I have always wondered why there are so few (almost none that I can think of) Dopers from anywhere in South America. Thanks for starting this thread and hope you continue to contribute to other threads, at least giving some insight into South American perspectives.
I believe every country in SA speaks Spanish, except for Brazil. Does speaking Portuguese set Brazil apart from the neighboring countries in any other ways? Are they considered “outsiders”? Do most Brazilians learn Spanish in school as a second language? How wide spread is English?
So far, I am loving this thread. I lived there on and off for almost a decade while married to a Brazilian woman, and can attest to the “personal service” aspect of all life there being the norm. Everyone has a few cell phones, not because they are rich, but because calling is free to all phones on the same carrier, so it’s cheaper to have 4 plans (I suspect now it’s down to three).
When I was in Rio, I lived in Botafogo (and never wore my Corinthians shirt), but was amazed at how easy it was to go by metro to the beaches. Speaking of which, how is the crime in that bus stretch between Barra and Ipanema?
Oh, Red Wiggler, I thought of another possible cultural explanation for poor work ethics: Brazil was one of the last countries to abolish slavery (1888, IIRC). Places like Rio de Janeiro were totally dependent on slaves for stuff to get done - Rio for a long time was a major city with no sewer system, simply because it was far cheaper to get slaves to chuck the contents of the chamber-pots into the surf every morning. I guess it became a habit for society to rely on someone else to do the heavy work; now there are no slaves to do it, so now a lot of the work simply doesn’t get done because nobody can be arsed. The south had much fewer slaves, many places only getting developed after abolition, and so didn’t get that cultural influence.
It’s a guess, anyway.
You’re very welcome, I’m glad this thread took off! I’ve been lurking almost every day since 2000, but I don’t post much. I do try to contribute whenever I see something relevant to South America or another subject I’m confident about.
In South America, in Suriname they speak Dutch, in Guyana English, and French Guyana is still a part of France. But then none of those countries have any exposure or influence whatsoever here. Brazil is “apart” because of the different language, but not an outsider - it’s the undisputed regional power, and MERCOSUR is effectively dominated by Brazil. Everyone generally gets along, and regional tensions (which are real issues, and sometimes violent) are caused by clashes in national interests rather than linguistic or cultural differences, from what I see.
Brazilians like to pretend they understand Spanish, and Spanish-speakers who have to deal with Brazilians generally learn enough of the differences to manage. However, there definitely is a bit of a language barrier. Spanish is an obligatory subject in school, but nobody takes it seriously (including the teachers), so nobody learns anything at all. Speaking to my wife about it right now, she commented that the hermanos probably learn more Portuguese than Brazilians learn Spanish.
English is another obligatory subject, but people graduate only knowing how to say “the book is on the table”. That’s not a joke or exaggeration. English is virtually unknown here, even in the tourist industry. Some people at higher levels at businesses learn English (many of them having lived in the US for a while), and many middle-class younger people who are plugged-in to modern technology learn. The attitude is changing a bit - people are accepting that they need to learn English to really get ahead (though that doesn’t translate to studying hard in the courses they pay for, sadly - they pay for a course and expect to learn everything automatically). That’s a decent source of income for my wife and I
I’m delighted you’re enjoying it! Yeah, people still do the multiple phones - TIM, Claro, Oi, and Vivo. I only have one, though. These days, however, they all suck - a while back the feds banned the sale of new SIM cards from one operator each in each state, which they soon backed off of unfortunately, because there’s simply no service. For much of the day I can’t receive or make phone calls, and the data plan for my smartphone rarely works. There’s simply no infrastructure for the number of cell phones these days, and the cell phone carriers are already making such huge profits that there’s no point in expanding alone. Ridiculous, but what can I do.
Yeah, going to the beach by metro is fine if you live in Botafogo or anywhere along that stretch to the centre. Unfortunately there’s a fair bit of bitterness that the upper-middle and upper classes are the only ones well served by the metro system, while the rest of us have to take the bus.
Crime on the bus stretch between Barra and Ipanema isn’t a problem at all these days as far as I’ve heard. The danger was São Conrado and such because of favela Rocinha - the worst favela in town, home of the Comando Vermelho gang. But, joy of joys, they’ve been evicted! There’s a permanent police presence there now, and Rocinha is getting integrated into the city again - cultural programmes, a sports complex, and even the basics like people driving past it without being terrified. Warms the heart, it does, or it would if I had one.
Just wondering, what do you mean by ‘sex shop’? A store that sells vibrators and other sex toys? A place to buy/rent pornographic movies? A whorehouse?
It is nice to see that the government has (largely) driven the drug gangs out of Rocina.
Now the city government has a big problem-do they accept ownership/title to houses in the favelas? Integrating the favelas with the city would make sense-property owners wold now be paying taxes, the government could at last provide services.
Except for one thing-the government would be making millionaires of people who never owned the land. All those years of free (stolen) electricty, water, etc.-would the favela dwellers want this?
Of course, having the favela dwellers paint their hoses, clean the streets would be very nice. The views fro Rocina are some of the best in the city!
Background: the favelas, generally speaking, arose when Rio de Janeiro really began to grow as a city - the construction workers and others in the lower classes were needed in the city to drive its expansion, but there was nowhere for them to live, so they occupied the hillsides and built shantytowns. That land was undesireable anyway - building on hills is expensive even in normal circumstances, but since RJ hill geography consists of a thin layer of dirt on rock, when it rains, whole areas of favelas could come tumbling down in mudslides. Now building technology is more advanced, and building on the occupied land is much more desireable because the city has just become too damn big and remains largely centralised.
Pretty much everyone outside the favelas would, at the end of the day, really like all the favelas to just disappear somehow. The problem is finding a way to make it work. One recent attempt was to build housing projects on available government land - really decent apartments in high-rises, so many more families can fit in one area. (a favela shanty is very rarely above two stories) The poor could apply for an apartment voucher, and then receive one of these flats. The problem - people would accept the apartment, then sell it, never leaving their shanty, and then get back in line for another apartment (to sell as well)! Most of the favelas are in very desireable locations, while the poor who don’t live in favelas tend to have to live in suburbs so distant and poorly connected that a 5 hour commute (each way) isn’t unheard of.
Technically, since the squatters don’t have title to the land, the government could just go in and demolish them - the problem being that voting here is obligatory and about a third of Rio’s population lives in favelas! Thus, any politician running on a platform of evicting favela-dwellers is automatically excluding a vast proportion of the voters. So mostly, as usual, we see half-assed attempts. Parts of Mangueira (near my place) are scheduled to be demolished (though it looks like that’s been stalled) mostly because it’s so close to the Maracanã stadium and the mayor wants it to look pretty for the 2014 football tourists. On the other hand, government services have arrived and are being consolidated and improved in basically all favelas, perhaps with the hope that the neighbourhoods will improve in time and that the shantys will vanish “organically”. They’re already improving a fair bit in some ways, though they’re still all eyesores.
Another problematic issue, I think, is that although many of the richer people would like to pretend that the favelas are all wretched hives of scum and villainy, the truth is you can’t demonise the people there. The drug gangs have been evicted, most of the people who live there are hard-working people providing useful services (hell, I’ve gone to Mangueira a couple times for motorcycle repairs and a new helmet, and with my cara de gringo (foreign face) I stick out like a sore thumb), and some aren’t even exactly poor - just normal people who score a place to live in a favela because it’s much more practical than buying “normal” housing. Basically all of the samba schools are also based out of favelas (although some of their premises are just outside them). Finally, a generalised eviction would presumably draw a generalised international and UN backlash on a scale not seen here in decades, which is, quite possibly literally, the second-to-last thing that the current government wants (the last, obviously, being losing power and the consequent access to to public funds).
At the end of the day, however, nobody really wants the government to pay to build “real” housing all over the favelas and then just give them to the residents for free - aside from the injustice of it, it would be prohibitively expensive. Even if all the two-story shanties were replaced with high-rise apartments so you could sell the surplus apartments, the poor inhabitants would depress the prices sufficiently that no developers seem interested. I don’t know if there even is a decent, effective solution that wouldn’t infuriate some important part of the electorate. (might make a good Great Debate one day - “how do we get rid of slums without violating rights or pissing people off?”)
Good comment. I wonder if the government would pay to give every favela dweller a bucket of paint-these complexes would not look bad at all, painted and spiffed up.
The poor are not going away.
Do you expect any big improvement when the Olympics infrastructure is developed?
Thanks! About the free paint - what would be the point? Within 48 hours the paint would have been pooled and sold for less than the government paid in the first place. If the government wants the favelas painted, they’ll have to do it themselves (presumably in conjunction with the communities). I wouldn’t be surprised if they do exactly that ahead of the World Cup in a few of the more visible-to-tourists areas. I actually prefer them remaining highly visible eyesores from the luxury condos in Copacabana, Ipanema, and Lagoa, and all along the highway to the airport. It forces the rich to accept that the poor are among them, which means that “something” has to be done about them. With the PT governments (post-2002) being obsessed with outward appearances regarding human rights and social issues, and with clear pretenses of socialism, the poor are actually benefiting substantially, albeit not ideally.
I expect no big improvements from Olympics infrastructure. The metro system is being extended to Barra da Tijuca, which is will almost solely benefit the rich who avoid using it anyway (having your own car, the fancier the better, is an essential status symbol). The Rio airports are likely beyond salvation, to increase traffic capacity they’ll probably need to build another one - yet I’ve never even heard this being suggested as a possibility by even the most radical politicians. The road networks desperately need expansion and improvement, and that’s not happening or even planned AFAIK. There is an improvement in express bus lanes from the distant suburbs to the outskirts of Rio proper, but that’s independent of the Olympics and World Cup. I haven’t heard of any growth in hotel investment here - for Rio+20 they parked a cruise liner in Guanabara Bay and asked residents to take in visitors in their own homes if possible. And all of this is just Rio! The World Cup is even worse, as it’s going to be in 12 (?) state capitals - how in the world are they going to prepare Manaus, in the middle of the Amazon, for thousands of tourists all arriving on the same day?
Interesting observations…I have endured the ride (via the coastal road) from Sao Conrado to Ipanema-even in a M-B 500 it is an exercise in frustration. The favela “slums” are misleading-the interiors of these houses are often quite nice…now that they are safer, some residents are ven opening pousadas and small restaurants!
What do you think of the efforts to clean up Guanabara Bay? As late as the 1970’s, the water was clean enough for swimming at Isla Pataca and BotoFogo-I wouldn’t attempt that now! I expect that extending the metro to the airport will be met with much resistance-the cabs and busses do a big business transporting people to/from the a airport.
Yeah, I know what you mean. You can’t judge any house here from its exterior.
Efforts at cleaning up Guanabara Bay are good, but insufficient. There has been, is, and will continue to be the compromise between wanting clean water on the waterfront for all the people living here with the need for all the shipping traffic. Brazil is woefully lacking in port facilities - the biggest port in South America is actually in Montevideo, Uruguay - so the existing ports, of which Rio de Janeiro isn’t even a huge one, receive very heavy traffic. You can, in fact, swim at Paquetá island within the bay (though it’s not great, and didn’t swim when I visited), and Botafogo/Flamengo is clean enough that they do triathlons there. At the end of the day, I feel that the water cleanup efforts are as good as one could possibly expect for a city of this size and geography, and the environmental authorities are actually, relative to most industrialised countries even, very powerful. You just can’t expect miracles in an enclosed bay with a major port. I think the garbage tossed in the streets or on the beach by the average João Q. Público is a bigger issue - that and contamination of drinking water with all the over-the-counter medications that Brazilians self-medicate with.
Extending the metro to the airport is something I hear about occasionally as a rumour, which I just dismiss as fanciful. I’d be amazed if it happens in the near future, genuinely floored. I’ve seen no work going on and haven’t heard of any official go-ahead. The big recent development was an express bus system to connect the airport with Barra for Rio+20. Buses are nearly non-existent between the airport and the city (I have a running joke of referring to the Real Ônibus linking Copacabana with the airport as a Brazilian legend told to tourists for giggles, like the chupacabra), and the taxi mafia is pulling in money hand over fist. It just brings to mind the high-speed train link between Rio and São Paulo: it’s a great idea which they’ve been talking about for years - decades, I think - but nothing ever gets done.
In the states it’s been said that Brazil is making great strides towards energy independence by producing and using ethanol to fuel their vehicles. There is even a ad by Shell Oil Co touting their partnership in etinol production. Story goes the sugar cane is so plentiful there seems to be no other use for it. If the average person can’t buy a car that would seem to be just a bunch of self serving PR. What’s the local take on this?
I love Mate! You can only find it at Whole Foods (A hoity toity grocery store here in Memphis, Tennessee) I haven’t had any in about 2 years, but it is fantastic. I don’t think I could have any right now since I am pregnant.
Question…how have Native Brazilians rights improved, or have they improved, since the 1980s. I am always learning about the Amazonian native fight for rights and seeing video of them riding airplanes to the States and meeting with US and Brazilian dignitaries, but it all seems staged and that the natives really aren’t getting much out of the deal except being paraded in front of TV cameras for our entertainment. Is this an accurate impression or are they gaining ground in the fight to save their homes and land?
Self serving PR? That’s what the government does best, and the cornerstone of their foreign policy! Yeah, ethanol is mixed in all fuels here, the government sets a minimum percentage. I think they raised it again recently. There’s loads of sugar cane (also used for sugar and cachaça), but far too little refining capacity to actually produce ethanol in quantities for export. So the ethanol mixed in the fuels doesn’t actually make fuel any cheaper.
Similarly, Brazil hopes to be one of the world’s foremost oil-producing countries once they get their deepwater oil extraction going. Again, there’s next to no refinery capacity. There was supposed to be a huge cooperation on this front with Venezuela, with the countries splitting the costs 50/50 to build a refinery up north so that both countries can export refined fuels instead of crude oil. The refinery was finished recently IIRC, but I don’t think Venezuela ever got around to contributing a single centavo.
But criticism aside - yes, there are definite efforts towards energy independence, it’s certainly an end goal, and there’s all sorts of support for clean energy initiatives, alternative fuels, and other environmentally friendly solutions to everyday needs. The great majority of Brazil’s electricity comes from hydroelectric plants (the expansion of which is, ironically, being obstructed by misguided environmentalists), São Paulo apparently has a few buses running on hydrogen fuel cells, flex-fuel and natural-gas-powered cars are all the rage, and so forth. I feel energy independence is being developed slower than possible, but as usual I attribute that to government incompetence/corruption and half-assedness rather than malice or hypocrisy.
Boy oh boy, that’s a complicated, controversial issue that most people try to avoid. I’ll do my best to provide a brief response, but note that I’m no expert by any means.
Indigenous Brazilians are practically invisible except for staged PR events (from whatever source). In daily life they are simply not involved. The one exception is violence between farmers and indians - sadly it is typically the indians that suffer losses, but the farmers that see popular support. Unfortunately, the very widely held stereotype is that the aboriginals are lazy backwards people who want to live off government support while demanding that the rest of the country has to accomodate their unreasonable demands.
Fortunately, the government really does try to do justice by them as far as possible considering the considerable pressure also put on the government by the farming/ranching lobby. FUNAI - the foundation for the indigenous peoples - represents the indigenous populations towards the state and population and has the largely thankless and extremely difficult job of protecting indigenous interests. Their recommendations are typically followed by the government, from what I see, at least recently. They also act as the intermediary between the aboriginals and the state, facilitating efforts towards integration of those tribes who wish to integrate, and the protection of those tribes who wish to be protected, isolated, and left alone. A problem is that it’s an ethically difficult situation all round. For example, if a given tribe wishes to live in their traditional manner, and this was decided by the tribal council, what about the children in the tribe who had no say in it but are subsequently excluded from a “normal” primary education and the opportunities granted to “normal” Brazilians?
Well, going down that avenue of discussion could fill several books.
As for staged PR vs. gaining ground - aboriginals are gaining rights, though they remain under constant threat of violence and face all sorts of social and economic difficulties in the grand scale of things. Most of their appearances in the media are, in fact, staged PR, but some of it is staged by themselves. Lots of it is nonsense - for example (this is from memory, but I think it’s accurate), one way that pseudoenvironmentalist morons have been blocking construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam & powerplant in the Amazon is because the damming of the Xingu river would be catastrophic for the Xingu people - the stupidity of the claim being that the Xingu river and the Xingu people are in completely different areas, the tribe being hundreds of km away from the area to be dammed and not even potentially affected any way whatsoever! The basis of the claim is from celebrities jumping to conclusions based on names. (Indeed, according to FUNAI, the aboriginals living in the Belo Monte area want construction to go ahead, but of course no media talks about that, and halfwits like James Cameron actively ignore or deny it! I have this information from a non-public briefing from FUNAI staff, BTW, not sure if I can dig up a cite)
Anyway, in short, I feel the aboriginals are gaining ground, respect, recognition, and acceptance, at least from the authorities - which is what really matters. They are being cynically used by some, but some aboriginals in turn do what they can to extract benefits from the rest of society, the state, and gringos. I do feel that the real success stories of self-sustaining tribes are fairly unknown, as you have to go to FUNAI or really look hard to find out about them, which is a shame.
Just some perhaps disjointed thoughts, but I don’t want to ramble on, nor do I want to end up writing a boring multi-page essay trying to answer your questions fully. If you want more specific details or have more specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask as I’ll be happy to go on.
Wow, thanks. That was super informative and appreciated. I head about the Xingu dam project, I think even Sting went down there for some photo ops and to campaign against it. It always reeked of foreign, paternalistic interference to me.
Yep, Sting, James Cameron, Sigourney Weaver, and others have been down here whinging with incomplete information. Not to mention all my acquaintances abroad whining on their facebook feeds until I beat them about the face and neck with the mighty trout of fact-based education. There was a huge celebrity campaign - domestic and foreign - to fight the Belo Monte project, and they were handed a solid beatdownby a handful of university students on YouTube! (Link Portuguese only - sorry)
The problem with using indigenous people in PR or news campaigns is that they can be used to present virtually any argument. Aside from the fact that they are individuals with actual, you know, varied opinions, any campaign on maintaining their traditional (read: pre-Columbian and technology-free) way of life has to ignore that that way of life is incredibly delicate and largely incompatible with modernity. Government construction projects threaten indigenous tribes’ way of life? So does government inaction, deforestation, the internal combustion engine, minor natural fluctuations in annual rainfall, the deliciousness of steak, ocean currents, football, Iceland’s economy, and the International Maritime Organisation.
Oh, by the way, since your link mentions devastating deforestation: rates of deforestation in Brazil have been slashed (uh, so to speak) over the last decade. Considering Brazil’s geography and the economic and administrative hurdles, it’s going very well under the circumstances.
While I am sympathetic to the plight of the Brazilian Indians, what about the ones who:
-don’t want to live in the jungle
-don’t want an early death (diseases, poisonous snakebites, starvation)
-don’t want to stay in the 20th century (BC)
It seems to me that living the aboriginal lifestyle is feasible, as long as you don’t mind a few inconveniences (see above).
What about the indians who want to move into the 21st century?
Yep, that’s the controversy I was alluding to in previous posts, sorry if that wasn’t clear. The pseudoenvirontalist whingeing of celebrities wanting to save the indigenous tribes is all for appearances, it’s not the reality. Indeed, apart from some incredibly isolated tribes only discovered in the past few years, if an aboriginal walks around entirely dressed in traditional dress it’s nearly always para inglês ver, i.e. for show.
What I meant above about FUNAI being the intermediary between the indigenous communities and the government is that they are trying to assist the movement into modernity while respecting aboriginals’ decisions (if any) to retain their culture. The primary issue is only land - the indigenous communities feel that since they were here first, their ancestral lands should be granted to them by law for them to dispose of as they wish (as opposed to being up for grabs by immigrant ranchers). Actual indigenous communities, with very few exceptions, are otherwise embracing modernity - they speak Portuguese, receive public education like all Brazilians, have access to free health clinics like all Brazilians, put outboard engines on their fishing boats, have electricity and radios and PCs, wear t-shirts and flip-flops like everyone in Rio, cheer for carioca football teams, and so forth. The (free) state and federal universities also reserve places for aboriginals like they do for afro-Brazilians, so aboriginals who want a higher education have it basically guaranteed. FUNAI and tribal elders try to balance this advancement with maintaining a knowledge of one’s roots and the preservation of one’s language and cultural traditions.
The controversy, as you are also alluding to, is that some communities reject some or all aspects of modernity, which subsequently imposes that rejection of modernity on those who were outvoted or not represented e.g. children. That’s what makes it such a thorny issue, and beyond the scope of this thread I think. I get the impression that such rejection in reality is actually extremely rare - most communities are only backwards and isolated because of geography, poor infrastructure, and poverty.
However, the thing that stands out is that it appears that the media, celebrities, etc. want to force the indigenous communities to continue living in the pre-Columbian era, even if they don’t want to! And that’s just silly. Fortunately the government thinks so too, though they don’t make a public issue out of it.
