Playing with fire

Kate Andries – National Geographic, 04/27/2013

Every Monday night around dusk in São Paulo, Brazil, a group of jugglers gather in a small city square covered in graffiti murals to put on a show.

They juggle hats, balls, clubs while riding unicycles, and even fire-such as the performer pictured above. (See more Brazil pictures.)

For the Circo do Beco—or Circus of the Alley—a small city square in São Paulo’s Vila Madalena neighborhood is transformed into a makeshift performance space, where street jugglers and professionals alike come to show off their skills, learn new tricks, and let off some steam, according to Reuters.

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Trattoria dumps tomatoes to protest Rousseff’s inflation stance

Joshua Goodman & Denyse Godoy – Bloomberg, 0/09/2013

One of Sao Paulo’s most traditional Italian restaurants is urging its clients to forgo the tomato to protest what it considers President Dilma Rousseff’s policy of promoting growth at the expense of higher inflation.

Augusto Mello, owner Nello’s Cantina, last month began curtailing his tomato purchases to protest a tripling in prices for the vegetable over the past year to 150 reais ($75) for a 20-kilogram crate. A sign on the entrance of the 38-year-old restaurant urges patrons to become “conscientious consumers” and help fight inflation by ordering dishes without red sauce.

The one-man crusade may be touching a nerve with consumers, whose pockets are being squeezed by surging prices for food and services. A report tomorrow will show that inflation breached the 6.5 percent limit of the government’s target range in March for the first time in 16 months, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists, even as the economy struggles to regain its footing after its second-worst performance in 13 years in 2012.

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Oscar Niermeyer tribute: 52 meter high mural in Brazil

Ada Teicu – Pursuitist, 03/17/2013

The impact of a single death can bring new life to the world. After offering his best ideas to the architectural field, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer’s portrait adorns one side of a skyscraper on one of Sao Paulo’s busiest streets – Paulista Avenue. The 52 meter tall portrait showcases a polychromatic version of the renowned architect’s influence.

After his passing in December 2012, at the age of 104, the architect was immortalized in a portrait on the building by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra and four other artists who helped with the expansive process. The huge art work was started in January and it took 6 hours of daily painting to reach the final result. Details and colors create a stunning mural that showcases the colorful imagination of modern influencers.

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Brazil, Where a Judge Made $361,500 in a Month, Fumes Over Pay

Simon Romero – The New York Times, 02/10/2013

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — There are many ways of striking it rich in Brazil, but one strategy may come as a particular surprise in today’s economic climate: securing a government job.

While civil servants in Europe and the United States have had their pay slashed or jobs eliminated altogether, some public employees in Brazil are pulling down salaries and benefits that put their counterparts in developed countries to shame.

One clerk at a court in Brasília, the capital, earned $226,000 in a year — more than the chief justice of the nation’s Supreme Court. Likewise, São Paulo’s highway department paid one of its engineers $263,000 a year, more than the nation’s president.

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Brazil sweetens road concession terms to lure investment

Roberta Vilas Boas – Reuters, 02/05/2013

SAO PAULO, Feb 5 (Reuters) – Brazil extended concession periods and improved financing conditions to lure private investors into multi-billion dollar road projects, in the latest bid to bolster anemic investment in Latin America’s largest economy.

Finance Minister Guido Mantega said on Tuesday the government has sweetened conditions of road concessions to raise the rate of return for investors to more than 10 percent in real terms.

“The government is seeking to boost the profitability of these projects to make them very attractive to investors,” Mantega told a crowd of business leaders in Sao Paulo. “We are talking about a large volume of investment that will help our economy become more dynamic.”

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Brazil: The Social Media Capital of the Universe

Loretta Chao – The Wall Street Journal, 02/03/2013

SÃO PAULO—When Barbosa family members botched their cover of an old Brazilian gospel song last year on a family video, they thought it was pretty funny—funny enough to upload to YouTube.

But they didn’t expect the rest of Brazil to laugh along with them. Within weeks, though, the video was viewed and shared millions of times on YouTube and Facebook FB -5.77% . Parodies, including an animated version in which the Simpsons lip-sync the family’s mangled version, spread across the Internet.

The popularity of the Barbosas’ performance reflects the growth of social media in Latin America’s biggest country. Brazil’s expanding middle class is increasingly going online, and social media are particularly popular because of Brazil’s hyper-social culture, social-media executives say.

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Brazil police can carry weapons for personal use

AP/ABC News, 01/16/2013

The Brazilian army has authorized law enforcement officers to carry heavy caliber weapons for personal use, a move critics say could lead to more gun-related violence.

Army spokesman Col. Nador Brandao said Wednesday that state, civilian and highway police officers will be able to buy the weapons to protect themselves. The army has jurisdiction over most law enforcement agencies in Brazil.

Ligia Rechenberg is the coordinator of the Sou da Paz, or “I am for Peace,” violence prevention group. She tells the O Globo newspaper that police will buy weapons “they don’t know how to handle and that puts them and the population at risk.”

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Sao Paulo crack addicts face obligatory treatment

BBC, 01/14/2013

Officials in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo are to begin making people addicted to crack cocaine get treatment.

A new law allows mandatory treatment for drug users in “advanced stages of addiction” and at risk of death. Social services, not police, will identify potential patients on the streets, the state government says.

A similar policy already targets addicted minors living on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

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More Killings in Brazil Than in Some War-Torn Countries

Fabiola Ortiz – Inter Press Service, 12/05/2012

Human rights activists in Brazil mobilised Wednesday to draw attention to the fact that half a million people have been murdered in this South American country in the past 10 years.

On Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, 500,000 beans were scattered on the national flag and on 40-metre-long strips of red carpet,, in a protest organised by the local NGO Rio de Paz.

Hundreds of passersby stopped to gaze at the symbolic rivers of blood, which ran up to a wooden cross and a sign reading: “Brazil: half a million murders in 10 years. SHAME.”

“We want a structural reform and the professionalisation of the police, who are plagued with serious corruption problems,” the president of Rio de Paz, Antônio Carlos Costa, told IPS.

“We are also calling for the transformation of the penitentiary system, because inmates live in subhuman conditions, without any prospects for reintegration in society. And we want every state to set homicide reduction targets,” he added.

The organisation has held peaceful protests in large cities since 2007. This week it organised demonstrations in Brasilia, the federal capital, and São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city, after the non-government Sangari Institute released a Map of Violence in Brazil, with the latest statistics.

The activist said “157 murders a day were committed between 2001 and 2010. In 2010 alone, 57,000 people were killed. We want the statistics on crimes and violent deaths to be released in a timely, transparent manner in all states” in this country of 194 million people.

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What’s Killing Brazil’s Police?

Graham Denyer Willis – The New York Times, 12/01/2012

Brazilian mounted military police officers patrolled the streets in a shantytown in São Paulo, Brazil, last month.

On the evening of Saturday, Nov. 3, Marta Umbelina da Silva, a military police officer here and a single mother of three, was shot in front of her 11-year-old daughter outside their house in Brasilândia, a poor community on the north side of the city. Records show that Ms. da Silva, 44, had never arrested anyone in her 15-year career. Instead, she was one of hundreds of low-level staffers, who mostly handled internal paperwork.

São Paulo, Latin America’s largest city, continues to descend into a violent blood feud between the police and an organized crime group, the First Command of the Capital, known by its Portuguese initials P.C.C. In 2012, 94 police officers have been killed in the city — twice as many as in all of 2011. Between July and September, on-duty police officers killed 119 people in the metropolitan area. In the first three days of November, 31 people were murdered in the city. These statistics conceal a deeper story about Latin American cities, their police forces and the war on drugs.

Ms. da Silva’s only mistake was that she lived in a poor community. And as a police officer, she was not alone. Almost all killings of São Paulo police officers in 2012 happened while they were off duty. The killings have been concentrated in poorer parts of the city, often occurring on officers’ doorsteps. The dead tended to be known in their communities and lived in neighborhoods controlled by organized crime, far from the protection afforded in wealthy parts of the city.

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