My second impression of California and the States was how pessimistic the economic and political news is, and how glad I am to be away for a short bit.
Now that I’m back in Brazil, I can confirm my third impression: things just work more efficiently, and with a greater sense of order, in the States. This point is obvious; I perhaps noted it anew because five months (from August 12 to January 20) was the longest period that I’ve been outside the United States before.
Oh, and things cost more there, except rent and houses in Rochester.
In any cases, I had an epic series of flights that convinced me of the value of paying a little more for quick connections. I left the San José airport and said goodbye to Bethany at noon on Tuesday; I arrived into Salvador and picked up my bags on Thursday morning at 1 AM, via Dallas, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Oh, Webjet, I shake my fists at your flight delays. Thank you for not charging me too much for my extra luggage. Azul would have charged me R$10 per extra kilo, or R$70; I paid R$39 for my stripped-down luggage.
I returned to Salvador, home of the Vieiras and my previous longest stay in Brasil. It’s the city where I learned Portuguese, but that lovely, smooth, even Bahian accent has been corroded by the various states I’ve visited since.
And boy is Salvador terribly organized and laid out. It cost me R$75 to take a taxi to Nick’s place in the center, through every curving ugly concrete on-ramp and off-ramp that engineers could imagine.
And yet it’s a lovely city on a stunning bay. The Trade Winds come from Africa and cool down the city, making it rarely as hot as Rio in the summer (but sometimes hotter in other seasons). As a special treat, we went swimming at Porto da Barra, in view of the Vieiras’ apartment building, and had a delicious moqueca stew for dinner. I thought it unfortunate that my camera is not waterproof and thus I can’t get a shot of Porto da Barra from the water, or the little fishes (me, into the water, audibly: “peixinhos!”) that school underfoot. Below are photos from Nick’s apartment balcony, looking west, that deserve the caption: “Convents to the left of me, churches to the right, here I am, stuck in Bahia again.” Apologies to Bob Dylan.
I wasn’t stuck in Bahia long. I took a cab to the bus station (R$22! Oh, for the days when trips to the rodoviaria or airport only cost R$4 in otherwise-expensive Rio de Janeiro) and an overnight bus to Alagoas.
We didn’t get blankets on the bus, despite paying more for “Gold Class” service, but the nice lady sitting next to me saw me folding my arms and shivering, and offered to share her blanket. They keep those buses extremely cold. I should have known better.
I awoke when she got off, just as the sun rose around 6 AM. In between short sessions of dozing, I began to watch the fields pass by.
This is the land of sugarcane. It looks like a big grass-like shrub, and it’s everywhere. Alagoas is also one of the poorest states in the country, with an abysmal score on the Human Development Index. I didn’t see a donkey cart (which sometimes still travel down major streets in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires), but there was little besides roadside shacks for miles. Every decoration and wall painting, including political paintings (identifiable at high speeds because they’re often nothing more than a name and a five or six-digit candidate number), seemed faded in the hot sun. And the sun is hot. Maceió is fewer than ten degrees from the equator, which is closer than I’ve ever been on land. (Flying doesn’t count.) From what I’ve heard and read, sugarcane cultivation is difficult and dangerous work. Working in the pounding sun can’t make it easier.
Perhaps the most dignified buildings we passed were the refineries (usinas in Portuguese). The sugar refineries are busy turning cane into ethanol and making Brasil a pioneer on the relatively-cleaner energy front. Here, the refineries and the plantations are owned by powerful families. Which leads me to the violence.
The processing plants all seem to have the last names Melo, Calheiros, and Vilela. The first name is attached to Fernando Collor de Melo, the only president (1989-1992) in Brazilian history to be impeached, and a current senator. His family also owns the local paper Gazeta de Alagoas, the local Globo TV franchise, and some radio channels. The second name is of Renan Calheiros, a senator whose own scandals – in which construction firms laundered hush payments to his pregnant mistress, overpaid to buy his farms, and paid his son’s mayoral campaign under the table – were front page news in Folha de São Paulo and Veja when I was last in Salvador in 2007. He’s still senator, though no longer Senate President. (If you scroll down to a previous entry, you’ll find that his replacement is current Senate President, former President of the Republic, and all-around charmer José Sarney. I’m going to his home state soon.) Oh, and Teotônio Vilela Filho (Filho is Portuguese for “Junior,” meaning that the son got the father’s name), is the current governor.
These families have long controlled the land, and local politics. In fact, they’re so dominant that the whole enterprise seems novel-worthy, in a tragic sense. I’ve been doing some reading on recent history. To wit:
In the 1980s, when he was governor, Fernando Collor signed an agreement with the refineries “in order to attract them or keep them in Alagoas.” In return for staying, the refineries would pay no state taxes. None. (Big industrial taxes are the main source of state funds, besides federal transfers. Brazil has a complex system in which a value-added tax is paid where a product is produced, rather than where it is purchased. State taxes and an enormous industrial base are the reasons that the government of São Paulo is so rich.) In any case, in 1996, during the governorship of another character who had to resign when police salaries went 12 months in arrears and enraged public workers stormed the State Assembly, some employee at the state Finance Secretary was given the job of investigating just how much the refineries should be paying. That employee was shot dead on the state assembly steps during the day; the case has never been solved. His brother resigned from the finance secretariat rather than meet the same fate. His wife, a judge, had death threats made against her after she indicted/denounced a child prostitution ring. (source: Gazeta Mercantil, 16 April 2001)
By 1999, the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo estimated that the state of Alagoas had failed to collect R$850 million in taxes from the refineries.
Oh, and those same refineries didn’t pay their energy bills for years. When the electrical company tried to collect, or threatened to cut off their power, the refinery heads went to a local judge and got a temporary restraining order keeping the lights on. There are multiple cases (including one involving Renan Calheiros) in which the local judges are cousins to heads of a sugar-refining operation. (The owner of the largest refinery in the state is the former senator, former national president of the PSDB, and current governor T. Vilela Filho. His father was a political boss before him.) Given the pace of the Brazilian justice system, a temporary decision can endure for years. The state energy company has long had an inability to collect, which was a minor reason the federal government (who took it over in order to pay off state debts, but that’s another tale) tried to privatize it and found no buyers.
Then there’s another story about the federal deputy from Alagoas who was kicked out of office for ordering a (successful) hit on a fellow deputy. The victim – Ceci Cunha – died. On his way out, the offending deputy declared that he would stay in Brasília, and look for work as a gynecologist. He claimed to be a good doctor.
For more of these “wow, Alagoas is like the Wild West” stories, see Peter Robb’s A Death in Brazil. The book was an interesting read. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the many accusations he makes, given my lack of local knowledge. It is true, however, that the “death” in the title is still an unresolved case. (On Monday, I passed a sign in front of the cathedral that read, “Honestly, Governor, they’re killing like never before. We have the worst [per-capita] homicide rate in the country.”)
Back to the bus trip. So we finally arrived in Maceió. My first verdict, based on my time in the beachfront neighborhoods of Pajuçara and Ponta Verde, is as follows. If Florianópolis, Campo Grande, and Miami Beach somehow had a love child, it would look like Maceió. The water offshore is indeed emerald-colored in the middle of the day, and a soft blue at sunset. This is a beach town like Floripa, but much more tropical. Like Miami Beach, it’s built for tourists and the prices are a little ridiculous. And like Campo Grande, there seems to be little attention paid to clean gutters, public trash, and traffic rules (or traffic common sense). Most frustrating of all, a very low percentage of streets have their name on a sign or on the wall. Still, it’s a charming little beach town in a sea of sugar cane fazendas.
Unfortunately, I’ve been without an internet connection throughout Monday. I dread that it’s a problem with my laptop (translation into Portuguese: “laptop”) and not with the connections. We’ll see.
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Wednesday update:
I had my first few interviews, and then a 50-minute bus ride around the town. (I was on the right bus, but it followed a terribly complex route and only passed my stop on the return.)
Other parts of the city are nicer and more developed than are my neighborhood of Pajuçara and the center. And the spilled trash on the sidewalk out front – here since Sunday – is being swept up and collected as I type this.
The people, as always, have been very helpful and friendly. I think I offended one of them, and I feel bad. I was chatting with a secretary, waiting for my appointment. We made the usual small talk about my travels and regional Brazilian accents and how much she likes living here but how hot it is, and then I asked if it was a portrait of the current governor on the wall. (There was also a crucifix, but so it goes.) She acknowledged that it was the current governor. I then mentioned that one of the things that fascinated me about Alagoas – and about this particular bureaucratic body – was “that this agency does a good job, when there have been so many instances of political problems in the past, delays [atrasos] in salaries and the like.” She repeated, “yeah, that’s the governor” and her mood visibly soured. I felt really bad, but I didn’t know how to apologize. I thought of stating that I didn’t mean any offense, but that would only bring it up again and, given that I’m me, I might put my foot in my mouth even farther.
Lesson: don’t come to someone’s home and say, “by the way, the politics here are a mess.” Even more so if they’ve been held up to ridicule and scorn by the rest of the country. (I’ve seen at least one national newspaper article quoting a politician in Rio saying “things are bad here, but this is not [as bad as] Alagoas.”)
I should have known this earlier.
After all, I’m from California.
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Nine more days or so more in Maceió.
