Theresa Bradley's Blogs
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Brazilians See Opportunity, Accountability in Olympic Spotlight
Cheers and whistles poured over the Sao Paulo streets into a quiet office above a cobblestone alley, sending an engineer leaping from his chair to his computer to check the internet for the second time in 15 minutes. This time, the results were in: Rio de Janiero had been awarded the XXXI Olympic Games, ending a more than two-year bid that had been covered in Brazil with all the suspense of a political election. “This is very good,” the engineer said, banging both hands on the table and setting the scene for a cascade of the kind of “Proud to be Brazilian” patriotism that's echoed in dozens of local ad campaigns. But pragmatism, not nationalism, followed. “Now we're powerful because we can really say to the government, ‘We have to comply with everything that we promised’” the world that Brazil would do to prepare for the...
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Ousted Honduran President Puts Brazil in Unexpected Bind
Grafitti outside Mackenzie University in Sao Paulo this month reads \"Down with the coup in Honduras.\" Latin America’s biggest power is taking new interest in the region’s fourth-poorest nation, with coffee-shop chatter in Brazil’s financial capital now including insightful comments such as, “Honduras is a country in Central America.” It’s hard to blame a Brazilian for asking: Metropolitan Sao Paulo alone has nearly three times more people than all of Honduras, which is 3,700 miles away and has an economy less than one-100th the size of Brazil’s. But Brazilian media are suddenly scrambling to explain a Honduran political crisis that has dragged on since June, when soldiers roused that country’s president from bed at gunpoint and flew him from the country in his pajamas. This week, ousted president Manuel Zelaya snuck back across the border and unexpectedly announced that...
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In Brazil, a Rising Star and Potential President
Buzzed-about potential presidential candidate Marina Silva offered a snapshot of Brazilian democracy in action this week, fielding questions from a squad of journalists and viewers in an hour-and-a-half interview that showed her to be the calm underdog and agitator that observers say could reshape the 2010 presidential race. Her smooth style and fast, easy speech were more like Obama than they were like the podium-pounding dinosaurs whose Senate-floor shouting match was rebroadcast on congressional TV at the same time that she appeared on the program “Roda Viva.” Brazilian media appear to find her manner and life story compelling – and have already been criticized for being “dazzled” by a novelty candidate with little real support. Silva does face tough odds to be Brazil’s next president. A recent poll showed her with just 4.8 percent support a year before elections, trailing Heloisa Helena, a leftist senator; Lula’s...
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