Learning the lessons of stagnation
As memories of galloping growth fade, it is time for tough thinking about the future
IN JUNE 2006 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then Brazil’s president, went to Itaboraí, a sleepy farming town nestled where the flatlands beside Guanabara Bay meet the coastal mountain range. He announced the building of Comperj—the Rio de Janeiro petrochemical complex, a pharaonic undertaking of two oil refineries and a clutch of petrochemical plants. With forecasts of 220,000 new jobs in a town of 150,000 people, Itaboraí geared up for a boom.
Today it is almost a ghost town. Its straggling main street adjoins an unopened shopping mall and is punctuated by a score of blocks of flats and office towers, one with a heliport on the roof, all finished in the past few months and all plastered with “for sale” signs. “A lot of people bet on this new El Dorado in Itaboraí and it didn’t happen,” says Wagner Sales of the union of workers building Comperj.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Learning the lessons of stagnation"
From the June 27th 2015 edition
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