Laughing in the Face Of Terrorist Reports
Brazilian City Lures Tourists With Humor

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 11, 2004; Page A24

FOZ DO IGUACU, Brazil -- The Brazilian summer was just beginning last year when Mayor Felipe Gonzalez summoned the top business executives, tourism officials and civic leaders in this border town for a meeting.

Just a few months earlier, CNN had broadcast a report saying that Foz do Iguacu -- a city of about 230,000 people in the southwestern corner of Brazil -- was home to a terrorist cell of al Qaeda and Hezbollah operatives. That was followed by a Vanity Fair magazine article saying that senior al Qaeda leaders had recently held a high-level summit here and that there were dozens of terrorist training camps in the surrounding jungle. And then a Brazilian magazine reported that even Osama bin Laden himself may have paid the city a covert visit.

No one here believed there was any truth to the reports, many of which were based on Latin American intelligence. But the bad press -- coming on the heels of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and an economic collapse in neighboring Argentina -- was drying up tourist traffic to the breathtaking waterfalls, and the golf courses and casinos in the area. Gonzalez said he knew something had to be done. This was no laughing matter.

No, wait, maybe it was.

Convinced that the reports were ridiculous, and afraid that a defensive posture would only fortify impressions of Foz Do Iguacu as a forbidding place, Gonzalez said in an interview that he and his advisers decided that humor was the only way to dispel the terrorist cloud hovering over this area known as the "Triple Border," near the intersection of the Paraguayan, Argentine and Brazilian frontiers.

In more than 160 foreign magazines and travel brochures, the city paid for advertisements with captions such as, "If he can find the time to come see the waterfall, why can't you?" under a photograph of bin Laden. Another ad juxtaposed photographs of Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair with the caption: "Foz Do Iguacu; All the world wants to see it, including them."

Civic officials published public notices of "terrorist meetings" and invited journalists to attend. Tourism officials in November organized Humor at the Falls, an international festival at which artists submitted nearly 2,800 cartoons poking fun at everything from the world's water problems to sex to al Qaeda.

"Where there is humor, there is no terror," read the slogan for the event, which awarded a $10,000 prize to the winning cartoon entry.

The city's good humor paid off. Tourism began to pick up again last year, and in the first two months of this year, the Brazilian side of the border attracted more tourists than in any previous two-month period. Tourism officials have added three major comedic-themed conventions -- cinematic comedy, theatrical comedy and a clown festival -- and expect a record 1 million tourists, or about 200,000 more than last year, to visit Foz do Iguacu this year.

"Nobody here is joking about the suffering the U.S. went through on September 11th," said Rogerio Bonato, a local newspaper editor who is also president of Humor at the Falls. "But we figured that humor is the only defense we had against these ridiculous rumors. We were handed a lemon. We made lemonade."