Brazilian Olympics you don't know about
Suspended Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff at a meeting with women from pro-democracy movements in Sao Paulo in July 2016.
The
last time I passed through immigratihon in Auckland, the immigration
officer caught me completely off my guard by asking what it was like to live in
Brazil. My off-the-cuff response was: “It is a very complicated place
to live, but I love it.”
When I
arrived in Brazil in 1992 I'd intended to stay just a few months, but
destiny has a way of changing things, which meant that soon after arriving I
met my future wife. After travelling back and forth between New Zealand
and Brazil, we married in 1997 and I have been a permanent resident in Brazil
ever since.
Before leaving New Zealand for the first time people
gave me all sorts of helpful advice about Brazil, such as:
1) The whole country is covered in jungle, so be
careful of snakes, especially anacondas.
2) Ten per cent of Brazilians have Aids.
3) Do not walk on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro
in bare feet as Brazilians place Aids-infected needles in the sand for tourists
to walk on.
4) Tell the Brazilians to stop cutting down the Amazon
Rainforest as soon the rest of the world will not be able to breathe.
5) Do not talk to the police. If you do, they will
shoot you.
Today I look back and laugh at the advice people gave
me, and at their and my naivety.
While waiting for the Olympics Games to get underway
in Rio, the international media has been out in force looking for news
outside the sports arenas.
Unfortunately a lot of the stories appear to be
negative sensationalism that does little more than reinforce the old stereotype
that Brazil is just about football, carnival, scantly-clad woman on the beaches
and violence.
An installation at the Olympic Whitewater Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: GETTY IMAGES
A Brazilian friend who recently returned from Europe
told me she felt more afraid and saw more street crime there than she has ever
seen in Brazil.
Another friend made this comment in relation to the
stories about unfinished work and crime in Rio de Janiero: “If you put an
Olympics Games in Brazil’s most failed state, where the violence levels are
greater than Bagdad’s, what do people expect? Rio does not represent Brazil.”
Like the Football World Cup, few Brazilians
are interested in the Olympic Games. This is because the real news in
Brazil, and where the real excitement is, has been in the economic and
political arenas during the last 24 months or so. The new national sport is
called Operacao Lava Jato.
Operacao Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash)
began as a small police investigation into money laundering at a car wash and
has grown into what may turn out to be the world’s largest corruption scandal.
Already Brazil has seen many of its top business executives jailed for
corruption (including those responsible for building Olympic complexes) and
hundreds more are under investigation. Soon it will be the turn of dozens of
politicians to make their way to jail also.
Unlike the Olympics, this new sport has common
Brazilians participating. Millions have been out on the streets in peaceful
protests and every time President Dilma Rousseff appears on television,
the multitudes beat pots and pans in front of their windows or toot their car
horns in protest. The big street party this month will not be the closing ceremony
of the Olympic Games, but the almost certain impeachment of President Rousseff
for corruption.
For New Zealanders why should the real news from
Brazil matter? It should matter because Brazil is the world’s seventh largest
economy, but New Zealand exports less than $200 million worth of goods there
each year.
If the sleeping giant of South America manages to
throw off the shackles of corruption, which may happen soon for
the first time in history, we can expect Brazil to be the world’s second or
third largest economy in the near future. It will become the world's first
super power that spends little on its military and has no imperialist
desires.
As a trading nation New Zealand can ill afford to
ignore what is really happening in this part of the world,
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