Word: brazile
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Brazil's time," President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva insisted in his pitch before Friday's International Olympic Committee vote. "It is time to light the Olympic torch in a tropical country." The IOC agreed - and that lit up a frenzied carnival in Rio de Janeiro, a city that knows how to party perhaps better than any other. As the decision was announced, the world forgot Rio's problems for a moment, especially its frightening murder rate, and watched tens of thousands of its residents, known as Cariocas, exult on Copacabana Beach, dancing to deafening music in tanga...
...indeed Brazil's time - but not just because it was about time that the Olympics go the South American Way. In fact, there's a reason that it's been four decades since a Latin American country, or any Third World country, has hosted the games. That was the Mexico City Olympiad of 1968, when Mexico convinced the IOC that it was a modern republic ready to stand alongside Britain and Japan and Australia - only to have its army massacre hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators 10 days before the opening ceremonies. The bar was set much higher for Latin America...
...Brazil is widely regarded as the first Latin country to get there, and the IOC's selection is as much an endorsement of that achievement as it is of Rio's $14 billion bid to hold the games. The Nobel literature committee awarded Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez its prize in 1982 in part to affirm the global influence of Latin America's magical realist tradition. Now, giving Rio the Olympics sends a strong signal to the rest of the developing world that the Brazilian model - the post-ideological mix of orthodox market economics and progressive...
Given its sheer size - a country just about as large as the U.S. and with a population of 190 million - Portuguese-speaking Brazil has always longed to project itself beyond the confines of Latin America. But, aside from soccer and Carnaval, the world has rarely taken Brazil as seriously. In fact, Brazil was long the butt of a joke that said it was the country of the future - and always would be. It was the only New World country to have a monarchy, which it abolished in 1889. That regal tradition spawned a quasi-feudal class system that made Brazil...
...after the Cold War, Brazil finally started tapping its vast potential, first under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002) and since then under Lula, a former São Paulo metal workers union leader. As he told TIME in an interview last year, Lula, who is also head of Brazil's leftist Workers Party, channeled his skills and philosophies as a labor negotiator into a hybrid development policy that's about "doing things right" instead of right-wing or left-wing. By eschewing the ideological polarization that has paralyzed Latin America for centuries, he's helped forge...