policemen enforce the Constitution on the streets, not the dog who barks and wags its tail. They do not have to cut the grass of their superior, turning driver of the colonel’s wife, serve coffee. This culture makes the policemen feel unsafe in the street just by an institutional insecurity and an unsafe policeman is worse than a poorly paid one. He lives all the time in fear of being punished. The cops always say, “if I do too

much, I am punished; if I do less, I am punished; if I do not do, I am punished’. There is a lack of qualified benchmarks for police work and it also depends on us to institute a professional training process” she says.

“Police cannot be improvised. An experienced officer is very costly to society; he cannot be replaced because died or because they suffered an accident,” concludes the anthropologist.

‘I FELL ON THE FLOOR PARAPLEGIC’ In 1989, Saul Humberto Martins, now nearing 50 years old, dreamed of entering the Military Police of the Federal District.

He says he found the beautiful profession that saw many bad things in the streets and thought he could contribute as a police officer. Saul entered the corporation by contest and worked as a police officer for 18 years until being hit by an accidental shooting during an instruction in April 2008, which made him paraplegic.

“That day there was a course. I was not part of the course, I was in another area, but was asked to provide support. And I went,” he recalls. In the course, for policemen with more than ten years of experience, Saul should simulate he was a criminal and, in many situations, try to take the weapon from the hands of another officer. He then took off his ballistic vest to be more mobile.

Before the training, all participants were asked to unload their weapons. However, during the instruction, a participant said he had a headache and wanted to leave the barracks to go to the pharmacy. He left the place, loaded the gun and placed at the waist and got a car to buy medicine. When he returned, the soldier forgot the loaded gun.

“As soon as he arrived, an officer entered the back of the car and said ‘now it’s time for you to make the approach’. They entered the education site, which was indoors.

When they entered, the official advised: ‘addresses those people there’,” he says. In the simulation, Saul was instructed to react to the approach. When he responded, the soldier shot out the loaded gun.

“The shot took my scapula, punctured lung, spine and lodged in my bone marrow. I fell on the flour paraplegic,” he says. The episode was filmed. Saul was a month hospitalized. The Military Police internal affairs of the Federal District ordered the official instructor of the course and the soldier who fired the gun to nine months in prison (converted into community service), but they remain in the corporation. Saul is now evangelical minister and waits his compensation in court.

“The person giving instruction on the day of my accident was no instructor. Simply because he was an officer he was there giving instruction, but he was not prepared to give that instruction. After my accident there were several other cases. Had a colleague who was not well oriented in a shooting instruction, he fired, the capsule hit him in the eye and he came out blind. We had another who was shot in the knee and had to amputate the leg. We had the case of Silva Barros sergeant who was shot in the bedroom Military Police Battalion,” he recalls. “We need better prepared instructors.

We have good instructors, but the problem is that they want to put the official sinks in

education just because they are official. It has very good instructional sergeant who cannot turn instructor because they want to have that privilege. Purely by the hierarchy,” he reflects.

On the training itself, Saul criticizes the excessive focus on the united order training. “The guy is in the gym and 50% of the course is to learn militarism. We need a more technical and professional training.

The police have to have more shot training, not to kill anyone, but to know when you need to shoot,” he says.

The Agência Pública tried to contact some of the injured police officers in the Federal District, but they refused to talk.

In a statement, the Military Police stated that “makes continuous training in order to increasingly improve and update its staff, and these trainings are conducted with fire arms to simulate real situations of danger and police action. All care measures are taken, but unfortunately accidents happen not only here, but anywhere in the world, and besides, we have one of the lowest rates of accidents causing serious injury or even death,” concludes the note.

Former Military Police soldier, Rodrigo Nogueira, imprisoned since 2009, speaks about his book “Como nascem os monstros” (or “How the monsters are born”)

DICTATORSHIP CULTURE “Our public security system brings a lot of stuff from the time of the dictatorship, including training,” says the military policeman from Santa Catarina Elisandro Lotin.

“We’ve done numerous complaints [about the training courses]. Recently, here in Santa Catarina there was a police academy with 200 women and they were forced to stay in a position to support and do push-ups on hot asphalt at three in the afternoon, several of them were left with burns on his hands.

Then you will reach them and tell them defend society?” he asked.

Vanderlei Ribeiro, president of Aspra (Association of the Military Police and the Fire Department of Rio de Janeiro) since 2008, assigns the “amateurism” of training to the “culture” of the Military Police. “We are poorly trained, ill-equipped and misled by the militaristic culture that exists in the military polices throughout Brazil. The training requires from the beginning an authoritarian behaviour that will be reflected in the population. Military culture is perverse; it does not prepare the policeman to understand that he has a social commitment. The police academy does not have any qualification and does not prepare anyone to act on the street. Training is aggressive, does not respect human rights, is arrogant, authoritarian and police only know to do the same when leave the academy,” he says.

For sergeant Leonel Lucas, member of the Military Brigade of Rio Grande do Sul and president of ABAMF (Antonio Mendes Filho Benevolent Association) it is not only the training needs to improve. “Unfortunately, we still have some Nascimento captains [reference to “Tropa de Elite” movie] giving instruction in the training courses. That’s why I think the first thing that has to be changed is the academic training of senior officers, when we change the head of who’s in forming upstairs and senior officers begin to receive a more humanistic education, it will be reflected for those who are in the lower ranks.”

Darlan Menezes Abrantes, author of the book “Militarismo: um sistema arcaico de segurança pública” (or “Militarism: an archaic system of public security”)

Military police try to contain a demonstration held in July in Favela da Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro to remember the twoyear anniversary of the disappearance of Amarildo during a police operation

In April, the Curitiba Military Police used tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets to contain a demonstration of support for teachers of public schools that were on strike in the state

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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BEL PEDROSA

DEMILITARIZATION

ARQUIVO PESSOAL FERNANDO FRAZÃO/AGÊNCIA BRASIL AGÊNCIA PARANÁ

A matter that divides the opinion of police and public safety specialists: is it possible to offer a more humane and efficient training to police officers without changing the military nature of Military Police?

In almost all the interviews for this report, the issue of demilitarization of the police appeared revived by the Constitutional Amendment 51/2013 authored by Senator Lindbergh Farias (Workers Party).

The anthropologist Jacqueline Muniz thinks so. “The military structure itself does not limit the effect of the training process for the police, which prevents the police apply what he has learned is the abuse of power. There are police with military inspiration, as Gendarmarie, in France, the Carabinieri, in Italy, and the Spanish Civil Guard, that were democratized, have high degree of training and of police rights and duties are guaranteed as full citizens. And these policemen are very well evaluated by their societies and have even lower levels of violence, corruption and violation,” she said.

Elisandro Lotin goes in the same line. “You can have a military police since its performance on the street is focused on human dignity, citizenship, since unlink all that logic that the army still insists on having control of the military police: the arms to the training, the number of effective. From that untying [Army], that does not mean demilitarization; we can have a national array of activities of the military police in Brazil focused on human dignity in labour rights for public safety professionals, appropriate codes of ethics and democratic conduct,” he argues.

Vanderlei Ribeiro disagrees. “The militaristic structure is incompatible with the ostensible policing. Militarism is for the Army. First you have to move the structure to after you talk to change the formation. There is no other way. You can get the best specialist in the country to teach to the police, but what he will do on the street is different from what he learned there because the entrenched culture does not allow other behaviour. Here in Rio de Janeiro had several agreements with NGOs, several university professors were there to teach the courses and not changed at all because the whole point is military. It’s no use having comrade sociology class if they will arrive on the street and will kill if they are trained in this militaristic concept,” he says. “No use you make classes of human rights if the police are military. When you go to the street what predominates is the military idea is the military logic,” says the former soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes.

“In interviews with police for my dissertation, a line caught my attention. They said: ‘We went into service and become operational we go into enemy territory. In enemy territory, I kill or I die. Do not ask me to intercede for the life of the enemy’. After studying about this speech, I was studying the Doctrine of National Security and it needs an enemy to be present. The dictatorship, the enemy was who? Who challenged the dictatorship. Finished democratization and this idea persists today the enemy is those facing the police, who commits an offense or who live in certain areas. The speech of many authorities is the discourse of war, to return to the territory of the enemy, to occupy the hill and return to the state. It is the discourse of the National Security Doctrine. In line tip, the message comes thus: ‘There is an enemy, then annihilate’. Perhaps this explains the police lethality,” concludes Lieutenant Colonel Adilson Paes de Souza.

“When you see a soldier policing, something is already wrong.

Or comrade is soldier, or police. The soldier has a premise that is what? Kill the enemy. So that’s the main thing. The soldier is formed to eliminate the enemy and not the police, at least should not,” said the former military police soldier Rodrigo Nogueira Batista. “This confusion of responsibilities between soldiers and police, they cannot be solved easily. Things keep happening in the eyes of everybody and nobody does anything. For example, those people who were returning from a party within a white car and were chased by a patrol.

Nothing was coming from the car and the policeman gave 15 rifle shots into the car. This can only happen on the head of a soldier, the head of a policeman does not happen this way. A police would chase, surround. But he was not going to shot at who’s not giving shot at it.

Only the head of the soldier, who thinks it’s a war. The guy was there, he gave the siren and the car sped up to escape the police. ‘Oh, it’s a bad guy, I’ll shoot’. Could be someone drunk, could be everyone doing an orgy in the car, could have a drink in the car and the guy being afraid of being caught, the guy could not have license, the guy could be deaf... There are millions of things, but the guy did not stop to analyze these things because he was not conditioned to think, to contextualize the type of service he’s doing. He was trained for what?

Accelerated, ran, bullet!” says Nogueira Batista, today in prison.

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CONECTANDO

EMBROIDERING RESISTANCE

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This article was originally published by Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org).

To learn more about the Brasil Observer’s project CONECTANDO, visit brasilobserver.co.uk/about-conectando

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

Through a technique known as arpilleria, originated in the Chilean military dictatorship, a documentary seeks to portray the story of five women in five regions of Brazil that had their lives brutally affected by dam construction

By Fernanda Canofre

B

Back in the days when Pinochet ruled over Chile, there were stories that couldn’t be told. Until one group of Chilean women – mothers and wives of political prisoners – found a way. Using scraps of old clothing and working by candlelight, they started to denounce what was happening in the country through needlework, just as singer and composer Violeta Parra did before them.

Years later, the canvas made by las arpilleras has appeared in museums around the world as a document of life, abuse and torture in Chile under dictatorship.

It was at one of those exhibits – at the Resistance Memorial in São Paulo in 2011 – that the Movement of People Affected by Dams (MAB) in Brazil discovered the arpilleria technique. The exhibition, created to encourage embroidery as a tool for empowerment and resistance, fit perfectly with the MAB’s women’s collective. As they told Global Voices via email, after getting support from the European Union to document and denounce human rights violations in areas affected by dam construction, the groups started to give workshops in 2013 teaching arpilleria throughout the country.

In Brazil, as in many countries, the more benefits that construction companies claim their dams will bring, the more damage they seem to cause. In a statement released by the National Human Rights Council, 16 human rights violations were identified in dams’ zones in Brazil. And, as stated by the MAB, “for women, violations are even greater”. “With the arrival of thousands of workers in small towns where hydroelectric construction sites takes places, for example, there is an extension of the cases of sexual harassment, women trafficking, prostitution and rape”, they explained.

These are some of the stories that a documentary produced by the movement wants to tell. With the help of 325 supporters at the crowdfunding platform Catarse, the film achieved its goal of 25,000 reais (approximately 4,675 pounds) and even surpassed it a little more. Only on its Facebook page, the Arpilleras count 4,811 likes.

LITTLE STORIES, NOT SO LITTLE WOMEN The documentary intends to follow the stories of five women from the five regions of Brazil and how their lives were changed with the arrival of energy companies and their giant construction projects. With the production set to start this August, producers still haven’t defined who the subjects will be. The travelling to the regions affected by the dams will take place after that.

As they shared with Global Voices, dams’ tales only changes addresses. “We have been listening to all kinds of stories. The scope of loss is wide and goes from Maria’s case, who was threatened by the company if she didn’t accept the credit letter they offered; to Fernanda’s, who lost her income because she used to work doing party pastries; from Damiana’s, who couldn’t leave her little daughter with her neighbour anymore; to Jose’s, who at age 15 got pregnant from a worker, giving birth to yet another “dam baby” because the worker had to go back to his home and family; and Lucenilda’s, who managed to escape “Boate Xingu” (Xingu’s nightclub)

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where she was being kept in conditions of a private prison and slavery, being forced to prostitute herself several times a day”.

In its 30-year existence, the Movement of People Affected by Dams has noticed a pattern in energy companies’ installation of power plants from north to south. Reparations and resettlements, for instance, are always issued by the companies under men’s names, leaving women out. The numbers on violence point to a gruesome picture: “there is much evidence of an increase in sexual harassment, women trafficking and prostitution around the dam construction sites. Porto Velho, Rondonia, where the Santo Antonio and Jirau plant is located, registered a significant rise in the violence indices after construction work began. According to research from Plataforma Dhecas, between 2008 and 2010 the number of premeditated homicides went up 44%, and the percentage of rapes grew 208% in three years after project arrived.”

SEWING THROUGH Enter arpilleria. A skill that women from the areas affected by dams are already familiar with – sewing and needlework – has helped create a safe space for them to share their experiences with and opinions on the situation they find themselves in, according to MAB: “Women are the ones who suffer the most with dam construction, but they also possess an extraordinary strength to unite, empower collectively and move forward defending their rights and their family and community rights”.

To Adriane Canan, a Brazilian journalist and awarded filmmaker who will co-direct the documentary with Guilherme Weimann, arpilleria is a brave and empowering work for women. “I already knew some of the women’s fight in Chile and arpilleria from previous readings and from when I travelled there”, Canan tells. “But the more present contact, to understand how this technique was and is being used as a tool for resistance and the subjectivity of this fight, only happened now, with a closer relationship with MAB women”. Adriane, who studied film at the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de Los Baños, in Cuba, is no stranger for films that portray gender, living and environmental issues.

In the two years that the MAB’s National Women’s Collective has been working with arpilleras throughout Brazil, 100 workshops have taken place in 10 states with 900 women. As Neudicléia de Oliveira, an MAB member, said in an interview with Brasil de Fato newspaper, sewing used to be a way for many of these women to make a living. Now, it’s a political weapon.

While there is still very little political willingness to do something for communities violated by giant energy projects in Brazil, for MAB the arpilleras could be the beginning of a revolution: “Violeta Parra defined the arpilleras as ‘songs that are painted’.

To Chilean women, they were a way to grieve and to fight. Arpillera to us is like widemouthed scream in the form of needlework.

Arpillera is to offend the historical meaning of sewing, which merely corroborates woman’s place in the domestic, private sphere.

Arpillera is a revolution, sewn.”

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B R A S I L O B S E R V E R

TS IN UK BRAZILIAN MOVIE DEBU TOR, C E IR D E TH D N A S A M E CIN TO ANNA MUYLAERT, TALKS BRASIL OBSERVER >> PAGES 24 AND 25

DIVULGATION

D N O C E S E H T R E H T O M

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

GUIDE

DYNAMICS OF A Anna Muylaert during Sundance Festival

The ‘Second Mother’ paints a picture of the “big house and slave quarters” relationship that still exists in Brazil. “My approach is not to judge but to show the truth crudely,” says the director of the film, Anna Muylaert, to Brasil Observer

By Gabriela Lobianco

Debuting on 4 September in Britain, The Second Mother (Que Horas Ela Volta?, in Portuguese), a new movie by the Brazilian director Anna Muylaert (Durval Discos, É Proibido Fumar), and starring the actress Regina Case, who plays Val. “There is a thirst for high quality foreign language cinema, following the success of films like Wild Tales and Force Majeure this year,” said Hannah Farr, Communications Coordinator at SODA Pictures, commercial representative and responsible for launching the film in the UK. But before, the movie had a unique exhibition on 12 August as part of the Film4 Summer Screen, an outdoor film festival that happens for 14 days in the wonderful neoclassical garden of Somerset House.

The only Brazilian movie of the festival, the film was chosen for the session called Summer Screen Spotlight, which highlights the work of a director from anywhere in the world that is little known by the British audiences. The choice was a passion at first sight of the curator, David Cox, during the Berlin Film Festival this year. “I couldn’t wait for other people to see it too, and realised that the best way to

make that happen was for us to programme it at Somerset House. The audience response at the festival was so positive and lively that I’m looking forward to experiencing that again.” He assured that the premiere was not a marketing strategy, “although hopefully the word-of-mouth from our premiere will help the film when it’s released in September,” he said to the Brasil Observer.

Acclaimed at the Berlinale and at the Sundance Film Festival, one of the most important in the United States, the feature film garnered awards and surprised even the director. “Although I was sure about the film I have on hand, I could never imagine the size of the impact, especially outside the festival circuit and in the film market itself,” said Anna Muylaert in an exclusive conversation with Brasil Observer.

A PICTURE OF BRAZIL DIVIDED At first, the idea of the film is drawing a social portrait of power relations and affection between employers and employees in Brazilian society. Anna remembered what historian Ser-

gio Buarque de Holanda said: the Portuguese brought to Brazil the idea of “leisure rather than business.” “In other words, here to not do the [domestic] service is more valuable than to do the job,” she said. So The Second Mother is a work of social genre that talks with subtle touches on very deep-seated issues and culture of the country. Questions of a contemporary Brazil that still has not abandoned its colonial roots.

This “big house and slave quarters” relationship, to recall the book by Gilberto Freyre (The Masters and the Slaves), is still alive. And it is in the skin of Val (Regina Case) that we find this dynamic. From the North-eastern region of Brazil, divorced, migrant and probably illiterate, she has worked for 13 years as nanny of Fabinho (Michel Joelsas), the only son of a upper-middle-class couple from São Paulo, while her daughter Jessica (Camila Márdila) is raised by relatives in Pernambuco. Muylaert explains that working with Regina was designed, among other things, because of the physical type of the actress – “a syncretism mirror of races in Brazil because in one figure she’s white, black and indigenous” – which fits perfectly

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SECOND-CLASS CITIZEN DIVULGATION

Scenes of the movie The Second Mother

in the paradigm of the poor and marginalized class represented by Val. At the beginning, Val is treated as a family member by employers, Barbara (Karine Telles) and Carlos (Lourenço Mutarelli), with her little room at the back, and serves with exemplary discipline and affection. Then, the routine of the house is broken: the maid’s daughter appears in São Paulo to take university exams. In this reunion, Jessica does not understand how the mother lends itself to the role of servant or, in her words, how she agrees to be treated as “second-class citizen”. The subservience of Val in this upscale neighbourhood of Morumbi house, hamstrung by Paraisópolis slum, is exposed.

Muylaert, however, focuses its mise-en-scene in a graceful and elegant way, suggesting instead of imposing, with looks that expose the story without intervening. “My approach is not to judge the characters and their actions, but to show the truth crudely.” It is clear, however, that for inequality to be perpetuated it’s necessary for rich and poor to know what their places and their positions of power are.

After all, as we say in Brazil, for the wise, half a word is enough.

THE OUTSOURCING OF MOTHERHOOD The film is the realization of a more than 20-year project that Anna Muylaert began at the time of her first pregnancy. “It’s a question that we women face: no one wants to leave the baby, but we cannot give up having a professional life and consequent financial independence.” In this sub theme unfolds an issue as large as the exposed class struggle within the film: to give and take care of life.

The sexist mentality of society in general still says that being a mother is something innate to all women, and that it has the responsibility of caring for the young.

According to Anna, especially in Brazil, the mother’s work is not valued, “it is almost as if the child was hers alone; proof of this is the low wages of nannies.”

In a larger context, this shows that society stipulates that domestic work is not noble, whether it be exercised by the mother or by a contracted employee. And, just as rich and poor have its role in the social wheel, women and men have pre-established social functions.

“I think that we women have to open this discussion because we are in a wrong world, built by the sexist values, concerned about the relevant values to male beings. And within this world the issue of education, for example, is not as valued as it should,” she argues.

The American anthropologist Donna Goldstein, in her book Laughter out of place: race, class, violence, and sexuality in a Rio Shantytown, describes that it is within the emotional exchange between those who can pay for home help and the poor [women] offering their services that class relations are practiced and played. More wicked than any relationship between employers and employed, so is the emotional relationships that emerge in these ties, strengthening the hierarchy that imposes housework, especially when children are involved.

Muylaert believes that “more than genetics, who educates is who leaves the deepest marks.”

In this sense, submerge a pain in my chest, as I leave my daughter in full time day care while I work for the bread. I hope that as Val, I can overcome any trace on my baby. After all, we still live for the capital.

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To find out the film exhibition venues in the UK, visit the Soda Pictures website: www. sodapictures.com

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CULTURAL TIPS

MUSIC MARCELO D2 BRINGS BRAZILIAN RHYTHMS TO BRIXTON

When: 22 August Where: Electric Brixton Entrance: £25 + Booking Fee Info: www.electricbrixton.uk.com

DIVULGATION

Hip hop outfit Marcelo D2 are one of Brazil’s most influential artists from the last two decades and are set to perform at London’s Electric Brixton on August 22, their first performance in the UK since 2012.

MD2 have long been considered the band that reinvented hip hop in Brazil mixing samba rhythms and samples with chopped up beats and socially conscious lyrics, waxing lyrical about the challenges faced when living in the favelas. MD2 are fronted by Marcelo Maldonado Peixoto, a rapper from Rio who started his musical career with 90’s hip hop/rock crew Planet Hemp. In 1998, Marcelo subsequently followed a new path and so hip hop’s bridge to samba was built.

The band has since been popularising. Marcelo D2’s collaborations with hip hop royalty are numerous including 2013 single ‘Danger zone’, featuring Aloe Blacc. In 2011 Marcelo D2 recorded ‘Obrigado, Brasil’ with Snoop Dog and released on the LA rapper’s own label Doggystyle. The band has collaborated with Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas and recorded with Sergio Mendes on his ‘Timeless’ album.

Away from their recent starlit past, it is the band’s contribution to the popular songbook that is of significance to any narrative about contemporary popular music in Brazil. The combination of samba and rap simply did not exist on any scale until the arrival of Marcelo D2. By mixing the two genres, MD2 have managed to connect swathes of young Brazilian hip hop fans to the original swing of samba. This unique combination predominantly under an umbrella of black consciousness has given MD2 the rightful tag as pioneers in samba rap offering up a fresh new genre to the urban music landscape.

It was 2005 when MD2 released their much-lauded album, ‘Looking for the Perfect Beat’, on UK label Mr Bongo.

Their latest album released through EMI in 2013 entitled ‘Nada Pode Me Parar’ features Aloe Blacc and has proven a smash hit with millions of YouTube plays.

MD2 arrives as a 7-piece band and will be performing at Electric Brixton as part of a larger European tour. The show is put together by promoters B Mundo and Portuguese booking agency Primeira Linha.

When: 2 – 11 October Where: Barbican and Rich Mix Entrance: From £12 Info: www.casafestival.org.uk

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Nadia Kerecuk is Convenor of the Brazilian Bilingual Book Club of the Embassy of Brazil in London

When: 20 August Where: Embassy of Brazil in London Entrance: Free Info: www.culturalbrazil.org

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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THEATRE CASA LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE FESTIVAL IS BACK From 2–11 October, CASA Latin American Theatre Festival returns to the Barbican and Rich Mix for another world-class programme, with this year’s politically-charged line-up including a special Mexican focus as part of the 2015 Year of UK-Mexico. Originally inspired by Buenos Aires’ Casas de la Cultura – literally homes converted to makeshift arts centres – CASA has a loyal following after 9 years presenting over 40 international works, and this year expects to welcome over 3,000 visitors into its unique, celebratory world.

This year marks the festival’s first regional focus, with five Mexican UK premieres. Exploring themes of environmental change, love, sex and politics, the shows delve deep into the heart of the nation.

The Barbican’s Pit Theatre hosts Los Guggenheim’s The Love of the Fireflies (El amor de las luciérnagas), a surreal romantic comedy from leading playwright Alejandro Ricaño; and Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s I’ll Melt the Snow Off a Volcano with a Match (Derriteré con un cerillo la nieve de un volcán), an account of the decades of corruption, intimidation and violence sustaining Mexico’s governing party, PRI.

LITERATURE BRAZILIAN BOOK CLUB: CANAAN, BY GRAÇA ARANHA

By Nadia Kerecu k g

The next Brazilian Bilingual Book Club of the Embassy of Brazil will be discussing Canaã (original spelling is Chanaan), translated into English as Canaan (Boston, USA, 1920 and London, UK, 1921).

José Pereira da Graça Aranha was born in São Luís, State of Maranhão on 21 June 1868. He was a prodigy child and went on to read Law in Recife. He started his professional life as magistrate first in Rio de Janeiro and, then, in Porto do Cachoeiro in the State of Espírito Santo. It was there that he would try a case of young immigrant mother from a German settlement that was accused of killing her own baby, fictionalized in his major novel Canaan.

Canaan was described as a “novel of ideas” soon after its publication. Brazil had an official policy to bring immigrants to Brazil to occupy and settle in its vast territory and, also, to replace slave labour force once the Abolition of Slavery came into force. Additionally, a number of private “immigration companies” appeared at the time exploiting the possibility of bringing immigrants to Brazil. The narrator offers a critical overview of effects that the arrival of immigrants created.

Gaining early recognition as a novelist, Canaan’s author benefitted from favourable reviews first in Paris. Anatole France (1844-1924) hailed Canaan as “the great American novel”. The New York Times reviewed Canaan after the publication of its translation into English stating that it “views humanity through the telescope of cosmic philosophy, as a baby taking its first uncertain steps toward Utopia”.

Graça Aranha became a diplomat initially under the wing of the notable Joaquim Nabuco. As his private secretary, he worked at the Embassy of Brazil in London becoming a skilled negotiator.

He became acquainted with intellectual currents in pre-WWI Europe meeting and corresponding with some of the most notable authors.

On his return to Brazil he advocated social, political and artistic reform in earnest, he became a leading figure in the 1922 Week of Modern Art, which he launched with a lecture entitled ‘The Emotional Aesthetic of Modern Art’ on 13 February 1922. He died in Rio in 1931.

Find more about the novel and the author at http://goo.gl/keMhmk

The Rich Mix programme includes Border Mass (Misa Fronteriza) by Gorguz Teatro and Universiteatro, a ritualistic musical set on the Mexican-US border, direct from an acclaimed run at Mexico’s National Theatre Festival; Colectivo Alebrije’s Apart (Aparte), following a young generation’s journey under the skin of their past to find hope for the future; and Montserrat, an autobiographical thriller by celebrated artist Gabino Rodriguez investigating his mother’s mysterious death from Mexico to Costa Rica via London.

Also on sale is the return of the Nuestra CASA Scratch Night, now firmly established as a powerhouse of new Latin American work in the UK. Recent winners have included Fringe First Award-winner Juana in a Million and last year’s Three Weeks Editor’s Award winner Manuelita, with five new companies competing this year.

Further international premieres are still to be announced alongside artist master classes and community events. And always as much a party as a theatre festival, the full programme will also include CASA’s legendary line-up of food, drink, live music and dancing.

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

COLUMNISTS

FRANKO FIGUEIREDO

NURTURING A NEW GENERATION There is still a wide gap in providing opportunities for young people to practice the art of directing. Currently, you can sign up to Genesis Directors, a network set up by the Young Vic, where emerging directors can access development workshops and opportunities, or you can apply to the Regional Theatre Young Director Scheme, or the various traineeships run by venues such as the National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse or the Royal Court. They are all very competitive and some may say, the latter option is extremely hard to access.

If you have the funds, you can apply for an MA course at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Central School of Speech and Drama or the Birberk College; even Morley College is soon to open a basic theatre-directing course. They all provide different routes into theatre directing. But how can we create routes that are more accessible and which provide participants with tangible opportunities?

As a director, I have often been approached by young people offering to assist me in exchange for learning from my rehearsal processes; in 2004, I had received so many emails and letters that I was pushed into thinking how I could support and nourish their desire to learn more about theatre directing.

The question came: could directing be taught? I decided to have a go. This was 10 years ago.

I approached Lewisham Arts and the now defunct Local Network Fund with the idea of running a young directors training programme. They liked the project and funded us to run the first Young Directors Festival at the Brockley Jack Studio in 2006. In 2007, we partnered with the Albany, Deptford and in 2013, we gained new associates: Regents University, London.

The programme content was inspired by my own training, which didn’t follow a particular root. I started writing and acting for the stage at the age of 15; and from then onwards, I assisted other directors and got involved with producing, designing and ultimately directing. I started making my own work, devising, adapting and writing until I finally officialised my training by completing an MA at Rose Bruford College specialising in Theatre Directing.

Like most artists, my professional career has been an uphill struggle, but none of the obstacles I faced stopped me from pursuing what I love most: making theatre. Let’s face it: it is not easy for a non-white, non-British artist to be given a voice in the UK Theatre scene now, imagine in the early 90s! Venues were very resistant to taking risks

on emerging artists, and although diversity in the arts have improved, there is still a lot to be fought for, a lot more to be achieved.

Despite everything, the more hurdles I was faced with, the more I strengthened myself; I jumped over some, fell at others, but most of all, I transformed those obstacles into opportunities. ‘Make it happen’ being my motto, I didn’t wait for anything to come to me.

I made it happen. StoneCrabs Theatre was born from this drive, this persistence in trying to make something different, bringing different voices to the stage, and so was the young directors training programme.

The Young Directors Programme exists to provide an opportunity to young emerging talent who, for many reasons, would not normally be able to access practical theatre training.

The programme aims to find diverse voices that can enrich the current UK theatre ecology.

Theatre fuels both television and cinema, many actors and directors start their careers from working on the stage. We cannot forget the importance of fostering young talent who will be responsible for future stories. We need to make sure that there are distinct stories being told.

We cannot underestimate the importance of seeing diverse voices on the stage, when we do not see ourselves on the stage, we are reminded that the world is being ruled mostly by rich, white and male politicians who don’t understand or care for the needs of the others (the poor, working class, non -white, female, etc). We need to be political about it, we need to embrace our uniqueness, we need to value and tell different stories.

StoneCrabs Young Directors Programme is an intensive 5-month long programme where participants take the driving seat in creating they own festival. This means that alongside the process of learning directing tools, working on plays, analysing play-texts, meeting other industry professionals, participants will also look into fundraising, marketing and producing their own shows for a week-long festival that is hosted by the Albany, Deptford.

StoneCrabs Young Directors Training programme is open for applications until 18 August.

For more information please visit www.stonecrabs.co.uk.

Franko Figueiredo is artistic director and associate producer of StoneCrabs Theatre Company (stonecrabs.co.uk)

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

AQUILES RIQUE REIS

OLD MUSICAL FRIENDS

RICARDO SOMERA

NEW VOICES FROM BRAZIL

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Clarinettist and saxophonist Nailor Proveta and the guitarist Alessandro Penezzi were to record an album. They became to show great concern, anguish as well. Even before I had the CD in my hands, either by intuition or guesswork – I don’t know – they went on to express an almost childish joy.

Without knowing exactly why so much anxiety, I still lived in solidarity with it.

That’s when, months later, I put my hands on a copy of Velha Amizade (Old Friendship, literally translating to English). Then I had to congratulate my ears by lucky guess to take unshakable faith in the cue of the two instrumentalists. They did more than that, my ears: they drew in advance that the album was something to be always at hand, in the lighter hours of the day to day or in the darkest hours of starry night.

It was almost the tenth time that the album was playing when I started wondering: how can it take so long to happen the meeting that brought to the public the union of these two? Why the unexpected took so long to bring us so pleasantly surprised?

Of the thirteen recorded themes, two are authored by both, seven by Penezzi and by Proveta. In each of the arrangement highlighted the phrasing of the instruments, their unisons, improvisation and dynamic. And all enhanced by precious mixing of Mario Gil. Now imagine, dear reader, a giant roller coaster. Imagined? For now put yourself in a stroller – do not forget to buckle your seat belt. One, two, three and go! Without res-

pecting the limits decreed that the “journey” should start slow... Nah, they play right away.

And in such a way that breathing wants to miss – it almost stops.

The roller coaster rails look like the pentagram lines. Between turns, spins and long straights, there are curves, steep climbs and hallucinated descents that, with the vertigo that cause, most seem to be hallucinogenic.

The stand roller coaster flies along the way (or is it arrangement?) prepared to make those with him will be totally focused on what came before, what is now and what is yet to come.

Velha Amizade is like this cart. When embarking on their tracks, the listener seems to hear that Proveta does not need to breathe or Penezzi does not seem to have only ten fingers.

Listening to the CD carefully, you do not lose any part of a banquet served in chords filled with musical notes. There are choro, polkas, samba-choro, Schottisch... All fattened by the seven-string guitar of Penezzi and the clarinet and the soprano Saxes of Proveta.

Hearing is full of reasons to make us happy: sometimes lush, sometimes bohemian, sometimes exquisite, sometimes alternating moments of clear agility with other serene romance, each melodic phrase serves as food for those who embark on the genius of this album.

The new crop of British musicians and bands can be found on the coolest radios in the world such as BBC 1, Absolute Radio and KEXP, or through player lists like Spotify and Radio. But to see what’s new in Brazil, it is difficult to count on Brazilian radio. While we hear o the foreign radio stations artists like Jack Garratt, George the Poet and Formation – but on Brazilian radio we will find only “sertanejo universitário” (a kind of country music), funk from São Paulo and sometimes Gun’s and Roses (yes, G&R in 2015!).

So I decided to write about new names of the independent scene in Brazil. A lot of good, creative and interesting people have gained ground in alternative clubs of Rio, Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre, but I had to make a selection of only four: Jaloo, Rico Dalasam, Russo Passapusso and Johnny Hooker.

From the metropolitan region of Belém, capital of Brazil’s Northern state of Pará, is one of the coolest new features. Jaime Melo, known as Jaloo recently released his EP Insight, with four songs including a cover of “Oblivion”, by the singer Grimes. Local media likes to associate Jaloo to tecnobrega – the most popular rhythm in Pará – but for me the boy is more like M83 from the Amazon. My favourite song is “Odoiá (In Your Eyes)”, a pleasant surprise to free the mind.

Representative of queer rap in Brazil, the talented Rico Dalasam is challenging rap stereotypes with his songs protesting in favour of a cause little explored in national rap: the gay scene. With hits like “Aceite-C” and “Riquíssima”, Rico has put everyone to dance opening shows of famous names such as

Rationais MC’s and Criolo, as well as participate in TV programs. Talent and scolding abound to this new name of Brazilian rap.

Front man of BaianaSystem, the musician from Bahia Roosevelt Ribeiro de Carvalho, better known as Russian Passapusso, is a mixture between Nação Zumbi, Otto and Criolo. Until the day of his show (sold out!) on a rainy Tuesday in São Paulo, I had no idea who he was. Luckily I got a ticket with a friend because it was one of the richest and amazing performances of the year. The strength of musicians like Curumim and Saulo Duarte adds a lot to the sound and vibe of the songs. “Flor de Plástico” was sung (twice) in chorus by fans, and “Anjo” were the big highlight of the presentation. I became a fan!

The multi artist John Donovan (aka Johnny Hooker) is the David Bowie of the tropics (more lizard than a chameleon, which is great).

An actor of cult movies, bar singer, Johnny surprises us by his diversity of references, ranging from Madonna to Caetano Veloso. Since I met the artist I see a mixture of Ney Matogrosso, Felipe Catto and Cassia Eller. This perception is reinforced in the romantic-tacky-cult album Eu Vou Fazer Uma Macumba pra Te Amarrar Maldito!, which took first place in the Deezer and Itunes Brasil at the time of launch and is already a new classic of Brazilian Popular Music. From Recife to São Paulo, from the sadness to the knockout.

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Aquiles Rique Reis is musician, vocalist of MPB4

Ricardo Somera is an advertising professional and you can find him on Twitter @souricardo and Instagram @outrosouricardo

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

TRAVEL

A PIECE OF LAND LOST AT SEA Local friends and people who love Florianopolis give their tips to enjoy this paradise in southern Brazil

By Ana Beatriz Freccia Rosa

“Um pedacinho de terra perdido no mar”, or “A piece of land lost at sea”, says the song ‘Rancho de Amor à Ilha’, composed by Claudio Alvim Barbosa, the official anthem of Florianopolis, capital of Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina, one of the greatest Brazilian beauties. In this place close to the sea at the foot of a hill, the pioneer Francisco Dias Velho founded the Village Nossa Senhora do Desterro, where the Square XV de Novembro is, in the central region.

From there Florianopolis began to expand, with its small streets bordering the beach. The Figueira, a century-old tree, is one of the main places to visit – and according to some if you walk around it several times it can bring you marriage and fortune.

This paradise in the south of Brazil is one of the most internationally known Brazilian cities, either by beautiful women parading in bikinis during the summer or the beautiful landscapes, which makes the city considered perfect for those who enjoy being close to nature.

If you have plans to travel to Brazil, know that Floripa – as it is called – is not on the main routes.

But, located just 45 minutes from Sao Paulo by plane it’s the perfect city for those who do not have much time: on a weekend you can traverse the entire island and leave in love with its people, its 42 beaches and its natural beauty.

By car, you can easily access the main attractions of all areas of the city, as well as the mainland, once the other side of the bridge is still considered Florianopolis. Two bridges make the island-continent connection and the historical Hercilio Luz Bridge, without access to cars or pedestrians anymore, it is one of the main Floripa’s postcards.

Florianopolis is a city for everyone, because it offers great food, beautiful scenery, and beaches for all tastes, culture, arts, nature, sports and more. Today, Florianopolis is responsible for 70% of production of oysters in the country and about 5,000 people make their living with the creation of shellfish in the south of the island. Floripa’s excellent cuisine was named World Heritage by UNESCO. Dream of consumption and life of almost all Brazilians, Floripa is my hometown and even living for five years abroad, I do not get tired of hearing good and interesting things that come out every time over the city. But, as I am in love with the island, I asked for local friends and those passionate about the city like me to give their best tips. And even as a heavenly place, please note: Florianopolis has four very distinct seasons, so it’s good to take care when packing!

If your travel is between the months of May and October, in addition to the swimwear you need to take a scarf. Now enjoy the tips and good trip!

Jurerê is a must: it is the only district of Brazil which has no walls, and without being a gated community!

There has Donna and 300 restaurants which are great.

Taste the pizza at Lorenzo’s, spend Sunday in Ribeirao and taste the delicious oysters in Ostramadus. Go to Campeche Island and dance on The Roof. Finnish the weekend in one of the great restaurants of Beira Mar Avenue

My favourite place is the Daniela

Luiz Augusto

Raquel Lima

Beach: clear water and calm sea.

I love the car keepers that leave water bottles behind the vehicles for cleaning feet Rubia Guedes

Have lunch at the restaurant Casa Do Chico, enjoy Matadeiro Beach and the trail to Ponta das Aranhas, through the Costão do Santinho are my tips for those who come to visit the island

brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

VISIT BRASIL

VISIT BRASIL

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VISIT BRASIL

Jurerê

Plate of oysters

Hercilio Luz Bridge

Lagoon of Conceição

Public Market VISIT BRASIL

A great options for families with children are wandering around the Lagoon of Conceição and have lunch at Barracuda (best children’s area). I also suggest Lorenzo’s pizza, the Daniela Beach, Horto Florestal and the Tamar Project Patrícia Tabalipa

I love and worth knowing: 1)

I love the Naufragados Beach,

Travessa Ratcliff, especially on

which comes after a wonderful

Saturdays, for a small market

trail, with exuberant nature. I

street in Tiradentes and you

also like Mozambique Beach:

can have a beer in Mad Kelt; 2)

cold water, high surf and high

Watch some play or concert at

spirits. Last year, I went around

Alvaro de Carvalho Theatre; 3)

the island and saw the Arvoredo

It is not in Florianopolis, but in

Island, beautiful, with unique sea

Sao Jose, on the second Sunday

life, wonderful place to take a dip!

of every month, there’s a fair in

Another wonderful trail begins

Old Town Square, with different

on the road to Joaquina Beach

foods and always a thematic

and leaves you on Gravata Beach,

presentation; 4) Ribeirao da Ilha

very beautiful. Restaurants: Japex,

to stroll and linger in the square

Floripa and Itaguaçu

Rodrigo Santiago

Cleiane Steinbach

GUSTAVO BRAZZALLE

RECOMMENDATION Apino Turismo (www. apino.com.br) creates the script that you want: luxury, adventure, family, honeymoon or a mixture of all you want to do on the island or to the coastal cities in other parts of the state of Santa Catarina. If you like to explore new places and feel like a local, contact Floripa Walking Tour on Facebook and know the city on foot.

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brasilobserver.co.uk | August 2015

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