Brazil is the clearest example of Latin America’s newfound financial stability
SÃO PAULO — “Investors and analysts seem to share the sunny attitude of the country’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. ‘Brazil is not afraid of this crisis,’ he said this week. It is, he insists, ‘an eminently American crisis’ caused by people trying to make a lot of ‘third-class money’”…
Thanks partly to ethanol from sugar cane, Brazil aims to be an energy superpower. But can it keep its own lights on?
PORTO VELHO — “An electricity-industry body predicts a 28-32% chance of blackouts by 2012 if the economy grows at 4.8% a year. Officials dismiss this as alarmist. But Lula is worried enough to have attended a recent meeting of his National Energy Policy Council for the first time”… (Photo copyright Robert Lane Greene, 2007)
A correspondent’s diary from Rondônia state in Brazil
“At issue with the dams, as with almost everything in Brazil, is the land. The teeming soil of Brazil can grow anything. Drop your mobile phone and a mobile phone tree will appear before you can pick it up”…
The death of a political boss, but not necessarily of the breed
SÃO PAULO
“THE most powerful men in Brazilian politics tend to go by nicknames or initials. The president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is invariably called simply Lula. One of the great acronyms was Antonio Carlos Magalhães, or ACM, a senator who dominated the political life of the large north-eastern state of Bahia for half a century. To some Brazilians, his death on July 20th at 79 marks the end of an era—that of coronelismo, the rule of the old-fashioned political bosses known as ‘colonels’”…
For the next six weeks, I’ll be covering Brazil from The Economist’s São Paulo bureau.
