The Brazilian Bureaucracy Behemoth

While sitting in a restaurant in our first few weeks we met the owner who was originally from Mexico. He had spent a lot of time in China and India before coming to Brazil. Being Mexican but having experienced China and India he thought he knew everything there was to know about bureaucracy…. until he came to Brazil. We thought the visa process was pretty tough but that was only a taster for what was yet to come.

First up was getting our residency card. To do this you need to bring the 1 million required documents with you to the police station and wait in line until your time slot is called. Then you have line 1 which is the line where they check you actually have an appointment. Then line 2 which is where they check your documents. Then line 3 which is… well I was never quite sure what line 3 was but if you can have 10 people doing the job of 1 person that’s gotta be better right? Then you go up to the huge waiting room and wait for your number to be called. The numbers aren’t sequential really and have lots of different categories so you have to stay glued to the screens in case your number comes up. Then, you finally get your appointment and they check your documents again and take photos and fingerprints and then… you DON’T actually get your ID card. What you get is a random bit of black and white A4 with some info on it about what your eventual ID information will be. The waiting time to actually get your ID card was something like 2 months. Apparently, it’s possible that the ID card simply doesn’t materialise by the time the flimsy photocopy expires and you have to start the whole process again.

Fast forward 2 months to approximately 2 weeks after our hallowed cards had arrived. We were going through an airport and Lindsey had all our documents. She insists on carrying my documents as if I was a toddler BUT, as avid readers of our blog will know, Lindsey’s temperament in airports is not always the best. Now, I’m not saying that Lindsey’s airport hypertension necessarily had anything to do with this but I am saying that when we got to our destination, my residency card was nowhere to be found. If, on the off chance, you are reading this in preparation for moving to Brazil, once you get your ID card – DO NOT LOSE IT!

So, now we had to apply for a replacement ID card. The wait time to get an appointment to simply apply for the replacement was over 2 months. Now, I had to carry around my old flimsy bit of paper, a photocopy of the lost ID card as well as police documents confirming that I had reported the card as lost. Next up was the need to get a driving licence because you can only drive on a foreign licence in Brazil for 6 months BUT, GET THIS, in order to apply for a driving licence, you need an ID card. As we had to wait so long for the appointment to apply for a new one, my ability to drive on my foreign licence expired along with the validity of my insurance meaning, when a friend visited us in January and we wanted to go to a bird lodge three hours’ drive away, I had to make HER drive – sorry Bethany!

While we were waiting for the Brazilian wheels to turn on the ID card we needed to start the driving licence process. Lindsey did it first because, well, I couldn’t. In Myanmar, when we got a driving licence you simply gave someone your documents and some cash and then they went away and hey presto, you got your driving licence. In Ghana it was a bit more formal but you could pay to have the process sped up – we got ours in half a day. Not so in Brazil.

The licence itself is a federal document but the process by which you are granted a licence is done locally. Not only that but it is up to the local region how they administer this process – they can do what they like and if they decide they don’t want to give you a licence they don’t have to.

Lindsey eventually went to the driving licence authority accompanied by one of the very nice accountants the school employs to help you with these things. She had with her the compulsory 8 million documents including a translation of her driving licence (don’t even get me started on that). The process for this is the obligatory line 1 where they check you actually have an appointment and line 2 where they check your actual documents. Lindsey seemingly had someone new in the job who was being helped during the process. You also have to make a payment during this part and when it came to making the payment the newbie person charged Lindsey for the wrong service. He immediately recognised the mistake and then asked her to pay again for the right service much to the bemusement of the accountant who said the payment should be transferred. Nothing doing, Lindsey had to simply pay again but they said she could ‘apply’ for a refund. (Not to get sidetracked, the upshot of this was that the accountancy firm checked up on this every week for about 9 months before eventually giving up!) The next step in the process is that the document checkers scan all your documents and then it goes to a mystery third line that neither you nor, seemingly, the line 2 people have any contact with. They are the ultimate arbiters of whether you get a licence but, while they are deigning to check your documents, you have to have a medical.

If you are Brazilian, you can have the medical there and then at the very same office, not so if you are foreign. If you are foreign, you have to go to two separate appointments in different parts of town to have your medicals for which there is a wait time. Lindsey got her appointments quite quickly. The first one is a psychology test – are you sane enough to drive in Brazil. Actually, a healthy amount of insanity is actually what every other driver seems to have here so this was surprising in itself. The psychology tests are different every time, unfortunately, so Lindsey was unable to prep me for mine. Hers first consisted of the game where you look at a picture for a few minutes and then write down everything you can remember was in it. The problem with this for Lindsey (and me) is that we didn’t speak Portuguese very well at the time and certainly couldn’t write in Portuguese very well. Lindsey tried to explain, in Portuguese, that she didn’t really speak Portuguese but was met with a stony stare. One of the items in the picture was a skydiver. When you learn a new language, how many years do you think it takes before you learn the word for ‘skydiver’!! Cue Lindsey’s sweat glands exploding. Her next test was to draw lines on a piece of paper continuously while listening out for a beep at which point you draw a dash. You had to do this for a whole 5 minutes – excruciating. The next test was to do the same exam only this time – for 10 MINUTES. Needless to say, she passed both this and the eye test and was duly presented with her driving licence. Lindsey 2 for 2. Gavin 0 for 2.

Eventually I got my second piece of flimsy temporary paper after having to go through the exact same process again – do your fingerprints change in 2 months I wonder – and now it was my turn for the driving licence. I showed up at the exact same place with the exact same documentation and the exact same nice helper guy. All seemed to go well but then a week or so later my application was rejected. Firstly because my translation was not deemed an original document (we only got it via email so we didn’t have an original paper copy). Secondly, because one of the scans was not done properly by the line 2 guys – yes, if the line 2 guys mess something up they reject you even if it was nothing to do with you.

So, round two. This time I had my original translation and the helper guy made the line 2 people show him the scans on the screen so that he could personally verify that they were OK. This request however seemed to annoy them and a person came to our desk waving a document that indicated that I would need to go to a consulate in order to proceed with my application. This was seemingly stuff that the guy was just making up to get rid of us but our friendly helper guy persisted and eventually insisted that they submit my application, which they eventually did. I left completely disheartened, convinced my application was going nowhere but fortunately and maybe because the final level of inspection sat in an ivory tower and didn’t even seem to speak to the line 2ers, my application was finally approved. My ID followed that and all is well with that debacle for now. At the time we got our licences both Lindsey and I had valid, legal driving licences in the UK, Myanmar, Ghana and Brazil at the same time – feels pretty James Bond!

Two last comments on this are that when I questioned the sanity of the process to the friendly helper guy, he said ‘Oh, you think this is bad, you should have seen it in the old days’ – I dread to think what that could have been like. Secondly, it made me feel slightly better when we found out that for one of Lindsey’s colleagues it took four bites of the cherry before he got his licence.

To be fair to Brazil, they have now introduced some online elements. The driving licence and ID are now viewable in an app for instance but on the flip side it seems a shame that a great country like Brazil should hamper itself so needlessly with such systems. The words on the Brazilian flag are “Ordem e Progresso”, which translates as “Order and Progress.” Apparently the irony is not lost on most Brazilians.

A note on the images. Nothing really goes with this post so most of the images are murals that we have seen in São Paulo since our arrival.