RIO DE JANEIRO - What is the United States? "That's the only place where there is winter?" Joao Paulo dares, 6 years. Who is Obama? "Obama is a Lula," replied Agatha decided Vitoria, 5 years. Here the boys all want to become great Ronaldinho and Kaka, the surprise is the girls: When questioned on many craft imagine a future of "empresarias" entrepreneurs.
Idea is not granted, the place where they are. They are in a class of first-graders to "Solar Meninos de Luz", the House of the Sons of Light. Institution wedged between two of Rio's notorious slums, nests of small houses perched on a hill, the slums that have devoured the tropical vegetation to cram 15,000 people nell'abusivismo for decades without running water and no lights, apply them to a crustacean steep wall that could collapse with a tropical storm.
Only in Brazil is possible that a place so bleak exact border is disputed between the two most chic and famous beaches all over the Southern Hemisphere: Copacabana and Ipanema. And in tribute to the evil that defies imagination carioca, these two favelas in the historical heart of Rio have names of birds: Pavaozinho (small peacock) and Cantagallo.
They are the ancient symbol of a cruel nation, which for centuries has seen live a few yards away the luxury of the super-rich and shameless abject misery of underdevelopment. But today become a symbol of something new: a development that for the first time really attacking poverty, reduces inequalities.
This is the reason why Barack Obama, who opens tomorrow in Brasilia on his first visit as president in South America, Sunday will also be in Rio and asked to visit a favela. Without noise controversial, without the Cuban or Venezuelan ideologies, Brazil in recent years has become a social democratic model that can teach something to the United States.
"Solar Meninos de Luz" was not born from the head of a president, is a small miracle of civil society. Behind us is a famous benefactor, the writer Paulo Coelho was born here in Rio, but there are myriads of anonymous citizens who regularly contribute small donations. The center has a footprint that can be debated by the religious to the laity nose (it's inspired by the teaching of French spiritualist Allan Kardec, pedagogue who believed in reincarnation), but not surprised no one in Brazil, where the Catholic Church lives with the animist African Candomblé , and both suffer the massive penetration of Evangelicals.
"What matters here is the result - I said my guide, Alessandra Maltarollo voluntary - and that is that these children see no more, no drugs or knives combat. We accompany you in high school and kindergarten-nursery to university" . The miracle of the "House of the Sons of Light" is the show that I see in the morning long coils that climb the steep hill: the ends of the alleys there is still a nation of idle young men, sitting behind the stalls, but in the middle of parade marches joyful school in a white uniform and green, very clean, ordered, directed to the classrooms.
They have a library with 20,000 texts, a theater with 400 seats, gyms where I train them to capoeira (Brazilian martial art), clinics and canteens, even teachers who are specialized in assisting children with severe disabilities. English courses and computer starting from first grade class that I asked about the arrival of Obama.
But the transformation of the slum is the result of combined action: in addition to the volunteers who work from the bottom there was an intervention from above. In the literal sense: it is from that rushed on this and other favelas of Rio helicopters, paramilitary squads, special forces combat.
A real war operations, pre-planned as one of the last acts of President Lula da Silva, in agreement with the governor and the mayor. "95% of the population here has not suffered as an invasion but as a liberation," he says Lerner Sallyr 65, for a life that was "the dentist in the favelas." The state has taken for the first time in history the control of this territory, mobsters and drug traffickers have fled.
And that invasion has not been a spectacular one-off exploits. The sanitation workers sweeping the streets are a sign that the state is still here. As the car police units patrolling the entrance to the Pacific which favela: a presence unthinkable even a year ago, when the police did not dare approach.
"One of the favelas - told me the photographer Ana Rodrigues - called the Gaza Strip. There's drug dealers selling drugs on the stalls outside, with the Kalashnikov over the shoulder. The children took me by the hand and guides me to photograph the pay pools hot blood of the last victims of score-settling.
" The favelas continue to grow in height, by dint of "puxadinhos" spintarelle houses that overlap on top of each other. But the hive chaotic Cantagallo is now all brick instead of wood: a modest sign of advancing well-being paramount. Behind the metamorphosis of the favelas, there is a much broader phenomenon.
The Brazilian unemployment rate fell to 6.1%, the lowest of all time, the lowest in the United States and the European Union. Part of this progress is simply the effect of the boom in all emerging countries. In the words of José Carlos Martins, executive director of Vale is the second global mining giant: "We wake up every morning and pray that China is good." Soya, sugar, coffee, timber, copper, iron, gold, everything that nature has generously provided Brazil, is selling like hotcakes in the Asian nations that are the locomotives of growth.
This country that was notorious for its bankruptcy, which between 1940 and 1995, eight times had to change the name of its currency as a result of hyperinflation, now has become the fourth largest lender in the United States. Foreign investment is pouring at a rate of $ 45 billion per year, only China will attract more.
Brazil has given the first letter of the new acronym BRIC, India and China with Russia is part of the club of "other" powers, those accelerating declines while the West. In Rio and Sao Paulo can feel the same confidence in the future I remember in Mumbai and Shanghai. But among the BRIC is Brazil that can boast the more balanced structure of exports.
Unlike China and India, Brazil is a "breadbasket" of the world, modern agriculture has to compete with the United States, and produces much more than it consumes. Unlike Russia or other emerging countries, not only in the raw materials. Export cars, phones, appliances, ships and locomotives.
Her jewelry industry is Embraer, the third group aeronautical world behind Boeing and Airbus. Then there is the most important feature that makes it unique among the BRIC Brazil, the fourth world democracy has been able to use the boom to reduce inequalities, rather than enlarge it happened in China.
"We are an exception - the economist adds Ernani Teixeira of the Brazilian Development Bank - also the trend of more mature liberal democracies." In the United States and in much of Europe, disparities in income and assets have grown. "Our luck - ironically economist Fabio Gambegia of BNDES - maybe it's linked to a quirk of history.
The new democratic Constitution was approved in Brazil a year and a half before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time when even There was confidence in the role of the state. " The first to apply it really was Lula. His social policy, which continues today with the president Dilma Roussef (former Chef de Cabinet of Lula, a past in the armed struggle, imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship), he "built" for the first time the masses of poor economy .
The minimum wage, which applies to 25 million workers, has a double indexation on the inflation rate and increasing annual GDP. A godsend in a period of strong growth as the last eight years. Today the minimum wage is worth more than $ 300, a level much higher than in other South American countries.
"This is the best way to reduce inequalities: to enrich the poor, instead of impoverishing the rich," says Gambegia. You can not say the same of Hugo Chavez or Cuban socialism. Brazil has won worldwide admiration with the invention of the Bolsa Familia, a direct subsidy to mothers who are paid only if the children go to school regularly.
It works, is the best antidote against ever invented child labor. Of course this is not Scandinavia, is a land with many poor, corruption, injustice, but is one of the few countries in the world where the Gini index of the gap between rich and poor is falling steadily for eight years. Now the miracle "Left" Brazil faces major challenges, the daughters of his success.
It has a very strong currency, which transforms Rio and Sao Paulo's most expensive cities in the world, and does not help the export industry. The overestimation is likely to increase in coming years for the discovery of huge offshore oil fields, 200 km from the bay of Rio, which make Brazil the fourth or fifth power in world energy.
One understands Obama's interest for this partner and rival, whose power began to eclipse the great northern neighbor. And 'that Obama has specifically asked to include in his visit to a Rio favela, City of God "Today we can safely explore it - I said Ana Rodrigues - a year ago that there would shoot to the President of the United States." 
Idea is not granted, the place where they are. They are in a class of first-graders to "Solar Meninos de Luz", the House of the Sons of Light. Institution wedged between two of Rio's notorious slums, nests of small houses perched on a hill, the slums that have devoured the tropical vegetation to cram 15,000 people nell'abusivismo for decades without running water and no lights, apply them to a crustacean steep wall that could collapse with a tropical storm.
Only in Brazil is possible that a place so bleak exact border is disputed between the two most chic and famous beaches all over the Southern Hemisphere: Copacabana and Ipanema. And in tribute to the evil that defies imagination carioca, these two favelas in the historical heart of Rio have names of birds: Pavaozinho (small peacock) and Cantagallo.
They are the ancient symbol of a cruel nation, which for centuries has seen live a few yards away the luxury of the super-rich and shameless abject misery of underdevelopment. But today become a symbol of something new: a development that for the first time really attacking poverty, reduces inequalities.
This is the reason why Barack Obama, who opens tomorrow in Brasilia on his first visit as president in South America, Sunday will also be in Rio and asked to visit a favela. Without noise controversial, without the Cuban or Venezuelan ideologies, Brazil in recent years has become a social democratic model that can teach something to the United States.
"Solar Meninos de Luz" was not born from the head of a president, is a small miracle of civil society. Behind us is a famous benefactor, the writer Paulo Coelho was born here in Rio, but there are myriads of anonymous citizens who regularly contribute small donations. The center has a footprint that can be debated by the religious to the laity nose (it's inspired by the teaching of French spiritualist Allan Kardec, pedagogue who believed in reincarnation), but not surprised no one in Brazil, where the Catholic Church lives with the animist African Candomblé , and both suffer the massive penetration of Evangelicals.
"What matters here is the result - I said my guide, Alessandra Maltarollo voluntary - and that is that these children see no more, no drugs or knives combat. We accompany you in high school and kindergarten-nursery to university" . The miracle of the "House of the Sons of Light" is the show that I see in the morning long coils that climb the steep hill: the ends of the alleys there is still a nation of idle young men, sitting behind the stalls, but in the middle of parade marches joyful school in a white uniform and green, very clean, ordered, directed to the classrooms.
They have a library with 20,000 texts, a theater with 400 seats, gyms where I train them to capoeira (Brazilian martial art), clinics and canteens, even teachers who are specialized in assisting children with severe disabilities. English courses and computer starting from first grade class that I asked about the arrival of Obama.
But the transformation of the slum is the result of combined action: in addition to the volunteers who work from the bottom there was an intervention from above. In the literal sense: it is from that rushed on this and other favelas of Rio helicopters, paramilitary squads, special forces combat.
A real war operations, pre-planned as one of the last acts of President Lula da Silva, in agreement with the governor and the mayor. "95% of the population here has not suffered as an invasion but as a liberation," he says Lerner Sallyr 65, for a life that was "the dentist in the favelas." The state has taken for the first time in history the control of this territory, mobsters and drug traffickers have fled.
And that invasion has not been a spectacular one-off exploits. The sanitation workers sweeping the streets are a sign that the state is still here. As the car police units patrolling the entrance to the Pacific which favela: a presence unthinkable even a year ago, when the police did not dare approach.
"One of the favelas - told me the photographer Ana Rodrigues - called the Gaza Strip. There's drug dealers selling drugs on the stalls outside, with the Kalashnikov over the shoulder. The children took me by the hand and guides me to photograph the pay pools hot blood of the last victims of score-settling.
" The favelas continue to grow in height, by dint of "puxadinhos" spintarelle houses that overlap on top of each other. But the hive chaotic Cantagallo is now all brick instead of wood: a modest sign of advancing well-being paramount. Behind the metamorphosis of the favelas, there is a much broader phenomenon.
The Brazilian unemployment rate fell to 6.1%, the lowest of all time, the lowest in the United States and the European Union. Part of this progress is simply the effect of the boom in all emerging countries. In the words of José Carlos Martins, executive director of Vale is the second global mining giant: "We wake up every morning and pray that China is good." Soya, sugar, coffee, timber, copper, iron, gold, everything that nature has generously provided Brazil, is selling like hotcakes in the Asian nations that are the locomotives of growth.
This country that was notorious for its bankruptcy, which between 1940 and 1995, eight times had to change the name of its currency as a result of hyperinflation, now has become the fourth largest lender in the United States. Foreign investment is pouring at a rate of $ 45 billion per year, only China will attract more.
Brazil has given the first letter of the new acronym BRIC, India and China with Russia is part of the club of "other" powers, those accelerating declines while the West. In Rio and Sao Paulo can feel the same confidence in the future I remember in Mumbai and Shanghai. But among the BRIC is Brazil that can boast the more balanced structure of exports.
Unlike China and India, Brazil is a "breadbasket" of the world, modern agriculture has to compete with the United States, and produces much more than it consumes. Unlike Russia or other emerging countries, not only in the raw materials. Export cars, phones, appliances, ships and locomotives.
Her jewelry industry is Embraer, the third group aeronautical world behind Boeing and Airbus. Then there is the most important feature that makes it unique among the BRIC Brazil, the fourth world democracy has been able to use the boom to reduce inequalities, rather than enlarge it happened in China.
"We are an exception - the economist adds Ernani Teixeira of the Brazilian Development Bank - also the trend of more mature liberal democracies." In the United States and in much of Europe, disparities in income and assets have grown. "Our luck - ironically economist Fabio Gambegia of BNDES - maybe it's linked to a quirk of history.
The new democratic Constitution was approved in Brazil a year and a half before the fall of the Berlin Wall, at a time when even There was confidence in the role of the state. " The first to apply it really was Lula. His social policy, which continues today with the president Dilma Roussef (former Chef de Cabinet of Lula, a past in the armed struggle, imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship), he "built" for the first time the masses of poor economy .
The minimum wage, which applies to 25 million workers, has a double indexation on the inflation rate and increasing annual GDP. A godsend in a period of strong growth as the last eight years. Today the minimum wage is worth more than $ 300, a level much higher than in other South American countries.
"This is the best way to reduce inequalities: to enrich the poor, instead of impoverishing the rich," says Gambegia. You can not say the same of Hugo Chavez or Cuban socialism. Brazil has won worldwide admiration with the invention of the Bolsa Familia, a direct subsidy to mothers who are paid only if the children go to school regularly.
It works, is the best antidote against ever invented child labor. Of course this is not Scandinavia, is a land with many poor, corruption, injustice, but is one of the few countries in the world where the Gini index of the gap between rich and poor is falling steadily for eight years. Now the miracle "Left" Brazil faces major challenges, the daughters of his success.
It has a very strong currency, which transforms Rio and Sao Paulo's most expensive cities in the world, and does not help the export industry. The overestimation is likely to increase in coming years for the discovery of huge offshore oil fields, 200 km from the bay of Rio, which make Brazil the fourth or fifth power in world energy.
One understands Obama's interest for this partner and rival, whose power began to eclipse the great northern neighbor. And 'that Obama has specifically asked to include in his visit to a Rio favela, City of God "Today we can safely explore it - I said Ana Rodrigues - a year ago that there would shoot to the President of the United States."
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