Educação pode mudar sua vida

By Tim Padgett and Andrew Downie / Rio de Janeiro “It is Brazil’s time,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva insisted in his pitch before Friday’s International Olympic Committee vote. “It is time to light the Olympic torch in a tropical country.” The IOC agreed  — and that lit up a frenzied carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a city that knows how to party perhaps better than any other. 

Giving Rio the Olympics sends a strong signal to the rest of the developing world that the Brazilian model  — the post-ideological mix of orthodox market economics and progressive social policy championed by Lula — is the one to follow. Brazil is the only country among the world’s 10 largest economies today that hasn’t hosted an Olympics. 

Given its sheer size  — a country just about as large as the U.S. and with a population of 190 million — Portuguese-speaking Brazil has always longed to project itself beyond the confines of Latin America. But, aside from soccer and Carnaval, the world has rarely taken Brazil as seriously. In fact, Brazil was long the butt of a joke that said it was the country of the future — and always would be.