Thank you. It is an interesting article but (of course) penned by biased journalists who make up the self-interested classes who have benefitted over the years from cheap labour washing their clothes, houses, pools etc. I was at a dinner party recently in Recife and I sat next to a well-healed lady who spent the entire evening damning the government because she cannot get affordable staff to clean her house.
I don’t get too mixed up in the politics. I keep half an eye on the economic environment to ensure my one and sole Brazilian asset (a beach house) continues to be a safe investment. That’s it really… apart from that I close my electronic gates, sit on my terrace, sip my wine, stare at the sea and generally forget about the tiresome business of life.
An afterthought, it is a general truism that we dislike our place of origin. I would not recommend my birthplace, London, to my worse enemy. My Brazilian friends think of the UK as ‘the mother of parliaments’, the ‘seat of democracy’ an ‘economic power house’, a place of tradition /culture and all that. I, on the other hand, think it is a deteriorating police state full of unhappy and unfulfilled souls. I guess we always bite the hand that feeds us… and gnaw at the maternal heart.