Portuguese is one of the most difficult Western languages for English speakers to casually translate, but what’s going on is clear: This is a robbery in the middle of a Brazilian news segment.
Fittingly, the woman is stripped of her necklace while she’s talking to reporter Eduardo Tchao about how likely it is she’ll get robbed due to poor police presence.
The thief doesn’t actually get away with the chain, but he doesn’t get arrested either. He brings his native country’s very real problem in front of the eyes of everyone.
Crime in the South American country is an epidemic so grave that it’s beginning to be conceived as folklore. Violence is everywhere, with homicides up more than 130 percent over the last 30 years—from 11.5 per 100,000 people to 27 per 100,000 in 2011—and drivers routinely run red lights for fear of getting mugged.
It’s telling that the woman in this video finds nobody rushing to her aid except the guy asking her the questions.
Down in Brazil, where hundreds of thousands of tourists will soon flock for the World Cup and Olympics, the two largest sporting events in the world, this stuff is daily life.
ht HyperVocal | Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III