The Real Brazil Is Not for Beginners

Sunday afternoon on a dusty road in a residential area of a city in the interior of Brazil. A car stops suddenly. From the car, a 15-year-old kid gets out together with his father. The loudspeakers scream: "Puta que o pariu (The whore who gave birth to you)."

My little daughter asks me: "What does the song say?" My answer is to get the family out of the front room into the back of our house. The nasty song cannot be heard because we shut the windows and turned on the TV despite the hot weather.
A few minutes earlier, another car with loudspeakers was running in the street with another song: "Vote for this guy number X."
I know nothing of local politics, but I know all the names of the candidates to council members. Why? Because of noise comparable to the one that hammers the people detained in the US base of Guantanamo, cars with loudspeakers go down the streets playing stupid songs about the candidates every hour of the day and night.

Does anybody vote based on a silly song heard in the streets? I do not know, but that is what people do here in the interior of Brazil.
Welcome to the real Brazil. Not fancy Rio de Janeiro or fashionable São Paulo, but the tough Brazil where most Brazilians live. Lawless cities where you get used to anything.
There's no respect for civil rights. You just have to get used to whatever happens. Here, you're always wrong, and you cannot complain. This is the way it is, they keep telling me. If you do not like it, leave it.

It is incredible how Brazil is developing nowadays. Even with the marked economic slowdown, Brazil is much better off compared to 10 and 15 years ago. Cities are growing at a fast rate.

The interior of Brazil, however, seems to live another reality. Here, the time has stopped. Here, you have to get used to what happens and not complain if you don't want trouble.
Right now, the most popular TV show is the novela (soap opera) Avenida Brasil on Globo TV. Everybody is amazed by that. It is all too well to turn on the TV and admire the "true" Brazil, the real people. Then, you turn off the TV and sleep in your pleasant apartment in Copacabana or Ipanema.

But if you live in the real Brazil, the story is different. Your kids want to sleep, but the car with loudspeakers stops again in front of your place, singing "puta que o pariu" at night. You cannot sleep.

Meanwhile, in the backyard of your house, a churrasco of what they call "cat meat" invades your home with a terrible smell at night. Drunk women and men start singing loudly. And you start wondering what the hell you are doing here.

Do you like real Brazil, correct? Go there, stay there, live there. Then you are going to change your mind. The beauty of the place and nature go together with people's wildness.
Brainwashing is so deep that even kindergarten children sing "Ai, ai assim você mata o papai" (Wow, wow, this way you'll kill daddy). The song has a double meaning with heavy sexual content, but children don't get it. If I weren't a foreigner, would I vote based on the songs heard in the streets? Maybe not.
But what I can say for sure is that it's not easy to adapt to this reality. And an old song comes to my mind: "Should I stay or go?"