As Rotimi, one of my subjects for the documentary mentioned, its hard to tell what is being done for the World Cup and what is being done normally. Rio is moving at a fast pace. Taking complete advantage of its renown as a country of football (soccer) fanatics who will host the 2014 World Cup, its notoriety as a country positioned to become the sixth largest economy based on its being the world's first sustainable biofuels economy and the biofuel industry leader and its union with other new leaders BRICS (the economic union of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), Brazil is starting to ask for an end to the dominance of leaders from U.S. and Europe in the International Money Fund and the World Bank.
"We will insist on the fact that governance at the IMF and the World Bank cannot be a systematic rotation between the U.S. and Europe, with the other countries excluded," Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff told reporters in Beijing April 12. "There is no reason for that."
The question for the small group of Brazilians which I chose to focus on in the documentary is how much of the economic power will filter down to the common man. Most of the people that I asked about how they were going about making their dreams come true never mentioned going through the system to get funding or inquiring about opportunities, and I found that to be odd. I know from my own experience that after you get over the initial fear of asking for help, and questioning whether your own ideas and interest have merit, applying for funding is just another way to keep your dreams moving. It need not be an either or, but is a valid "in addition to" in combination with the do-it-yourself method.
I am put in mind of the artist who I'd met in Salvador Bahia that also owned his own restaurant Artist X (he is a private person), who first mentioned that any and every infrastructure request that he'd ever made involved bribery to officials. His statement stuck with me and I immediately gave up on my initial enthusiasm for Brazil. I thought 'this apple has a worm in it, and I'm not moving here'. However, since then, (late 1999) I have grown to know that the U.S. has its own brand of corruption that is just as insidious even for being more hidden, and infrequently talked about.
In Brazil there is no welfare system, there is no bail out, but is what you see what you get? As I look past the paradise that is the initial impression that I had of Brazil, I wonder what happened to the gang of little boys I used see by the park near the beginning of Ipanema, and who is fighting for the little girl that I saw watching the buses go by as she used the street as her facility in Lapa. How much deeper will I need to go to find out WHY BRAZIL?
I later found out that Artist X, that I met in 1999 still lives in Salvador, uses the international arts fund to ship his artwork to festivals and exhibits for free, and has also become a real estate agent. What is the unique element about this country that keeps people coming back, investing, and prospering despite its corruption, poverty and racial problems.
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