Our recommendation: beware of flatterers

In January 2009, a few weeks after Beto Richa’s reelection as mayor of Curitiba (77.2%), a woman fell from a packed bus and died on the spot. The way the newsroom learned of the matter is among the worst. A listener called the radio’s production desk and said “a woman died on the BR (highway).” To which the journalist asked “are you sure she is dead?” “Unless she can live without her head, she is,” he retorted.

In the news, the matter caused an uproar. She was a general-services worker, on a line that had shown signs of exhaustion for quite some time, because this was too violent even by the capital’s standards. I myself was at the burial. It was in a simple cemetery of the Metropolitan Region, with the dead woman’s colleagues in uniform, as if they had come straight from the pantry to the burial.

When the matter reached the anchoring of José Wille on CBN Curitiba, the idolized commentator Luiz Geraldo Mazza came out with something more or less like this: “this woman’s death is the result of the 77%.” Not far from there, from the PSDB happiness of a record vote, of an approval considered glorious, Richa went to the Paraná governorship and, beyond that, to the back seat of a police van.

To this day, no one has given me plausible reasons for Richa’s arrest (I wrote to O Globo about the matter more than once, which gives me the measure of national press on the subject). Whatever he did, he offended someone who does not get offended. A journalist who advised Richa at the time of the mayoralty explained it this way: “the people around Richa walled him in. He was left without references, and fell easily into what they wanted of him.” It makes sense, because I heard something similar from Euclides Scalco. Indeed, that morning Scalco was so down, so very down, that Hélio Pugliesi told him: “don’t be so sad, my friend.”

I think the bitter remedy is to avoid flatterers.