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IRP Gatekeeper Editors' Firsthand Look at Brazil: AIDS, Aviation and Amazon
June 2001
2001 Gatekeeper Editor Tom Fiedler
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SAO PAULO, Brazil - In this teeming city of 15 million, Brazil's largest metropolitan area, the global scourge of AIDS would seem to be a grave threat. After all, nine out of 10 new cases worldwide are in the Third World and a decade ago Sao Paulo was facing an AIDS crisis.
But today the fight against AIDS in Sao Paulo, and in the rest of Brazil, is a story of hope, with implications for the whole world. Brazil's program to manufacture and distribute cheap anti-AIDS drugs has dramatically slashed infection rates and is being studied as a possible model for other countries, particularly in Africa, where HIV-positive patients cannot afford the normally high prices for the treatment.
In June 2001, 12 U.S. news editors in the IRP Gatekeeper Editors program had an in-depth look at Brazil's AIDS program during a 12-day fact-finding visit to Brazil that spanned four cities and brought them in contact with dozens of Brazilians, from AIDS patients to aircraft company executives to Amazon rainforest scientists.
The editors, from 10 U.S. newspapers across the country and from CNN and National Public Radio, came to Brazil to see first-hand this giant nation of 170 million people. The fifth-largest country in size and population, Brazil may be on the verge of realizing its long-stalled potential as a regional and global leader.
At an AIDS clinic in central Sao Paulo, the city with more than 30 percent of the country's estimated 200,000 cases of AIDS, the editors heard from doctors who said mortality rates have declined by 50 percent in the past five years.
"Our primary goal is to guarantee that Brazilians get the drugs they need," said Mylva Fonsi, a doctor at the clinic in the Villa Mariana section of the city. Nationwide, the number of HIV-positive cases - once predicted by the World Bank to reach 1.2 million by the year 2000, has reached only 570,000.
Brazil's AIDS program was a focus throughout the gatekeepers' trip because it coincided
with a worldwide AIDS meeting at the United Nations. Just a few days after two of the members
of the group - Trudy Rubin of
At a meeting in Brasilia, the editors interviewed Brazil's Health Minister Jose Serra on the eve of his departure for the UN meeting. Serra, a possible candidate in the country's 2002 presidential race, emphasized that Brazil was actively engaged in negotiations with the United States and with the worlds' leading pharmaceutical companies. "The way out is to negotiate," he told the editors.
The AIDS issue was only one of many the IRP editors examined in Brazil. While in Sao Paulo, the group interviewed Mayor Marta Suplicy, elected last year as a candidate of the Workers Party on a strong social-justice platform. A first-time officeholder, the glamorous former radio talk-show sexologist is considered a possible future presidential candidate - provided she can govern what is widely considered one of the most sprawling, polluted, crime-ridden and congested cities on the planet.
"The first time I saw (the suburban slums), I thought, 'what can I do about it,'" Suplicy said. She blames the outgoing government and the incumbent federal administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose party is a longtime political rival of hers, for insufficient social spending and for laws that limit her budget.
With 800,000 unemployed residents in Sao Paulo, Suplicy argues that Brazil needs to do far more to help reduce the country's income gap, one of the worst in the world. The mayor has made a conscious effort - surprising to some, given her populist rhetoric - to meet with Sao Paulo's large and wealthy business community to encourage private spending on social programs.
"She's done reasonably well," noted Roberto Faldini, a businessman and one of the directors of the powerful Federation of Industries of Sao Paulo State (FIESP). He shrugged his shoulders about some of his colleagues' vituperative anti-Suplicy statements. "That's part of democracy."
To get a sense of Brazil's business and industrial success, the editors traveled to Sao Jose dos Campos to visit the headquarters of Embraer, the world's fourth largest aerospace company that now exports hundreds of jets around the world, including to major U.S. commercial airlines.
"We've exhausted all the available space we have," noted Horacio Forjaz, executive vice president of Embraer. Business is good, a fact quickly confirmed by a tour of the company's bustling hangars, filled with planes in every stage of assembly. Logos of carriers like United, American, Delta and other U.S. firms were emblazoned on many of the planes.
Once a moribund company propped up with government subsidies, Embraer has boomed since it was privatized in 1994. The firm is Brazil's largest exporter, with profits of $353 million last year on total sales of $2.8 billion. With another $23 billion in orders, the company can't turn out planes fast enough to satisfy the huge demand for regional-flight aircraft.
"Embraer's only solution was to privatize," Forjaz told the Pew group. As at other Brazilian firms, privatization sparked initial opposition by unions but has streamlined productivity at Embraer and made it a hot place for bright young Brazilians to work. "Embraer is today the only successful aerospace company below the equator," Forjaz said.
During their 12-day visit to Brazil, the gatekeeper editors also met with residents of the Rocinha slum in Rio and with scholars and media leaders in Rio and Sao Paulo. The group also met in Brasilia with Brazilian and U.S. diplomats, officials of Brazil's Central Bank and President Cardoso's chief of staff, Pedro Parente, the point man for the country's current energy crisis who defended Cardoso's spending priorities as the right ones for a country of vast needs in infrastructure, education and social services.
The editors also spent parts of four days in the Amazon, visiting a rainforest research camp operated jointly by the Smithsonian Institution and Brazil's government to study ways to reduce destruction of the rainforest.
"Brazil has the highest rate of deforestation in the world," said Bill Lawrence, an American specialist on the rainforest, at a briefing for the editors in Manaus. Large scale cattle-ranching, legal and illegal logging and small-scale slash-and-burn agriculture account for most of the deforestation.
Gatekeepers spent a night at the research camp three hours outside of Manaus, sleeping in hammocks and rising at dawn to go on a naturalist-led tour of the rainforest.
"The insight of the scientists and the first-hand visit to a research camp in the Amazon were
clearly the highlight" of the Brazil trip, said David Stoeffler, editor of
the
Another editor, Tim Connolly of the
Gregory Victor of the
Each year, the International Reporting Project selects one country, usually a nation that is somewhat overlooked by the U.S. media, for a fact-finding tour by gatekeeper editors. In 2000, a different group of gatekeepers visited Indonesia. The destination for 2002 will be announced at the beginning of the year.
The gatekeepers selected for the Brazil trip were:
Tim Connolly, assistant international editor, Dallas Morning News
Tom Fiedler, editorial page editor, Miami Herald
Susan Guernsey, assistant news editor, St. Paul Pioneer Press
Bruce Lowry, commentary editor, Anniston Star
Marco Mulcahy, news editor, Columbia Missourian
Olga Reswow, copy editor, Akron Beacon Journal
Trudy Rubin, editorial board, Philadelphia Inquirer
David Stoeffler, editor, Lincoln (NE) Journal Star
Christopher Turpin, senior producer, National Public Radio
Gregory Victor, international editor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Roy V. Wadia, director of integration, CNN International - CNN.com
Willis Witter, deputy foreign editor, Washington Times
Copyright © 2007 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.