Thread by @bruceecurb

Today's my last day working in Brazil. When I arrived here at the end of 2012 I was only planning to stay a few months. But then I found myself with a sunga, a cpf and a child on the way. Now, after seven years, 7,348 paes de queijo and two sons, I'm finally leaving (thread, 1/?)

After 7 years, it's hard to describe Brazil w/ "words at once true and kind,/ Or not untrue and not unkind." Still, I'll miss it. Brazilians are good-looking, resilient, charming, wittingly & unwittingly hilarious. I was never going to fit in. I'm not cool enough to stay. (2/?)

As for all the bad stuff: Brazil's medieval levels of violence; grotesque inequality; brutally efficient racism; farcical justice system; dysfunctional politics: you should read all about it in your local, paid for news source. (3/?)

Being a gringo journalist in Brazil is like being a kid in a sweet shop run by a diabetic lunatic. Kudos to the iron-stomached still fighting the good fight. But more kudos to Brazilian journalists who have a much tougher job. (4/?)

So for 7 years, 7 stories. One of my first pieces was a radio package for the BBC about the pacification of Rio's Complexo do Lins, just a few days after the disappearance of Amarildo da Silva in Rocinha, an incident that marked the moment the UPP project started to turn sour.5/?

I hitched a lift with @jonathanwatts and @SamCowie84 to a Habib's on the road leading into Lins at 3am one morning. We spent the morning following armoured personnel carriers into the favela, before the BOPE raised a flag and unveiled a small drugs haul before the TV cameras(6/?)

While the policy may now be widely discredited, I remember the shout of joy from one resident when she saw a yellow taxi in her street; a sign, she believed, of normality - and security - returning to the area. (7/?) soundcloud.com/brucedouglas/t…

Around that time I wrote a piece for BBC sport about the pre-World Cup efforts of residents of Bangu, an unloved suburb in Rio's northern zone famed for its prison, to challenge the official narrative that Charles Miller brought football to Brazil (8/?)
bbc.com/sport/football…

As protests against the World Cup swelled, I wrote for Esquire about the longstanding efforts to criminalize Baile Funk and the current middle-class pearl-clutching around the "rolezinho" demonstrations taking place in various upmarket shopping malls in Rio and Sao Paulo. (9/?)

My description of my terrible bowel trouble at a frankly terrifying baile funk in Parque União, the last before the military occupied the Complexo do Maré, somehow didn't make the final cut. (10/?)
esquire.com/uk/culture/new…

My biggest regret is that I didn't spend longer in the Amazon. Here's a radio report about the Catholic Church's work with the Munduruku to prevent the damming of the Tapajós, the only untouched tributary of the Amazon (11/?)
audioboom.com/posts/2713631-…

It's hard to communicate the scale of the violence in Brazil to the outside world. It has a homicide rate that is at least commensurate with a low-level civil war. This GQ piece reports on a 2015 massacre in Belém by off-duty cops
(12/?)
gq-magazine.co.uk/article/brazil…

A Redenção de Cam, a painting from 1895 in Rio's Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, shows three generations of a Brazilian family: a black grandmother, hands raised in gratitude that her mixed-raced daughter and her white husband have produced an almost white child. (13/?)

Not so much has changed in Brazilian cultural and sexual attitudes to the desirability of whiteness since then, a story @FlowFilmsUK and I tried to tell in a film for The Guardian about Globo TV's first black Globeleza. (14/?)

theguardian.com/news/video/201…

After the Olympics, I moved to Brasília, where I worked as a LatAm Editor for @business. I spent most of the time editing stories of my talented reporter colleagues @simoneiglesias @SamyAdghirni @mariosbessa @rachelgamarski (and @DLBiller who we don't talk about any more). (15/

But I still did some reporting. This story for @BW was about four years in the making. I first went to Itaboraí, a oil town on the outskirts of Rio, in 2015 to write a story for Foreign Policy magazine about the petrochemical complex there that went bust as Brazil's economy sank

I stayed in touch with some of the unemployed workers, who contacted me in late 2018 to tell me that a brutal mafia had taken over the city and were extorting residents for basic public services. I wrote this story with @sabrinavalle (17/?)

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Shortly after the story came out, the police arrested dozens accused of involvement in the mafia. Life in Itaboraí improved...for a while. But recently, my contacts in the town say that the militia is back, and now collaborating with one of the local drug gangs. (18/?)

I said seven. I lied! Here's an eighth about bees:
bloomberg.com/news/articles/… (19/?)

So goodnight, God bless. Like any good Imperialista I'm taking the best of Brazil with me, in the form of Amanda Moreth and our two Anglo-Brazilian sons, Fred and Josh. I'll be back in some form or another for, as Titãs would say, "é cedo, ou tarde demais/ Pra dizer adeus." (fim)