Brazil - Land of Terror

First of all Brazil is not the only place where awful things happens. Have all of you already forgotten "Columbine" "Virginia Tech Massacre", Oklahoma and Timothy McVeigh??
What about the "exportation of terror" to distant lands like Iraq or Viet Nam?

Have you already forgotten the Nazi madness? the Fascist regimes of Franco and Mussolini in Spain and Italy respectively? Stalin and his "Gulags"?

The fascist military "juntas" in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, etc?

The "Death Squads" in Guatemala, El Salvador or Nicaragua?

Cambodia? Rwanda? Darfur? Lebanon? Palestine? Afghanistan? Chechnya? The women killed in Ciudad Juárez? The Balkans?...
I might continue naming places and atrocities around the world and I would never end.

But don't get me wrong, the fact that things as woeful as what happens in Brazil with those poor "Meninos da rua" (homeless kids) and the criminal police, also happens or have happened in other countries, doesn't diminish nary the horror from the awful things that happens in that country.

I am not expert on the subject, However I am gonna throw my 2 cents: The problem in Brazil is a mix of ancient unsolved issues and new ones: Omnipresent racism. One of the biggest gaps in the world (if not the biggest) between the richest people and the poorest ones. Corrupt, poorly paid and poorly trained police, the institutionalisation of violence and crime. Impunity (you can commit any kind of crime and most likely you won't end in prison). A rotten penitentiary system. Corruption everywhere.
The dehumanization of the media and segments of the brazilian society.

That is not something exclusive to Brazil, it happens almost everywhere to some degree. But perhaps in Brazil have reached levels that makes you cringe, especially because Brazil is not at war (neither a civil or foreign war).
Albeit in fact there is a war in the streets of the main cities from that beautiful country, where the band of the "goodies" (police) usually is even worse than the band of the "baddies".

I won't judge an entire country and its population like some people here have done it (people who might believe that in their own country unpunished crimes doesn't exist!... naive ones!). NO! I won't do that. But the true is that something is rotten in the Kingdom of Brazil.

Hopefully the brazilians will fix it up someday. Will be hard and will take time to develop a social consciousness on every citizen.

José Padilha and his fantastic work "Bus 174" might help (even if just a little bit) to achieve that.

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you people need to realize that just because you're above the poverty threshold, doesn't make you elite. the real "elites" of brazil are the drug dealers. are they not the ones keeping your country in the gutters? until your society is willing to stand up for themselves and stop tolerating these scum, you will have to live with them.

I love this movie because it serves to remind all brazilians out there that they DO NOT live in a developed country; that this country is NOT "happy" and "joyful"; that we ARE NOT white, pretty and polite; and that we are NEVER going to change this place as long as we keep fooling ourselves with this.

Our people is ignorant, poor, violent and it's sad, very, very sad.

The saddest part of it all is the "invisibility" mentioned in the film. I couldn't agree more. The elites in Brazil (therefore people who use the Internet, such as myself) are ashamed of the poverty and injustices of their country, and for that reason there will ALWAYS be someone to tell you that "despite all, Brazil is a good and beautiful country".

Trust me, it is not.

Very soon we will be living a Civil War and no one seems to realize it. Day after day things get worse; the rich richer, they buy their "Incredibles" DVD and sit around all day watching "Friends" and they think everything is ok. IS IS NOT.

So I congratulate films like "The Tresspasser", "City of God", "Bus 174", among others, for throwing the feces this country is right on our screens and right in the middle of our homes.