虹在天涯 在寂寞行星的浪跡

我不久前才寫了好幾篇和里約有關的文章，直讚嘆里約的美與熱情。

不過這一陣子里約 ﹝甚至整個巴西﹞治安好像又有惡化的趨勢。

先是有整車英國觀光客才從機場過來，就在 Ipanema海灘附近 被搶﹝Ipanema該算是里約的好區了，可是‧‧‧﹞，上月底又有幫派火拼。不過去年年底的除夕夜還是吸引了上百萬的觀光客前往慶祝。因為里約實在太美了‧‧‧

這篇本周刊出的的『紐約時報』文章分析的還蠻有道理的。雖然都是英文的，大家有空讀一讀吧！
,﹝我的英文能力就是靠讀『紐約時報』讀出來的﹞

P.S. 2007里約熱內盧的嘉年華盛會 於二月17日 ﹝周六﹞正式展開，於2月20日 ﹝週二﹞達到最高潮。此期間正好是華人的農曆新年 所以很多人將有長假可用。

拿台灣護照去巴西需要辦簽證 ﹝不過美國人及加拿大人也得辦簽證，所以我們不用太怨嘆﹞，詳情請聯絡 『巴西商務中心』. 地址, 台北市中山北路六段197號5樓. 電話, (02)2835-7388.


“Rio Dances Into New Year Despite Violence”

By SETH KUGEL
Published: January 14, 2007

THE drug traffickers who rule many of Rio de Janeiro’s slums may have been hoping, in part, to scare people away from the city’s famous New Year’s Eve celebration on Copacabana Beach. But the coordinated acts of violence they committed on Dec. 28, which killed at least 20 people and made news worldwide, were upstaged by two forces apparently more powerful: a steady drizzle that kept some revelers away and a concert by the Black Eyed Peas on Ipanema, the next beautiful beach over.

There, crowds of young Rio natives, visitors from across Brazil and international tourists, mostly dressed in traditional white, were packed like dancing sardines to hear a night of concerts on the beach. Estimates by the local news media put the audience at about 1.5 million, whereas the crowd at Copacabana was estimated at about one million.

These were the hotel-packed neighborhoods where most tourists heard of the attacks three days earlier, either in their Internet-connected, CNN-equipped rooms or in worried text messages from friends and relatives abroad. For the Portuguese-speaking, banner headlines like “Factions Unite Against Militias and Terrorize Rio” in O Globo, the city’s main daily, told the story. (No translation was needed for Jornal do Brasil’s headline: “TERROR.”)

And with Carnaval beginning in just over a month and the quadrennial Pan American Games scheduled for Rio in July, the state’s new governor, Sérgio Cabral, declared security his priority. Taking office on Jan. 1, he immediately asked Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to send in the country’s National Security Force. The president himself labeled the violence “terrorism” that same day in his second inaugural address. Thousands of troops were already scheduled to be sent in July for the Pan Am Games; Mr. Cabral asked for them to come as soon as possible.

Regular travelers to Rio understand that it is not known as the Marvelous City because it is marvelously safe, so it is unclear whether the attacks will have a long-term impact on tourism.

Paulo Senise, the executive director of the Rio Convention and Visitors Bureau, said such incidents affected tourism in the short run, especially among domestic travelers bombarded with news media coverage, but then things settled back to normal. “Sometimes there is a wrong perception that Rio is another seaside town and people don’t realize the size of this city of six million people,” he said. “The new governor and security secretary are planning a whole new series of strategies. We need to give them a bit of time before we measure the results.”

In Rio, the standard tourist warnings are: Don’t wear jewelry; don’t bring lots of money; don’t leave tourist areas.

The city’s poverty is painfully apparent in everyday scenes: men and women sleeping in the street; destitute boys juggling for spare change at major intersections; tiny girls peddling gum outside chic nightclubs. The city’s slums, or favelas, rise up on the hills around the city. Travelers taking the Linha Vermelha, as the highway to the airport is called, sometimes drive through gunfights in the favelas. On Jan. 4, a group of German and Croatian tourists were mugged after their vehicle left the highway.

In return for such risks, visitors get to savor the city’s beauty, both its natural surroundings and the tanned, gym-going denizens of its wealthier neighborhoods. Bewitching nightclubs offer live samba and pagode, bossa nova and forró. For New Yorkers, Londoners and the like, the combination of year-round beach life and cosmopolitan lifestyle defies logic. Then there is the much dissected but never completely explained spirit, energy and happy (if vain) disposition of the Carioca, the Rio native.

So it is the kind of city where travelers have long invented their own rules based on their own perceptions of risk and reward. Everyone has a different opinion, and for every gringo drinking a Skol beer with local residents in a slightly marginal part of town, there’s another who refuses to stand still for even a second along the tourist-infested Copacabana beachfront avenues, for fear she will be instantly robbed.

On Dec. 30, two days after the attacks and the only really sunny day around New Year’s, crowds on the beaches did their usual thing, lolling on the sand as vendors made their way around selling iced-tea-like mate from metal canisters or scooping seedy pulp out of a passion fruit to make caipirinha cocktails (about $2.50 for local residents, significantly more for tourists).

At a kiosk along the walkway at Copacabana beach, a 65-year-old tourist named Francine West was wearing an “Over What Hill? I Don’t See Any Hill” T-shirt, drinking beer with a group of friends from California, and looking most unconcerned. “I think they’re trying to scare you to death,” she said of the news reports.

The group, mostly old Rio hands, had a been-there, heard-that attitude about the risks. “The first time we came here in 1987,” Jean Segers said, “they told us be careful, blah blah blah, whatever spiel you get from travel agents. We have no fear. The same thing could happen to us in Oakland.”

Hotel staff members at places like the luxury Caesar Park on Ipanema Beach gave the same advice as always about not venturing out of tourist areas or walking around with expensive jewelry. The United States Consulate issued a warning on Dec. 29, but stopped short of advising visitors to avoid any particular areas.

Most visitors who come to Rio for New Year’s Eve are domestic travelers, who are even more familiar with what goes on in the city. Dagmar Bedê and Nayara Mesquita, 18-year-old journalism students, were stretched out on Ipanema Beach. “There’s violence everywhere,” said Ms. Mesquita, who, like her friend, lives in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais state. “I would never not come to spend New Year’s in the Marvelous City.”

Tourists who experienced the violence firsthand were more concerned. Max Erdrich, a 20-year-old from Berlin now living in Santiago, Chile, heard gunshots from his hostel in the Botafogo section, and saw bullet holes in cars near a police post that had been hit by machine-gun fire.

“My Dad told me to be careful,” he said. “I said, ‘Well, thanks, Dad, but I think I know more about South America than some German tourist who walks around with their camera.’ ”

A few days after the attacks, the city celebrated what most considered a successful and safe New Year’s Eve, and photos of fireworks ruled the newsstands the next few days. But readers who delved into the newspaper might have seen another item from New Year’s Eve in Copacabana: Four people were wounded by stray bullets, apparently from celebratory gunfire, on or near Copacabana Beach.

In O Globo, the news only made Page 22. This is still Rio, after all.