The Capital of Brazil Is Buenos Aires



""Now the monkeys cannot bite me ... I am like sugar to them!""

- Ronaldo (thanking Lisa for donating enough money so his orphanage could buy a door), The Simpsons, "Blame it on Lisa"

...when it's not Rio de Janeiro.

Some country somewhere in Latin Land; the spoken language is Spanish, like everywhere in Latin Land. It is composed by only one state (which is overrun by the Amazon forest) called São Paulo, whose capital is Rio de Janeiro, but it is also called Buenos Aires. Every Brazilian woman is stunningly beautiful. By the way, whenever you're in a Brazilian city, it'll be a favela (what Brazilian people call shantytowns), which is a place that makes the industrial era slums look like bright Utopias; there are monkeys in the city streets, and large cats, and alligators ... and the occasional anaconda. The state has no military whatsoever, or schools; civilization is at a never-ending war against the natives. Finally, everyone is junkyard poor.

Whenever you see a Brazilian (or really, any South American) in fiction, expect him to look like a stereotypical Mexican or Latino. Also, whenever The Hero goes to Brazil for whatever reason it will be during Carnaval. Always. Well, it would be easier to just make a list of what is wrong with Brazil on fiction:

Brazil, as with other Latin American countries, is a constant victim of Did Not Do the Research, as most people around the world only know Brazil from tropes like this; as repeatedly mentioned above, Brazil is kinda like the United States, except that it has jungles to speak of (Hawaii barely counts for the USA), was a horrible and utterly Lawful Evil dictatorship from 64 to 84, has more social-inequality problems (caused in no small part by said dictatorship), and speaks Portuguese. The social inequality has been changing a little in very recent times, though.

And for the record, the real capital of Brazil is Brasília, which is no hamlet itself at 2.5 million people. Rio used to be the capital up until April 21, 1960, when Brasília was founded by then-Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek (see? With a Czech name like that, he could be from Chicago!) It even is considered a World Heritage Site by UNESCO (Buenos Aires is not in Brazil at all, but neighboring Argentina). Brasília actually represents another similarity between Brazil and the United States: like Washington DC, it was a city built from the ground up to be the national capital, and their metropolitan areas are similar in population.

Anime & Manga

 * Nodame Cantabile has the protagonist Shinichi Chiaki going to São Paulo as a guest conductor. What does he find at first? Asses, thongs, beaches (although São Paulo is far away from any beaches), hot sun... He even hallucinates about Carnival while conducting.
 * For an anime that surely shows a love for Brazil, Michiko to Hatchin fails miserably in several key basic information about the country. Surely you can't blame the Japanese for giving Japanese names to everybody, but then they try to balance it out with Brazilian surnames but the surnames doesn't make any sense as surnames. The anime can't even get something as basic as some of its local treats right by their local names. "Água de coco" (coconut water) is called "suco de coco" (coconut juice) and "caldo de cana" (sugarcane syrup) is called "suco de cana" (sugarcane juice) on the street market signs, when absolutely no Brazilian would call then that way.
 * Inazuma Eleven features the very powerful Brazilian national team The Kingdom. The only team in FFI (that's their World Cup) to sweep 4-0 in their corresponding blocks. Whose captain Mac Roniejo has a special move named "Strike Samba" that obviously shouts "CARNIVAL!" and their special tactic being the Amazon River itself (or at least a humongous wave from the Amazon). And then there's the dark side. They were blackmailed by the Big Bad Garshield to work for him, since their families are extremely poor. The catch: win the FFI or get sent straight back to the favelas. However, everything else is averted. Their looks are obviously Brazilian, especially the goalkeeper Falcao da Silva (a capoerista on top of that)

Comic Books

 * For some unknown reason, every single Brazilian character to ever show up in Comic Books, either as Superheroes or as minor characters, have always had the last name "da Costa" or "daCosta" (although prepositions are not considered part of the name).
 * The worst offender is the most prominent Brazilian superhero, the (very) minor Superhero Fire from the DC Universe. Not only her last name is daCosta, pretty much everything on her biography and herself is just plain wrong. Her complete name is Beatriz Bonilla daCosta (née Carvalho), of which only Carvalho and Beatriz are proper Brazilian names (Beatriz is also a proper Spanish name, so it was probably a fortunate coincidence), "da Costa" (not "daCosta") being a kinda common surname. Her father name is Ramon, again a name more common outside of Brazil. She was an agent for the Espiães (sic; correct spelling "Espiões") Nacionales (Yup, seems like Brazilian institutions have Spanish names) de (sic; "do") Brasil (ugh, I guess we should be happy it wasn't "Espiones", which, by the way, wouldn't even be Spanish). By the way, the Brazilian intelligence agency is called ABIN (Agência Brasileira de Inteligência), much like CIA isn't named "National Spies of the United States). Some of this was thankfully retconned, but there's too much wrong that's too deep to retcon there.
 * What about Roberto da Costa, aka Sunspot? Called "Mr. Da Costa", though
 * Actually, "da Costa" is not that uncommon. It's a real Portuguese/Brazilian surname. Its Spanish equivalent would be "de la Cuesta." What we Brazilians find strange is that, apparently, American comic-book writers can't think of another surname. (Silva, Souza, Fonseca, Braga, Abreu, Oliveira...).
 * On the other hand, those are the only Brazilian comic book characters of any significance. It is a bit odd that both have the same surname, but two characters isn't much of a sample size.
 * But let's not forget that Sunspot liked to say "Dios mio", and that Fire also uses some weird Spanish sometimes...

Film
"You'll find your happiness in Rio
 * In the Mr. Magoo movie, Quincy Magoo faces off against a monkey in the middle of a high-class party at Rio de Janeiro.
 * He also glides from there to the Iguazu Falls, a Brazilian-Argentinian landmark that's in the Brazilian border in the other side of the country.
 * The movie The Burning Season commits the Latin ethnicity error. Every Brazilian shown could as well be Mexican.
 * This might be because it was filmed in Mexico.
 * The movie Blame It On Rio is a perfect example of this trope. In the movie all women are topless at the beach and surrounded by monkeys, parrots and toucans. The painful irony lies in the fact that the director had to artificially add these elements to the beach scene since they were not there to begin with, which means he knew they were not realistic.
 * Rare aversion in The Incredible Hulk. Bruce Banner isn't in a favela because he happens to be in Brazil, he's in a favela because he doesn't want to be found.
 * The Incredible Hulk subverted this in many ways, including showing the ethnic diversity, Bruce Banner going to great lengths to learn Portuguese (and struggling with it), people in favelas shown to actually work, it not being Carnival, among some minor details.
 * They could have hired national actors, though, or at least try better at the accent thing. It's like someone making a film about the US, only everyone talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.
 * Still, he supposedly leaves Rio and gets fairly easily to a bordering country in the Amazon Rainforest, pretty much on the opposite side of the (very large) country. But this was probably meant to emphasize the Hulk's mobility -- witness the look of shock on Banner's face when he's told where he is, and realizes how much distance he's just covered. And being able to cover huge distances quickly by riculously long leaps has always been part of the Hulk's schtick.
 * Kind of averted in the infamous movie Woman on Top, where Brazil is portrayed avoiding most of the topics above mentioned, but still the main heroine was interpreted by a Spanish actress (Penelope Cruz), and for a famous restaurant the place was strangely decaying.
 * Word of God says that they were going to cast a Brazilian actress, but Penelope Cruz was just too damn good to miss.
 * Miami Vice (the movie version) features Ciudad Del Este, a cosmopolitan boomtown on the tri-border area between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Exactly the kind of city a geography-challenged screenwriter could have made up, but it really exists.
 * Lampshaded and played with masterfully, for plot-point effects in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer. Jennifer Love Hewitt's character wins a radio contest by answering the trivia question "What is the capital of Brazil?" with Rio de Janeiro. She, her Black Best Friend, and their boyfriends don't actually visit Brazil, but towards the end, the revelation that Brazil's capital is actually Brasília leads her to realize that the whole thing was a trap.
 * Averted, in the movie Brazil, which seems to take place anywhere except Brazil.
 * However, the movie originally opened in an exotic South American rainforest.
 * The Rundown tries its best (specially considering they shot it in Hawaii after the location scouts who traveled to Brazil got stolen there), even managing to put ads for Brazilian beer and some soccer crests in the background. But the atrocious Portuguese and the baboons make it even more hilarious to Brazilians. There's also American actress Rosario Dawson pretending to be a native Brazilian, although she's not that bad.
 * Nicely (mostly) averted in Phillipe de Broca's 1964 That Man From Rio -- Rio is shown as a big, bustling modern city, one of the principal characters is black (along with several minor ones) - though he does live in a favela. Another principal is a rich man named De Castro, which is close to da Costa (but played by the Italian Adolfo Celi). It's not Carnival, but there is some samba dancing. The action shifts to a newly-minted Brasilia, gotten to by a short car ride, however.
 * Actually, it's pretty accurate about distances - when asked how far it is to Brasilia, the local kid shrugs "Not far; 1,000 kilometers." Adrian sarcastically suggests taking the subway. When they do ride it takes a day and a night and another day. After Brasilia, the action shifts to a floating village on the Amazon and then deep in the rainforest, gotten to by a long plane trip, then a long boat trip.
 * Painfully obvious in the (bad) James Bond movie Moonraker, which has several scenes set in Rio. Obviously, it's Carnival, and the Sugar Loaf (with its cable cars) is a location, as are the Iguaçu Falls (which fall on the "mixing landmarks" example mentioned above, as they are part of the Amazon river). As well, there's an Aztec temple or something ... in the Amazon.
 * Mostly averted in Rio. Helps that the director is Brazilian, and one of the actors too. Still they arrive during carnival.
 * 2012 has a broadcast showing Rio getting hit by an earthquake (complete with the Cristo Redentor's destruction). They namedrop an actual news station, Globo News. But the broadcaster speaks with a Portuguese accent! (but due to Hollywood Science, let's not dwelve into the fact that Brazil is far from earthquake zone)
 * The Producers plays this trope so straight it's almost a parody with the short musical number "You'll Find Your Happiness In Rio," wherein a band of mariachi accompanies the characters' singing.

The beaches there are strewn with pearls

The tropic breezes always blow there

And, so we hear, do the girls"

Literature

 * The Book of the New Sun might count as an example: it is set After the End in what definitely seems to be a South or Central American country (there are references to pampas, people drink hot chocolate with chili peppers, there is a reference to the Popul Vuh at one point), but perhaps because of the horrible economic inequality, the popular fan Epileptic Trees theory is that it is set in future Buenos Aires.
 * There's a character in the first book who is clearly a Shout Out to Jorge Luis Borges, who was Argentinian. And the capital city is called Nessus, which depending who you listen to is either a: obviously a reference to BueNOS AIreS, or b: obviously a reference to a character from mythology, who was poisoned like the water and soil of the old city.
 * New Sun's geography fits too well to be anything but South America. Nessus is on the banks of a huge river (the Rio de la Plata), ocean to the east, mountains in the west and jungle to the north.
 * Twilight does that as well during Bella and Edward honeymoon trip, where we find out that the Cullens have an island in Rio de Janeiro, where you arive through the west bit of the city, than taking a boat, in spite that they should have gone south from the airport to reach the sea. No one was surprised that Stephenie Meyer didn't know how to use google maps, but then it becomes even better when Edward decided to go back to the mainland to hunt. Since, you know, it's a forest out there and there must be something that a vegetarian vampire could eat. Except there isn't anything big enough for him. One wonders if he attacked the city zoo.
 * Funny thing, too, that in the week Breaking Dawn came out, a massive amount of dead penguins were found in the north litoral, in an unexpected case of Leaning On the Fourth Wall.

Live Action TV

 * In one episode of House, Dr. House surprises every Brazilian to ever watch the show by saying "castanhas-do-Para" perfectly well in actual Portuguese instead of a Spanish mimic of Portuguese, but then this leads to him diagnosing his patient to be in Brazil because he was somewhere where Carnival was celebrated for a month. Not only is Carnival only celebrated for part of a week in Brazil (or one whole week in the case of the city of Salvador), it would be the rough equivalent of saying the United States doesn't function during the month of Thanksgiving.
 * Yeah. Obviously that happens at Christmas.
 * Actually, in the sister cities of Recife and Olinda, pre-Carnival "rehearsal" parties start happening as soon as the dust settles from New Year celebrations. So it would be accurate to say that we celebrate Carnival for a month. Salvador isn't very different.
 * Let's face it, the only time Salvador isn't celebrating Carnival is during the week between Christmas and New Year.
 * And let's not forget that, in USA, "castanhas do Pará" are known as... "Brazil nuts". But that's not a good excuse, since the Brazil nuts that are sold in USA can come from Brazil, but also from Bolivia and Peru...

Video Games

 * Samba De Amigo: well, where to start...
 * The E3 trailer of the game Shadowrun, set in Brazil, had a poster stating "Las Tropas, Unen", which is Spanish (wrong Spanish at that), not Portuguese.
 * They fixed everything to be written in Portuguese when the game got actually released.
 * Played mostly straight in the game Terranigma. The village of Liotto is based on Rio de Janeiro (complete with a Christ The Redeemer statue), and it's appropriately Carnivalesque as per the trope. However, the producers took the time to add signs in Portuguese.
 * And (fairly misspelled, but still) names from Brazilian cuisine (feijoada, churrasco and caipirinha; that last one being a drink made with a strong liquor that a child like Ark had no business drinking, really).
 * And all Brazillians are black, except the blonde girl outside, the receptionist girl and the boy who talk about soccer (his mother is black too).
 * In the boy's room there's a poster of Brazillian soccer hero nicknamed "Pelé".
 * In the game 'Nigel Mansells F1 World Championship', the Brazilian GP is set at the Interlagos circuit, against a nice backdrop of the Sugar Loaf, a landmark of Rio de Janeiro... except Interlagos located at São Paulo.
 * Max Payne 3 is scaring a lot of fans of the series with its radical change of setting to Sao Paulo. In Brazil, however, it is gaining attention because Brazilians are wondering how much it will completely misrepresent them. So far it is too soon to know it will follow the trope straight or subvert it in any way.
 * The trailer, however, seems to show Hispanic people speaking in Spanish accents, in what seems like a pretty standard Mexican drug lord plot set in California.
 * In Rainbow Six: Raven Shield the tangos plant a bomb on a São João's float. The June Festivities (St. John, St. Anthony and St. Peter's days) are specially celebrated in rural areas, because it coincides with the corn harvest, and ressembles a county fair. These festivities assumed a mocking form on urban areas: kids dressing up as hillbilies, staged shotgun weddings and anachronistic square dancing. These traditions are getting outmoded on urban areas but are still strong, and growing, on rural areas, but there was never something like a float's parade on June Festivities. Obviously the game producers tried to avert this trope, replacing the Carnival with some bad researched Brazilian festival, but failed anyway. Also, Brazilian Carnival's floats are built like a two stories houses on wheels, not like these pathetic, wimpy, undernourished excuses of floats we see in the game.
 * In the same stage we can see the beach just outside a auto repair shop. Alright, it's a very fancy repair shop, the kind where you would bring your Ferrari for a check-up, but still is a auto repair shop on seaside, the most expensive strip of land of all Rio de Janeiro. It simply sounds bizarre, like a Laundromat on 5th Avenue.
 * One of the early stages are on warehouses of Porto Alegre. It appears that the designers found out there are others cities on Brazil, besides Rio and Buenos Aires. The architecture of the warehouse even looks familiar to a Brazilian's eye! But then a eerie feeling settles in. Why there are posters about coffee plastered on every wall? These buildings are owned by a coffee trading comnpany? In Porto Alegre? Coffee still is a important export of Brazil, but it never was in Rio Grande do Sul (the state where Porto Alegre is the capital). It feels like breaking in a exports office in Marseilles and finding stacks of marketing material for calvados, and not a single one about pastis. Strange.
 * Tom Clancy's HAWX had the protagonist and his wingmates defending Rio de Janeiro against an invasion from a hostile foreign entity. Numerous references are made to a presidential palace and the Brazilian leaders.
 * Sengoku 3 have a Brazilian stage, with lots of freak mutants, Tribal sound (in African style) and a huge Mayan temple.
 * Snes Warof Gems shows some Mayan Temples in background.
 * Arcade Kaiser Knucle have a triceratops skeleton in the middle of inflammable jungle.
 * It becomes better in Monster Maulers because the Brazilian boss is a giant Eenie Meenie Miny Moai Statue!!!
 * The first segment F3AR is set in an unknown location in Brazil (you start off in a prison, then proceed to a favela)... Except, everyone speaks Spanish. The developers almost got everything right, though: some of the signs are in Portuguese... While others are still in Spanish. Still, the license plate from the cars is Brazillian, so that's something.
 * Street Fighter is a well known offender:
 * In Street Fighter II, we have Blanka, who is a Brazilian beastman with green skin, fur, and who can unleash electricity. His stage is apparently an Amazonian village. With a huge anaconda.
 * The Brazilian stage in Street Fighter IV is inside the Amazonian jungle, but we can see some Aztec totems in there. And monkeys.
 * In Street Fighter III: Second Impact, the Brazilian stage is set in "SÃO PAURO". The stage itself is a common street, where there is an overturned truck written "CEAZA" (where the right would be "CEASA"), loaded with bananas. Obviously, there are monkeys all over the place.
 * Street Fighter III: Third Strike averts this. It's Brazilian stage is set in Santos Harbour, and we can see a small truck of Brazilian coffee and a huge cargo ship. And they all have proper Portuguese written on them.
 * In The King of Fighters' 94, we have a Brazilian stage set on the Amazon. There is a wrecked helicopter, baboons, and cannibal Indians. There is also a toucan, which is actually a Brazilian native species.
 * Even tough the Ikari Team in 94 represents Brazil, none of it's members are Brazilian. However, later on fans created the misconception that Leona is Brazilian, and this 94 stage is apparently the only reason for this.
 * The King of Fighters' 2001 averts this somehow, by having a Brazilian stage set in the Interlagos Racetrack.
 * The first Samurai Shodown has one stage set in Amazon, called "Green Hell". However the stage has a huge Aztec temple in the background. Tam Tam, the owner of the stage, also resembles an Aztec warrior.

Web Animation

 * There's an comedy animation in Youtube that plays with this trope. The "O Dia em que o Brasil foi Invadido" (The Day When Brazil was Invaded) shows the ex-president Bush back in 2006 planning to invade Brazil to conquer its natural resources. After being informed that his army forces were being defeated (only thanks to the many problems in the country, like the Tietê river being so polluted that it became toxic and dissolved the USA army's boat), Bush decides to launch an atomic bomb to win the battle, guess which capital he selected as target...

Web Original

 * Averted in the Whateley Universe with Verdant, who is from one of the worst favelas in Rio de Janeiro, but knows there is more to Rio than where her family lives. And Phase, who has been to Brazil once, when his uncle was meeting with government officials. In Brasilia.

Western Animation

 * The Simpsons episode "Blame It On Lisa" is full of these, deliberately used for humorous effect in its portrayal of Brazil, however they did lampshade one of the popular misconceptions by having Bart painstakingly learn Spanish for the trip ... only to learn Brazilians speak Portuguese.
 * One particular geographical slip is for the kidnappers to take Homer, whom they kidnapped in Rio, all the way to the Amazon forest, a couple thousand miles away.
 * For the record, this episode is actually banned for broadcast in Brazil, it only circulates on DVD. It only aired for exactly three times on television, then many brazilians (from normal citizens to senators) went crazy at how "demoralizing" the episode was, not knowing that The Simpsons mocks every country they come across, even their own. Still the ban took full effect, and takes even now; FOX managed to get the episode available in Brazil only for DVD volumes.
 * Which is understandable, as not many people in a country would feel confortable if a foreign show would mock their country and possibly ruin its turism, like happened in Brazil. FOX later apologized to Brazilians for the controversial episode and made them an offer to loose tensions. Also, bear in mind that in Brazil (like in the rest of Latin America) there is historically a strong anti-imperialistic sentiment (the support the military dictatorship received from the USA doesn't help matters) and so these jokes are interpreted as hypocritical insults.
 * Then again, it can be seem as a weird case of real life Did Not do The Research, as we are talking about The Simpsons, a tv show that mocks every country it ever portrayed... their own most than anyone else's. It's argued that all the fuss the episode raised was caused mostly by certain tv channels (by that, read the most influential) playing Fourth Estate.

Real Life

 * The trope name comes from a real life episode when then-President Ronald Reagan went to Brazil and, with a grin on his face, said to be "Happy to visit the capital of Brazil, Buenos Aires" (which, for the record, is the capital of ANOTHER COUNTRY). The trope name is still open, however, to one more commonly mistaken (Rio).
 * This trope is older than that, and that event didn't occur exactly in this way. In the morning following the day of his arrival the President Ronald Reagan addressed the Brazilian public as "the friendly people of Bolivia" (or Colombia, again). This gaffe was dismissed by the Itamaraty (Brazil's Diplomatic Corps, named as such due to the name of the building they are headquartered at) as result of jet lag but Jornal do Brasil (then an influential local newspaper) quickly pointed that Mc Donald's paper mats, at that time, all over Brazil, were being printed with characters dressed in the traditional garbs of several countries. The Brazilian character was dressed in a complete Andes Quechuean attire, with the little black hat. There was a public outcry and the Mc Donald's local administration excused themselves alleging that the paper mats were designed in USA. It was never known if the paper mat were the reason for the presidential faux pas, but since then the paper mats used in all Mc Donald's restaurants from Brazil are designed and produced locally.
 * As said, he addressed the Brazilian public (including the Brazilian president!) as "the friendly people of Bolivia". To be fair, he immediately recognized his mistake, apologized and said "sorry, that's where I came from". The only thing is... he had came from Peru.
 * A local magazine ran a magnificent "advert" after the happening, saying: "The people of Bolivia is thankful for the visit of the president of Canada".
 * Also, we cannot forget that, even with Brasilia as the capital and São Paulo as the main economic center and preferential entry port for the country (since something like 80% of commercial international flights arrive there), almost all journalists from international media that covers Brazil are based in... Rio de Janeiro.
 * The same pattern happens with those weather reports in newspapers, that show the max/min temperatures for the day around the globe. The only Brazilian city that appears is Rio de Janeiro.