A Insustentavel Carga Fiscal das Aposentadorias Brasileiras - Simon Romero (NYT)

Brazil Pension Crisis Mounts as More Retire Earlier, Then Pass Benefits On
Simon Romero
The New York Times, October 20, 2015

When Rosângela Araújo turned 44, she decided that she had worked long enough.
So Ms. Araújo, a public school supervisor, did what millions of others in their 40s and 50s have done in this country: She retired, with a full pension.
"I had to take advantage of the benefit that was available to me," said Ms. Araújo, now 65. Her government pension stands at about $1,000 a month, five times the minimum wage.
An exploding pension crisis here in Brazil, Latin America's biggest country, is wreaking havoc on its public finances, intensifying a political struggle over the economy that already has the president fighting for survival.
Brazilians retire at an average age of 54, and some public servants, military officials and politicians manage to collect multiple pensions totaling well over $100,000 year. Then, once they die, loopholes enable their spouses or daughters to go on collecting the pensions for the rest of their lives, too.
The phenomenon is so common in Brazil's vast public bureaucracy that some scholars call it the "Viagra effect" - retired civil servants, many in their 60s or 70s, wed to much younger women who are entitled to the full pensions for decades after their spouses are gone.
"Think Greece but on a crazier, more colossal scale," said Paulo Tafner, an economist and a leading authority on Brazil's pension system. "The entire country should be frightened to its core. The pensions Brazilians obtain and the ages at which they start receiving them are nothing less than scandalous."
The pension crisis is feeding Brazil's political turmoil as President Dilma Rousseff fights calls for her ouster. The nation's economy has soured badly, and this month the Federal Court of Accounts ruled that Ms. Rousseff violated accounting practices by using funds from giant state banks to cover budget shortfalls. School and health budgets are being slashed, and Ms. Rousseff is now proposing steps to keep pension spending from ballooning even more.
But a rebellious Congress voted this year to significantly expand pension benefits. Ms. Rousseff vetoed the legislation, setting the stage for a bruising battle with lawmakers. Some of the president's allies view the showdown as part of her opponents' strategy to impeach her.
Still, economists warn that the pension crisis will grow more acute regardless of whether Ms. Rousseff stays in office, ranking it among Brazil's most vexing structural binds. Officials had expected a major shortfall in 2030, but now say that could happen as soon as next year.
Brazil is enduring its sharpest economic downturn in decades, hemorrhaging jobs and depleting contributions to the pension system. The Federal Revenue Service said such payments plunged 9 percent in August.
Then there is Brazil's plummeting fertility rate - which recently dropped to 1.77 children per woman, below the rate needed for the population to replace itself - eventually putting even more pressure on a pension system already under intense strain.
This shift partly reflects higher living standards in recent decades and broader availability of birth control, but it will result in fewer young people to support a much larger older population. As recently as 1980, Brazil's fertility rate was 4.3 children per woman, according to the United Nations.
And the average life expectancy in Brazil has climbed to 74.9 years in 2013, from 62.5 years in 1980, according to government statistics. Instead of building a surplus now to prepare for an onslaught of new pension obligations, scholars say Brazil is squandering a demographic bonus that will soon fade.
Economists note that Brazil already spends more than 10 percent of its gross domestic product on public pensions, similar to what southern European countries with much older populations have recently spent, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Unless changes are made, an even bigger shock is expected here, given that the population of people 60 or older is expected to reach about 14 percent of the overall population in just two decades, up from about 7 percent now.
But the biggest challenge that political leaders across the ideological spectrum face is one they helped create: the generosity of Brazilian pensions.
Some authorities have occasionally taken a stab at the issue, trying to raise the retirement age to 65 for men and 60 for women, prevent young widows from easily receiving their deceased husbands' pensions, or stop many in the private sector from receiving their full salary as public pensions.
But loopholes flourish, making it relatively easy for Brazilians to retire much younger, often with public pensions equivalent to their full salary. Brazilian men now retire at an average age of 55, while men in Greece retire on average at the age of 63.
The pension system can ease extreme poverty. For instance, rural workers can retire five years before others even if they have never contributed to the public pension system, receiving a monthly payment equal to the minimum wage, about $210 a month.
But the system also perpetuates inequality by providing special benefits to hundreds of thousands of government employees and their families.
In 2000, for instance, officials did away with rules allowing the daughters of military officials to receive the pensions of their fathers after they died. But the shift applied only to new entrants into the armed forces, so more than 185,000 women still draw military survivors' pensions, often amounting to the full salary of their fathers upon retirement. Spending on such pensions is forecast to last through the end of this century, economists say.
This kind of benefit is widespread enough throughout the public bureaucracy that Brazil is estimated to spend about 3 percent of G.D.P. on survivors' pensions, about three times the level in many rich industrialized countries.
Politicians have been especially skilled at securing big pensions at the state level. In the Amazonian state of Pará, former governors and first ladies were recently receiving lifelong pensions as high as $7,000 a month, even if they only served a few years in office. Brazil's Supreme Federal Tribunal suspended such pensions this year.
But other states are struggling with similar payouts. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, the authorities had relied on royalties from offshore oil production before oil prices fell sharply in recent months. Officials in Rio are now preparing a bailout to transfer about $500 million from the state treasury to cover this year's shortfall in the pension system.
With Rio's pension obligations soaring, that means fewer resources for basic services like schools, hospitals, policing and sewage systems. Rio is planning to spend about $4.5 billion this year on pension benefits, compared with about $3.6 billion on the state's public education and health systems, officials said.
"Brazil has three very clear options to prevent large increases in pension spending: Increase contributions, increase the retirement age, or decrease pensions," said Mariano Bosch, a labor markets specialist at the Inter-American Development Bank. "All of those options are very unpopular."
So far, political leaders do not seem prepared to embrace any of those options. Instead, Finance Minister Joaquim Levy is seeking to resuscitate a broadly unpopular tax on financial transactions in an effort to close the pension deficit.
Well-organized pensioners' unions are rejecting calls to scale back benefits.
"Making retirees pay the price is just not fair," said João Pimenta, 63, a former director of a shopkeepers' association who retired at age 49 and regularly leads protests against pension cuts in Brazil's capital, Brasília. "Why isn't the economic elite being called upon to sacrifice? I'm sick of hearing that normal people need to pay the price with their pensions."
Some analysts hope that Brazil's political battles could open the way for pension solutions. But others say that the crisis could actually have the opposite effect by emboldening Ms. Rousseff's opponents in Congress who are aggressively seeking to expand pension benefits.
If Ms. Rousseff is ousted, political analysts point out, her governing Workers' Party would move into the opposition, potentially encouraging it to mobilize the same unions that view overhauling the pension system as an abomination.
"Public pensions in Brazil have long been a slow-motion disaster," said Raul Velloso, a specialist on public finances. "The difference now is that the debacle is accelerating, revealing to our children the political cowardice and irresponsibility our leaders are bestowing on them."

Venezuela: documentando as ultimas horas de um regime ditatorial - Simon Romero (NYT)

Americas

Amid a Slump, a Crackdown for Venezuela

By SIMON ROMERO and GIRISH GUPTA

The New York Times, February 22, 2015

Photo

A sample bank note with the face of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and the word “devaluated.” Above, t Credit Jorge Silva/Reuters

CARACAS, Venezuela — For a glimpse into Venezuela’s economic disarray, slip into a travel agency here and book a round-trip flight to Maracaibo, on the other side of the country, for just $16. Need a book to read on the plane? For those with hard currency, a new copy of “50 Shades of Grey” goes for $2.50. Forget your toothpaste? A tube of Colgate costs 7 cents.

Quite the bargain, right?

But for the majority of Venezuelans who lack easy access to dollars, such surreal prices reflect a tremendous currency devaluation and a crumbling economy expected to contract 7 percent this year as oil income plunges and price controls produce acute shortages of items including milk, detergent and condoms.

“I’ve seen people die on the operating table because we didn’t have the basic tools for surgeries,” said Valentina Herrera, 35, a pediatrician at a public hospital in Maracay, a city near Caracas. She said she planned to look for other work because making ends meet on her salary of 5,622 bolívars a month — $33 at a new exchange rate unveiled recently — was impossible.

Faced with tumbling approval ratings as Venezuelans reel from the economic shock, President Nicolás Maduro is intensifying a crackdown on his opponents, reflected in last week’s arrest of Antonio Ledezma, the mayor of Caracas, and his indictment on charges of conspiracy and plotting an American-backed coup.

Mr. Maduro, a protégé of President Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013, has adopted an increasingly shrill tone against critics of Venezuela’s so-called Bolivarian Revolution. As evidence against Mr. Ledezma, Mr. Maduro pointed to an open letter this month calling for “a national agreement for a transition” that was signed by Mr. Ledezma; Leopoldo López, another opposition figure who has been imprisoned for the past year; and María Corina Machado, an opposition politician charged in December with plotting to assassinate Mr. Maduro.

“In Venezuela we are thwarting a coup supported and promoted from the north,” Mr. Maduro said over the weekend on Twitter. “The aggression of power from the United States is total and on a daily basis.”

Mr. Maduro is taking a page from Mr. Chávez, who was briefly ousted in a 2002 coup with the Bush administration’s tacit approval, then made attacking Washington and locking up people suspected of being putschists a fixture of his government. But the State Department has disputed Mr. Maduro’s claims, saying the United States is not promoting unrest in Venezuela.

At the same time, the move by Mr. Maduro points to a hardening in how opposition figures here are treated. Thirty-three of the 50 opposition mayors in the country are now facing legal action in connection with antigovernment protests last year that left 43 people dead, according to Gerardo Blyde, the mayor of Baruta, a Caracas municipality.

One prominent opposition mayor, Daniel Ceballos of the city of San Cristóbal, has been in jail for the past year, while another, Enzo Scarano of the industrial town of San Diego in Carabobo State, was transferred from jail to house arrest last month because of deteriorating health.

The arrest of Mr. Ledezma, 59, who was democratically elected but had much of his authority stripped away in 2009, has even some pro-Chávez analysts questioning the wisdom of Mr. Maduro’s move. While Mr. Ledezma joined a hardline faction of the opposition last year called “the Exit,” he was not viewed as especially prominent or influential.

“Fueling suspicion is a distraction tactic from the huge currency devaluation we’ve had to withstand,” said Nicmer Evans, a pro-Chávez political consultant who is among those on the left here now openly criticizing Mr. Maduro. “What’s not clear is the proof of wrongdoing in this case.”

With inflation soaring to a rate of 68 percent, the Venezuelan authorities are seeking to manage the economic crisis with a complex web of three official exchange rates. For instance, some basic goods are imported at rates of 6.3 and 12 bolívars to the dollar, but a new floating rate of about 171 was introduced last week, effectively reflecting a devaluation of nearly 70 percent.

On the black market, which some Venezuelans already use to carry out basic transactions, the rate is even higher.

Even for some Chávez loyalists, Mr. Maduro seems to be in over his head in dealing with the scramble for hard currency. Jorge Giordani, one of the late president’s top economic advisers, said this month that Venezuela was emerging as Latin America’s “laughingstock,” citing corruption and labyrinthine bureaucracy as factors accentuating the economic quagmire.

“We need to acknowledge the crisis, comrades,” said Mr. Giordani, whom the president ousted last year as finance and planning minister.

Indeed, some economists say that the government’s hesitance to overhaul its perplexing currency controls could intensify Venezuela’s economic problems.

“The system is going haywire,” said Francisco Rodríguez, chief Andean economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, emphasizing that galloping price increases could soon enter the realm of hyperinflation, accelerating to triple digits this year and to more than 1,000 percent in 2016 if policies are maintained.

Mr. Maduro seems to recognize that some profound economic changes are needed in Venezuela, which commands the world’s largest oil reserves, creating the illusion of inexhaustible wealth. He supports raising the price of gasoline, which costs less than 10 cents a gallon at the strongest official exchange rate; there is considerable resistance to such a shift even though the fuel subsidy costs the government more than $12 billion a year.

But ahead of congressional elections this year in which Mr. Maduro’s supporters seem vulnerable, the president is also seeking to shore up his base.

Mr. Ledezma’s wife, Mitzy, told Reuters on Sunday that the president was showing his dictatorial tendencies. “He knows that every day there are more opponents,” she said.

Despite the widespread complaints about hardship and high levels of violent crime, some here remain loyal to Mr. Maduro out of gratitude for a vast array of social welfare programs.

“I’ll vote for Maduro until I die,” said Marco Miraval, 77, who sells coconuts in 23 de Enero, a sprawling housing complex that is a bastion for pro-Chávez groups, pointing to Mr. Maduro’s support of subsidized university education and health care. He said Venezuela’s economic problems were a result of Washington’s pressure on the government. “It’s because they’re being sabotaged by this economic war,” he said.

Still, while Venezuela’s opposition remains divided and hampered by the arrests of some leading figures, Mr. Maduro lacks the oratorical skill of Mr. Chávez, who skewered his opponents in what often seemed like a stream-of-consciousness approach to governing that kept many Venezuelans on the edge of their seats.

“Maduro is trying to consolidate his leadership without having the charisma to do so,” said Margarita López Maya, a historian who studies protest movements, describing his latest moves as amounting to “an excess of authoritarianism.”

In the meantime, bizarre prices persist for many basic services, punishing those who earn and save in bolívars while benefiting an elite with access to hard currency in bank accounts abroad. For instance, monthly broadband service from the state telecommunications company costs less than the equivalent of $1. The monthly electricity bill for a huge luxury apartment, with air-conditioning on at all hours, comes to less than $2.

Even that absurdly cheap flight to Maracaibo is more complicated than it appears since some airlines have trouble obtaining the dollars they need to maintain their planes.

“You’ll see things you’ll never believe: half a dozen aircraft from just one airline just waiting on the ground because they don’t have parts,” said Nicolás Veloz, a pilot based in Caracas.

For some Venezuelans who are struggling to get by, the economic disorder they see explains the president’s targeting of his opponents. “Maduro is terrified, and so he’s using more totalitarian methods, putting politicians in prison with so many police,” said Eduardo de Sousa, 28, a pharmaceutical lab assistant. “They know that the revolution is over, and they’re scared.”

María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.

Continue reading the main story

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  Oil Cash Waning, Venezuelan Shelves Lie Bare JAN. 29, 2015

Heranca maldita (nao so dos companheiros): as grandes obras abandonadas... - Simon Romero (NYT)

From Boom to Rust, Lavish Projects Are Languishing in Brazil

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.”

==========

Fotos de todos os empreendimentos falidos, abandonados, em ruinas, podem ser vistas no link da matéria: 

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/12/world/americas/grand-visions-fizzle-in-brazil.html

Brazil: um corrupto ordinario (como muitos outros)

Brazil Is Entranced by a Tale of Love, Taxes and Bribery

By SIMON ROMERO

The New York Times, November 26, 2013

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RIO DE JANEIRO — There were the boxes of Cuban cigars, which cost about $500 each at a shop in Vila Nova Conceição, one of the most exclusive districts of São Paulo, and the $2,260 bottles of Vega Sicilia Único, a legendary Spanish red. Throw in a Porsche Cayenne, speedboat jaunts to tropical islands and all-night soirees with high-end escorts, and what do you get?

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The unlikely lifestyle of a Brazilian tax inspector.

In one of the most salacious corruption scandals to captivate Brazil in years, the municipal government of São Paulo, the nation’s largest city, is reeling from revelations of a scheme in which investigators claim that a group of tax inspectors allowed construction companies to evade more than $200 million in taxes in exchange for bribes.

“We always had marvelous dinners, excellent trips by private plane to Angra dos Reis,” Vanessa Alcântara, 27, the former companion of one of the inspectors charged with accepting bribes, said in a televised interview, referring to the oceanfront city that is a playground for Brazil’s elite.

The titillating details of the scandal are emerging as an offshoot of a custody battle between Ms. Alcântara and Luis Alexandre Cardoso de Magalhães, 41, a low-ranking São Paulo official. Brazilians are absorbing their confessions and accusations against one another, some of which have been nationally televised, in a case that underlines how political corruption remains entrenched despite landmark efforts to send corrupt officials to jail.

So far, the scandal has tinged the administration of São Paulo’s current mayor, Fernando Haddad, and of his predecessor, Gilberto Kassab. Investigators say the bribes to Mr. Magalhães and his colleagues were largely used to gain approval for real estate projects.

A top aide to Mr. Haddad, Antonio Donato, resigned after tax inspectors implicated in the scheme told prosecutors that some of the bribes were channeled to Mr. Donato when he was a city councilman. Mr. Donato denied that claim on Tuesday, and Mr. Haddad said in a statement that his administration put an end to the inspectors’ actions shortly after he took office this year.

Intercepts of phone calls by Mr. Magalhães suggest that he met Ms. Alcântara in 2011 at Bamboa, a São Paulo nightclub frequented by prostitutes. She disputes that account, which Mr. Magalhães repeated over the weekend on the Globo television network, contending that they met when she tried to sell him a cellphone plan.

But when it comes to living high from ill-gotten gains, the estranged couple seem to agree on a lot of things.

Mr. Magalhães, who chose to cooperate with investigators after his arrest in October, described how developers delivered bags of cash, some containing about $30,000, on a weekly basis to his office. The money was then divided among four municipal officials, he said, recounting how he burned through much of his haul by spending more than $4,500 a night on prostitutes.

“I spent because the money was coming in,” he said. “I wanted to live.”

In telephone intercepts and newspaper interviews, Ms. Alcântara said she and Mr. Magalhães, who had a child together, would count the money in her living room, on occasion finding more than $180,000 on their hands. Prosecutors estimate his fortune at $8 million, an amount difficult to reconcile with his annual salary of about $82,000.

Ms. Alcântara said he used some of the money to decorate her apartment at a cost of $50,000, and local newspapers have reported that they would splurge on $2,200-a-night suites at a designer hotel and meals at steakhouses with $380 bottles of Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru, a coveted French wine.

The high life apparently ended when Ms. Alcântara became enraged over what she saw as the meager monthly child support Mr. Magalhães offered her after they separated, prompting her to talk to prosecutors.

As is sometimes the case in the cycle of Brazilian corruption scandals, celebrities can emerge from such intrigue.

One aspirant to such status is Nagila Coelho, 38, a personal trainer who is now a romantic companion of Mr. Magalhães. She is planning to start her own line of bikinis, according to a report in Folha de São Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. Ms. Alcântara, meanwhile, is mulling a venture into politics.

She said she already had a slogan: “Being a thief is easy; I’ll be honest amid all the thieves.”

Lis Horta Moriconi contributed reporting.

Trapalhadas governamentais na visita do papa: incompetencia ou bagunca,mesmo? - NYTimes

Missteps by Brazil Mar Visit by Pope

By SIMON ROMERO

The New York Times: July 24, 2013

RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis celebrated his first public Mass on Wednesday at one of Latin America’s largest shrines, asking Catholics to shun the “ephemeral idols” of material success, power and pleasure, but his visit to Brazil continued to be marked by tension over blunders by its Brazilian organizers.

The missteps began minutes after Francis arrived in Rio on Monday, when his small motorcade got stuck on a crowded thoroughfare, exposing the pope to a mob scene of people trying to touch him through the open window of his car. On Tuesday, Rio’s subway system broke down for two hours, leaving thousands gathered here for a conference of Catholic youth scrambling to reach a seaside Mass.

Rio’s political authorities have also faced scrutiny over their handling of street demonstrations around the pope’s visit. They acknowledged using undercover agents to infiltrate the protests but denied claims that their intelligence officers were to blame for violence, including the throwing of firebombs.

“I think our governor here is an idiot,” said Robson Lopes Landaw, 56, a lawyer who watched the Monday protests from his window. Sérgio Cabral, Rio’s governor, has been grappling for weeks with demonstrators voicing anger over issues including police brutality and Mr. Cabral’s costly use of helicopters to shuttle between residences.

Like others in Rio, which is the host of the Vatican’s World Youth Day this week and is preparing for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, Mr. Lopes Landaw questioned whether the city is ready for the strain of such large events. “There is an open spigot of money coming in but it is badly administered,” he said.

For his first trip abroad since he was selected as pope in March, Francis chose Brazil, which has more Catholics than any other nation, to emphasize Latin America’s importance to the church. At Aparecida, a city that is home to a massive shrine to Brazil’s patron saint, the pope offered an upbeat Mass. “The dragon, evil, is present in our history, but it does not have the upper hand,” he said, referring to the Book of Revelation. “The one with the upper hand is God.”

The pope ended his appearance in Aparecida by switching from Portuguese to Spanish, smiling and clearly enjoying the moment as he connected to thousands gathered in the rain to see him. He said he planned to return to Brazil in 2017. Later on Wednesday, the pope returned to Rio, where he visited a hospital for drug addicts. At the hospital, he criticized supporters of decriminalizing drug use and called traffickers “merchants of death.”

Commentators have focused attention on how Francis was getting a taste for the challenges which Rio’s residents face daily.

“As in the case of thousands of others in Rio de Janeiro, the pope ended up in a traffic jam on Presidente Vargas,” Elio Gaspari, a newspaper columnist, wrote about the frenzied scene on Monday. He noted that among the street chaos, Francis had calmly blessed a child thrust in his direction. “He was just a man without fear of the people.”

Playing down security concerns, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, told reporters that the pope wanted “direct contact with the people” and not a “militarization of the situation.” But the church substituted a closed vehicle for an open popemobile for Francis’s Wednesday ride through the working-class neighborhood of Tijuca.

Police officials on Wednesday again rejected claims that their own intelligence agents were inciting confrontation at protests, with some demonstrators contending that this was a strategy for cracking down on street dissent. Still, the revelation that Rio’s security authorities had infiltrated protest movements with undercover agents provoked disgust among some. João Paulo Soares, 21, a student, said the police’s tactics violated the right of “freedom of expression.” But he welcomed the visit of Francis, an Argentine-born Jesuit with spartan habits. “He is revolutionary, like we are,” he said.

Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, suggested that it was time to move on and make the remainder of the pope’s trip, which continues through Sunday, as smooth as possible. “Any explanation seems unnecessary and useless at this moment,” he said. “What we need to do is apologize.”

Taylor Barnes and Paula Ramon contributed reporting.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Missteps By Brazil Mar Visit By the Pope .

Republica dos companheiros: o pais da pizza a 30 dolares (ou 66 reais): deu no NYTimes...

Bem, aqui nos EUA, onde estou, com esse dinheiro, dá para comer duas pizzas e mais dois chopps, como diriam os paulistas, ou então, dá até para fazer um almoço para três, num restaurante popular, tipo Panera Bread.
Se a escolha, então, for McDonalds, ou Burguer King, dá para seis pessoas, facilmente, e ainda sobra para sobremesa.
Que o Brasil tenha ficado caro, isso não é surpresa para ninguém, sobretudo para a classe média (não a do governo, mas a média média) que já viajou para Miami ou Orlando, ou então para Paris: na capital francesa, esse valor cobre o almoço de duas pessoas, com entrada, prato principal, sobremesa e um copo de vinho, nos restaurantes populares do Quartier Latin. Todo mundo sabe disso, por isso mesmo que a classe média trocou Ciudad del Este por Miami ou Paris, para fazer suas compras.
De quem é a culpa?
Bem, os companheiros são parcialmente culpados, por terem preservado um sistema protegido, introvertido, garantindo o super lucro dos grandes capitalistas, mais exatamente dos rentistas (que eles encarnam, hoje, perfeitamente bem). Sobretudo por terem preservado um Estado avassalador, dirigista, controlador, que se apossa de dois quintos da riqueza nacional, devolvendo muito pouco em termos de serviços de qualidade para pobres e menos pobres. As distorções acumulados ao longo de doze anos de rentismo companheiro, a falta de infraestrutura, a ausência de acordos comerciais, o próprio estatismo desenfreado e o protecionismo exacerbado que eles promovem são responsáveis pelo fato de o Brasil ser hoje um dos países mais caros do mundo.
Como é que um empresário pode colocar um produto competitivo no mercado (doméstico ou externo, não importa) se ele tem de "deixar" 35 a 40% do faturamento para o ogro famélico em que se converteu o Estado brasileiro? Ele também tem de "deixar" uma outra parte para outras partes, se vocês me entendem...
Parece que a nossa classe média vai ter de decapitar algumas rainhas para acabar com os nossos aristocratas operários...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
PS: Cliquem no link para o "Sample of Sales Taxes for Products in Brazil", abaixo, para ver quanto vocês pagam de imposto sobre cada um dos produtos típicos de um "manifesteiro", ou protestário. Mesmo reclamando do governo, vocês pagam entre 35% e 60% do preço do produto como tributo a esse governo perdulário e famélico; link: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/07/23/world/americas/samples-of-sales-taxes-on-products-in-brazil.html?ref=americas&_r=0

Prices Fuel Outrage in Brazil, Home of the $30 Cheese Pizza

Brazil's Seeds of Protest: Brazilians express their grievances with the lack of resources invested in education and health care.

By SIMON ROMERO

The New York Times, July 22, 2013

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Shoppers here with a notion of what items cost abroad need to brace themselves when buying a Samsung Galaxy S4 phone: the same model that costs $615 in the United States is nearly double that in Brazil. An even bigger shock awaits parents needing a crib: the cheapest one at Tok & Stok costs over $440, more than six times the price of a similarly made item at Ikea in the United States.

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Samples of Sales Taxes on Products in Brazil

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For Brazilians seething with resentment over wasteful spending by the country’s political elite, the high prices they must pay for just about everything — a large cheese pizza can cost almost $30 — only fuel their ire.

“People get angry because we know there are ways to get things cheaper; we see it elsewhere, so we know there must be something wrong here,” said Luana Medeiros, 28, who works in the Education Ministry.

Brazil’s street protests grew out of a popular campaign against bus fare increases. Residents of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro spend a much larger share of their salaries to ride the bus than residents of New York or Paris. Yet the price of transportation is just one example of the struggles that many Brazilians face in making ends meet, economists say.

Renting an apartment in coveted areas of Rio has become more expensive than in Oslo, the capital of oil-rich Norway. Before the protests, soaring prices for basic foods like tomatoes prompted parodies of President Dilma Rousseff and her economic advisers.

Inflation stands at about 6.4 percent, with many in the middle class complaining that they are bearing the brunt of price increases. Limiting the authorities’ maneuvering room, the popular indignation is festering at a time when huge stimulus projects are failing to lift the economy from a slowdown, raising the specter of stagflation in Latin America’s largest economy.

“Brazil is on the verge of recession now that the commodities boom is over,” said Luciano Sobral, an economist and a partner in a São Paulo asset management firm who maintains an irreverent economics blog under the name the Drunkeynesian. “This is making it impossible to ignore the high prices which plague Brazilians, especially those who cannot easily afford to travel abroad for buying sprees where things are cheaper.”

Brazil’s sky-high costs can be attributed to an array of factors, including transportation bottlenecks that make it expensive to get products to consumers, protectionist policies that shield Brazilian manufacturers from competition and a legacy of consumers somewhat inured to relatively high inflation, which remains far below the 2,477 percent reached in 1993, before a drastic restructuring of the economy.

But economists say much of the blame for the stunningly high prices can be placed on a dysfunctional tax system that prioritizes consumption taxes, which are relatively easy to collect, over income taxes.

Alexandre Versignassi, a writer who specializes in deciphering Brazil’s tax code, said companies were grappling with 88 federal, state and municipal taxes, a number of which are charged directly to consumers. Keeping accountants on their toes, the Brazilian authorities issue an estimated 46 new tax rules every day, he said.

Making matters worse for many poor and middle-class Brazilians, loopholes enable the rich to avoid taxation on much of their income; wealthy investors, for instance, can avoid taxes on dividend income, and partners in private companies are taxed at a much lower rate than many regular employees.

The result is that many products made in Brazil, like automobiles, cost much more here than in the far-flung countries that import them. One example is the Gol, a subcompact car produced by Volkswagen at a factory in the São Paulo metropolitan area. A four-door Gol with air-conditioning sells for about $16,100 here, including taxes. In Mexico, the equivalent model, made in Brazil but sold to Mexicans as the Nuevo Gol, costs thousands of dollars less.

The ability of many Brazilians to afford such cars reflects positive economic changes over the past decade, like the rise of millions of people from grinding poverty and a decline in unemployment, which is now at historically low levels. Salaries climbed during that time, with per-capita income now about $11,630, as measured by the World Bank, compared with $6,990 in neighboring Colombia. But Brazil finds itself far below developed nations like Canada, where the per-capita income is $50,970.

As a result, a resident of São Paulo, Brazil’s financial capital, has to work an average of 106 hours to buy an iPhone, while someone in Brussels labors 54 hours to buy the same product, according to a global study of wages by the investment bank UBS. To buy a Big Mac, a resident here has to work 39 minutes, compared with 11 minutes for a resident of Chicago.

Stroll into any international airport in Brazil, and such imbalances are vividly on display, with thousands of residents packing into flights each day for shopping trips to countries where goods are substantially cheaper.

Even though the Brazilian currency, the real, has weakened against the dollar this year (it currently stands at about 2.20 to the dollar), Brazilians spent $2.2 billion abroad in May, the highest amount on record for the month since the central bank began tracking such data in 1969.

Eyeing this market, some travel agents have begun tailoring trips to Miami for clients eager to buy baby products like digital monitors, strollers, pacifiers, even Pampers wipes, which in Brazil cost almost three times as much as in the United States.

Seeking to prevent such shopping binges from getting out of control, the federal police screen travelers upon arrival, picking out people whose luggage appears to bulge with too many items. If it can be proved that Brazilians spent over a certain limit abroad, they are immediately forced to pay taxes on their purchases.

Such screening catches foreigners, too. In May, the police at São Paulo’s international airport arrested two American Airlines flight attendants, both American citizens, on smuggling charges after they were found going through customs carrying a total of 14 smartphones, 4 tablet computers, 3 luxury watches and several video games. The smartphones were hidden in their underwear, the police said, and were intended to be sold on the black market.

Before the protests began, Brazil’s government had begun trying to combat price increases. The central bank raised interest rates after an uproar over food prices this year contributed to inflation fears. The authorities removed some taxes on some products, like cars. Even so, inflation remains high while the economy remains sluggish, leaving many Brazilians fuming about the high taxes embedded in the price of products they buy.

A new federal law requiring retailers to detail on receipts how much tax customers are being charged has fed some of this anger. Fernando Bergamini, 38, a graphic designer, was stunned after spending $92 one recent day on groceries like tomatoes, beans and bananas, only to glance at his receipt and discover that $25 of that was in taxes.

“It is shocking given the services we receive for giving the government our money,” Mr. Bergamini said. “Seeing it like this on a piece of paper makes me feel indignant.”

Lucy Jordan contributed reporting from Brasília, Taylor Barnes from Rio de Janeiro, and Paula Ramon from São Paulo.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 23, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Prices Fuel Outrage in Brazil, Home of the $30 Cheese Pizza 

========

Samples of Sales Taxes on Products in Brazil

Brazilians pay at least 30 percent in sales taxes on more than 400 products and services, 

according to data compiled by a group advocating for reduced taxes. 

Above, protesters in Rio de Janeiro last month demonstrating against government 

spending on the 2014 World Cup.

Shirt 35%

Bottled water 45%

Paper 38%

Flag 36%

Mask 44%

Cell phone 40%

iPhone 5, 64GB, no contract, Prices compared:

New York City (8.875% sales tax): US $ 924

São Paulo (63,29%): US$ 1.339

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