In a scene reminiscent of Bush v. Gore (2000), the voting process for this year’s competitive Carnaval parades in São Paulo is beset by chaos.
As the envelopes with the jurors’ votes inside were opened on Tuesday afternoon, Tiago Ciro Tadeu Farias, 29, wearing the T-shirt of Império de Casa Verde, broke into the location where votes were being unsealed. At that moment, Mocidade Alegre was in the lead, trailed by Rosas de Ouro, Vai-Vai, Mancha Verde and Unidos de Vila Maria.
An attorney for Império da Casa Verde denies that the man arrested for tearing up the ballots is a member. A member of Gaviões da Fiel was also detained. Both had credentials allowing access to the vote count. According to the rules of the process, representatives of the samba schools are barred from this sort of disorderly conduct. …
Mayor Gilberto Kassab tweeted his remarks on the “regrettable” interruption, which included an act of arson targeting the floats of the «Falcons of the Faithful».
The eventual winner: Mocidade Alegre.
Glossed in Translation
This year’s Carnaval diva on the Globo network was Jennifer Lopes, starring in an endlessly repeated Brahma beer commercial in which she is invited to the Brahma box seats at the Sambadrome and provided with a crash course in samba culture by Zeca Pagodinho.
An embarrassing cultural miscue occurs when she is heard to memorize such terms as popozuda and piriguete. The former translates as, ahem, junk in the trunk.
The latter, as translated by the Dicionário Informal, means
A woman who is easy, who attends parties looking for the sort of man who will pay for everything, since they never have any money. They almost invariably do it on the first date.
Anarchy At The Anhembi
As the envelopes with the jurors’ votes inside were opened on Tuesday afternoon, Tiago Ciro Tadeu Farias, 29, wearing the T-shirt of Império de Casa Verde broken into the place where votes were being unsealed. At that moment, Mocidade Alegre was in the lead, trailed by Rosas de Ouro, Vai-Vai, Mancha Verde and Unidos de Vila Maria.
An attorney for Império da Casa Verde denies that the man arrested for tearing up the ballots is a member. A member of Gaviões da Fiel was also detained. Both had credentials allowing access to the vote count. According to the rules of the process, representatives of the samba schools are barred from this sort of disorderly conduct.
Tico-Tico no RICO
Tão Gomes recalls a memorable encounter with the American mobster who pioneered the legalized sex industry in Nevada.
Patronage by gambling mafias, paramilitaries and drug rings remain an awkward untold story for the world-famous celebrations of Rio and to a lesser degree São Paulo … and in particular for the Globo network, which hosts the Web presence of LIESA, the Rio de Janeiro league of samba societies with which it maintains as exclusive contract for worldwide coverage, on its own servers.
News coverage from time to time — with practically no follow-up — suggests that certain league members might well qualify as racketeering and corrupt organizations. Attempts at using federal culture subsidies to undermine these dependencies over the past several years seem to have had some effect, but it is rather hard to tell.
Note from fact-checking department: The mobster described by our columnist is Joe Conforte, not Joe Confort.
Outro Carnavais
Caption:
Carnival of collusions: Capt. Guimarães (left) — a military torturer turned king of the jogo do bicho and president of the League of Independent Escolas de Samba — with Rio mayor Cesar “Chairman” “The Naked” Maia (second from left) during Carnaval 2006. Guimarães later jailed for buying very senior Rio judges with mountains of money. Fat Tuesday and the Globo network (which gets exclusive worldwide rights from LIESA to broadcast the folia) meet the hog heaven of the hard men.
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