Tangled Up in Brazil: Two Decades as a Foreign Correspondent
São Paulo - Late for our interview, Lula exploded into the room with fellow petista Aloisio Mercadante. They both sported lit cigars – no doubt the spoils of a recent pilgrimage to Fidel Castro Island. Mere weeks had passed since Lula’s runoff defeat at the hands of Fernando Collor in December 1989. Despite the electoral loss, the fledgling Workers Party and its supreme leader were giddy after having received over 31 million votes. “We can take power” – that pull quote from Lula became the headline of my Q&A. It would take more than a decade of full-time campaigning, but the future president would eventually prove to be his own best prophet.
Almost exactly three years later, I would be sitting in the Senate chambers in Brasília listening to Collor’s lawyer read a handwritten note by the president declaring his resignation. Not to lose their moment in the sun with live national coverage, legislators went ahead to impeach Collor anyway. My editors and I held the front page of the final edition of The Financial Times open into the early London morning as they deliberated.
Looking back on more than two decades of covering Brazil as a foreign correspondent, I’m struck by how tangled up my life has been with the country’s post-dictatorship history. I remember the shock on my wife’s face when she answered our home phone, back when lines were scarce and we had but one, to hear Delfim Netto’s voice on the other end. I sacrificed my New Year’s holiday to cover the Collor impeachment, as I would again to file a story about the new Cardoso administration that took office on January 1, 1995.
But it hasn’t been all lost vacations. I’ve done lots of cool stuff. I’ve ridden through the streets of Salvador atop a trio elétrico, and I’ve danced in the winning Samba School of Rio’s Carnival parade. I’ve slugged through the Amazonian mud and crouched in canoes with native fishermen hunting the pirarucu, the world’s largest freshwater fish. I’ve chased down the last remaining speakers of dying Amazon languages. I’ve toured the mega-dam Itaipú with company officials, flown over nearby Iguaçu Falls in a military plane, and rappelled down into the canyon off a 55-meter high platform across the way. I’ve ridden on horseback through the plains of Rio Grande do Sul. I’ve witnessed the São João mid-winter extravaganza in Caruaru and the post-Christmas Wise Men Festival in Minas Gerais. I’ve surfed the primo waves of Santa Catarina. I’ve hung out in the shantytowns of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador. I’ve flown over São Paulo in a helicopter. I’ve interviewed everyone from Lula, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jorge Amado and Oscar Niemeyer to street kids and prostitutes. Zé Ketti used to hang out at the weekend barbeques we had at our house, and I once spent the night at a party discussing Brazilian poetry with Nelson Pereira dos Santos. I even played basketball against Celso Daniel - though maybe I shouldn’t mention that lest I end up six feet under.
Not only has my life tracked the history of a country, but also that of an industry in transformation – or, as some like me would have it, in decline. I punched out the first story I filed from Brazil on an old telex machine. After plowing my way through a stint in the mainstream media, often frustrated by not being allowed to publish the stories I thought essential, I reinvented myself as an independent digital media entrepreneur – the proud founding editor and head janitor of an online guide for foreigners called BrazilMax.com.
Speaking of the media, my first lesson about how the foreign press should not cow-tow to local big shots involved a media personality. This was the late 1980s and I was still living in Rio de Janeiro. The Rio foreign correspondents club had scheduled a luncheon press conference with Globo mogul Roberto Marinho. I went thinking I’d be able to grab some quotes for some stories I was developing. But upon arrival we were informed that our “press conference” would be off-the-record. I didn’t like that, but I’d already paid for my lunch, and so what the heck. I’d sit around chatting with my friends and ignore Marinho. But as we reached our table, my friends and I noticed a big TV Globo camera stationed right in front of the podium. Off the record? For whom? Three of us stormed out, demanding our money back. The Tribuna da Imprensa covered our little protest, but that newspaper’s circulation could hardly compare to the millions who watched Marinho lord over the foreign press on the Eight O’Clock News. You can imagine my horror 15 years later when a main drag in my old Brooklin neighborhood of São Paulo was renamed “Jornalista Roberto Marinho” by then-Mayor Marta Suplicy. Journalist, nada. A slap in the face to us regular hacks trying to scrape out an honest living.
I ended up in Brooklin because I was in love with a Brazilian woman who had adopted the Zona Sul neighborhood as her home. Though motivated by personal reasons, my move from Rio to São Paulo put me ahead of the curve in a trend on press coverage in Brazil. When I arrived in 1986, most foreign correspondents still resided in Rio de Janeiro – a legacy of a time when it was the capital. Of course most “gringo cariocas” refused to follow the politicians to Brasília. They remained close to the beach. But eventually both editors and reporters began to recognize that the place where things happen in Brazil was neither Rio nor Brasília but São Paulo. Over the years, the foreign press has been gradually migrating to the Paulista state capital. That trend continues to this day.
By the time I put my roots down in São Paulo, the focus of international journalism was changing. By the early 1990s, human rights and Indians were no longer big. It was the economy, stupid. Business and financial news was king.
One of the first gigs I had in this realm was pretty scary. It wasn’t exactly journalism, though we used the same skill set. Call it my first venture into consulting. A blue chip multinational industrial company was thinking about abandoning Brazil after decades. Not only would thousands lose their jobs if the company’s plants were to close, but the country’s already fragile economy might never recover from the shock. I was hired to interview and interpret the words of Brazilian leaders in politics, business, the military and other walks of life to get a sense of where the country was headed. (For the record, the company stayed and continues to operate in Brazil to this day.)
That consulting job provided me with my first opportunity to meet and interview Fernando Henrique. Then a Senator, he received me in his office as an important vote was taking place on the Senate floor. I’ll never forget how he offered me his full attention, responding in detail to complex questions, while at the same time paying even more attention to the audio feed of the Senate debate piped in through the intercom.
No surprise that a big name company might want to leave Brazil back then. Chronic hyperinflation, with rates sometimes reaching 30% a MONTH, obviously created an environment impossible for normal business – or even normal life.
In 1989 I attended a 4th of July party in my native Los Angeles. Many of the guests were stock brokers, and they were fascinated about life under hyperinflation. How to you buy a car? How do you buy a house? How do you even buy food? I went back home and wrote a piece providing answers to their questions – talking about the “overnight,” consortiums and other really weird stuff like watching out for the price gun guy as you trolled supermarket aisles.
A few years later I had my second exclusive interview with Lula, this one for a Guatemalan magazine called Hombres de Maiz. Back then, Lula seemed to love the press and would schedule an interview with a cornstalk if it held a tape recorder. I asked what in retrospect seems to have been an interesting question: “Polls taken during the most recent mayoral elections revealed that voters consider certain candidates to be corrupt but that they vote for them anyway. What’s going on with the Brazilian electorate?” Lula began by saying that “In Brazil, there’s a political culture that accepts the premise of ‘he steals but gets things done.’” He then went on to criticize candidates who gave handouts to voters in exchange for votes.
After Collor left office, Vice President Itamar Franco took office. Senator Cardoso became Foreign Minister Cardoso and then Economy Minister Cardoso. With Itamar busy appearing at Carnival with pantiless women and bringing back the VW beetle, Cardoso became the virtual Prime Minister. I was in Brasília on assignment and had scheduled lunch with a long-time Cardoso aide named Eduardo Graeff. “Do you mind if I bring someone along?” Eduardo asked. Fine with me.
When he took over the reigns of the economy, Cardoso brought along economists associated with the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) like Edmar Bacha and Pedro Malan. The guy Eduardo brought to lunch was one of their protégés, a young turk named Gustavo Franco. Newly into his first experience in politics, the future Central Bank president seemed to be in shock. “We did the rounds of the offices to introduce ourselves,” he told me. “You walk in and there are five people sitting around drinking coffee and chatting, and one guy over there in the corner with a pile of papers on his desk trying to make up for everyone else.” Your taxes at work.
Since I never had time for vacations, I set up a working one in Bahia. My wife Maruska and I rented an apartment for January 1994 and I went around interviewing all the big local names like then Governor Antonio Carlos Magalhães and Vovô, founder of the “bloco afro” Ilê Aiyê. Maruska was doubling as my photographer – a role I often invited her to play. She wasn’t really a photographer at heart, but she had a good eye and charmed people into feeling at ease so that she could get into their faces for close ups. Sometimes her efforts produced unique results. Back in 1989 Lula resolutely refused to pose for photos; he only allowed “action shots,” but Maruska got him to pose – with comic results that seemed to help explain Lula’s phobia. Carlinhos Brown generally refuses to be photographed without his sunglasses, but she got him to remove his shades for a shot.
Never a wall flower, Maruska invariably wanted to butt in on my interviews. I had to teach her to not argue with my sources at least until I was done with them. During our stint in Bahia, I met with probably the first Brazilian bishop to be short-listed as a potential pope. Pope John Paul II outlasted Dom Lucas Moreira Neves, so of course the Brazilian never made it. But back then he seemed to have a chance. Seeing her chance to lobby a papal contender, Maruska jumped on him after I’d finished my questions. “Why can’t women be priests?” she demanded. Dom Lucas responded: “How can women be priests when Mary Magdalene washed Christ’s feet?” I almost had to drag Maruska away from that debate.
On the plus side, my wife helped provide insights into my coverage of the 1993 plebiscite on the form of government. Those who weren’t around back then may be shocked to learn that it offered voters not only a choice between presidential and parliamentary systems, but also between a republic and a monarchy. Maruska was from Paraty, a costal colonial town in Rio state, and one night during a visit there we were strolling across the main square when she stopped to greet a guy named Joãozinho. As if on cue, he launched into a bizarre monologue about how Brazil would be better off with a monarchy. After we took our leave, I turned to Maruska: “Who’s that guy? The town jester?” “No,” she laughed, “he’s the prince!” Indeed a branch of the royal Bragança family had established itself in Paraty, and Joãozinho really was a prince.
Some encounters with big shots have been particularly revealing. ARTnews magazine sent me to interview Oscar Niemeyer in November 1995. I’ve already written about my encounter with Niemeyer, so I won’t elaborate here. Surreal wouldn’t even start to describe it.
Niemeyer remains a communist to this day, but Jorge Amado abandoned the party long before I interviewed him in 1997. But that didn’t make my interview with Jorge Amado any easier. The film and television trade magazine Variety wanted a story about productions based on his novels. But the writer was sick. The scuttlebutt in Salvador said he was on his death bed. He would actually hold on for a few more years, but the chances of getting an appointment seemed slim. However a Bahian photographer friend knew Amado’s wife, Zélia Gattai, and offered to get me in the door if she could take the pictures. Gattai agreed, and I went to their house in the Rio Vermelho district of Salvador. After Niemeyer, this one had to be my weirdest interview ever. Gattai hovered over us, vetoing every question that wasn’t strictly about film and television. And he only answered the questions she allowed.
The late 1990s marked the peak in demand for coverage of Brazil by the international media during my stint here. In 1996 I even made a journey to Riberão Preto to report on the economic boom in that rural São Paulo town. I met an unknown mayor named Antonio Palocci. At the time, Palocci still pronounced the “cc” in the Italian style as a “ch” rather than the Lulista “s”.
In sports the Pelé Law was supposed to save Brazilian soccer from the “cartolas” – the slimly and selfish men who run Brazil’s national pastime. I went to Rio de Janeiro to cover a seminar in the venerable Hotel Glória about the “clube-empresa,” a new legal entity that all teams would be required to create. Zagallo and Parreira were there along with sundry other “boleiros,” investment bankers and consultants. One of the consultants was ex-Minister Dorthea Werneck, who was helping Botafogo adapt to the new regulations. Werneck started her presentation by praising the clube-empresa idea because it would bring much needed transparency to Brazilian soccer. A murmur in the front row grew louder, into a buzz and then into shouts. Soon Vasco’s Eurico Miranda and Rio soccer federation chief Caixa D’Agua were on their feet, charging the podium, pointing their fingers at Werneck. “What do you know about soccer? Women don’t know anything about soccer! Transparency! I’ll show you transparency!” Brought nearly to tears, Werneck never really regained her composure, though to her credit she did finish her talk when things calmed down. Soon soccer clubs would no longer need the services of consultants like her: the “cartola” lobby overthrew the clube-empresa law before it took effect. The result is what we see. (Or don’t see. “I’ll show you transparency!”)
I’ve long maintained that I’ll only believe that Brazil is serious about attacking corruption, impunity and the generalized disrespect like the Gerson Law (from the old cigarette commercial where the soccer star told people to “scam when you can”) when it cleans up soccer. Forget Renan Calheiros, the mensalão scandal and Celso Daniel (everyone else already has). When soccer gets cleaned up, the rest will follow naturally. The question “Who killed Celso Daniel?” will suddenly seem more interesting than “Who killed (telenovela character) Taís?”.
A slightly different version of this essay will appear in Portuguese in the forthcoming book “O Brasil dos Correspondentes” to be published by the São Paulo Foreign Correspondents Club (ACE). Bill Hinchberger served as president of the ACE from 1995-1999.
