VINICIUS TORRES FREIRE
FOLHA COLUMNIST
Everywhere is crowded, everything is expensive. There is not road enough for all the cars, track enough for all the trains. The infrastructure is incapable of transporting the food that the farms produce. Meanwhile, the patience of the citizenry is wearing thin.
Brazil’s infrastructure has not been able to cope with six years of economic growth, followed by three years of slowdown. As well as a lack of expertise, there is not enough money to build more.
For more money to be produced, growth is necessary. But the President and her circle think that concerns about economic growth and GDP are reactionary nonsense.
“Brazil is overbooked,” observed a friend of mine on a social network. In other words, they sold more tickets than there are seats on this, our “plane” or “train”. This manifests itself in price inflation, consumer disillusionment, external deficit, in everything being overcrowded.
Every other day there are problems with the trains in São Paulo. Both the statistics (average number of kilometers covered between faults), and the engineers say that the relative number of problems fell from 2003 until at least 2012 (the information for 2013 has yet to be published).
However, as the train network has grown, the total number of problems has also grown, giving the impression of decline. Still, for the frustrated passengers and trade unionists working in the area, this is a flimsy excuse.
Official reports and statistics are not to be trusted, given the self-indulgence of the governors. Following the trouble in São Paulo’s train network last Tuesday, state governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) was quick to pin the blame on “vandals”.