Sleeping with the Enemy - Brazilian Style

It never ceases to amaze that in a nation that has so many laws as Brazil that they, for the most part, completely disregarded by the very governmental "watchdog" agencies that are supposed to enforce them. Even when they do take some kind of action it is either cosmetic or simply misdirected. Think about some of the following situations:

ANATEL - The national regulator for telecommunications in Brazil gets thousands of complaints about providers of both mobile and fixed telephone service each year. Their traditional response is little more than a temporary slap on the wrist, which is withdrawn very soon thereafter. They prohibited TIM, Oi, and others from writing new contracts because their services were so poor. This lasted a couple of weeks and everything is back to business as usual, no improvements have been made.

Fixed telephone services are no different. You pay a monthly fee for the service whether or not you make any calls. You pay for your calls on top of that. Half of the time the telephone lines are dead, you can't get any DSL signal so you have no internet, and on, and on. What gets done - absolutely nothing, of course. And just try to find a public telephone that actually works, better have some really top-end walking shoes my friend. Embratel was subjected to a penalty of not being able to charge for long distance phone calls from their pay phones until the end of this year. I've never heard of anybody getting a free call. They still haven't fixed any of their broken phones either.

PROCON - The agency charged with protecting consumer rights. They have a very extensive Consumer Protection Act in Brazil, for what? Beats me! Despite the fact that it is a crime not to have clearly marked prices on products, especially those on display in store windows, this is not enforced.

The law clearly states that if you have a problem with a product during its guarantee period the manufacturer has 30 days to resolve the problem or the customer has the right to demand either a new product in perfect working condition, full rebate plus interest of the purchase price or the equivalent reduction in the price of another product. Again, this is never enforced. While the government has it within their power to ban companies who do not conform to the laws regarding guarantee service from selling their products in Brazil this is never done.

False or deceptive advertising is another sore point. While they never go after the flagrant violators, those making claims that their product can do everything from cure cancer to realize your wildest dreams nothing gets done about them; while PROCON-SP goes after McDonalds Restaurants for unfair selling practices because the McHappy Meal has a toy inside so they say it targets children unfairly - yet they didn't go after Habib's (a Brazilian chain) who sells the Kit Habib's in exactly the same supposedly unfair manner.

ANEEL - The watchdog agency for electrical energy providers, useless in the extreme. They allow constant price hikes in energy rates while doing nothing to force the providers to upgrade their infrastructure and guarantee uninterrupted service. Power outages are commonplace throughout the whole country. Brazilians pay higher electricity rates than consumers in the USA, Canada and many European countries.

ANAC - Agência Nacional de Aviação Civil sits on their hands while airfares have in some cases tripled over the past six months. They allow the bigger and prefered airlines to gobble up the low-fare competition only to shortly thereafter cease operations, dismiss the employees and leave passengers holding the bag (no pun intended). Even though all the economic predictions are for impressive growth in Brazil's airline sector in the coming year they allow the airlines to plead poverty when they want to dump some smaller company they bought out simply to disband.

The list goes on and on, just look around you. Makes you kind of wonder who's climbing into be with who, doesn't it?

Cheers,
William James Woodward - Brazil Animator, Expat-blog Team