At least 245 confirmed dead in night club fire - Santa Maria RS

This tragedy points out the serious problem of ‘informality’ and ‘irregularity’ that is created all over Brazil as a result of the excessive bureaucracy that has been built up over the years and the fact there the regulations are neither clear nor are they universal. It is not as if there is no regulation, there is too much. Brazil is a country that has laws, rules and regulations for everything you could possibly imagine and others you couldn’t even dream of. What is completely lacking is inspection and enforcement. This is what everybody seems to rely on here in Brazil. Rules are complied with in order to obtain official licenses to operate a business, begin construction, open a commercial establishment, etc., and then quickly forgotten.

The night club in question had a capacity of two thousand people for events; we’re talking about probably the single largest location for this type of event in the City of Santa Maria – RS. News reports here state that the documentation for the establishment has been expired since August, 2012.  Yet, not only have they been operating business as usual, but the Federal University of Santa Maria which claims to have a completely informal partnership with the club did not even bother to check if the documents were all in order. I’m sorry, but once a federal institution of continuing education lends its name to some kind of event, formal partnership or not, they have a moral duty to take all possible steps in order to ensure that all regulations are being observed and licensing is in place.

The City of Santa Maria, who issues the business license (alvará) for establishments to operate doesn’t have any way of telling when those documents expire and ensuring that they no longer conduct business without authorization? Frankly, they don’t and what’s worse they simply don’t care. City governments all over Brazil issue licenses for construction based solely on blueprints submitted to them and never make any kind of subsequent inspection during construction unless they receive some kind of complaint about irregularities. They issue business licenses with little concern other than collecting the fee involved. They do not make any kind of inspection or visits to the business premises in order to confirm that the business that has been described in the license is, in fact, the type of business that is being operated or that they meet any kind of standards for safety.

Unlike in most other countries, the local Fire Departments do not perform routine inspections of all business establishments and public places to ensure the safety regulations are being complied with. There is no closure of establishments that do not comply. Federal laws require that all commercial buildings over a certain size have on their staff a Civil Firefighter (Bombeiro Civil), yet the night club did not. Most public events which are attended by this number of participants would be required, anywhere else in the world, to have ambulances and medical teams on-site, not this night club. They certainly had security staff, and their only concern was payment of the R$15 admission fee. They went so far as to lock the main doors and prevent people from leaving without first paying. This resulted in many, if not all, of the deaths.

Here the bureaucracy is daunting, suffocating everyone. There is absolutely no uniformity of the rules. In most cases rules for the same process differ so greatly it appears that the civil servants themselves simply make them up as they go along. This sets up a situation where businesses simply look around for locations that have the minimum of regulations and the ones that have the greatest absence of any kind of enforcement; they then choose to set up operations there. The other alternative, the option most often chosen, is to comply with the rules and regulations only long enough to obtain their initial license / building permit / whatever and then operate “under the radar” from that point on. They all know that the chances of ever being caught, much less penalized, are slim to none.

This is not just a problem that affects small towns in the interior of poorer states. It’s everywhere. Even in the City of São Paulo it has been reported that the majority of the most upscale shopping centers in the city are operating without the benefit of proper licensing. Smaller business operate everywhere in the “gray market” and function completely off the map. The only time they face any kind of difficulty at all is simply because the city, state and federal governments crack-down on them because they traditionally are the ones who are not paying taxes. The rest isn’t of the least concern to politicians and lawmakers.

This whole tragedy was something that was predictable long ago. Nothing was done; nothing will really ever be done, because it involves relaxing and unifying the bureaucracy along with stepping up enforcement and inspections on a nationwide scale. Will this kind of tragedy happen again? Most certainly, it’s just a matter of when and where.

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

E uma coisa terribel, Uma tragedia.