South America has been a special part of my life for four decades. I have lived many years in Brasil and Peru. I am married to an incredible lady from Argentina. I want to share South America with you.
The official mascot of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil
Spending on the World Cup will have a negligible impact on Brazil’s economy despite Brazilians’ perceptions that the tournament is costing the country dearly, a study says.
The games will generate only 0.4 per cent of additional gross domestic product for Brazilin a 10-year period and the infrastructure spending envisaged amounts to just 0.7 per cent of the country’s total investment planned between 2010 and 2014, Moody’s, the rating agency, said in a report.
“The Brazilian economy is very large so, because the duration of the World Cup is limited and also the investment is limited to certain cities and or states, the impact is not that large,” said Barbara Mattos, an analyst with the agency.
The government has made extravagant promises of giant economic gains from hosting the Fifa World Cup, such as the generation of 3.6m jobs, in an attempt to sell the benefits of the event to an increasingly sceptical public.
But discontent in Brazil over the quality of public transport, health, education and security boiled over last year during the Confederations Cup, which served as a dress rehearsal for this year’s tournament, in the form of mass protests.
“The World Cup is very expensive and Brazil should have other priorities – just look at this bus here, every day it’s completely crammed. I don’t think this is the right time for Brazil to host the world,” said Luiz Henrique, a conductor on a bus in São Paulo.
“It will be great to follow the games, it will be historical, I’ll be thrilled to watch the games with my children, drinking an ice-cold Coca-Cola, but it enrages me to see how much they are spending on it.”
The Moody’s report, however, could serve as a reminder to all governments and voters in large economies to lower their expectations regarding the effects of hosting large sporting events.
Brazil’s minister of sport Aldo Rebelo last year rattled off a list of expected benefits from the World Cup including R$28bn ($12bn) investment in urban transport, ports, airports, stadiums and tourism infrastructure.
Citing an Ernst & Young study, Mr Rebelo said there would be R$112bn in additional economic activity between 2010 and 2014 related to the World Cup.
But he admitted that many of the public infrastructure projects, other than the stadiums, such as airport upgrades, were already included in the government’s general infrastructure plan, known as the growth acceleration programme.
Moody’s said the World Cup would not affect Brazil’s sovereign credit rating or that of most of its companies.
Even at the individual city and state level, government outlays on the event, seen as lavish by protesters, would not represent a strain on public finances.
Even the state most heavily exposed to the event, the soyabean centre of Mato Grosso, whose capital Cuiabá is building a stadium and a light rail system, will only increase debt-to-total revenues nearly 9 percentage points to about 51 per cent, a level that Moody’s considers comfortable for its credit rating.
But the reputational effects of the tournament, which was witnessed by half the world’s population in South Africa four years ago, could be longer reaching.
Moody’s said a successful World Cup would raise Brazil’s stature on the world stage but “social unrest during the games or failure to have needed infrastructure in place could sully the country’s image”.
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Rusino cannot decide which is worse: living under the control of drug gangs or the police.
“I was in bed with my wife one night and the police just burst into our place – they think everyone around here is a drug dealer,” says the 30-year-old hairdresser, sitting on a kerb in the Manguinhos group of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. His sister cuts him off, terrified: “Why do you always have to talk so much? Just act deaf and dumb like the rest of us!”
Tensions are running high in the area. Last week the captain of the favelas’ new so-called pacification police unit, the UPP, was shot – the latest in a wave of attacks against police that comes less than 80 days before hundreds of thousands of tourists descend on Rio for the footballWorld Cup.
Manguinhos, a 15-minute drive from Rio’s international airport, now resembles no-man’s land as military police clutch assault rifles to their bullet-proofed chests, eyeing groups of men who sit staring at them from piles of rubble across the road.
Community organisations say Rio’s latest escalation of violence represents one of the biggest crises yet for Brazil’s offensive against the criminal gangs and militias that have haunted the country’s second-largest city for decades.
After seven attacks on the UPP since the beginning of last month and several police murders, Rio’s state governor Sérgio Cabral announced this week that the army will be brought in to assist the police in the Maré group of slums that borders the main road to the airport.
Rio began the UPP pacification programme in 2008, using its elite police “Swat” team to drive out gang leaders from favelas, before installing police units to keep watch over the newly conquered territories.
Rio now has 37 UPPs serving 257 communities and 1.5m people – a result that has been widely applauded by international groups and Brazilians of all political stripes.
As such, it is only natural that the country’s most powerful criminal gangs, such as Comando Vermelho (Red Command), should want to try to regain influence, says José Mariano Beltrame, Rio’s state public security secretary.
“In areas where the state was absent during decades, criminals took on the role of legislative, executive and judiciary lawgivers,” says Mr Beltrame. “The people who always made a living from crime will not give up so easily and we knew this.”
The timing of the latest wave of violence is no coincidence either, says Carlos Melo, a political scientist at Insper, a Brazilian higher education institute. The city is in the spotlight as it prepares to host the World Cup and then the Olympics in 2016, encouraging gangs to exploit “a moment of visibility and the vulnerability of the government”, he says.
Brazil is already under fire over its shoddy infrastructure and delays in building the required stadiums, which threaten to turn the event into a source of international ridicule rather than the coming-of-age moment it had dreamt of when the country won the bid in 2007.
Growing revulsion among favela residents over the excessive use of police force also makes it an opportune time to act, says Professor Melo.
Military police officers patrolling Rio’s favelas say the retaliation may be linked to the country’s upcoming gubernatorial and presidential elections in October – a view backed by Sandro Costa, vice-coordinator of human security at Viva Rio, the NGO.
“Aside from the drug trafficking itself and the whole industry that surrounds it such as the payment of protection money, there has also been a history of political involvement in Rio too,” says Mr Costa. In the past, aspiring political candidates in the city have been accused of making deals with militias in order to enter otherwise forbidden favelas, giving them exclusive access to pools of voters, he says.
However, while the timing of the showdown between Rio’s gangs and the police has left the government on edge, the attacks against UPPs is likely to die down during the World Cup itself, says Mr Costa. “Murder and crime rates in general always fall during carnival so we’re expecting the same pattern for the [World] Cup.”
For the residents of Manguinhos and the city’s other more than 1,000 favelas, however, the one thing everyone craves is stability – with or without the UPPs. While most welcome the pacification movement as it has driven away powerful drug lords and removed heavy weaponry such as grenades from their streets, it has not come without problems. Common crimes such as robberies have risen in ‘pacified’ slums as the police are largely less feared than the former drug gang leaders, who would often mete out their own barbaric punishments.
The traffickers who remain in pacified favelas are also increasingly recruiting children as they are more difficult for the police to stop, say officers. In Brazil, under 18-year-olds can only be detained for a maximum of three years regardless of how heinous their crime is.
“The drug trade is still here – it’s just that the traffickers have adapted to the new model,” says one officer on patrol outside Manguinhos.
However, as in war, the next step must be to win over the hearts and minds of residents like Rusino, by using police intelligence rather than just brute force and by bringing more public services to the favelas to alleviate acute social problems, say academics and NGOs.
“At the moment, the police are just putting out fires,” says Insper’s Prof Melo. “The real battle will be to attack the root of the problem.”
Investors edgy in case Rousseff loosens her straitjacket
By Joe Leahy in São Paulo
Fear that economic restraints will be cast aside after election
Afew days ago a strange thing happened to the shares of Petrobras, the Brazilian state-owned oil company.
A rumour swept the stock market that Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff – whose government has imposed price controls on fuel distributed by Petrobras to try to curb inflation – had fallen in opinion poll ratings about to be released.
Investors rushed to buy the stock of the beleaguered oil producer, hoping that Ms Rousseff’s once mighty lead against opposition presidential candidates might be waning, opening a chance for Petrobras to return to profitability.
In the event, Ms Rousseff recorded a solid 43 per cent in the opinion polls, enough to win the forthcoming October election easily.
But the mere existence of the rumour was confirmation, if any were needed, that Ms Rousseff, who came to power amid expectations she would be an efficient, chief executive-style president, has failed to win the confidence of the markets.
Critics accuse her government of embarking on a series of economic policy misadventures that this week led Standard & Poor’s to downgrade Brazil’s investment grade credit rating to one notch above junk, placing in jeopardy 15 years of hard-won credibility in financial markets.
Eduardo Campos, an opposition presidential candidate, summed up the problem succinctly in a speech on Tuesday in São Paulo: “There are other countries with more problems than Brazil but there exists here a crisis of expectations and of confidence.”
The government vigorously rejects such criticism, and with some reason. Brazil’s economy grew 2.3 per cent last year, below the country’s earlier average of about 4 per cent, but much better than the mediocre performance some other emerging market peers, such as investor favourite Mexico, as well as Russia and South Africa. Brazil also remains resilient against external shocks, thanks to its large foreign exchange reserves, its relatively solid banking system and domestically orientated economy.
The government argues that it has maintained the three pillar-system that brought economic stability to Brazil after the runaway inflation of the 1980s and early 1990s – inflation-targeting by the central bank, a floating exchange rate and responsible fiscal management. Indeed, inflation has remained within the central bank’s (admittedly generous) band of 4.5 per cent plus or minus 2 percentage points.
But the problem investors have with the Rousseff government is that it has always seemed like a person in a straitjacket – eager to break out of the restraints imposed by market economics. From the beginning, it has been a government obsessed with manipulating the levers of the economy rather than addressing the fundamental problems.
In 2010, when easy monetary policy in the US led to greater foreign fund inflows, Brazil declared a “currency war” on the markets by imposing ad hoc taxes on investors to try to make its exchange rate more competitive. The currency war damaged Brazil’s reputation as a consistent and predictable investment destination.
But probably the most damning case for Ms Rousseff is that of Petrobras. As a former energy minister, Petrobras should have been a strong point of her administration.
Instead, it is a disaster. In spite of having announced the world’s largest offshore oil discovery in decades in 2007, its share price has slumped to all time lows, driven there by an unofficial government policy of suppressing fuel prices to control inflation.
With Ms Rousseff looking like a favourite in the October poll, economists are asking whether her government would continue in a second term with the same, much-criticised, policies or return to the conventional posture of her predecessors.
Either way, most are predicting that Brazil will be forced to undergo an adjustment by ending price controls and returning to budgetary discipline in the next year or two, whether Ms Rousseff likes it or not. The sooner it comes after the election, the less painful it will be.
One hundred years ago, beef madeArgentina rich. Today it is making Argentines poor. At a classic Buenos Aires steak house with surly waiters and walls lined with nostalgic black-and-white photographs, Luis Hernández articulates the sorrow of many when he says: “An Argentine without beef is like a football team without its best striker.”
Like his fellow countrymen, Mr Hernández, a furniture salesman, loves meat – on average, Argentines gorge themselves with 64 kilos of beef a year, more than twice the amount eaten by consumers in other meat-hungry countries such as the US or Australia. The produce of the Pampas region’s fertile plains is ingrained in Argentine society. It bred the country’s “gaucho” culture, brought in mass immigration from Europe and set the nation up as one of the world’s richest by the early 20th century.
Yet now, the country’s economic problems, especially inflation of about 30 per cent last year, and the government’s long record of haphazard policy making, are jeopardising what Mr Hernández and many Argentines believe is their birthright.
The fears of carnivorous Argentines are shared by the government of President Cristina Férnandez de Kirchner, which demanded last month that beef be sold at “accessible” prices amid concern that a 30 per cent jump in beef prices since November is leading to a drop in consumption. Economists predict that Argentina will slip into recession this year.
“We are going to have to approve measures that once and for all defend consumers from abuse by powerful sectors, oligopolies and monopolies,” Ms Fernández said in an annual address to Congress.
Suffering from a sharp drop in support, from 42 per cent in December to just 25 per cent now, in large part because of economic problems, Ms Fernández is attempting to impose price controls introduced at the start of the year on almost 200 supermarket items, with threats of fines or closure for offending stores.
Cabinet chief Jorge Capitanich, who accuses “speculators” and “unscrupulous businessmen” of pushing up beef prices, threatened last month to step up intervention in the beef sector, which has already suffered almost a decade of export restrictions and price controls that have forced many cattle farmers out of business.
Agricultural produce from beef to soya accounted for almost half of Argentina’s $83bn of exports in 2013, making it the country’s single most important source of foreign exchange since a crippling sovereign debt default in 2001 locked the economy out of international capital markets.
Although Argentina took a step forward in its so-called “external financial normalisation” when Spain’s Repsol last month accepted $5bn in compensation after its assets were expropriated nearly two years ago, the government remains heavily reliant on agricultural exports.
Indeed, it was an alarming decline in central bank reserves, plunging below $30bn by the end of last year from $42bn a year earlier, that triggered a 20 per cent devaluation in January – but economists warn that this could further fuel inflation, after prices rose 3.7 per cent in January alone, according to a new official consumer price index announced last month.
Already, restrictions introduced on beef exports since the devaluation have caused them in February to drop to half January’s levels, despite the fact that rising global beef prices could be advantageous for Argentine farmers.
Instead, over the past decade, and particularly since a bruising 2008 conflict with striking farmers over export taxes, government meddling has caused Argentina’s stock of cattle to shrink by more than 10m head to a low of 48m in 2011. The country has fallen from its position as the world’s third-biggest beef exporter to 12th place, now lagging behind smaller neighbours Uruguay and Paraguay. Exports accounted for 20 per cent of production in 2007, but have now fallen to just 7 per cent.
“These are alarming statistics,” says Rubén Ferrero, president of the Argentine Rural Confederation.
Nieves Pascuzzi, an economist at the Argentine Rural Society, argues that fixing prices is not the answer. “If you want cattle production to grow, we need stable policies for the long term,” he said.
“It’s no good changing the rules of the game every three months.”
Under such conditions, many farmers have switched from raising cattle to growingsoya, a business that has boomed in Argentina over the past decade, benefiting in particular from rising demand in China that has caused prices to soar.
Soya exports have become so fundamental to the Argentine economy that the government is eagerly awaiting the harvest that begins soon to bring in a fresh supply of foreign exchange to top up central bank reserves.
The likes of Mr Hernández glimpse a nightmare scenario in which the production of soya could continue to displace that of beef, forcing Argentines one day to have to make do with soya burgers. “I might wither away if I had to become a vegetarian,” he says.
Elena and I got up at 3:45 and went online with the FIFA website to get tickets for the World Cup in Brasil Elena's dream shot was tickets to Argentina games. There was too much demand. But she got tickets for three other games and we are getting her set up to go in June. I have to stay behind to care for the house and the dogs.
Slave ships in the 19th century docked at the huge stone Valongo wharf, exposed by archaeologists near Rio’s port.CreditLianne Milton for The New York Times
RIO DE JANEIRO — Sailing from the Angolan coast across the Atlantic, the slave ships docked here in the 19th century at the huge stone wharf, delivering their human cargo to the “fattening houses” on Valongo Street. Foreign chroniclers described the depravity in the teeming slave market, including so-called boutiques selling emaciated and diseased African children.
The newly arrived slaves who died before they even started toiling in Brazil’s mines were hauled to a mass grave nearby, their corpses left to decay amid piles of garbage. As imperial plantations flourished, diggers at the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos — Cemetery of New Blacks — crushed the bones of the dead, making way for thousands of new cadavers.
Now, with construction crews tearing apart areas of Rio de Janeiro in the building spree ahead of this year’s World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, stunning archaeological discoveries around the work sites are providing new insight into the city’s brutal distinction as a nerve center for the Atlantic slave trade.
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Petrúcio Guimarães dos Anjos and his wife, Ana de la Merced Guimarães, in their home.CreditLianne Milton for The New York Times
But as developers press ahead in the surroundings of the unearthed slave port — with futuristic projects like the Museum of Tomorrow, costing about $100 million and designed in the shape of a fish by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava — the frenzied overhaul is setting off a debate over whether Rio is neglecting its past in the all-consuming rush to build its future.
“We’re finding archaeological sites of global importance, and probably far more extensive than what’s been excavated so far, but instead of prioritizing these discoveries our leaders are proceeding with their grotesque remaking of Rio,” said Sonia Rabello, a prominent legal scholar and former city councilwoman.
The city has installed plaques at the ruins of the slave port and a map of an African heritage circuit, which visitors can walk to see where the slave market once functioned. Still, scholars, activists and residents of the port argue that such moves are far too timid in comparison with the multibillion-dollar development projects taking hold.
Beyond the Museum of Tomorrow, which has been disparaged by critics as a costly venture drawing attention away from Rio’s complex history, developers are working on an array of other flashy projects, like a complex of skyscrapers branded in homage to Donald Trump and a gated community of villas for Olympic judges.
At the same time, descendants of African slaves who live as squatters in crumbling buildings around the old slave port are organizing in an effort to obtain titles for their homes, pitting them against a Franciscan order of the Roman Catholic Church that claims ownership of the properties.
“We know our rights,” said Luiz Torres, 50, a history teacher and leader in the property rights movement. With the slave market’s ruins near his home as testament, he added, “Everything that happened in Rio was shaped by the hand of blacks.”
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Crushed human bones from a cemetery were discovered in the home of Mr. and Ms. Guimarães during a renovation.CreditLianne Milton for The New York Times
Scholars say the scale of the slave trade here was staggering. Brazil received about 4.9 million slaves through the Atlantic trade, while mainland North America imported about 389,000 during the same period, according to theTrans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a project at Emory University.
Rio is believed to have imported more slaves than any other city in the Americas, outranking places like Charleston, S.C.; Kingston, Jamaica; and Salvador in northeast Brazil. Altogether, Rio received more than 1.8 million African slaves, or 21.5 percent of all slaves who landed in the Americas, said Mariana P. Candido, a historian at the University of Kansas.
Activists say the archaeological discoveries merit at least a museum and far more extensive excavations, pointing to projects elsewhere like theInternational Slavery Museum in the British port city Liverpool, where slave ships were prepared for voyages; the Old Slave Mart Museum in Charleston and Elmina Castle, a slave trading site on Ghana’s coast.
“The horrors committed here are a stain on our history,” said Tânia Andrade Lima, the chief archaeologist at the dig that exposed Valongo, built soon after Portugal’s prince regent, João VI, fled from Napoleon’s armies in 1808, transferring the seat of his empire to Rio from Lisbon.
The squalid wharf functioned until the 1840s, when officials buried it under more elegant docks designed to receive Brazil’s new empress from Europe. Both wharves were eventually buried under landfill and a residential port district, called Little Africa.
Many descendants of slaves settled where the slave market once functioned, with African languages spoken in the area into the 20th century. While the district is gaining recognition as a cradle of samba, one of Brazil’s most treasured musical traditions, it was long neglected by the authorities.
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Artifacts from the old wharf where slave ships docked.CreditLianne Milton for The New York Times
Black Consciousness Day is observed annually in Brazil on Nov. 20 to reflect on the injustices of slavery. In 2013 Ms. Rabello, the legal scholar, pointed out, Rio’s hard-charging mayor, Eduardo Paes, who is overseeing the biggest overhaul of the city in decades, did not attend the ceremony at Valongo, where residents began a campaign to have it recognized as a Unesco World Heritage site. Complicating the debate over how Rio’s past should be balanced alongside the city’s frenetic reconstruction, some families still live on top of the archaeological sites, occasionally excavating Brazil’s patrimony on their own.
“When I first saw the bones, I thought they were the result of a gruesome murder involving previous tenants,” said Ana de la Merced Guimarães, 56, the owner of a small pest control company who lives in an old house where workers doing a renovation first discovered remains from the mass grave in 1996.
It turned out Ms. Guimarães was living above a dumping ground for dead slaves that was used for decades, until around 1830. Estimates vary, but scholars say that as many as 20,000 people were buried in the grave, including many children.
Ms. Guimarães and her husband opted to stay in their property, opening a modest nonprofit organization on the premises, where visitors can view portions of the archaeological dig. The authorities have plans to build a light-rail project on their street, which may lead to more discoveries.
“This was a place of unspeakable crimes against humanity, but it’s also where we live,” Ms. Guimarães said in her home, complaining that public agencies had provided her organization with little support.
Washington Fajardo, a senior adviser to Rio’s mayor on urban planning issues, said that some important steps had been taken at the archaeological sites, including the designation of the slave port as an environmental protection area. And he said that a plan under consideration would create an urban archaeology laboratory where visitors could view archaeologists studying material from the sites.
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A dilapidated house near where the Valongo slave market in Rio de Janeiro once functioned.CreditLianne Milton for The New York Times
Mr. Fajardo also emphasized that at another new venture in the port, the Rio Art Museum, residents of the area make up more than half the staff.
“We’d like to do more,” he said, referring to the slave cemetery. “It’s complex because there are people living on top of the site. If they want to stay, we have to respect their wishes.”
Throughout Rio, other discoveries are being made. Near the expansion of a subway line, researchers recently found relics belonging to Pedro II, Brazil’s last emperor before he was overthrown in 1889. And near the slave port, archaeologists found cannons thought to be part of a four-century-old marine defense system.
But none of the discoveries have been quite as striking as the unearthing of the Valongo wharf in 2011 and the earlier excavations of the cemetery under Ms. Guimarães’s home. Beyond the large stones of the wharf itself, archaeologists found items that helped reconstruct the daily lives of slaves, including copper pieces thought to be talismans and dominoes used for gambling.
Between the slave port and the cemetery, visitors can also view the Ladeira do Valongo, where the depots of Rio’s slave market once horrified foreign travelers. One visitor, Robert Walsh, a British clergyman who came to Brazil in 1828, wrote about the transactions.
“They are handled by the purchaser in different parts, exactly as I have seen butchers feeling a calf,” he said. “I sometimes saw groups of well-dressed females here, shopping for slaves, exactly as I have seen English ladies amusing themselves at our bazaars.”
Slavery’s legacy is clear across Brazil, where more than half of its 200 million people define themselves as black or mixed race, giving the nation more people of African descent than any other country outside Africa. In Rio, the large majority of slaves came from what is now Angola, said Walter Hawthorne, a historian at Michigan State University.
“Rio was a culturally vibrant African city,” Dr. Hawthorne said. “The foods people ate, the way they worshiped, how they dressed and more were to a large extent influenced by Angolan cultural norms.”
Brazil abolished slavery in 1888, making it the last country in the Americas to do so. Now the relatively relaxed approach to the archaeological discoveries is raising doubts about how willing the authorities are to revisit such aspects of Brazilian history.
“Archaeologists are exposing the foundations of our unequal society while we are witnessing a perverse attempt to remake the city into something resembling Miami or Dubai,” said Cláudio Lima Castro, an architect and scholar of urban planning. “We’re losing an opportunity to focus in detail on our past, and maybe even learn from it.”
