Do You Like Concrete? Brasília, Distrito Federal

I came to Brasília in search of nationwide data and to test a few hypotheses about federal-state relations. I can say that I won't leave completely empty-handed. I would call my week moderately productive, and I'm almost certain that I'll have less productive weeks among the next few.

I'm still tired of travel, tired of being in the field, tired of the same routine and of the same loneliness. Yet I march onward. I go running a lot, though I fear that my shoes are barely going to make it to July 3rd. (I left my new pair for Bethany to bring down then.)

Brasília, the capital of the future. Or at least a very 1950s version of the future, built for the automobile, mass urban housing, and dramatic gestures in urban planning.

Brasília, for the uninitiated, is laid out in the shape of an airplane, with the body comprising the Monumental Axis, the Esplanade of the Ministries, the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Presidential Palace, and (somewhere) a McDonald's I falled to locate. The wings of the airplane are devoted to zoned residential and commercial areas.

Everything is laid out according to a system of acronyms and numbers. I stayed in the South Wing, at superblock 705, off street W3, in CRS (Residential Center South, I think). I went to a meeting in SRTVS Quadra 701, or Sector Radio and TV South, Block 701. There are separate areas for hotels and hospitals.

There is a logic to it all, which one learns gradually. I don't actively dislike Brasília - though I actively dislike the fact that a decent hotel is out of my budget range, given that hotels are limited to Hotel Sector North and Hotel Sector South - like others do. I just think it could stand for some re-development and new planning after fifty years. It's certainly not a pedestrian-friendly city, despite the fact that cars stop at crosswalks (not always guaranteed elsewhere). Brasília would receive a Walkability Score close to zero.

To get an idea, of just how spread-out and car-friendly it is, see the following photos.





The last picture is of a diorama that's in a small underground museum near the presidential palace.

These photos are all taken within the airplane, an area known as the Pilot Plan. There are other outlying areas, but almost none are adjacent to the Pilot Plan. One has to go down a long road to reach the next developed areas. This movement out of the Pilot Plan is surprising. Normally, in Brazil, as one leaves a big city, one encounters suburbs and smaller developments that are poorer and more run down that is the center of the city. The poverty level seems to increase as you move farther from the city center, until at last you're in the countryside.

Brasília, by contrast, has among the highest wealth and development scores of any city in Brazil. And for twenty-one of its fifty years of existence, it was the site of a military dictatorship. Hence there are almost no visible slums on the outskirts. When traveling out of the city (by newly-built metro or by car), one immediately jumps from city to countryside. In Brasília's case, one jumps right from the buildings into the red-dirt cerrado, the high savannah in the middle of the country. I wish I had photos of this, but alas I was negligent in not bringing my camera along to that interview.

On the first Sunday in town, I took a walk down to the presidential palace in hopes of seeing a tour. I wore long pants, but didn't sweat too much. Although the termperature still hovered around the same 31-32 C it was in Fortaleza and Salvador, the air here is much drier. I almost miss the humidity. Almost.

Along the way, I passed the new national library, which has nothing on the old national library on Avenida Rio Branco in Rio de Janeiro. (Reminder: When Brasília became the capital, all those federal public sector employees had to move out of Rio de Janeiro. Poor them.) Coincidentally, it's named after a former governor of Rio, a master populist.



I also passed the newly-opened National Museum (the hemisphere resembling Saturn) and the Cathedral. The latter bears a striking resemblence to Space Mountain at Disneyland and Disney World, also pictured below. That's not by accident. They were built in the same era (well, Space Mountain in the 1970s), and were both designed to showcase the future of architecture. Space Mountain doesn't have stained glass.






Beyond the Cathedral lie the Ministry buildings. Each building has brass letters outside declaring which Ministries it contains. I imagine that somewhere there is a collection of giant marquee brass letters, ready for the moment the next president rearranges the ministries or creates new ones.




Also, nothing says "bureaucracy" like big concrete slabs, row after row.

The Ministries are also one of the redeeming features of Brasília, in that many of them have restaurants that are open to the public. The restaurants function mainly to feed public employees, of course, but visitors are welcome after 1:00 PM. And the food is cheap!

I visited the restaurants at the Ministry of Agriculture (R$9.46 per kilo, but no credit cards accepted) and at the Ministry of Communications and Transport (R$10.00 per kilo, credit cards accepted), the latter twice. Normally, food is R$17.99 per kilo if it's affordable, over R$20 per kilo at most places in Zona Sul in Rio, and R$30.00 or more at the mall. By contrast, the Ministries are a steal. I would like to personally thank the Brazilian people for subsidizing three lunches for me. I ate 1.38 kilos on my second visit, and 1.02 kilos on my third visit. (Go ahead, convert that to pounds.) Normally, I eat around 0.6 kilos for lunch at a restaurant, and pay more.

Numbers above fixed. Thanks to Amy in comments.

And on my walk I encountered my good friends at the Ministry of Foreign Relations! Hooray!




The building is rather beautiful. It may be a little nicer than the old Palácio Itamaraty in Rio (which I have also visited; see the posts about my visa mix-up). The contrast is between colonial and modern styles.

[On reflection, my best friends are the Federal Police; it was their mistake and slip-up that allowed me back into the country, and thus did not send me toothbrush-less and computer-less back to Argentina.]

Other bureaucratic buildings on the east end of the Axis, like Itamaraty, are more beautiful. I saw the Ministry of Justice building and wanted to jump into the fountain for a swim.



And of course there's the famous Congress. I was surprised by how close I could get to the building. The security-mad United States wouldn't dare let one duck under the awnings and walk on the grass.








At the end of my walk, I was sorely disappointed. The Presidential Palance, the Palácio do Planalto, is under refurbishment and was closed to tours. Oh well.




In conclusion, Brasília falls right about in the middle, out of all the cities I've visited. I'd come back, though I'd try to drive hard bargains to stay at a nicer hotel. I will say that I did enjoy the cheap food, and running in the Parque da Cidade.

Now to return to the Mato Grossos, but briefly.

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Oh, and the United States can best be represented by a bacon cheeseburger. Obvio. (The US burger is available on Fridays. Other days are McAlemanha, McBrasil, McArgentina, McItália, and McEspanha.)

Something something something dark side: São Luís, Maranhão

São Luís took some time to understand.

To speak well of it, I would note that it has a little bit of almost every Brazilian city I’ve visited: it has a lagoon like Rio and Florianópolis, it has long, wide beaches like Maceió, it has a colorful colonial center like Salvador, and it has office towers and political offices in high-rise buildings in the middle of nowhere, like Cuiabá and Salvador. In fact, I would consider it Salvador in miniature, with the same long looping roads, inexplicable traffic, coast and historic center, racial diversity, and (until recently) oligarchic politics.

To say the very least about São Luís, I would comment that it’s almost like a bad caricature of Brazil and the challenges that Brazil faces. The lagoon surrounded by luxury apartment buildings smells of sewage (a constant algae bloom, according to one respondent). It rains a lot, and every time it rains, the lovely beaches are unfit for swimming. I walked into the ocean the morning after a rain and had two little white worms with black eyes attach themselves to my arm and bite. I crushed them both, and never went into the water again. Open rivulets of city water carry trash and debris onto a beach that is otherwise stunning. The historic center is colorful, in that you can look at the buildings, but the museums don’t offer much information and aren’t terribly captivating. The center is pretty, but it lacks a sense of life. (According to my new maranhense friend, almost all the residents were expelled from the center when the city got UNESCO status and the state government developed it into a tourist attraction.) I was the only visitor at two museums, and there just weren’t that many people - tourists or locals - on the streets on a Saturday.

Photos below are of colorful streets in the city center. My favorite is the Rua da Giz, the middle picture. I wish there was some exhibit on the design of the streets, or their history, or settlement patterns, or name origins. If there was such an exhibit, I missed it.





The city is famous for its use of azulejos, or blue-and-white tiles in a Portuguese style. According to the guide, it was discovered that azulejos worked well in cooling buildings and fending off São Luís’s ever-present humidity. I can understand how the first task works by reflecting sunlight; I can’t really grasp how the latter works.

At the Visual Arts Museum, a curator named Mario explained the differences among old Portuguese tiles (connect in sets of four to form very straight geometric patterns), French tiles (form more artistic, curved patterns in sets of four), German tiles (much more elaborate, multi-colored) and English tiles (mass-manufactured, all the same, don’t connect to each other). I took some photos from around the historic center.







Ah, but I wasn’t here for the azulejos. I was in São Luís for the politics.

The story begins and ends with the Sarney clan. (“Clan” is the preferred term used in Folha de São Paulo.) In 1966, an ambitious young federal deputy named José Sarney was appointed governor of Maranhão by the military regime. His clan would only lose a state-level election for the first time in 2006. In the meantime, José Sarney has been governor, senator, vice-president, President of the Republic, and President of the Senate, as well as a well-acclaimed fiction writer.

To understand how the clan has stayed in power so long, it helps to know that Maranhão, the state of which São Luís is the capital, is among the poorest in Brazil. I recall (but can’t locate at the moment using XP) an article from 2000 noting that, of the 100 poorest municipalities in Brazil in 2000, 83 were located in Maranhão. The bus ride into São Luís from Belém certainly didn’t offer any evidence to undermine this statistic. (I really can’t or shouldn’t judge relative poverty levels from a bus window.)

I can’t state for sure that the Sarneys (oh, it’s plural - his daughter is currently governor, having engineered to throw the candidate who beat them in 2006 out of office in 2009 by means of judicial rulings on vote-buying) employ vote buying or turnout buying. Or that they engage in electoral fraud. I have no solid evidence. Not having evidence, however, didn’t stop plenty of Maranhenses from leveling these accusations in our discussions.

In any case, here’s the view of the colonial center from the north end of the José Sarney Bridge. By coincidence, I took these photos on the Senator’s 80th birthday.




Sarney, you might recall, was previously in the news last spring for a series of accusations that he, as President of the Senate, issued a bunch of secret acts to give relatives and friends jobs and contracts. I can’t remember all the details because it’s all gone down the Great Brazilian Memory Hole and we’ve all moved on to present scandals. He’s still President of the Senate, being a Senator from Amapá. (He stepped aside so that the next generation of Sarneys could take over in Maranhão; Amapá is a smaller state where it’s presumably cheaper and easier to win elections. After all, he’s a former President of Brazil.)

In any case, being a poor state with a nationally-prominent patriarch from the right-wing means that federal monies are very important, and that Mr. President of the Senate matters in getting the pork from Brasília. Thus, as a corollary, they’re always on the side of the president. Roseana Sarney was an ally to Fernando Henrique Cardoso. She’s now an ally to Lula. (Painted walls in town read Roseana 25 Lula 13, which is not a football score but rather the two electoral codes for their respective tickets.)

I talked to two sets of non-Sarney administrators. A former governor, who broke with the Sarneys after being appointed and elected with their support, pointed out that Vale’s projects to invest in steel plants in Maranhão were all shelved after José Sarney objected. Cooperation with the World Bank on a sanitation project was stopped because the Senate would never approve a loan. In short, the governor said, after his break, Maranhão received no money that wasn’t already its legal automatic due. José’s hope was that his daughter would win in 2006, and receive all the acclaim for re-starting the stalled investments and projects.

I’ve been to other states before where conflicting personalities among political elites stall or reverse projects. Rio de Janeiro comes readily to mind. But Rio de Janeiro isn’t as desperately poor and in need of investments as Maranhão is. I don’t mean to dramatize the situation, but lack of investments in sanitation mean that people are dying of preventable illnesses. Lack of investments means that people aren’t getting jobs or better jobs.

(Oh, it almost goes without saying that the good Senator from Amapá also blocked extra federal monies for the administration of Jackson Lago, who beat Roseana in 2006.)

It started to put a human face on the costs of sub-national oligarchy and one-party rule in Brazil. The political science term “sub national authoritarianism” isn’t exactly right, but the phenomenon is similar. I was more than a little sickened by these tales. (I still need to find numbers to corroborate the stories.)

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Oh, and the governor’s palace sits perched on a hill overlooking the river, at the north end of the historical center. It’s the Palace of the Lions, but I never learned why.





The city was originally founded by the French, specifically by a guy named Daniel de la Touche. Write your own silly joke with that. The Portuguese expelled them soon after.



The visit was unremarkable. I stayed on the northern coast, ate at touristy but empty restaurants for lunch, sweated a lot, cursed aloud when I found out that the day after my arrival was another national holiday, and ran on the beach until wild dogs and rivers of run-off blocked my path.

It rained every day, usually in quite heavy bursts. The city sits on the margins of the Amazon ecosystem, but still close enough to receive the Amazonian downpours.

I did make a new friend, who grew up in São Luís but goes to graduate school in Belém.

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I’m now in Fortaleza. On Friday afternoon, I showed up early to the airport hoping to get some work done on the laptop. São Luís’s airport, however, is the first I’ve encountered in Brazil that isn’t air-conditioned in its lobby. It was a long wait.

I did go to my first running event here in Fortaleza (and in Brazil). That story is forthcoming.

Below, a view of the upper-class neighborhood Ponta d’Areia (Sand Point), looking back across the muddy Rio Anil and the Ponte José Sarney. Also, an explanation of the state flag, from the plastic bag of a Maranhão-only grocery chain, Mateus. It’s not the only state flag in Brazil that bears a passing resemblence to the Stars and Stripes, and the resemblence is not coincidental.

Thank Goodness for the Rain: Belém, Pará

My memories of agreeable little Belém would be far different had it not rained (which is to say, fell in a downpour) every single day. The rain usually came around mid-day, lasted anywhere from an hour to six hours, and did a great job of clearing out the morning heat. Of course it brought afternoon humidity, but nothing worse than what one might experience in other parts of Brazil. The cooler air and the shade provided by mango trees made walking around Belem a pleasure.

Side note: the mango trees were planted by the city father many years ago. Although they provide excellent shady sidewalks - and apparently Manaus does not have the same - the trees have the bad habit of producing and dropping fruit. These heavy (not always ripe) mangoes often fall on cars, denting car bodies and cracking windshields. Use caution when parking in Belém.

There’s little of excitement to report. I started running again, and made a course out of going down to the docks, up to Ver-o-Peso, and back to the Praça Batista Campos for a few laps. There’s a 10km run in Fortaleza when I arrive, sponsored by the Pague Menos line of drug stores. I’m motivated for it, but I’ve now been to four different Pague Menos locations and no one seems to know how to register me. (And no, it can’t be done online. To my consteration.)

On Saturday, I had a chance to walk down to Belém’s Old City, which is colorful



Bustling (this is Ver-o-Peso, so-named because the Crown would weigh goods shipped from the interior and the Amazon in order to collect the royal ten percent duty)



And sometimes fragrant.



The history is that the Portuguese built a fort here in 1616 to protect their interests further up the Amazon River. I’m not entirely clear on how that was supposed to work. The Amazon delta is enormous, and it has multiple islands behind which one could slip by undetected. Perhaps the settlement at Belém was designed to prevent any permanent settlement upriver. It seems plausible that the French couldn’t plant (and supply and maintain) an Amazonian city without eventually being discovered by the crew at Belém.

In any case, the last above photo is taken from the Fishermans’ Wharf area around Ver-o-Peso, pictured below. This area stands between Ver-o-Peso and the fort; the latter was a nice place, but didn’t seem to warrant the price of admission.








Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I haven’t really changed. Below, I’m standing in front of the Casa das Onze Janelas, or the House of Eleven Windows. It’s a former mansion-turned military hospital-turned chic art gallery and pricey restaurant.



In selecting among museums, I went straight for the Pará State History Museum. It reminded me of the state history museum in Santa Catarina (oh, 1,800 miles away or so). In both cases, the state history museum is the old governor’s mansion, with plaques and exhibits on the development and uses of the mansion, but with very little actual state history. I was disappointed, but the nice guard let me (the only guest at the time) break the no-photographs rule if I took pictures without my flash. Below is the entrance staircase, with various marbles imported from Italy.




I should say that another example of this museum-as-old-fancy-residence genre is the Imperial Palace in Petrópolis, RJ, which is very worthwhile.

I had planned to take more photos and continue my walk, but the camera’s battery decided that it was finished for the day. On Sunday, I did go by the Teatro da Paz, in the Praça da República nearby my hotel, and I got a final photo of my favorite example of belle epoque architecture in Belém. (Quick history: Belém in the turn-of-the-century grew rich off a boom in the demand for rubber tires, which was limited to one worldwide supply in the Amazon. The city prospered, and rich rubber barons built elaborate homes in a town that came to be known as “the tropical Paris.” It all ended when an Englishman smuggled a rubber tree sapling out of Brazil and to Southeast Asia, to be planted far from the plant’s natural enemies/predators. Leeson of the story: never trust the English.





Pará is also recently famous as the site of most of that factoid I always heard growing up: one football field worth of rainforest was being destroyed every 10 minutes or so. Pará is home to the greatest extent of rainforest desmatamento (Portuguese for deforestation).

So I wasn’t surpised to look up and see this NGO was in town.



I’m now in São Luís, Maranhão, after a 16-hour bus ride. It was supposed to be a 12-hour bus ride. The bus broke down and we had to take a detour because the main road was flooded. I’m very secure in my decision to fly on to Fortaleza now, and not bother with the 20-hour bus ride.

More about São Luís soon. In short, as I had expected, it’s very much a little Salvador.