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Every year Time lists its 100 Most Influential People In The World.
The 2012 list is out today and there are a record three Brazilians on it, entrepreneur Eike Batista, President Dilma Rousseff and Petrobras CEO Maria das Graças Silva Foster.
Everyone can find fault with the list – how is that guy on it and where is so-and-so?!? – but that’s part of its appeal.
Time editors choose who makes the list and there are often heated, last-minute discussions over who makes the final cut and who gets bumped.
But the coolest thing about the list is how famous people write short essays about those chosen.
This year, Barack Obama writes about Warren Buffet, Bill Gates talks on Salman Khan, Mia Hamm lauds Lionel Messi and, ahem, Cristina Kirchner even writes about Dilma Rousseff.
We managed to convince Eduardo Paes to give us his opinions on Eike Batista and the Rio mayor wrote a lovely piece that captures their friendly relationship but most of all, their mutual love for Rio.
The whole list can be found here but here’s Paes’ ode to Eike:
“I have the best job in the world. I wake up every morning energized at the thought of running Rio de Janeiro, the most exciting city on the planet. Our beloved Cidade Maravilhosa(Marvelous City) is going through an extraordinary era of positive change and social development — and as one of its most treasured adopted sons, Eike Batista, 55, has helped us shape the renaissance. He might be Brazil’s richest man and the world’s seventh richest, bringing vital investment to our city from oil and mining, but his most valuable asset is his commitment to Rio’s legacy. In 2009 Eike bolstered our successful bid for the 2016 Olympics, and since then he has partnered with us on municipal projects like the cleanup of the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. His initiatives, besides helping fund a children’s hospital, include the revitalization of the city’s Marina da Glória, which will be home to the Olympic sailing events, and the establishment of Escola Social de Vôlei, a nonprofit organization that promotes social inclusion in the favelas through sports. Eike and I may not agree on which of us has the best job in the world, but one thing we certainly agree on is that Rio de Janeiro is the best place in the world.”
The most incredible thing about this whole Jerome Valcke says Brazil “needs a kick up the backside” spat is his apology.
FIFA general secretary Valcke sent a letter to Sports Minister Rebelo apologising for saying Brazil’s World Cup preparations were “not working” and that organisers needed “a kick up the backside”.
The comments caused a huge furor in Brazil, as you can see here in my Reuters story.
Valcke blamed a translator for his lack of diplomacy and said his French should have been translated as something more akin to Brazil “needs a shake.”
Well, I spoke to someone who was there when he made those comments and it turns out HE SPOKE IN ENGLISH!
What kind of man – least of all being recorded by dozens of journalists, radio reporters and cameramen – thinks he can get away with such blatant lying?
And isn’t there someone in the Brazilian government who is going to take him to task about this?
Valcke, of course, has a history of lying, as this great Independent story from 2007 reveals. He was fired from FIFA once before for lying in a court case involving big sponsors.
His boss Blatter tried to smooth over the ruffled feathers yesterday by apologising to the Brazilian government. But I don’t know if it’s enough. The Brazilian government has declared Valcke persona non grata.
We’ll find out next week if they accept the double apology and back down. Valcke is due to visit Brazil March 12.
Sex sells.
My piece on the controversial Gisele Bundchen lingerie campaign is top of the Time’s most read list today.
I’d like to think that’s because of my sparkling writing and astute analysis. But I think it’s probably because it is about Gisele Bundchen in lingerie.
I can only imagine how popular it would be if I included videos of the three ads in my story, featuring the Gaucha goddess pouting away in her bra and panties.
You can find them here.
Here’s the first one for your delectation.
Hacking has been in the news recently, with hackers, or crackers, as they supposedly call themselves, taking down a number of Brazilian sites last week, including many run by the federal government.
(See my blog in today’s Christian Science Monitor.)
Adding an extra spice to the issue was a report in yesterday’s Folha de S. Paulo newspaper saying a 21-year old hacker accessed hundreds of Dilma Rousseff’s emails while she was campaigning to become president.
That led the country’s Science and Technology Minister to try and co-opt Brazilian hackers.
Aloizio Mercadante called on hackers to join his ministry’s programmers today and help them solve internal bugs. He dubbed July 1 Hackers Day.
Nice try. But it ain’t going to work.
If Mercadante really wants to get a message across (and this goes for government and private enterprise alike) he could start by concentrating on the basics.
His ministry’s own site didn’t mention his much reported call to hackers.
When I read that headline, Small Earthquake in Brazil’s Planalto, in today’s Financial Times I thought people in the capital were worrying about books falling from shelves and coffee spilling over.
It turns out that the FT editorial was metaphorical rather than literal.
The paper lauded the earlywork of President Dilma Rousseff for making her own mark on government, paticularly in the fields of human rights and the economy.
Rousseff was Lula’s pic and many thought she might be Lula in a skirt. But the FT cheerily noted:
“Ms Rousseff has broken with her predecessor’s policies in a number of encouraging ways. One of the least appealing aspects of Mr Lula da Silva’s presidency was his cosying up to Iran, and his refusal to speak out about human rights abuses there. This posture made cordial relations with the US difficult. Ms Rousseff is reversing his stance. She rightly criticised the refusal of her predecessor’s government to join a UN resolution to condemn stoning in Iran.”
The FT also praised Rousseff for making more spending cuts but it warned these are early days and there is much to do, such as reform Brazil’s ridiculously complex tax code, boost the savings rate and prevent inflation and interest rates spiralling out of control.
The overall verdicton her first month was positive.
“Ms Rousseff has made a sound start,” the paper said. “The panic that greeted Mr Lula da Silva’s inauguration proved largely misplaced. If Ms Rousseff continues as she has started, she will confound the doubters as well.”
Amen to that.
Having lived and reported in Latin America for 20 years, I’ve done my fair share of disaster reporting. When I worked in Mexico and Haiti it felt like every week I was counting bodies, either from explosions in oil pipes or fireworks factories, or floods, or earthquakes and hurricanes.
I remember boarding an almost empty plane to Cancun to try and get in the way of Hurricane Mitch. When we got there everyone else was thronging the airport to get out – and I was bummed out when the hurricane took a left turn at the last minute and hit Honduras instead.
I once went to the Guatemalan border to cover floods there and couldn’t find a hotel room because the small town was filled with army officers. My memory of that day was speaking with a young lad who walked miles from his home town with a letter asking for help.
And one of my first big stories as a correspondent was just a few weeks after I started at UPI and I spent the night on the office couch doing regular updates to the death toll after an oil duct exploded in Guadalajara.
It would be insensitive to describe them as good times, but they were certainly memorable and they helped me become the reporter I am today.
Although none of what I did was as dramatic as this amazing rescue video shot yesterday near Rio:
I write this because I’ve just spent the last 36 hours writing about the terrible floods in Brazil. I’ve done similar stories it seems almost every year from here and this time the questions I wanted to ask were clear: Why does this keep happening and why do authorities never work on prevention?
The clearest answer was from the Gil Castello Branco, who does great work over at Contas Abertas, an NGO that monitors government spending. He told me:
“When these disasters occur we know what will happen, the politicians will survey the disaster area from a helicopter, then touch down and declare solidarity with the families and then announce a big rescue package so that he looks like the savior. What they should be doing is going there when the sun shines to stand on the edge of a hill and announce that people living there will be removed from the high risk area. But no one wants to do that.”
“It is a historic problem, Brazil always spends money after the fact rather than in prevention,” he added. “We turn that old saying on its head. We aren’t safe, we are sorry.”
There’s more answers here in the Christian Science Monitor and here in Time magazine.
With less than two weeks to go before Lula leaves office, the season of retrospectives is upon us. Many newspapers and magazines have issued special supplements looking back over Lula’s fascinating, largely successful and always eventful eight years in power.
One of the most pertinent questions, though, concerns not Lula’s past but his future. Many people wonder whether Lula, a former union leader who has know nothing other than politics for the best part of three decades, will be able to cope with life outside the spotlight. (See my Christian Science Monitor piece on that speculation here.)
Lula is the consummate politician and loves being centre stage. He loves to talk and he loves the attention. Some believe he hand-picked a relatively unknown civil servant to succeed him in order to make it easier for him to run again in four years time.
Those rumours took on a new lease of life this week after Lula told a local TV channel he did not rule out another presidential bid in 2014.
“I can’t say no because I’m still alive,” Lula told Rede TV. “I’m honorary president of a party, I’m a born politician, I built extraordinary political relationships.”
The timing undermines Dilma Rousseff, who has not commented on the interview (or much else for that matter).
But should we really give the talk any credence? Indeed, should we take anything Lula says seriously? A consumate politician, Lula is known for preaching to the choir. As I say in this Financial Times piece today:
Mr Lula da Silva is charming and folksy and famous for saying one thing one day and something completely different the next, often depending on the audience in front of him.
Just last month he called speculation he might run again “small-minded” and said Brazilians should be discussing 2011 and not 2014.
That completely contradicts what he told Rede TV. So which Lula to believe?
Another example of the contradictions surround Lula’s immediate future. He has hinted variously that he will work for Africa, take on a role at an international organization, focus on eradicating world poverty, and put his feet up and relax. Of course, he can do all of those things. But he has told different audiences different things.
A more worrying example of his mixed messages are in his future dealings with Rousseff. He offered her advice and then vowed not to interfere in her administration. Then he said he will help her if she needs him.
And all this in spite of the fact that he has spent the best part of eight years telling his predecessor that ex-presidents should be seen and not heard.
Time will tell where Lula goes and what he does. But I can’t see him bowing out quietly. There have been many acts in Lula’s storybook life. I think (and hope) there are more to come.
The death of Nestor Kirchner has left a leadership void in Unasul and it is one that some analysts believe Lula could be well suited to fill.
The Union of South American Nations is made up of 12 regional countries and essentially seeks to do for South America what the European Union did for Europe. It wants to create a single South American market with no import tariffs, a common currency and more regional infrastructure. It also proposes free movement of workers among the member nations and a common defense policy.
This recent piece by the Council of Hemispheric Affairs gives an interesting outline of where Unasul now stands, especially in relation to Dilma Rousseff’s new government.
It doesn’t mention Lula as a possible successor to Kirchner. I am not sure how widepread these rumours are or if they should be given any credence but two separate political analysts have suggested to me over the last couple of days that Lula might be interested in taking over as Secretary General of Unasul.
Lula would like to head an international body but he’s no chance of taking over at the IMF or the World Bank, as some have speculated. This might be a good alternative.
COHA also has a piece here entitled Challenges Ahead for Brazil’s First Female President.
One of the new president’s first statements – and the one most repeated by the press – was her call for gender equality and her promise to “honour Brazilian women.”
Just moments after being declared president-elect, Dilma Rousseff said Brazil needs more women in leadership positions and appealed to parents “to look their little girls in the eye and tell them, Yes! Women Can!”
It was a sweet moment.
Unfortunately, it’s what Brazilians call political smoke. In other words, nothing but words. Cynical, empty words.
If Dilma had wanted to honour Brazilian women she’d have had more of them in her inner circle. She’d have made more campaign promises. She’d have shifted the subject of gender inequality onto centre stage.
She did nothing of the sort. Dilma made almost no mention of women’s issues in the campaign. There was no talk of opening more reproductive health clinics or increasing the number of hospitals offering screening for breast cancer, for example. This campaign video designed specially to appeal to women makes absolutely no firm commitments in the gender sphere.
Worse, Dilma reversed her pro-life stance and came out against abortion after the neandarthal religious lobby criticized her for daring to challenge the church’s position.
More than 200 Brazilian women die after desperately attempting illegal abortions each year and another 200,000 are hospitalized from complications arising from botched attempts (as I said in this earlier post).
Reflecting her ambiguous position, leading feminists criticized her and said her campaign did women a disservice by attempting to present her as “the mother” of Brazilians (a strategy she later abandoned).
Women are woefully underrepresented in Brazilian politics. This chart of Women in Parliaments puts more than 100 nations ahead of Brazil in the table measuring female participation in government. Brazil is 106th of 186 nations.
In the Oct. 3 Congressional elections, the number of female Senators went from 11 of 81 to 12. Only 43 of the 513 Deputies are female, LESS than the last Congress, when there were 47.
That percentage is, incredibly, much less than in Rwanda, Mozambique, Uzbekistan or Bulgaria, to name just a few of the nations that outshine Brazil. According to the Women in Parliaments table, of the Western Hemisphere nations, only Haiti and Panama have a lower percentage of women in Congress than Brazil.
It’s not too late for Dilma, she can single-handedly deal a blow for gender equality by naming qualified females to her cabinet and to other top posts. She can insist companies employ women and pay they the same salaries as their male peers. She can decriminalize abortion and give women the right to choose what they do with their own bodies.
She has the power.
Her words were cute. But words are not enough.
Dilma is the new president.
Here’s my piece from Time on her election and what her government might be like.
And here’s another one of my offerings with a bit more analysis on the Christian Science Monitor website.
The AP have a good piece here from the always reliable Bradley Brooks and the NYT’s offering is here.
