Brazil's Dead

Brazil’s Dead End Larry Rohter APRIL 23, 2020 ISSUE Brazil Apart: 1964–2019 by Perry Anderson Verso, 224 pp., $26.95 The Edge of Democracy a documentary film by Petra Costa O Mecanismo [The Mechanism] a television series created by José Padilha and Elena Soarez Francisco Van Steen Proner Ramos Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with supporters on the day he agreed to start a prison sentence for corruption, São Paulo, April 2018; from Petra Costa’s The Edge of Democracy For Brazilians, January 1, 2003, was one of those rare moments in history when everything seems possible. It was Inauguration Day, and not only was power being transferred from one democratically elected civilian president to another for the first time in more than forty years, but the man donning the green-and- yellow presidential sash, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was a former lathe operator and union leader, and the son of illiterate peasants—what Brazilians call povão, a man of the people. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had traveled from every corner of their vast country to celebrate his swearing-in, and they flooded the esplanade in front of the presidential palace in Brasília, waving banners, chanting “hope has vanquished fear,” and cheering the incoming president’s promise of a new era of honesty and transparency in government. Sixteen years later, Lula, as he is universally known, was several months into a long prison term, having been found guilty of corruption and money laundering during and after his eight years in office. His hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff (whom Brazilians usually call by her first name), had been impeached, with the connivance of political parties nominally allied with her, and the left- wing party Lula founded and led, the Workers’ Party, had been all but obliterated in the municipal elections that followed soon after. Encouraged by that outcome, an obscure ultra-right-wing congressman from Rio de Janeiro with no party support, Jair Bolsonaro, had launched an insurgent campaign for president that, shockingly, was about to put him in control of Latin America’s most populous nation. How Brazil got from Lula to Bolsonaro in so short a time seems unfathomable, even to many of the 210 million Brazilians who lived through the process. Two main theories have been offered to explain the momentous shift. One is that Lula, by presiding over the most corrupt government in Brazilian history, betrayed those who believed in him and that Bolsonaro became the instrument of their disgust and revenge. The other is that Lula and his party were victims of a “parliamentary coup d’état” and a campaign of judicial persecution, both aimed at restoring to power the elites who scorned Lula and regarded him and his party as a threat to their interests. In Brazil Apart: 1964–2019, Perry Anderson, an emeritus professor of history and sociology at UCLA, positions himself squarely in the second camp. Lula is not only innocent of the trumped-up charges of which he has been convicted, Anderson argues, but he and his party are solely responsible for virtually all the social and economic advances Brazil has enjoyed this century. From 2003 to 2016, he writes, Brazil was “the theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major state,” making it for the first time in its history “a country that mattered politically beyond its borders, as an example and potential inspiration to others.” The collapse of that noble experiment, he would have us believe, was the work of a jealous, vindictive, and treacherous opposition, and he directs particular opprobrium at Lula’s predecessor in office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the center-left party he then led, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party. About Bolsonaro, Anderson reiterates the obvious: he is a moral monster. He spouts racist invective at black and indigenous Brazilians; is a misogynist; uses the most vile language imaginable to refer to gay people; extols the military dictatorship that tortured, exiled, and killed Brazilians for twenty-one excruciating years; sees arming the middle class as the solution to the country’s crime problem; wants to hand the country over to the rapacious corporate interests that are pillaging the Amazon and fouling pristine beaches; and is waging war against a free press. If he has redeeming qualities, they are carefully hidden, though Anderson generously describes him as “crude and violent certainly, but also with a boyish, playful side, capable of a coarse, on occasion even self-deprecating, good humor.” Lula, on the other hand, is far more complicated and interesting. When I first met him in 1978, he was leading a metalworkers’ strike in the industrial belt around São Paulo and, at the age of thirty-three, just emerging as a national figure. He seemed inspiring, a charismatic, plain-speaking orator born in the parched and poverty-stricken interior, the seventh of eight children in a family that, like millions of others, had migrated to industrial cities in the south in search of a more bearable life. He left school after the sixth grade, sold oranges and shined shoes before getting a factory job, lost part of a finger in an industrial accident, then lost his first wife during childbirth. As Anderson writes, “Lula embodies a life-experience of popular hardship and a record of social struggle from below that no other ruler in the world approaches.” That was Lula the labor leader. Lula the politician and president has proved to be a rather different matter. From the time the Workers’ Party, founded in 1980 and often referred to as the PT, its Portuguese-language initials, began winning mayoralties, it engaged in the standard schemes to siphon money from public coffers that have always contaminated Brazilian politics and invented a few new ones of its own. Some of that graft inevitably found its way into the pockets of party leaders. But PT stalwarts who brought the abuses to Lula’s attention, thinking he would intervene, were instead drummed out of the party, and in 2002, Celso Daniel, the mayor of a São Paulo suburb and coordinator of Lula’s presidential campaign, was murdered—a case that, though still unsolved and consigned by Anderson to a brief mention, revealed an elaborate network of bribes, kickbacks, slush funds, extortion, and other payoffs to the PT. Referring to Lula and the corruption that was institutionalized during his first term as president, Anderson urges the reader to brush aside “lapses in the PT of which he had, of course, been unaware.” But that assertion is challenged by the sworn testimony of associates of Lula who turned state’s evidence, such as the former party treasurer Delúbio Soares, barely noted by Anderson, and the former minister of finance Antonio Palocci, whom he dismisses as a “toad” and a snitch. And all of that was just a prelude to the wholesale pilferage of public assets that provoked the Operation Car Wash investigations beginning in 2014: billions of dollars stolen from Petrobras, the state oil company, and distributed to the PT, its allies in Congress, and corrupt businessmen. Inadvertently, Anderson is highlighting one of the central problems in current Brazilian politics: the unwillingness of Lula and the PT to accept the slightest responsibility for the corruption that flourished during their years in power or even to concede wrongdoing. Lula, Anderson claims, was jailed merely for “his inspection of a beach-side condominium” and the “improvement of a friend’s retreat.” But Lula’s own depositions, along with piles of documentary evidence, are available online for all to see, and they point not only to his guilt on the charges filed against him but also to several channels of malfeasance that have yet to be judged, including the unexplained wealth of his son “Little Lula,” a former zookeeper who became a millionaire during his father’s time in office. And an “everybody does it” argument doesn’t wash either: the PT came to power promising to hold itself to a higher standard than its rivals, so the sense of deception and disillusionment has been especially sharp. The “parliamentary coup” theory also has enormous holes that Anderson blithely ignores. Contrary to what he implies, the impeachment articles against Dilma were largely drafted not by her opponents but by Hélio Bicudo, a founder of the Workers’ Party and a distinguished jurist and human rights defender who held senior posts in a pair of PT governments in São Paulo; appalled by the thievery metastasizing around him, Bicudo broke with Lula in 2005 but continued to espouse the party’s core values of social justice. The articles included election fraud and negligence as chair of the Petrobras board from 2003 to 2010, but Eduardo Cunha, the devious president of the Chamber of Deputies, accepted only the weakest one: that Dilma had illegally borrowed money from state banks to make up for budget shortfalls. Both Cunha and Dilma’s vice-president, Michel Temer, were members of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which has no defined ideology and seems to exist only to enjoy the fruits of power and corruption. In a political system with more than thirty parties, it has often provided the support in Congress that any president needs in order to govern effectively, for which it has exacted a high price in the form of ministerial appointments and other patronage. Its alliance with the PT was especially uneasy, and Cunha, whom Anderson describes as “an exceptionally skilled and ruthless politician, a master of the black arts of parliamentary manipulation and management,” held back the stronger impeachment charges in hopes of saving his own skin; he too was enormously corrupt, and the Car Wash investigation had already unearthed a wealth of incriminating evidence against him.

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