Bureaucracy. Red Tape. The System. Or ‘burro-ocracy’, as I have also heard it called—no one feels it quite like a foreigner in Brazil.
It starts out easy enough. If you come from a country that doesn’t need a visa to enter Brazil, you just turn up at the immigration desk, your passport is stamped, no questions are asked, and no information is given.
But how long can you stay? Are you allowed to work? Can you extend your visit, or what happens if you overstay your welcome? These are the mysteries of the tourist visa.
My situation is different, as I am married to a Brazilian, but I have met many others in this situation. And the answers to the questions above, in case you are wondering, are, in order: 3 months; no; yes—although you cannot be here more than 6 months in 365-day period; and at the very least you will be fined R$ 8 per day of your ‘illegal’ time.
OK, but back to me. I could write an entire novella on my dealings with Brazilian bureaucracy, but I will just share one or two of my favorites so far. Firstly, as we were married in the UK, we knew we had to register the union here in Brazil. We also knew that no one would be too impressed by our ‘foreign’ marriage certificate, so we had it translated—word for word—by a ‘juramentada’.
At the cartório we were told this wasn’t sufficient--the document would need to be returned to London for certification by the Brazilian consulate there. Sigh. Several weeks and more money later, we returned with the marriage certificate, and its shiny new stamp on the back.
The woman looked at the paper suspiciously. She turned it over, and then back again. Where is the translation, she wanted to know. We handed her the one we had. No, she told us, you need a new translation. To include the new stamp. ‘But the stamp is in Portuguese’, my husband cried in disbelief.
And so it goes. A new translation, more money spent, and then the federal police get to do their part. You can work now, the official tells me. Fantastic! And I can finally get a bank account too? He shook his head sadly. Unfortunately, not until the full residency papers are finalized, perhaps 1-2 years. It’s a quirk of the system, apparently. You are allowed to work, but not to open a bank account. And many jobs require you to have a bank account into which they can deposit your pay…
You have to laugh, as they say, or else you cry.
4 comentários:
I have another word for you that I invented while dealing with my visa papers.. Brazil is BUREAUCRAZY!!
Sorry, but it is true. Coming from a country where all communication with the government is online, this can be really frustrating.
But I think one day I realized the difference. Here, everything is built on communication - you talk to the store guys, the policemen, the loterica people etc, to survive.
In Estonia, everything is organized to avoid communication as much as possible!
really?
LOL It's so true! I'm brazilian from Porto Alegre currently living abroad. I don't even want to think when I return home and have to update my driving licence and my status on the electoral register. I foreshadow a nightmare filled with bureaucracy.
While the information (and experience I had with my foreign wife) is different, it was no less of a bureaucratic nightmare. The Bank account was easier to accomplish because it only require you to have a CPF (roughly equivalent to your National Insurance number), which itself did not require you to have the full residency papers. Even the work permit did not require that (only the CPF and the local marriage certificate). Perhaps the person in the bank you went (as is often the case) did not know the rules well enough. I know we had our share of people not understanding the rules and bouncing us around.
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