IN JUNE 2006 Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then Brazil’s president, went to Itaboraí, a sleepy farming town nestled where the flatlands beside Guanabara Bay meet the coastal mountain range. He announced the building of Comperj—the Rio de Janeiro petrochemical complex, a pharaonic undertaking of two oil refineries and a clutch of petrochemical plants. With forecasts of 220,000 new jobs in a town of 150,000 people, Itaboraí geared up for a boom.
Today it is almost a ghost town. Its straggling main street adjoins an unopened shopping mall and is punctuated by a score of blocks of flats and office towers, one with a heliport on the roof, all finished in the past few months and all plastered with “for sale” signs. “A lot of people bet on this new El Dorado in Itaboraí and it didn’t happen,” says Wagner Sales of the union of workers building Comperj.
What did happen? Private firms that were supposed to join Petrobras, the state-controlled oil giant, in investing in the petrochemical plants took fright when a shale gas boom in the United States slashed costs for their competitors there. Lula and his successor, Dilma Rousseff, burdened...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1GtqtZp
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