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February 2007
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Members : 17360
Content : 3757
Content View Hits : 29521363
Content : 3757
Content View Hits : 29521363
The year was 1959. The place, Santa Rita do Sapucaí, a city in southeastern Brazil. The main character in the story is Sinhá Moreira, a very wealthy woman with good connections and a lot of vision. Upon returning from a trip to Japan, in the 1950s, Sinhá Moreira was enchanted with how technologically advanced that country was - despite just having suffered the horrors of the Second World War, the country was already producing technology at full blast. 
Enough already of all the cruelty. Of bus passengers burned alive, of young people killed, of assaults, kidnappings, massacres. And of the daily acts of violence that do not even make it into the news. Enough already of a reality that looks like a scene from a horror movie. Enough already of a society that remains shocked only for a few days - until Carnaval, the World Cup, the next scandal.
Brazilian and foreign shareholders must be wondering why decisive punitive action in an insider trading scandal involving one of Brazil's biggest companies has been taken by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and not the Brazilian equivalent, known as the CVM. 
My own research on racial exclusion in Brazil has given me ample reason to believe that this environment exists only because the majority of Brazil's pretos and pardos still don't seem to understand what their phenotype has to do with their chances for success in life. 
Did you know that when you withdraw money at an ATM machine you are being watched? Would you ever think that any single money transaction you make is carefully scrutinized by sophisticated computer systems that look at any detail of what you do?