Dancing With the Devil in the City of God: Rio De Janeiro on the Brink

by Juliana Barbassa

  “We had a wonderful franchise in Rio,” said Levy, when I had the chance to ask why he came back. “We just needed to give people the confidence to invest.”

  The state’s $200 billion GDP was substantial and very diversified, he said. But the lack of organization in the state’s finances was such when he started that the doors were wide open to waste and outright abuse.

  “The possibilities were there for corruption, absolutely,” he said. “When I started, elephants would walk through; there was zero control.”

  He brought organization and transparency to the state’s revenue and payments. It was basic, but no one had done it before. Investors followed. In March 2010, two years after Standard & Poor’s had raised Brazil’s credit rating to investment grade, the ratings agency gave the state of Rio de Janeiro the same status.

  In the wake of the good news, the governor went to New York, promoting Rio and touting expected investments as high as $90 billion over the next four years.

  The marketing budget for the governor’s office is a good yardstick for its sales pitch: $69.4 million in 2008, $115.1 million in 2010. But anyone looking at Rio in those days would have caught the excitement: massive infrastructure projects to prepare the city for the World Cup and the Olympics brought construction companies, which drew architects, engineers, and managers from other states and abroad. The number of visas issued to foreigners broke records, and professional Brazilians who’d gone abroad in the 1990s after despairing of finding jobs were now returning.

  There was all this, and then there was the oil, vast deposits of it discovered 180 miles or more beyond Rio’s coast. This find alone had the potential to stimulate the economy in Rio and the country, creating jobs, attracting foreign investors, revamping the shipping and exploration industry, and bolstering national coffers.

  Brazil had long teetered on the edge of energy self-sufficiency but this 2007 announcement by Petrobras, the company behind my itinerant childhood, could catapult Brazil into the top five oil producers in the world. Extracting it would require drilling through sixteen thousand feet of rock and salt, deep into the bowels of the earth, from platforms floating on the Atlantic—a risky and technically challenging proposition that would push the edge of ultradeep offshore exploration and require an investment of up to a trillion dollars.

  As the first oil field started gushing, however, the promise of bonanza ahead prompted even the avowedly secular and notoriously stone-faced president Dilma to risk a joke and say the find was “strong evidence that God is Brazilian.” The line is an old staple of Brazilian self-deprecating humor, but this time it was served up without irony. The pre-salt fields, as they’re known, could bring the kind of wealth and geopolitical heft that could leverage Brazil into the big leagues.

  By 2010, the announcement of deep offshore fields off Rio’s coast had expanded the oil industry and attracted foreign players. Monthly rents on high-end offices jumped nearly 50 percent in 2010 alone, making Rio the most expensive market in the Americas. The building in which the AP had its office also housed corporate law firms and oil services companies. I’d often find myself boxed into a corner of the elevator by Japanese men in identical blue suits, a tall stand of Norwegians, or a particularly prominent Texas gut.

  I should have known my dreams of beachfront living were in trouble when I saw a Nordic-looking man taking long-legged strides down the bike lane in Ipanema on what looked like cross-country skis on wheels. Of course. They wanted it, too, and they were flush with petrodollars. Asking prices in Ipanema had gone up nearly 300 percent over the last handful of years as multitudes flocked toward the golden sand. I felt like someone had taken the Brazil I’d known and sent it through an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. Nothing was as expected.

  But I still needed a place to live. This time I would be more methodical. Instead of just plunging in, I wanted to make sense of the market. For that, I went to Leonardo Schneider, vice president in Rio of SECOVI, the biggest real estate association in the country and the source of reports that detailed price fluctuations across neighborhoods.

  We met in his office and began our conversation by looking over graphs that outlined change over time. Oil was a factor, but there were others, he pointed out. The turning point was 2009, when the city got the Olympic nomination and the new favela policing projects, the UPPs, started to spread.

  Going from graph to graph, he plotted out the ripple of higher prices through the city. It started in the sought-after south side. As Cariocas found out they could no longer afford the rent there, they began to consider neighborhoods in the working-class north, where new residential buildings were going up after a hiatus of decades, or the gated communities sprouting to the west.

  “Before, we had whole areas where at night you simply wouldn’t go. You had stray bullets, shoot-outs, traffickers, right?” he said. “There were whole sectors that were abandoned, with little value. And then we saw what happened with the first UPP—Santa Marta, in Botafogo. Buyers waited a little to make sure that this was serious, here to stay. Within seven or eight months we had people wanting to move to the area, rent, buy, anything. Soon the market was anticipating the UPP, and prices would go up even before the police came.”

  I thought of my sister and her husband, who lived not far from Santa Marta. They’d bought a two-story penthouse right under Cristo’s armpit before there was any talk of UPPs. Two years later, refurbished and post-UPP, the flat was worth nearly three times what they’d paid. The favelas above Ipanema and Copacabana also had UPPs; that brought down petty crime in the area, but it also jacked up property prices and rent. It was inescapable; Leonardo had no secrets to share. If I wanted to live anywhere in the south side and near my job, I’d have to pay.

  So, with my expectations readjusted to remove any thoughts of an ocean view, I went back to my search. Forty or so apartments later, I realized that cost wasn’t my only problem. After dozens of duds pulled from the classifieds, I realized the apartments I was looking at were the worst of the lot, the ones left over for people like me—people who didn’t know anyone.

  Cariocas are, above all, connected. They value personal contacts and invest a lot of time into cultivating these relationships, often turning a simple operation, like ringing up purchases at the supermarket, into a ten-minute transaction. This was maddening to me, with my very American expectations of efficiency. But my failed apartment search had taught me all this chitchat wasn’t a waste of time; these interactions were valuable ways of accumulating social capital. Without a friendly hand or a useful tip, one ended up as I had, looking at one flop after another.

  It seemed the fewer traditional resources one had—money or power—the more important this web became. My problem was that I didn’t have enough money to hire an apartment scout, who would use his network on my behalf for one month’s worth of rent. I had no personal connections, either.

  But I did begin to work at it. I walked down streets where I wanted to live and chatted up the doormen who spent all day perched on hard-backed chairs, solemnly buzzing in visitors, buzzing out residents. As Cariocas felt less safe during the 1980s and 1990s, porteiros had become ubiquitous.

  Their salaries were part of what I thought of as Brazil’s hidden cost of living: the extras you paid for twice, first through your taxes and then out of pocket. The police couldn’t ensure safety, so you lived in a building with round-the-clock doormen or in a gated condo with private guards; public universities were top-notch and free, but a public high school education wouldn’t get your kid past the entrance exam, so you forked out for private schools; the Brazilian Constitution enshrined the right of citizens to health care at no cost, but the hospitals and clinics were overburdened and underfunded, lacking essentials like gauze or saline solution. So, if possible, you paid for health insurance.

  In my circumstances, the porteiros were the solution. No one knew the life of each building better than these men, general
ly migrants from the impoverished northeast who came south looking for jobs. As Brazil’s regional stereotypes go, the nordestinos are tough, conservative, hardworking, and self-sufficient, perfect foils to the gregarious, life-is-a-beach Cariocas. By the second or third time I swung past my chosen streets, prying these taciturn men for news, I got nods of recognition. With some prodding, they would share tidbits about who was moving, which building offered better value, and which unit was torn apart by a divorcing couple on their way out (it was the porteiro who explained the mystery of the absent faucets in the weeping wall apartment).

  This was how I eventually found a place. It was on the second floor of a slightly down-at-the-heels 1970s Ipanema building called Superstar, apparently without any irony. It was not yet advertised. I jumped on it after a quick glance.

  It was well above my price range, with a view into the private lives of the elderly couple across the street, and right by an intersection of the neighborhood’s main bus thoroughfare. The screech of brakes and deep rumble of revving diesel engines ricocheted off the concrete walls and into my bedroom, populating my dreams. When Carnaval rolled around, the acoustics brought the resounding bass of roving samba bands and the caterwauling of their drunken revelers right into my living room; I could sing along to the traditional marchinhas even in my sleep. The kitchen door came with a resident termite colony that had been breeding, unmolested, for years; the doorknobs came off in my hand.

  The kicker I didn’t learn until later: the bathroom window was inside the shower stall and opened onto the exhaust pipe of the restaurant below, which specialized in picanha na chapa—grilled meat served sizzling on a cast iron skillet. For the next year, each time I bathed I had the disturbing sensation I was soaping up with a chunk of medium-rare steak.

  All these qualities would reveal themselves in the months to come. But when I first stood in that empty living room, I was so relieved to have found a place that was at least adequate that I raced to the real estate office handling the contract: I’d take it.

  Apartment found, I thought, the hard part was over, and I could focus on making a home for myself. Right? No. Not even close.

  * * *

  I. Lula had won with 61 percent of the vote, but his party garnered less than one-sixth of Congress, where 21 parties vied for a share of power. Forming a coalition was essential to governance; the mensalão brought these parties into the fold.

  II. This despite the fact that in 2006, his finance minister was brought down in another corruption scandal, revealing that he used a lakeside villa staffed with prostitutes in Brasília to entertain lobbyists and others in exchange for favors and information.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT’S COMPLICATED, QUERIDA

  If searching for an apartment had been a lesson in the cost of living in this new Rio, signing the lease was my introduction to Brazilian bureaucracy, a legacy of the Portuguese monarchy that stretched over centuries in a tangle of red tape that ensnared the simplest operation. Buying a cup of juice at the stand-up corner bar was a dance involving at least three people—a cashier, an attendant at the counter, and another in the kitchen, each playing out a specific role in a complex choreography. Why did I assume signing a lease would be a simple matter? Clearly, more of the United States clung to me than I had been ready to admit.

  I should have guessed at the challenges ahead from the long look I got from the secretary, Maria José, or Zezé as we called her, when I announced at the office I’d found a place and would be in a little late the next day because I planned to sign the lease first thing in the morning. She had been a fixture of the AP in Rio for thirty years, nursing generations of correspondents through their wide-eyed enthusiasms, their first run-ins with paperwork, and their eventual deflation of confidence. It was the composer Tom Jobim who first pointed out that “Brazil is not for beginners,” but it might as well have been the diminutive Zezé.

  At just about five feet tall, she was the office’s front line and drew from a bottomless well of forbearance to deal with the vagaries of the news cycle, the frantic demands of foreign management, and Brazil’s maze of forms and stamps. She gave me a nod and a little Mona Lisa smile as I galloped out the door, absolutely confident that I’d be back contract in hand. And she was there, with her customary kindness and a demitasse of coffee, to prop me up when I returned, empty-handed, the next day.

  The rental agency needed to see my Brazilian ID, not just the little slip of paper I was handed when I’d applied for it. Of course. Plus proof of income and of residence. I didn’t have a bank account—I needed an ID for that—and so had no way of proving an income other than my old U.S. paychecks, which were not acceptable. I certainly didn’t have a residence. To check my financial background they wanted last year’s tax return and twelve months of bank statements, and since mine were in English, they needed them all translated into Portuguese by a certified translator, copied in triplicate, each page stamped by a notary.

  The traditional Brazilian rental contract also requires a cosigner who owns at least one property in the same city and who is willing to put it up as collateral in case of default. So the rental agency also wanted the cosigner’s documents, their proof of income, and their tax return—all, of course, in triplicate, notarized.I

  By this point I was losing my mind. Each step I’d take toward completing a task I assumed would be simple—getting a local credit card, registering for health insurance, signing a lease—would instead reveal a myriad other smaller steps that needed to be taken first. The harder I ran, the deeper I found myself within this perverse hall of mirrors.

  This was when Zezé took pity and got the hotel clerk to write a letter giving that address as my official residence, opened an account for me with a bank manager she knew, and put me in touch with a notary from a local cartório who’d come to the office and stamp away for what seemed like hours while I worked. When we were done gathering the documents I stared in awe at the two-inch-thick bundle of stamped, signed pieces of paper we’d compiled. A city park’s worth of trees went into that stack, plus enough notary stamps to guarantee his grandchildren a very merry Christmas, and it didn’t even include the actual contract—which would have to come in triplicate, signed by myself, the cosigner, plus a witness, and notarized. Of course.

  It was only years later that I was able to quantify the grip these cartórios have on Brazil. Although the United States has notary publics, to equate the two is to vastly understate the way Brazilian cartórios permeate, and strangle, the country’s business, from contracts between multinationals to the simplest operations, such as renting an apartment. A survey by the National Justice Council, which oversees them, put the yearly earnings of the country’s 13,803 cartórios at about $6 billion. Indeed, the profession is so lucrative its title was for a long time passed from father to son, in a sort of feudal inheritance system.

  I began to feel as if this running in place were a test of my desire to call Rio home. Anyone can visit and dig their toes into the sand for a few weeks. But navigating the labyrinth of paperwork required to live and work in Rio while remaining calm took another level of resolve. Cariocas seemed to have an otherworldly ability to remain affable in the face of inefficiency, incompetence, or sheer indifference. They were also masters of the jeitinho, a certain tact that allowed them to bend the rules without breaking. This was a skill that started with the ability to charm and backslap, and, depending on individual style and the occasion, could range as far as proffering a bribe with grace and discretion, avoiding offense.

  Fail to learn this dance—lose your temper, invoke your rights, threaten a lawsuit—and you could find yourself unable to get your cell phone to work or to ensure delivery of that fridge you bought for double what you’d pay elsewhere. Cariocas prize cordiality and go far to avoid confrontation, but they will say come back tomorrow, meu amor, you’re missing a document, or it’s complicated, querida, falling back on the inf
inite elasticity of evasion and spurious amiability, until you sink into despair—phoneless, fridgeless, and without an apartment.

  I would take nearly a month of cold showers before I got the gas working. The new rules required a different kind of duct, something not revealed by the rental agency and which meant weeks of hosting a friendly but decidedly unhurried construction crew. At least moving in was easy: all I had was a suitcase. The furniture and personal belongings I’d shipped from San Francisco remained ensnared at the port. They would remain there, inside a metal container and baking in the summer sunshine, until I could rescue them six months later with another two-inch sheaf of stamped, signed, notarized documents. All copied in triplicate, of course.

  Standing in my new home, keys in hand, I realized I’d signed up to pay more than two thousand dollars in rent to sleep, eat, and work on a flimsy camping pad in an empty, echoing apartment. And yet it felt like a victory.

  Every morning I ran on the sand toward the great granite embrace of the Dois Irmãos peaks, and then swam back, flipping over to watch skeins of white clouds knitting and unraveling above. A balloon of happiness filled my chest and I knew this was right, in spite of Rio’s angry heat and its ungainly apartment blocks, the honk and roar of its traffic, its lines and long commutes. From beyond the break, the city was beautiful again, reduced to a bright strip of buildings against a backdrop of green, to the idea and the promise of home.

  Even as I struggled to get settled, I realized the trouble I had was far from unique. Bureaucracy and the sluggish pace of public service formed a bottleneck that choked all transactions and dampened growth even in this booming economy. In 2010, opening a business required 13 procedures and, on average, 119 days, if all went well and the documents were lined up. In the United States, this took 5 days; in India and Russia, 29 days, according to the World Bank. This red tape was a real burden, costing the country about $26 billion a year, according to a survey by an industry group.