Brazil is the 21st ­century power to watch

When I appeared on a panel of journalists from international publications recently, the moderator asked us to nominate our big story for the next year.

One of the panellists suggested the UK parliamentary elections. A second mentioned the continued ramifications of the financial crisis. I said Brazil, which I was about to visit for the first time.

Consider, I said: Brazil had come through the financial crisis in reasonable shape. It was sitting on a vast deepsea oil find. It had just seen the world's biggest stock market listing this year the $8bn flotation of part of the Brazilian arm of Santander. It would also be host to the world's two biggest sporting events: the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games which Rio de Janeiro had won this month over Tokyo, Madrid and Chicago.

Yet as I sat on my flight to Rio, I could not suppress some trepidation at the country's well-known drawback. "Violence and crime can occur anywhere and often involve firearms or other weapons," the British Foreign Office travel advice on Brazil says. "Cases of carjacking occur, sometimes with the occupants being taken and forced to withdraw money from their accounts at cash machines."

As for public transport: "There have been instances where gangs have set buses alight leaving passengers inside after robbing them," the Foreign Office said.

Official advice is often frightening. Should the worst happen, governments do not want you saying they should have warned you.

But old Brazil hand Peter Robb was no more reassuring. Brazil was "a country of immense atural wealth, at peace with its neighbours and facing no unusual turbulence or social unrest within its borders. Yet the killing rate in Brazil, tens of thousands of violent deaths a year, falls within the parameters of the United Nations' definition of a lowintensity civil war," he wrote in his hypnotically compelling book A Death in Brazil.

I saw none of this. But within two days of my departure, gun battles between