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SAO PAULO (Reuters) – It's 8 p.m. at Sao Paulo's sublimely overcrowded planetary airfield and Marvin Curie, seeing every the chairs around him taken, decides to join mountain of added playing travelers and ordered on the floor.

Until, that is, a coffee-colored mystery liquefied starts to flow discover of a nearby men's room.

"Oh, Jesus!" chemist exclaims, scrambling to his feet. He checks the centre of his meet pants for stains -- nothing.

"I hate this place," sighs the U.S. caregiver executive, gesturing at the peeling paint, the flickering fluorescent lights and, above all, the crowds. "You'd conceive that a land same Brasil would hit fixed this by now."

Indeed, scenes same this are questionable to become a abstract of the instance here. Brasil plans more than $1 trillion in cerebration projects this decennium to alter its woeful airports, roads and added stock up to date -- an enterprising antiquity boom that module prepare the land to patron the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, wage a godsend of opportunities for external investors, and bonded Brazil's locate among the world's most impulsive aborning economies.

That's the dream, anyway.

In reality, expectations are reaching unraveled -- fast. Brazil's noble stock plans today seem probable to start substantially short of President Dilma Rousseff's ambitions, according to a Reuters enquiry of field antiquity projects and interviews with nearly digit dozen senior semipolitical leaders, investors, polity watchdog groups and others.

Even Rousseff's crowning aides are play to vocalise doubts.

"We requirement to begin to curb people's expectations," said Sports Minister Orlando Silva, who is overseeing preparations for the World Cup and Olympics. "The intent that we were feat to attain up for 30 eld without assets in stock in meet quaternary eld was belike never realistic."

Numerous high-profile projects are falling victim to a daylong itemize of problems including enzootic corruption, flushed tape, depleted assets and -- above every -- a glaring obligation of activity and know-how.

By whatever autarkical estimates, less than half of the field projects designed nationwide module be finished on time.

Unless Rousseff and added officials act apace to overcome the obstacles, investors haw requirement to rethink whatever of their rosier long-term scheme forecasts for Brazil. The delays also improve questions most whether expectations are likewise broad for aborning mart democracies generally, including India, South continent and others, as they essay to primed measure with obligation from their palmy region classes but obligation China's noesis to compel rapid, despotic solutions.

So some bounteous projects are currently behindhand schedule that Pele, the Brazilian football legend, warned in Feb that Brasil risks "embarrassing itself" during the World Cup.

The structure that would patron the tournament's inaugural correct in Sao Paulo hasn't modify had its groundbreaking yet, resulting in a unstoppered legging with FIFA, the concern football body. But that's but the most circumpolar problem. Pele and others feature that road and expose traffic, communications grids and added systems could only founder low the coefficient of player obligation during the Cup unless progress is made at a measure that Brasil has, so far, not shown it's overconfident of.

Silva hears the warnings, and he's concerned. The lone compartment member from Brazil's politico Party has found himself in the unlikely function of being digit of the nation's super cheerleaders for clannish investment, barnstorming the land and gathering with governors and mayors in a furious last-minute effort to disencumber the jural and restrictive issues -- and, often, the mental blocks -- that are preventing progress.

It's not feat every that well.

"People are eventually play to actualise that we're streaming discover of instance ... that we requirement to do more, faster," Silva said. "But resources are scarce. And the impact is difficult."

As if to elaborate his point, during an discourse in a Sao Paulo restaurant, Silva patterned a senator from the north land of Ceara whom he had seen the punctuation before at a specially argumentative gathering for World Cup preparations.

"So," said Senator Inacio Arruda, grinning mischievously, "are we feat to be hit a Cup or not?"

"Are you worried?" Silva asked.

"You're making us worry."

"Everything module impact out," Silva replied, clasping him on the back. "But we're feat to requirement help."

Silva haw still be proven right. But the actual perplexity for Brasil boils down to this: If it's so hornlike to intend a newborn structure or airfield shapely before the World Cup when the full concern is watching, then what module hap to the projects that rattling matter? That is, what most the ports, refineries and railways that are pivotal to Brasil partitioning the bottlenecks that defence between it and developed-nation position in the incoming decade?

"People aren't discussing it publicly, maybe because Brazilians favour to be pollyannaish ... (but) the truth is that we are seeing an essential modify in expectations," said Andre Glogowsky, chair of Hochtief Brazil, digit of the country's maximal cerebration firms, which has shapely hydroelectric dams and added field stock projects here.

"There are meet so some barriers."

STUCK AT LATIN AMERICA'S WORST AIRPORT

No housing encapsulates those barriers better than the jam-packed, hard-to-reach, 1980s-era instance aberrancy that is Sao Paulo's planetary airfield -- popularly known as Guarulhos.

Congestion exclusive and right Guarulhos is so intense that visitors to Brazil's playing crowning are advised to leave for the airfield at small five hours before their grace departs. Those who successfully manoeuver the 15-mile trip, which is only possible by car, are greeted by chaotic, shifting lines that snake finished the main terminal; signs in the bathrooms warning of narrow thieves; and, of course, the irregular pool of sludge leaking discover of the pipes.

Guarulhos was hierarchical "hands down" the poorest among 26 field airports in dweller USA in a survey of playing travelers publicised in Feb by dweller Trade magazine.

The overcrowding is, same so some bottlenecks in Brazil, conception a creation of its stunning scheme growth. Passenger reciprocation nationally has doubled in the tangency heptad years, and grew 21 proportionality in 2010, as millions of Brazilians connected the region class and flew for the prototypal time.

Yet there are other, more sordid explanations as well.

The polity authority that operates Brazil's airports, Infraero, has daylong been digit of the country's most maladaptive organizations. As some as a third of Infraero's engineers are currently suspended from their connatural jobs because of suspected immorality or added irregularities, threesome sources with candid noesis of the authority told Reuters.

The sources crosspiece on condition of obscurity because of the sense of the issue. In an e-mailed statement, Infraero denied the allegations.

Those engineers are grave to some airfield expansion, which helps vindicate ground Infraero no individualist plans to closing a field newborn tangency at Guarulhos by mid-2014 -- which would hit been presently sufficiency to appendage visitors for the World Cup.

Meanwhile, Infraero is meet upgrading its existing facilities. Of the roughly $3.3 1000000000 budgeted for improvements at airports at the 12 cities that module patron Cup events, only 2 proportionality has been spent to date, according to Contas Abertas, an autarkical assemble that monitors polity accounts.

A field conceive why: Employees in Infraero's surpass and enter ofttimes refuse to sign acquisition contracts because so some of their colleagues hit been prosecuted in conjoin investigations, said Alex Fabiano, nous of Infraero's employee association.

"We've every seen families and full careers ruined by meet the suspicion of corruption," Fabiano said. "Some projects don't proceed because nobody wants to place their study on them."

Infraero, which is conception of the accumulation ministry, was daylong aerated as a intimate for politicians to appoint their friends, supporters and relatives. Fabiano estimates that until a past clean-up drive, most 1,000 of the company's roughly 13,000 employees were semipolitical appointees, most of them with lowercase to no theoretical noesis of how airports work.

The wish at Infraero, and throughout Brazil, was that the World Cup and athletics would wage an iron-clad defence for the land to intend its act together -- not meet for the intoxicant of the fair events, but for the long-term good of a land where reciprocation jams, blackouts, and miles-long lines of trucks at overburdened ports during harvest are every likewise common.

However, presently after Rousseff took office on Jan 1, officials said that airports module probable hit to rely on temporary, warehouse-like "modules" to house passengers for the World Cup -- not meet at Guarulhos, but in added cities also.

"We hoped the Cup would lead to a more profound expansion," Fabiano said. "It's a dishonor what immorality has done."

Yet immorality lonely cannot vindicate the woes at Infraero, or at added Brazilian projects, for that matter. After all, the super unstoppered info of the orbicular stock playing is that streets from municipality to Peiping hit been successfully and expeditiously sealed over the eld by greasing the palms of officials who, in turn, support measure up construction.

People who undergo the Brazilian land equipment from the exclusive discover feature the problems go such deeper.

"The actual difficulty with Infraero is that it's a prisoner of this disorderliness ... this disfunction you wager in the unstoppered sector," said Sergio Gaudenzi, a past congressman who ran Infraero from 2007 to 2008. "More than corruption, it's the slowness, the obligation of funds, the restrictions."

"This isn't a difficulty with only Infraero. It's a difficulty you wager everyplace in Brazil."

WAITING FOR GODOT... AND SAO PAULO'S LINE 4

If anybody deserves a ribbon for handling with the Brazilian unstoppered sector's problems -- and bearing them with nearly superhuman cards -- it's belike Luis Valenca.

Valenca runs ViaQuatro, a privately held connexion that operates Line 4, Sao Paulo's newest subsurface line. Under the arrangement, digit of Brazil's prototypal public-private partnerships or PPPs, the Sao Paulo land polity module physique the line's tunnels and stations and ViaQuatro module then control the assent for 30 years.

On rails right the company's offices, individualist gleaming, new, top-of-the-line Korean trains sit, primed to go. The subsurface module be digit of the world's most past and cushy -- as presently as the land polity finishes construction.

The delay: 42 eld and counting.

"We didn't expect so some adjustments in the timeline," Valenca says, with experienced understatement and a sarcastic smile.

The plans for Line 4 hit been on the books since 1969, when Sao Paulo's municipality polity prototypal ordered discover a plan for a subsurface treatment to assuage reciprocation in what is today a municipality of most 20 meg people. Yet the grouping has meet swollen since the New 1970s, and the Line 4 has suffered so some mortal accidents, lawsuits and added problems along the artefact that tabloids feature it is "cursed."

The story of what went criminal begins with a number: 1,825,059,944,843. That was, nearly incomprehensibly, the assembled proportionality of inflation in Brasil between 1968 and 1993 -- a punctuation that saw the federal government, exertion low the coefficient of inefficient state-run companies, go functionally smash and print money to cover its debts.

The polity eventually began to intend its accounts in visit in 1994 by introducing a newborn currency and privatizing companies, reforms that ordered the initiate for Brazil's underway scheme boom. A newborn feasibility study for Line 4 was complete around the same time. Yet unstoppered assets remained extremely tight, and added decennium would pass until Sao Paulo's land polity could mobilisation the finance to begin construction.

"That's more than 30 lost years, not meet for this send but virtually every super send in Brazil," said Jurandir Fernandes, the installation helper for Sao Paulo state, who is responsible for the cerebration of Line 4. "We're still pain the consequences."

In fact, digit of the super problems covering Brasil sounds nearly likewise ultimate to be true: There meet aren't sufficiency grouping with undergo executing field projects.

Silva, the sports minister, said that at the prototypal gathering he chaired to discuss proposals for installation projects attendant to the World Cup, including Line 4, whatever governors and mayors showed up with null but book documents locution lowercase more than "Build Metro from airfield to downtown."

Jose Baiao, the chair of the engineers' connexion for the Sao Paulo Metro, said "an full generation" of his colleagues had every the proper upbringing for their jobs but lacked practical undergo because so lowercase subsurface cerebration took locate in the city.

"We tried to go from set projects to a hundred projects, and that's impossible," Baiao said. "Human crowning doesn't impact same that ... especially in theoretical fields same this."

An black example: On Jan 12, 2007, a assets of the Line 4 tunnel that was low cerebration collapsed, inaugural up a super crater in digit of the city's most densely populated areas.

The happening killed heptad people. Local media investigations at the instance attributed the founder to errors by engineers streaming the project. A gesture of lawsuits followed.

It wasn't the prototypal jural difficulty for the line. Brazil's byzantine restrictive and jural grouping is, essentially, the added field bourgeois in delays at Line 4. Based on Napoleonic code, and thusly highly reliant on decisions by individualist judges, the grouping "makes it staggeringly cushy for parties with complaints to halt cerebration over and over again," says Andre Janszky, a lawyer who advises companies in the stock sector.

"The artefact (judges) provide discover injunctions here is assorted anything you'll wager in most places, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon world," says Janszky, who has also experienced accumulation in the United States. "It's a bounteous conceive ground companies conceive digit or threesome nowadays before involved in projects here."

Fernandes, the Sao Paulo installation secretary, says Line 4 has suffered nearly likewise some lawsuits to calculate -- by residents who fought eviction, by environmental groups, and by public-sector unions who he says opposed the status of clannish crowning "and took some opportunity to attain this full send look same a failure."

Partial assist between digit stations eventually debuted in May 2010, allowing Sao Paulo's then-governor, who was streaming for president, to feature he had opened the line. Yet, figure months later, no newborn stations hit opened and assist relic limited from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. until engineers closing conducting "tests," Fernandes said.

The underway estimated date for Line 4's completion?

"2014," Fernandes replied.

Guaranteed?

"I'm confident," he said. "But you hit to advert that this is Brazil."

TONING DOWN THE BRAZIL EUPHORIA

It's speech same that that has Paulo Resende, digit of the country's crowning autarkical stock experts, touring the concern and pleading with investors to stop treating Brasil same an fateful success story.

He says the government's underway projections are "totally unrealistic" and estimates that less than half of the designed entireness module be complete on time.

The communication is a thickened digit to deliver at a instance when so such of the concern is fair on aborning markets to be the main engine for growth. "People want rattling such to believe in Brasil ... but we're feat to effort with these bounteous projects, at small in the short term," said Resende, coordinator for the Center of Infrastructure and Logistics at Fundacao Dom Cabral, a Brazilian playing school.

Reeve Wolford, chair of the stock working assemble at the Brazil-U.S. Business Council in Washington, agrees and says he is today advising dweller companies to essay opportunities in "areas where Brasil only can't fail," such as section systems for the World Cup.

Within the presidential hall in Brasilia, Rousseff's aides acknowledge whatever problems but feature they are overconfident their flagship stock program, known as commission for its initials in Portuguese, module be a success.

A long polity technocrat, Rousseff personally oversaw the stock information for individualist years. She campaigned in 2010 as "the care of the PAC," hailing newborn bridges, highways and refineries as the distinction to achieving her imagine of success extremity poverty in Brazil.

"The chair is personally sworn to this issue," said Mauricio Muniz, the Planning Ministry authorised who inherited fault of the PAC. "We are fortuitous to hit someone in her job who understands dead what needs to be done."

Muniz pointed discover that the prototypal phase of the PAC, which ran from 2007 to 2010, coincided with the poorest orbicular business crisis in 70 eld -- a punctuation that saw clannish long-term financing, already tenuous in Brazil, practically disappear.

Yet, thanks in super conception to a boom in resource from the BNDES land development bank, authorised data shows that a burly 82 proportionality of the PAC's designed projects were completed. "That's not perfect, but I conceive it's acceptable," Muniz said. He expects a kindred success evaluate in the incoming quaternary years.

Mention that data to the PAC's critics, though, and they run to go wild.

"Those numbers are not true," said Gil Castello Branco of Contas Abertas, the watchdog group. He and Resende feature the authorised "success rate" is dishonorable because it includes money that Brazilians spent on mortgages -- on newborn and old houses alike, and modify on renovations.

Contas Abertas' own calculations, which removed mortgages and added expenditures it deemed improperly categorised as stock investment, place the variety of commission projects that were over by the modify of 2010 at a such lower 52 percent. Resende cites a kindred number.

"We hit no evidence to declare the polity can execute above that level," Castello Branco says.

Rousseff's actions declare that she sees the requirement for changes -- to an extent. Her most dramatic move to date was her announcement in March that, for the prototypal time, Brasil would adopt a assent support to earmark the clannish facet to control terminals or perhaps full airports.

The papers was welcomed by investors who saw it as grounds that Rousseff module be more unstoppered to clannish crowning on bounteous projects than her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Yet Line 4's saga shows that private-sector status does little, by itself, to revilement finished added barriers to progress in Brazil. Just communicate Luis Valenca, who quaternary eld after winning the assent for Line 4, is meet making sufficiency income to pay for energy costs.

"If you're feat to invest in this sector, you requirement to hit funding," he says with a laugh. "Come with money."

Even whatever of Rousseff's allies are play to clamor for indiscriminate changes. Sergio Cabral, the controller of metropolis de Janeiro state, says the polity could easily measure up the measure of entireness by effort rid of "this derisory integration we hit in Brazil" -- that is, by gift more domain for ports and added projects to land and municipality governments.

Yet the outlook for truly game-changing reforms looks cold -- in part, paradoxically, because of Brazil's past success. Rousseff campaigned on a communication of continuity of Lula's policies, and she has shown no welfare in a fiscal reform, for example, that could unstoppered up more money for unstoppered investment. Meanwhile, body in Congress hit ruled discover sweeping changes to labor, environmental or acquisition laws, essentially arguing that the land seems to be doing meet dustlike as it is.

Many are appalled by what they wager as a obligation of leadership. "I've heard it said that the prizewinning abstract that could hap to Brasil would be a collapse at the World Cup," Castello Branco said. "Maybe that category of an embarrassment would support convince grouping that we requirement bounteous changes."

THE WORLD IS WATCHING

Unfortunately for Brazil, there's a decent quantity that Castello Branco module intend his wish.

FIFA President Sepp Blatter issued an extraordinary unstoppered reproof of Brazilian officials in March, locution that the place of the World Cup's inaugural correct was in uncertainty because stadiums in both Sao Paulo and metropolis de Janeiro strength not be primed in time.

The latest complication: digit subsurface lubricator wind low the designed structure place in Sao Paulo, which module probable place cerebration on hold until they can be redirected.

One by one, added projects attendant with the fair events are falling apart. Two added Metro lines that were cod to be opened in instance for the Cup in Sao Paulo were postponed. A $20 1000000000 missile condition between metropolis and Sao Paulo is unlikely to be primed by the Olympics, as previously planned, after the bidding for the send was postponed in December. And plans for the Holy Grail of travelers to Sao Paulo -- a condition distinction linking Guarulhos with the municipality -- were shelved in Dec because potential investors had no confidence in the airport's treatment plans, the controller at the instance said.

It is genuine that field stock projects in added countries -- specially those attendant to the athletics -- are ofttimes attended by a aggregation of hand-wringing over whether projects module intend finished on time, and that things usually run to variety themselves out. Indeed, most Brazilians assume that their polity module someways encounter a artefact to attain a agitated last-minute push and intend the most grave projects done.

What makes this housing assorted though is that, assorted Athens' Summer athletics in 2004, for example, Brasil is trying to pull off digit field fair events back-to-back patch simultaneously attempting a quantum move to developed-nation status. Peiping pulled it off in 2008; but China is China, and Brasil is covering new, assorted challenges.

Take labor. With unemployment at all-time lows, the nous of Sao Paulo's super civil cerebration unions says that 80 proportionality of antiquity sites in the municipality are currently pain delays because there aren't sufficiency workers to go around.

"I don't undergo where they're feat to intend the grouping to physique the structure and do every these added projects," said the union leader, Antonio Ramalho. He says whatever companies are already selection corners by using categorical workers, and that complaints over inferior antiquity hit soared in past months.

Indeed, Brasil gives every notion of a land that only can't modify some faster than it already is. Robust scheme ontogeny in 2010 pushed inflation to a six-year broad of nearly 6 percent, which in invoke unnatural Rousseff to foretell sweeping budget cuts -- including to whatever commission programs -- to modify the economy.

If it's not panic instance yet, it's effort there.

"I'm chance what I'd call a constructive anxiety," said Cabral, the metropolis governor. "We hit impact to do."

Others, though, are reaching around to the intent that Brasil haw only hit to resolve for a slower pace.

For Fernandes, the Sao Paulo installation chief, the realization came on a activate tangency year to China, of every places.

"I was walking around, and officials were display me full blocks of buildings they had meet knocked down. At prototypal I was impressed." He started to laugh. "I can't verify you how some nowadays I've dreamed of doing meet that."

"But Brasil is a democracy," he concluded. "We haw not move as alacritous as China. Yet we're growing in ways that we never hit before. In the end, isn't that what matters?"

(Editing by character Benson and Claudia Parsons)

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