Why does the Date below change to "2014-07-07" when converted to POSIXct?
Sys.setenv(TZ='America/Sao_Paulo')
d <- as.Date("2014-07-08", format="%Y-%m-%d")
d
[1] "2014-07-08"
as.POSIXct(d)
[1] "2014-07-07 21:00:00 BRT"
Answer
Because as.POSIXct.Date doesn't look for a timezone (and won't pass it to .POSIXct if you specify it in ...) and Date objects are "UTC", so your POSIXct is offset from the UTC of the Date object.
It would be better to call as.POSIXct on the character string directly, if you can:
> as.POSIXct("2014-07-08", format="%Y-%m-%d")
[1] "2014-07-08 BRT"