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"American historian Robert M. Levine, director of Latin American Studies at the University of Miami, has once commented that Brazilians are a kind of people who 'pride themselves on being especially creative in their array and variety of gambit suitable for bending rules'. Actually, they pride it so much that they have even elevated the bending of legal norms to a highly prized institution: the jeito or jeitinho..The social mechanism known as jeito can be adopted in many legal and non-legal situations. A jeito can be asked, for instance, when the queue in a bank is too long and a person argues that he cannot wait for his turn. Lawyers can also apply it in the form of a 'favour' (legal or illegal) requested to court employees. Finally, it can also be granted by a public inspector who condones the failure of a company to comply with a statutory provision for considering it somehow uneconomic, unjust or unrealistic".
Augusto Zimmermann,
Jeitinho, Brazil's Creative Way to Break the Law
and Feel Virtuous about It
