Below is an excerpt of someone's personal account of how (local) politics are down here. In the US, I'm pretty sure I could tune out politics come election time, but here it's impossible. The cars playing the election jingles drive by non-stop. I've seen traffic completely stop on main streets in various neighborhoods because some idiot hired a bunch of people to basically block traffic, wear shirts and carry signs supporting one politician or another. Their names, faces and voting number are plastered everywhere. There are places in the favelas where I hear the police only allow one kind of politician's signs to be displayed (because the police are often as corrupt as the politicians).

As for the equal amount of allotted airtime per politician, I know someone who was running for city council and she told me the allotted time is not equal, that it's dependent on several factors. In any event, politics here annoys me all the same.

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"It's 3PM and a car drives by the apartment complex. This isn’t an odd occurrence since I live near a main street. This particular car happens to have large speakers set up on its roof and it’s playing the kind of song that is attractive to young people. Without considering it, I start bobbing my head to the beat while at my desk...then comes the chorus. Strangely, it’s a five digit number that is on a loop.

What I’m experiencing, in actuality, is a local politician’s campaign strategy. Politicians in Brazil each get a number which they need to use to the best of their ability in order to get their constituents to vote for them. These numbers are repeated ad-infinitum as if the only purpose were to implant that number in people’s heads.

A few other strategies are also employed during election time, with only one of them allowing the politician ‘air-time’ to say what they stand for. Another phase of the “remember my name and number” plan of attack, is to hire anyone looking for some extra cash to stand in high traffic areas and hand out glossy leaflets with the politician’s face, name, number and political party on them. The idea, I suppose, is to hammer the message home. Whatever that message might be, I can’t quite tell."