Category: Brazil

Brazil was once derided as “the country of the future and always will be” but it seems to have become the country of today.   The economy is doing very well, even in these tough global times and this year Brazilians will vote in their sixth free presidential election. That was the topic of a seminar I attended today at the Wilson Center.

It was interesting even before I got into the room.  As I checked for my name on the guest list, I noticed that we were all listed by our first names. I had forgotten.  That is how they do it in Brazil.  You generally call people by their first names, even if you don’t know them well.

You can read about the panelist at the link above.  I am going to write in general just to put out the quick note.

Brazil faces the challenge of success. The currency is stable; economy doing well and Brazil is getting the international respect it has long sought. Much of this is the result of the “Plano Real” enacted in 1994. At that time, Brazil was in dire straits and its options were limited. They had to follow good macroeconomic policies and privatize or at least discipline state owned firms.  Today, options have expanded and so has temptation to slip back into the state capitalism or socialism that created so many problems in the past. The Economist featured and article about that last week, and comments of panelists echoed some of the same themes.

The middle class has grown. Brazilian sociologist divide their society into groups A,B, C, D, E.  A&B are fairly rich. C is middle class, i.e. people can afford some things like nice TVs, computers etc.   The C class has grown by thirty million in the last decade and has gone up from 34% to 49% of the population. These people are feeling good and Brazilian consumer confidence is at an all time high.  The issues are “middle class” priorities, such as crime, drugs and schools. Concerns about jobs, inflation and poverty have moved into the “givens” categories and do not motivate voters as much in this election.

The current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, just called by “Lula,” comes from the workers’ party (PT) which was socialistic, but Lula has followed policies that have mostly made businesses and investors happy. He is very popular, and could almost certainly win a third term, but Brazilian presidents are limited to two terms (like ours). So he is trying to pass his popularity to Dilma Rousseff (just called Dilma) his former chief of staff, who will run on the PT ticker. Dilma has never run for office before, so nobody knows how well she will do. Lula is phenomenally charismatic, Dilma, not so much.  The question is whether Lula will be enough. Panel members pointed out that it is easier for Brazilian politicians to control the message  and that PT will protect Dilma.

The main opposition candidate is Sao Paulo governor Jose Serra.  Serra is ahead in the polls, but everybody agreed that it is much too soon to tell. Serra (they called him by his last name, maybe because Jose is such a common name) is known as a competent manager, but not charismatic as Lula. IN this election, where most people are content with the status quo, his strategy seems to be that his management competence will be better to maintain and enhance the good times that people are living today.  But it is always hard to sell change when times are good.

Some of the outlines of the election are already clear. Serra is strong in the richer parts of the country (the South and Southeast) and among the richer people. The panelist agreed that Dilma will carry the poorer parts of the population, but Serra will need to ensure that the loss is not a landslide.

The question and answer session added a few insights.  For example, the panelists agreed that race is not an issue in Brazil as it is in the U.S.   Brazil doesn’t treat race in the binary way we do. There has been a lot of racial mixing and it is possible for siblings to be in different racial categories.   Most Americans “blacks” would be thought of as mixed race in Brazil and many would even be classified as white.  There is some trouble now with the idea of quotas.  One person told a story about applicants at the University in Brasilia where twin brothers categorized themselves differently and the one got in based on race preference.  

Internet is still not important politically in Brazil.  Radio is still the big way to reach people.  This year, however, it will be possible for candidates to solicit money over the Internet and the parties have brought down U.S. consultants with experience raising Internet money here.  Nobody knows how that will work out.

The most interesting guy on the panels was Alberto Almeida, Director, Instituto Análise.  His talk was interesting and delivered with a great and amusing style.   I will have to make a point of looking him up when I get to Brazil.   He wrote a book called “A cabeça do brasileiro.”  I would like to read it.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be available on any of the online bookshops I can access.

There is some other references from the Wall Street Journal. 

I have been reading clips from Brazilian newspapers. The Embassy put me on their electronic distribution network and gave me SharePoint access. I get daily PDF files of articles about environment, energy, politics, culture and security. My Portuguese is coming back very nicely, at least reading. I can read most of the articles fairly rapidly and I can do it well enough that I actually enjoy it, i.e. I can get the news and views from the article rather than just treat it as a language lesson. It is a lot easier to read contemporary articles and easy if you can follow the news narrative.  Since I know what to expect, I can often understand unfamiliar words and phrases from the context.   I am learning a lot about cotton subsidies, foreign military sales in Brazil, renewable energy and the Brazilian government’s attitude about Iran.

Naturally, it is easier to relearn a language than to start from scratch.  I used to reach the Brazilian newspapers every day when I was assigned there. The funny thing is that I think I am actually better now than I was back then.  It doesn’t seem possible. The intervening quarter century should have wiped out much of my Portuguese and it had, but the reading came back very fast.  I don’t remember being able to sight read articles as I can now.  Maybe my standards are lower, but I think my general ability to comprehend and figure out written foreign languages just go better with practice, even if the practice was in Polish or Norwegian and not Portuguese. I will see how good I really am when they give me the test before I start formal study.

My comprehension of spoken Portuguese is not good at all. I got several Brazilian movies.  I couldn’t tell what was going on w/o the subtitles, although I am not entirely sure it is only the language because even with the subtitles I sometimes cannot follow every plot line.  There is a lot of cultural context in film.  Sometimes I cannot follow British television shows, even though I understand most of the language.  I never understood the attraction of Benny Hill, for example.  

I used to watch the Brazilian news every night when I was working there and I recall understanding it well-enough.   But news is familiar.  Maybe that is why I can understand the newspaper articles so well.  I wouldn’t want to tackle a Brazilian novel. 

New technologies are making it easier to study language. I can get the Brazilian news on the same day.  I remember when I first learned Portuguese.  I had to page through copies of very old magazines and newspapers on that ultra thin airmail paper.

I am really motivated to get the language right. I want to be precise. My Portuguese used to be fluent, but I don’t think it was really good. This time I will do better. 

Brazil was my first post. I learned a lot and made a lot of mistakes.  I learned some lessons so that I won’t make the same mistakes again. I suppose I will come up with a whole new set of them.

Brazil is a very interesting country and I can’t think of a better place for me at this time.

I got my “welcome to post” notification from Brasilia.   It is still more than a year in the future and it seems sort of ironic as I watch the snow falling outside my window but the future has a way of becoming the present faster than you think.  

So much advance notice is unusual.  I had my boots on the ground in Iraq about a month after I first even thought about volunteering for the job, but usually we get around a year.   Two years is unusual unless you are assigned to hard language training. 

Portuguese is an odd language when it comes to our training.  It is a “world language” and it is a fairly easy language to learn, but it is not as common as other “easy” world languages like Spanish or French.  Since it is not a  not a “hard language” like Russian, Arabic or Chinese, the FS sometimes doesn’t build in enough time to learn or relearn it as it does for officers assigned to posts with hard languages.   This system can work for French or Spanish, since there are lots of people in posts with those languages, Portuguese maybe not so much.   I don’t know if I explained that well, but it makes sense to me.   Suffice to say that for this PAO assignment they really wanted someone with good Portuguese, so this time they built in enough time to make sure of it and I am the beneficiary.

This is very exciting.  I learned Portuguese at FSI a quarter century ago and I got to be fluent when I was in Brazil for a couple years.   In those days you had to use the language all the time, since English was not that common in Porto Alegre.  But fluent is not necessarily the same as good.  You can speak very fast and fluently but not get the grammar or the words exactly right and I never felt really confident.   Diplomats should be really good at the languages of the countries where they are assigned and this additional training – with some consistent work – will put on the polish.   I hope so.

I don’t expect to speak like a native, but I want to get very good.  We have numbers from 1 to 5.  I want to get to 4 before I leave for Brazil, but the numbers don’t mean much.  I think of it in terms of foreign actors.  I want to get to the equivalent of Ricardo Montalban, but I am afraid I had only reached the sophistication of Sergeant Shultz on the old Hogan’s Heroes in my previous time.  I am not starting from zero this time.  I have been reading the WSJ in Portuguese.  I don’t get all the details, but I can understand most of the articles.  I also bought a dozen of Brazilian movies.  W/o the subtitles I would be out of luck, but even in the short time I have been doing it; the language is starting to come back.

Technological advances make it a lot easier to learn languages; at least it has become a lot easier to get the materials.  I can read Brazilian newspapers online and listen to radio and TV.  And of course Brazilian-Portuguese movies are easy to find.  There is almost no comparison to how it was twenty-five years ago.   I remember being happy to get those old newspapers and having to copy audio tapes.

Look below at what I just did   I used Word to translate the paragraph above into Portuguese and then back translated into English.  It did a decent job.  I would have to make a few minor corrections.   The strangest thing is that it translated the word Portuguese into English.   It also left out some of the subtlety, such as “I want.”  The Portuguese translation is better than the back translation to English, it has the “I want” (quero) for example.  This is understandable, since it is like making a copy of a copy.  But the translation certainly still makes sense and is a thousand times better than I could do on my own – the wonders of modern technology.  

Desta vez, quero aprender a escrever português.   Temos de aprender a falar e ler-se nos nossos cursos de língua, mas nós não aprender a escrever, pelo menos não como escrever bem.    Aguardo com expectativa a obtenção de muita ajuda a este respeito de Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word é muito bom na fixação de palavras que estão escritas quase corretamente.   Ele faz isso em inglês, parto do princípio de que é possível fazê-lo também em português.

Back translation

This time, I learn to write English.   We must learn to speak and read in our language courses, but we do not learn how to write, at least not how to write well.    I look forward to getting a lot of help from Bill Gates.   Microsoft Word is very good at fixing of words that are written almost correctly.   It does this in English, I assume that it is possible also in English.

It is really interesting the way that the machine can translate in seconds.  But somehow I am staring to understand how John Henry felt when he saw that steam drill rolling up.

I am back in the U.S. after my week in Brazil.   We took the overnight flight that left at 10pm.  The plus side of flying through the night is that the day is free, so we spent our last Saturday in Brazil looking around Sao Paulo.  It was a great day: cool and clear.  I had not been back in Brazil since 1988.  No surprise that a lot has changed.  The roads are better.  There is less air pollution.  People are interested in protecting the environment.    People are running in the parks.   I didn’t get to Porto Alegre, so I am basing my opinions only on Paraná and Sao Paulo.  I knew those places less well.   

They always said that Brazil was the country of the future.  Looks like it has arrived. Anyway, I have some short comments and pictures that together are enough for a post.  They are below.

Below is feijoada, a bean, rice and meat dish.  It is very filling.  And below is a local pharmacy, unrelated to the beans, but maybe not.

Below – any place that has good beer is civilized.

Below is the monuement to the Bandeirantes.  They were a mixture of explorers, pioneers and bandits, who explored and settled southern Brazil.

Below is the monument to Brazilian Airforce pilots from World War II.  Brazil was the only South American country to send fighting troops to support the allies.  They fought bravely in the Italian campaign. They also patrolled the S. Atlantic and hosted bases.

Below – runners in Sao Paulo

Below Cesar and Tim.  Cesar was my colleague back in Porto Alegre, lo those many years ago.  In the background are rips roasting at the churascaria.

Below – the last picture is not in Sao Paulo.  It is me at the falls in Parana.  Brazil has a lot of variety.

See video of the Sao Paulo vista at this link.  

Sao Paulo is the biggest city in Brazil and the third largest metropolitan area in the world.   It is a nice place to visit for short time, but I would not like to live in this mega-city.    I have to say that it has improved a lot since I was last here.  The air is less polluted and there are some attractive buildings, but it still is a paradise for lovers of concrete and cinderblock.

We are staying in the Marriott Renaissance in the Jardim section of town.    I found some pretty places including a park that features a small part of the Atlantic forest in the middle of the city.  

We had some very good meetings with technology leaders.   Brazil is an exciting place for new technologies will be or already is a leader in social community systems.   I will write some general comments about what I learned later.  Suffice to say that our Brazilian friends have done impressive things and will be major players in the new media.  

Street Scene in Sao Paulo

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You get to eat several pounds of really good meat and I taking full advantage of the opportunity in Brazil.  We now have some churrascurias in the U.S.   The most famous is Fogo de Chao.   But in the U.S. these are upscale restaurants.  They have to be because of the price of good beef.   In Brazil they started off as feasts for the working man and in most places they have kept that mission.

We passed dozens of churrascurias on the road from Sao Paulo to Jaguariaivia in Parana.  Most were associated with gas stations, which fit with a kind of truck-drivin’ feeling.  We finally stopped off at one called Fontana.  We got there at the end of the rush hour and the place was still full of families having a boisterous good time.    They quickly identified us as “not from around here” and everyone was very friendly.   English was not common and my Portuguese had atrophied almost out of existence, but we easily got by.   A couple of young people stopped by to inform us that they were studying English, but did not attempt to pursue the conversation beyond that.  

Brazilian roads have improved a lot since I last drove on them and I didn’t feel in imminent danger most of the time.   Cars have improved too, so you don’t get that combination of very slow junk heaps blocking traffic and testosterone charged me in muscle cars anxious to pass them.  Slow trucks still remain a problem, but the better roads and extra lanes have turned them into more a nuisance than a menace.  

It was actually a pleasure to drive most of the time although expensive.   Brazilian cars run on alcohol, which was not too expensive, but the major roads are leased to private firms.  They maintain them but the price is high.  We probably paid around $70 in tolls.   If the choice is free, public, dangerous and bad versus good, expensive, smooth and safe, I suppose I choose second option.  But it could be a little less expensive.  My guess is that a lot of the local traffic is pushed onto secondary roads, which remain as they were.

We rented a car from Hertz and paid the extra $15 for GPS.  It was worth it.  I don’t think we could have gotten out of Sao Paulo w/o it.  It tried to mislead us a few times, but on balance was good.  It is amazing how far technology has come.  You no longer really need local knowledge.  In the old days, we didn’t even have good maps and we spent a lot of time asking locals for directions.  They often did not really know the answers, but they were polite and told good stories.

Jaguariaivia is a pleasant little town.   The thing that struck me was the number of Evangelical and Pentecostal churches.   There were dozens along the road and in the city.  Brazil has been almost an exclusively Catholic country for centuries, but I am not sure that they are any longer the majority in Parana and certainly not the majority of the enthusiastic believers.