On top of the world: Why Brazil is booming

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Blessed in show: The refurbished Christ the Redeemer statue at the Corcovado hill, in Rio de Janeiro

By David Usborne

Friday, 9 July 2010

It is a 100th birthday party in a well-to-do postcode of Sao Paulo, where the house of our journalist host – he and another writer pal are actually each turning 50 – slips graciously down a slope to a terrace and the chatter is nearly all politics. Then the DJ cuts the music in the middle of a samba everyone knows. They reflexively fill in: "Ò coisinha tão bonitinha do papai" – "Oh daddy's beautiful little thing".

Not everything in Brazil is beautiful. Not the slums, or favelas, which ring cities like this one or Rio de Janeiro, or last Saturday's national glee when Argentina – neighbour and perennial rival – crashed out of the World Cup one day after the Brazilian squad's humiliating Dutch demise. ("Que desgraca!" squealed an old man when the stricken face of Diego Maradona filled the TVs in a bar on Sao Paulo's Teodoro Street.)

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Fonte: The Independent