By SIMON ROMERO
The New York Times, April 12, 2014
Grand
Visions Fizzle in Brazil
Photographs by
DANIEL BEREHULAK
Projects conceived in boom times stand abandoned,
visible symbols of waste and the country's crippling bureaucracy.
PAULISTANA, BRAZIL
Brazil plowed billions
of dollars into building a railroad across arid backlands, only for the
long-delayed project to fall prey to metal scavengers. Curvaceous new public
buildings designed by the famed architect Oscar Niemeyer were abandoned right
after being constructed. There was even an ill-fated U.F.O. museum built with
federal funds. Its skeletal remains now sit like a lost ship among the weeds.
As Brazil sprints to
get ready for the World Cup in June, it has run up against a catalog of delays,
some caused by deadly construction accidents at stadiums, and cost overruns. It
is building bus and rail systems for spectators that will not be finished until
long after the games are done.
But the World Cup
projects are just a part of a bigger national problem casting a pall over
Brazil’s grand ambitions: an array of lavish projects conceived when economic
growth was surging that now stand abandoned, stalled or wildly over budget.
The ventures were
intended to help propel and symbolize Brazil’s seemingly inexorable rise. But
now that the country is wading through a post-boom hangover, they are exposing
the nation’s leaders to withering criticism, fueling claims of wasteful
spending and incompetence while basic services for millions remain woeful. Some
economists say the troubled projects reveal a crippling bureaucracy,
irresponsible allocation of resources and bastions of corruption.
Huge street protests
have been aimed at costly new stadiums being built in cities like Manaus and
Brasília, whose paltry fan bases are almost sure to leave a sea of empty seats
after the World Cup events are finished, adding to concerns that even more
white elephants will emerge from the tournament.
“The fiascos are
multiplying, revealing disarray that is regrettably systemic,” said Gil
Castello Branco, director of Contas
Abertas, a
Brazilian watchdog group that scrutinizes public budgets. “We’re waking up to
the reality that immense resources have been wasted on extravagant projects
when our public schools are still a mess and raw sewage is still in our
streets.”
The growing list of
troubled development projects includes a $3.4 billion network of concrete
canals in the drought-plagued hinterland of northeast Brazil — which was
supposed to be finished in 2010 — as well as dozens of new wind farms idled by
a lack of transmission lines and unfinished luxury hotels blighting Rio de
Janeiro’s skyline.
Economists surveyed by
the nation’s central bank see Brazil’s economy growing just 1.63 percent this
year, down from 7.5 percent in 2010, making 2014 the fourth straight year of
slow growth. While an economic crisis here still seems like a remote
possibility, investors have grown increasingly pessimistic. Standard &
Poor’s cut Brazil’s credit rating last month, saying it expected slow growth to
persist for several years.
Making matters tougher
for the government, it is an election year, with a poll last month showing
support for President Dilma Rousseff’s administration falling to 36 percent
from 43 percent in November as sluggish economic conditions persist.
Ms. Rousseff’s
supporters contend that the public spending has worked, helping to keep
unemployment at historical lows and preventing what would have been a much
worse economic slowdown had the government not pumped its considerable
resources into infrastructure development.
Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva, Ms. Rousseff’s political mentor and predecessor as president, put many
of the costly infrastructure projects into motion during his administration,
from 2003 to 2010. In a recent interview, he acknowledged that some of the
ventures were facing long delays. But he contended that before he came into
office, Brazil had gone for decades without investing in public works projects,
so the country essentially had to start from scratch.
“We stayed for 20 years
without making or developing any public infrastructure projects,” Mr. da Silva
said. “We had no projects in the drawer.”
Still, a growing chorus
of critics argues that the inability to finish big infrastructure
projects reveals
weaknesses in Brazil’s model of state capitalism.
First, they say, Brazil
gives extraordinary influence to a web of state-controlled companies, banks and
pension funds to invest in ill-advised projects. Then other bastions of the
vast public bureaucracy cripple projects with audits and lawsuits.
Some ventures never
deserved public money in the first place,” saidSérgio Lazzarini, an economist at Insper, a São Paulo
business school, pointing to the millions in state financing for the overhaul
of the Glória hotel in Rio, owned until recently by a mining tycoon, Eike
Batista. The project was left unfinished, unable to open for the World Cup,
when Mr. Batista’s business empire
crumbled last year.
“For infrastructure
projects which deserve state support and get it,” Mr. Lazzarini continued,
“there’s the daunting task of dealing with the risks that the state itself
creates.”
The Transnordestina, a
railroad begun in 2006 here in northeast Brazil, illustrates some of the
pitfalls plaguing projects big and small. Scheduled to be finished in 2010 at a
cost of about $1.8 billion, the railroad, designed to stretch more than 1,000
miles, is now expected to cost at least $3.2 billion, with most financing from
state banks. Officials say it should be completed around 2016.
But with work sites
abandoned because of audits and other setbacks months ago in and around
Paulistana, a town in Piauí, one of Brazil’s poorest states, even that timeline
seems optimistic. Long stretches where freight trains were already supposed to
be running stand deserted. Wiry vaqueiros, or cowboys, herd cattle in the
shadow of ghostly railroad bridges that tower 150 feet above parched valleys.
“Thieves are pillaging
metal from the work sites,” said Adailton Vieira da Silva, 42, an electrician
who labored with thousands of others before work halted last year. “Now there
are just these bridges left in the middle of nowhere.”
Brazil’s transportation
minister, César Borges, expressed exasperation with the delays in finishing the
railroad, which is needed to transport soybean harvests to port. He listed the
bureaucracies that delay projects like the Transnordestina: the Federal Court
of Accounts; the Office of the Comptroller General; an environmental protection
agency; an institute protecting archaeological patrimony; agencies protecting
the rights of indigenous peoples and descendants of escaped slaves; and the
Public Ministry, a body of independent prosecutors.
Still, Mr. Borges
insisted, “Projects get delayed in countries around the world, not just
Brazil.”
Mr. da Silva, who
oversaw the start of work on the Transnordestina eight years ago, was frank
about the role of his Workers Party, once the opposition in Brazil’s National
Congress, in creating such delays. “We created a machinery, an oversight
machinery, that is the biggest oversight machinery in the world,” he said,
explaining how his party helped create a labyrinthine system of audits and
environmental controls before he and Ms. Rousseff were elected.
“When you’re in the
opposition, you want to create difficulties for those that are in the
administration,” Mr. da Silva said. “But we forget that maybe one day we’ll
take office.”
Some economists contend
that the way Brazil is investing may be hampering growth instead of supporting
it. The authorities encouraged energy companies to build wind farms, but dozens cannot operate because they lack
transmission lines to connect to the electricity grid. Meanwhile, manufacturers
worry over potential electricity rationing as reservoirs at hydroelectric dams
run dry amid a drought.
Other public ventures
sit vacant. Officials in Natal, in northeast Brazil, spent
millions on wavy buildings designed by Mr. Niemeyer, opening them in 2006 and
2008. But they abandoned them almost immediately, allowing squatters to occupy
some areas; the authorities now say they have plans to refurbish the buildings.
Another Niemeyer project, a $30 million television transmission tower in Brasília designed like a
futuristic flower, remains unused two years after it was inaugurated.
Then there is the
extraterrestrial museum in Varginha, a city in southeast Brazil where residents
claimed to have seen an alien in 1996. Officials secured federal money to build
the museum, but now all that remains of the unfinished project is the rusting
carcass of what looks like a flying saucer.
“That museum,” said
Roberto Macedo, an economist at the University of São Paulo, “is an insult to
both extraterrestrials and the terrestrial beings like ourselves who foot the
bill for yet another project failing to deliver.”
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Fotos de todos os
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