The Passenger: Brazil

Brazil

The 1950s were coming to a close when the world first heard the term bossa nova on João Gilberto’s album Chega de Saudade; between 1958 and 1970 a generation of superstars wowed the world with their acrobatic and explosive football, while Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa created Brasilia, the 20th century’s largest concrete utopia, situated dramatically between the blue of the sky and the green of the forest. Music, football and architecture, Brazil’s three great contributions to those years of dreams and dynamism, from a country that had found its own path into the future with a ‘modernity that was fluid, light and simultaneously complex’. Not even the dictatorship was able to stifle the air of optimism and revolution that combined with Brazil’s legendary joy tinged with melancholy to create a soft power that was so seductive that for many years it survived its own decline. For outsiders, who were also misled by the economic boom and reforms of the 2000s – which saw the Brazilian middle classes grow at a rate unequalled almost anywhere at any time – it was a rude awakening to witness the election of a president who was greeted by half the country with a mixture of resignation and disbelief, their mood so succinctly captured by the famous hashtag #EleNão (#NotHim). The dream has turned into a nightmare; the world looks on helplessly as deforestation ravages the Amazon, which even as recently as the end of the 20th century had seemed almost infinite. But in Brazil people’s lives have adapted to a different reality (or failed to) for some time: crippling corruption, the myth of a post-racial society that is debunked by blatant discrimination along with decades of a growth in violence that gives the country the unenviable record of having the world’s highest number of murders. Luckily Brazilians have not lost their desire to fight, minorities are still determined to assert their rights and, now that the glorious past is dead and buried, a desire to rebuild for the future is emerging. The challenge of telling the story of this extraordinary country right now lies in searching for the thread of joy running through the sadness: chega de saudade, no more blues.

Contents

Brazil in Numbers

A Sign of the Times — Fabian Federl

The Icon: Marta Vieira da Silva — Aydano André Motta

Order and Progress? — Jon Lee Anderson

Jon Lee Anderson, one of America’s foremost reporters and a leading expert on Latin America, attempts to answer the question the whole world has asked since the election of Jair Bolsonaro: how was this possible?

Funk, Pride and Prejudice — Alberto Riva

Coarse, over the top and foul-mouthed but also pioneering, liberating and feminist, Brazil’s funkeiras are turning the tables on a patriarchal society and fighting against the stereotype of white middle-class beauty.

Prime Time — Alex Cuadros

For decades Rede Globo’s programming has determined Brazilians’ evening routine: the news, followed by a telenovela and a football match. While its direct influence on politics has waned since the days when its founder Roberto Marinho decided whether a government would stand or fall, it still holds considerable sway.

Prosperity Now: The Rise of the Evangelicals — Anna Virginia Balloussier

Brazil is seeing a boom in conversions to the neo-Pentecostal movement and in particular to the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which preaches prosperity theology: pay up and have faith.

In Defence of Fragmentation — Michel Laub

How can we define the indefinable? Is it possible to pin a single label on a country so multi-faceted that it appears almost schizophrenic?

The Road — Stephanie Nolen

Highway BR-163 cuts a brutal path through Brazil’s conflicting ambitions of transforming itself into an economic powerhouse while preserving the Amazon. Stephanie Nolen travelled two thousand kilometres along the dusty, dangerous corridor and found a range of ways that the forest could work for everyone.

Real Life on the Passarela do Samba — Aydano André Motta

After decades of toeing the line, samba schools are now engaging with the socio-political issues at the heart of the contemporary debate.

The War — Bruno Paes Manso and Camila Nunes Dias

Two factions – the Primeiro Comando da Capital and the Comando Vermelho – are vying for control of the drug market, the prisons and the favelas in an all-out battle for supremacy.

You’ve Got Mail! — Fabian Federl

There was a time when Rocinha, Rio’s largest favela, had no addresses, but then Eliane Ramos drew the first map of the area before starting a postal delivery service.

‘On the River, I Was King’ — Eliane Brum

The construction of the Belo Monte Dam meant those living happily on the banks of the Xingu River had to be relocated to the outskirts of Altamira, one of Brazil’s most violent cities. Now they live behind barred windows surrounded by gun violence, forced to buy food with money they never used to have and for which they never before felt the need. Their situation is dire, but the fight back has begun.

Tales from Another Brazil — Valerio Millefoglie

An Author Recommends — Luiz Ruffato

The Playlist — Alberto Riva

Further Reading

The photographs in this issue were taken by the Brazilian photojournalist André Liohn, whose work has appeared in Der Spiegel, L’Espresso, Time, Le Monde and Veja. After turning his hand to photography in his thirties, he quickly found a mentor in the American-Czech photographer Antonín Kratochvíl, who took him under his wing. In 2011 Liohn became the first Latin American photographer to receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal and to be nominated for the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for his documentary efforts during the second Libyan civil war. His photographs of the war zone were used by the International Committee of the Red Cross for its Health Care in Danger initiative, which highlighted the violence suffered by healthcare personnel around the world. In 2012 he took part in Almost Dawn in Libya, a project that used photojournalism as a bridge for reconciliation in post-war Libya.

Brazil in Numbers

A Sign of the Times

FABIAN FEDERL

Translated by Stephen Smithson

Standing in line outside the Bar da Dona Onça, a young woman leans towards her boyfriend and whispers, ‘Hey, isn’t that the telenovela actress in front of us?’ The boyfriend nods. Meanwhile a waitress has pressed a little sign into the actress’s hand with a number denoting her place in the queue.

It’s all quite egalitarian in what is probably central São Paulo’s best-known restaurant. All must wait their turn, even soap stars, footballers and musicians from the well-to-do parts of the city. A model leans against a column while his collar is adjusted by an ostentatiously hip photographer. In the queue two men in the uniform of black ankle-skimming trousers, granny glasses and hessian New Yorker tote bags are discussing whether it was the Guardian or The New York Times that described the Edifício Copan, the large, grey, curvaceous high-rise on whose ground floor the Bar da Dona Onça is located, as ‘Latin America’s coolest building’.

Just fifteen years ago the area around the Copan was the most dangerous place in São Paulo, and the Copan itself was a particularly hazardous place to be. Today the building has become something of a new hub, the focal point of all that makes visiting the city worth while – theatres, concert halls, restaurants, bars, parties, galleries and parks – and, more generally, of all that gives it its sheer scale, something that surrounds you every second that you spend here.

The design of the building, with its curving lines hinting at the mathematical symbol for a sine, is actually modelled on the tilde above the ‘a’ in São [Paulo]. It was designed in the 1950s by Oscar Niemeyer, Latin America’s most renowned architect, and is the largest residential property in the world in terms of living space. Some of its apartments cover several hundred square metres while others are so small that they require folding beds. For tourists looking to stay at the Copan, a range of accommodation types can be found listed on Airbnb.

The Copan is like a small town within a big city. In the arcades on the ground floor there are seventy-two shops, travel agencies, an evangelical free church, two galleries – as well as popular establishments such as the Bar da Dona Onça, where everything, from the napkins to the frames of the photomontages on the walls, is decorated with kitschy leopard print. During the day throngs of people – residents, passers-by and tourists – move between the arcades, past enamel signs from the 1960s telling you where you are, past dozens of porters who know their residents by sight and will hold the lift doors open for them, past groups of office workers from the nearby office blocks.

It is often said that São Paulo has no views of the horizon because there’s always a building in the way, but you can ignore such talk if you stand on the right floor of the Copan. With a little luck – and with no rain, smog or haze – you can see from here to the line of hills on the northern fringes of the twenty-million megalopolis. Given the scale, it is easy to feel like a farmer’s boy in the big city, mesmerised by the endless chains of brilliant car headlights, the clusters of high-rise buildings, the hundreds of helicopters and aeroplanes in the airspace above the city. Depending on your vantage point you might see the eightlane Rua da Consolação, which leads to the rich southern part of the city, or you might see the Minhocão. This long thoroughfare – the ‘Earthworm’ – is closed to traffic at weekends when it is transformed into São Paulo’s most popular leisure area, bringing the city’s residents out to walk their dogs, to skateboard or to cycle. The walls of the buildings, which in some cases are just a few centimetres from the roadside, are covered in street art, while notices stuck to lamp posts carry political propaganda or advertisements for readings of tarot cards and coffee grounds. On Sundays tens of thousands of people walk down the Minhocão to the weekly market at Santa Cecilia to drink sugar-cane juice and eat pastel de feira, fried empanadas, the greasiest – and thus also arguably the best – that the city has to offer. The Earthworm leads from Praça Roosevelt, a square right next to the Copan around which teenagers and students sit with cans of beer in the evening, to Campos Elíseos, another central district, about two kilometres away.

The streets are narrower in Campos Elíseos than in the rest of São Paulo, but they are less densely built up. There you can still find the 19th-century villas built by the coffee barons when the city became rich on the cultivation and export of coffee, all done out in colonial style and surrounded by magnificent gardens. At the same time Campos Elíseos is one of the most run-down parts of the city. It may house the Estação da Luz – an ornate former railway station now converted into a concert hall with among the best acoustics in the world, to which guest conductors from New York or Tokyo are routinely flown in – but you only have to walk five metres from the entrance and you’ll find tents and tarpaulins stretched out, underneath which there are rows of people – hundreds, maybe a thousand – wrapped in grey blankets. Some of them pull nervously on glass pipes; others swap small rocks of crack for a few coins. Several kick cans around; some call out in confusion; others lie, bent double, in the middle of the street. Up to three thousand craqueiros – crack addicts – are based around here.

Campos Elíseos provides a visible reminder of what it was like fifteen years ago in and around the Edifício Copan. One person who can tell you about those dark times is Affonso de Oliveira, now chief caretaker at the Copan. He sits at his desk on the first floor of the building, a broad, tall man of seventy-nine with white hair and a rumbling voice. Before him there are piles of books – about architecture, about urban planning and also about the Copan. On the wall behind him hang panoramic photos from the roof terrace, old clocks and calendars and a floor plan showing the positions of the original lifts from the 1950s – all gifts from residents. On Affonso’s belt the walkie-talkie crackles at regular intervals; this time it is assistant caretaker Luis, one of 103 employees, looking for plans for the defective power lines in Block B. On the table the phone is vibrating. Every few minutes the secretary brings him sheets of paper covered in notes.

Affonso has witnessed the fall and rise of the building right from the beginning. In 1963, when he moved in, he was a chemistry student and the Copan was still a prestigious building. São Paulo, the administrative centre of large-scale agriculture in the region, was in the ascendant and would, it was believed, become to Brazil what New York was to the United States. Actors, musicians and artists lived in the Copan; the great Tropicália musician Caetano Veloso sang songs about the neighbourhood. But then came the urban exodus of the 1980s, when those who had money moved to the country, leaving poverty to become concentrated in the centre.

‘In 1993 crack arrived,’ says Affonso. ‘At that time there was a woman on my floor with two children of primary-school age. Every evening I would see the boys sitting by themselves in the empty corridor in front of the apartment door while the mother received clients inside.’ On the floor below was a military policeman who sold crack. Again and again people died: some overdosed; some were killed; many fell to their deaths from the roof, whether in a drugged frenzy or because they’d had enough of life. Again and again fires broke out. In the mid-1990s all the shops in the ground-floor arcades were closed.

Affonso did not want to see his home deteriorate any further, so he applied for the position of caretaker and set about the task of renewal. He called the porters of the five blocks A–E to his office and set up a log of those residents who received new ‘friends’, ‘contacts’ or ‘colleagues’ every few hours. He issued daily warnings to drug dealers and prostitutes that he would call the police. Many thought he was bluffing, but Affonso was serious. He was threatened and harassed; he would move through the Copan armed and in a bulletproof vest. He started putting up cameras in the arcades and in front of the doorways, then on the surrounding streets. ‘The dealers eventually left the Copan because it had started to become too troublesome for them here,’ he says. ‘Without dealers there were no craqueiros, without craqueiros there was no crime and without crime there was no fear.’

People working in the headquarters of big companies in the city centre began to feel safe again around the Copan. By around 2007 the area was starting to fill up at lunchtimes. More and more restaurants opened. As well as the Bar da Dona Onça these included the Padaria Santa Efigênia, also situated right inside the Copan. This is a ‘bakery’ of a kind typically found in São Paulo, which means that it’s more a kind of restaurant/bakery/café/kiosk/bar/souvenir shop.

Two hundred metres away, on Praça Roosevelt, the first clubs soon began to open up, bringing people from richer neighbourhoods to the centre for nights out. Some of these ‘nightlife commuters’ eventually started to look for somewhere to live near the praça, and the best place for that was the Copan. Students and artists followed, and after them a more bourgeois clientele. By 2018 the Copan was roughly back where it started. This is the year when its arcades – a meeting place in the 1960s for artists who would later go on to exhibit in New York and London – saw the opening of their first bar with international flair.

At the entrance to the Fel you have to give your name, and then you will be led in by a waiter in a suit. The Fel is set out in a sombre manner, brownish-red hues with small spherical lamps giving off just a little light – dim and subdued as though it were emitted reluctantly – into the room. Here you won’t find caipirinhas or vodka-cola. You will find drinks with history, such as the St Charles punch – port, sherry, raspberry and lemon, created in the bar of the Hotel St Charles in New Orleans in 1896 – or the Saratoga – Woodford Reserve bourbon, Carpano vermouth and Angostura bitters – first concocted in 1862 in his Broadway bar by Jerry Thomas, the pioneer of the American art of mixing cocktails.

The Fel, unlike other establishments housed within the Copan, is not at all kitschy or daring, it is stylish. You sit on sumptuously upholstered barstools with the massive building above you, and you could be in New York or London rather than São Paulo. But then you lean back against one of the columns studded with small terrazzo tiles, seventy-two million of which were ordered in an act of folie de grandeur for the Copan façade, and you couldn’t be anywhere else.

The Icon: Marta Vieira da Silva

AYDANO ANDRÉ MOTTA

Translated by Laura Garmeson

The number 10 printed on the back of a football shirt didn’t have much significance before the arrival of Pelé. The greatest player of all time was given the number (purely by chance, apparently) during the 1958 World Cup when he exploded on to the world scene as a precocious seventeen-year-old and created the mystical aura that now surrounds the number. A constellation of other football stars followed, including Zico and Zidane, Platini and Messi, Maradona and Neymar, to name but a few.

But none of these other number 10s has had so long and hard a road to follow as Marta Vieira da Silva.

Born into poverty in the sertão – or outback – in the Northeast region of the country, she put all her tenacity, bravery and talent into pursuing her dream of becoming a professional footballer. She achieved this without the support she was due but to great acclaim: in her nineteen-year career she has been voted the best footballer in the world six times by FIFA, a number equalled only by Lionel Messi – and she got there first.

It would be fair to say that Marta practically invented the women’s game in Brazil. Navigating her way through one of the most male-dominated societies on the planet, which has done everything in its power to prevent women from playing its sacred sport, she rose to become a footballing idol wearing the most famous number-10 shirt of all, that of the Brazilian Seleção, the national football team. Overcoming the disdain of managers and institutions, she became a heroine in the fight for gender equality.

Like millions of Brazilians she grew up in a family with an absentee father – her mother, Teresa, raised her four children alone in a single-room house partitioned with sheets hung from the ceiling. Marta, the youngest, used to watch the boys playing football from an early age and started playing herself at six, much to her mother’s disapproval. ‘There was a lot of prejudice. They used to call me a tomboy,’ said the star player in an interview with Brazilian magazine Trip. ‘Girls played handball