Seth Kugel's Notebook:

Rejected Alternative: "Wake Up With South America's Biggest Iron Ore Producer"

What do the Bronx and Brazil have in common, besides that I've covered both of them? No matter how far they come, they can't seem to shed those annoying stereotypes the rest of the world pins on them.

Sure, after years of economic growth, Brazil was among the first countries to emerge from the crisis, showing impressive jobs growth and preparing to become a major oil power. It's even made progress against brutal inequality, and a huge arms purchase from France will beef up its military presence. But for 7-Eleven convenience stores, this place is all about the babes.

Here's a iPhone picture a friend in Boston sent me today:

(Photo by Jon Chapman)

Female Brazilian friends and sources in the states always complained to me about the leering reactions they get from men when they say where they're from. Waxing questions are usually quick to follow. Something tells me this ad campaign isn't helping matters.

By the way the coffee is really Brazilian, at least not 100%. The 7-Eleven site notes it's made with "only select beans from the high mountains of Central and South America." But I suppose "Wake up with a hot Nicaraguan" didn't have quite the same ring to it.

Political drama in Brasilia

Since I got back to Brazil on Tuesday, there has been a political whirlwind in the nation's capital. Here's a summary:

On Tuesday, Lina Vieira — the ousted head of the Brazilian tax agency — testified before a Senate committee that in December she had met with President Lula's chief of staff and hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff. In that meeting, she said, Rousseff had asked her to "expedite" investigations into businesses owned by Lula ally and now-embattled Senate President Jose Sarney. Vieira said she did not feel pressured to end the investigations, but many see it differently. On Monday, Lula himself had challenged her to produce the agenda that showed the meeting with Rousseff, which she could not do. But today's O Globo shows that the official agenda of Rousseff herself was inaccurate for the days in late December when Vieira believes the meeting to have taken place.

Then yesterday, the Senate Ethics Committee voted not to proceed with any of the ethics accusations against Sarney, seeming to grant him victory in a battle waged over months in the press and the populace, and most recently on the Senate floor.  The vote was credited to Lula's pressure on his own party's three senators on the committee to support Sarney — who is a member of the allied PMDB. The Senators' support for Sarney was feeble, as evidenced by their "barely inaudible" roll call votes, according to press reports. Sarney now looks cleared to keep his role as Senate president, at least for now, to the surprise of many political prognosticators who thought he was doomed.  But there are still other investigations pending.

Also yesterday, Marina Silva, a senator from the Amazonian state of Acre who had been Lula's environment minister for five years announced she was leaving the Workers Party. Unofficially, Silva has agreed to join the Green Party and most likely serve as their presidential candidate in the 2010 elections — possibly even with Brazilian music legend and former Lula cabinet member Gilberto Gil as running mate. It was an additional blow to the Workers Party on a day when they weren't looking so good to begin with.

Then today, Senator Aloizio Mercadante, announced (via Twitter) he would give up his post as Workers Party leader in the senate. He later tweeted that Lula had requested a meeting with him and that he would not make the official announcement until after the meeting, but Mercadante has been fed up with the proceedings in the ethics committee and in his own party's protection of Sarney.

What could happen tomorrow in the Senate? Who knows. But something tells me it won't be any actual lawmaking.

Brazil in the News

I've been in Colombia for the last week and will be back in Brazil tomorrow, but while I've been away there has been a lot of interesting stuff published in the English-language press about Brazil. In this week's Economist, a piece on the president which weighs in on some of the issues I alluded to in my recent piece on Lula. Among other things, the piece points out that his "instinct for conciliation between political opposites make him friends everywhere. 'He’s my man,' gushed Barack Obama at the G20 summit in London; Fidel Castro calls him 'our brother Lula.'"

But is he being all things for all people, concerned more about popularity than effectiveness? The article drills him for not standing up more to Chavez (and let's not forget Ahmadinejad). It concludes: "The way to [prevent a cold war in Latin America] is not to equivocate between democrats and autocrats, as Lula seems to think. It is to shame Mr Chávez by drawing a clear, public line in favour of democracy—the system that allowed a poor lathe-operator to come to power and change Brazil. Why should other countries deserve less?"

The issue also has an in-depth piece on South American-Asian relations.

Two other articles about Brazil in the big papers:

The New York Times writes about American documents just declassified over the weekend that detail how the Nixon administration encouraged the Brazilian military rulers to back a coup of Chilean leftist Salvador Allende. (Allende was overthrown in 1973, but according to the article it is unclear how much of a role, if any, Brazil played in that.)

And the Financial Times has a great feature by Daniela Gerson about how Brazilian immigrants have transformed Martha's Vineyard, where the Obamas will be vacationing soon. It's really not just about Brazilians on Martha's Vineyard, but  how immigrant communities in general form in unexpected parts of the U.S. and then transform those parts, often with a dose of community tension.

Facebook on the Rise

Social networking on the computer in Brazil has long meant one thing: Orkut.  The Google program never caught on in the States, but it's long been huge down here, as I wrote about for another news organization in 2006, when it was already huge.

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But Brazil's internet use is sky-high for a country at its stage of development, and news recently surfaced that a higher percentage of internet users in Brazil use Twitter than anywhere else. So how could a country that loves Twitter not love Facebook?

Give them time. There are now 1.3 million Facebook users in Brazil, but that is double what it was three months ago, according to Folha de Sao Paulo, which ran an interview today with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, who is in town this week promoting a Brazil-specific Facebook application challenge. 

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In the interview, he sounded charmingly humble in a country where his company is not king: "Obviously we're behind the biggest player in the market," he said, in my English translation of the Portuguese translation of his English interview. "Even though we're small and we're not the main network people use now, if we focus on building the best product, with time users will move to the best."

It's really only a matter of time.  Lots of my Brazilian friends have been showing up on Facebook recently, and I have virtually completely abandoned Orkut, which is great for checking out friends' pictures, snooping on their communications, and joining all sorts of odd communities ("I Hate Sunday Nights," "My Father is Fat"). But it is plagued by spam, and no match for Facebook's status update culture, and sharing cool links and news stories.

Plus, for some reason, on Orkut no one ever posts pictures of me from fifth grade. And what fun is social networking without that?

Swine flu hits Brazil

It’s Brazil’s turn. By latest count, 76 Brazilians have died from the A(H1N1) virus, the majority in the last few weeks. Most of the deaths have hit the country’s heavily populated southeast (where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are) and the wealthy southern states (which border Argentina, swine flu central for South America), although today the first deaths were reported in the the populous northeastern states of Bahia and Pernambuco.

Though there is nowhere near a state of panic, coughing, sneezing and nose-blowing is not regarded well in enclosed public places. On busy 25 de Março Avenue, where bargain hunters go for low-end consumer goods, masks go for one real, about 55 cents, and people are wearing them (even though they apparently don’t do much good, especially if they are not replaced every two hours).

But the first real hit takes place this week, as students in state-run public schools that were supposed to return from July (a.k.a. winter) break today get an extra one or two weeks off in the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná and the Federal District. Many, if not most, municipal school systems (run separately from state schools) and private schools have followed suit. Those are five of Brazil’s six biggest states, and its capital, which together make up about 100 million people, more than half the country’s population. Some cities also closed public day care centers for pre-schoolers.

For high school students, the delay raises concerns that there will not be time to make up missed school days before a new high-stakes college admissions test, the ENEM, is offered on October 3 and 4.  For families of children in younger grades, it leaves half the country with one huge day care headache.

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