BRAZILIANS delight in Portuguese words that seem to have no equivalent in other languages. Saudade is yearning for an absent person or a place left behind. Cafuné is the act of running one’s fingers through a lover’s hair. More newsworthy is jeitinho, a diminutive of jeito (“way”). It is a way around something, often a law or rule. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, an unpopular president who has not personally been accused of serious wrongdoing, is a jeitinho around the constitution. (Many of the politicians who voted to impeach her are themselves indefatigable explorers of such byways, for example around campaign-finance laws.)
Jeitinho, which has connotations of ingenuity as well as illegality, is a marker of national identity, says Livia Barbosa, an anthropologist. Two-thirds of Brazilians confess to seeking out such shortcuts, according to a survey conducted in 2006 by Alberto Almeida, a political scientist. Daily life is criss-crossed with them. A restaurateur offers policemen a packed lunch to entice them to patrol his street, saving 10,000 reais ($3,000) a month in private-security fees. Laranjas (“oranges”) act as cut-rate shell companies, hiding business activities from taxmen and investigators. 
To spare busy students from having to accept internships, required for many university courses, professors approve fictitious ones, complete with made-up reports. Brazilians bring along children or old people to jump queues at banks, clinics and government offices; some parents lend out their children for that purpose. The material world has its own sort of jeitinhos, jury-rigged contrivances called gambiarras. An iron could serve as a skillet; a sawed-off styrofoam cup, affixed to a fork, becomes a spoon.
Keith Rosenn, a legal scholar at the University of Miami in Florida, points out that in the parts of Latin America governed by Spain rule-bending was tolerated. Charged with executing laws ill-suited to local conditions, colonial administrators could tell the king, obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but do not comply), without fear of punishment. Though Portugal’s monarchs offered their Brazilian “captains” no such leeway, they took it anyway. Hence, the resort to jeitinho. Modern laws are no more sensible. Brazil passed more than 75,000, many of them pointless, in the ten years to 2010. More than half of Brazilians think there is little reason to comply with many of them.
Some scholars think that Catholics, tempted to regard confession as an alternative to compliance, are especially prone to jeitinho-like behaviour. Others suggest that mestiço (mixed-race) societies like Brazil’s are liable to be flexible, about the law as much as ethnicity. Perhaps inequality plays a role: the rich and powerful flout the law, so why shouldn’t ordinary folk?
That may be getting harder, and not just for politicians caught up in the judiciary’s unrelenting investigation into the bribery scandals surrounding Petrobras, the state-controlled oil company. Nowadays, cameras rather than police officers enforce speed limits. E-Poupatempo (e-save time), an internet portal set up by the state of São Paulo, expedites such tasks as filing police reports. It allows little scope for jeitinho. Roberto DaMatta, an anthropologist, thinks Brazil may be moving towards Anglo-Saxon norms, in which laws “are either obeyed or do not exist”. If that happens, the satisfaction many Brazilians will feel may be tinged with saudades.
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