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...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...
...that Brazil still doesn't have epic development problems to fix. Rampant corruption, violent crime, abysmal education and inadequate infrastructure are all urgent issues that Rio and Brazil alike have to address during the next seven years. Even Copacabana revelers like Gomes remember the holes in Rio's efforts when it hosted the Pan-American Games in 2007. "They didn't do all they said we would do and a lot of what they did do was left to rot after the games ended," she says, adding, "I think the elite will benefit from this more than most." Says Sotero...
...choosing Rio, in fact, the IOC is saying that, after the committee got burned 40 years ago by the Mexico tragedy, it's confident Brazil has matured enough to solve its headaches or at least keep them from adversely affecting the Olympics. Barack Obama reminded the IOC that Chicago is the "city that works." But Chicago lost out in large part because Lula could argue that, in Brazil, Latin America finally has a country that works. As a result, it's time to light the torch down South American...