Imagine this. A sightly miss has an unseemly liaison (and a love child) with a senior legislator. The lawmaker, hoping for discretion, deploys a shadowy envoy to send her child support in the form of regular wads of cash. Then the whole affair blows up into headlines, threatening to wreck reputations, careers, and homes. A tragedy for all involved? Hardly. This is Brazil, after all, where "peccadillo" might be an anagram for "opportunity." True, as I write, Renan Calheiros is holding onto his job as senate president by his drawer strings. (Not because of his dalliance, but because of the murky finances that have come to light since.) But his onetime paramour, Monica Velloso, is on a roll. Not only has she become the toast of the tabloids, but she's reportedly weighing an offer from the Brazilian edition of "Playboy" to bare her soul and more.
She wouldn't be the first. Parlaying political scandal into centerfolds is an honored tradition here. In most countries, when public figures are caught disrobing it's probably because they've fallen prey to paparazzi or that their careers are going south -- unless your name is Britney, Lindsay, or Paris, for whom it's just part of the job description. In Brazil, getting naked is practically coronation for social climbers and -- thanks to the talent scouts at "Playboy" -- the most anxiously awaited byproduct of even the most noisome poltical or social imbroglio.
Take Brazil's landless peasants movement, best know for seizing and often trashing other people's property in the name of agrarian reform. Leave it to "Playboy" to recruit a shapely young tractor operator from behind the barricades a while back, give her a good scrub, and then shoot her in all her unalloyed glory for the amusement of millions of bourgeois readers. Then there was the honey blonde football fan who lobbed a firecracker during a Brazil v. Chile match some years ago, stopping the game (the petard landed in the Chilean backfield) and roiling the international sporting world (the goalkeeper was punished for faking injury). Faster than Ronaldinho on the pitch, "Playboy" went on the attack and promoted the "Rocketeer" to cover girl.
And who'd have thought that the massive money-for-votes scheme that virtually paralyzed the Brazilian legislature a couple years back could generate anything more than indictments and a good Bronx cheer? You guessed it. "Playboy" was there again, raking the mud for roses. They picked Camilla Amaral, a young aide to a congressional investigator who shed her clothes in the capital's streets a stone's throw from where the politicians wash theirs.
What is it about delinquency that calls for nudity? Rank opportunism, perhaps. Or maybe it's the publishing industry's idea of diversion in a society all too accustomed to cheescake politics. According to the latest Veja, the nation's biggest news magazine, only a couple of the 240-odd suspects fingered for taking payola, peddling votes, or helping themselves to the public purse since 2003 are now in jail.
Impropriety for impropriety, Brazilian politics beats the girlie magazines hands down.
