Bumblebee of the South:
McDonough, Peter
REPORT ON BRAZIL BUMBLEBEE OF THE SOUTH WOBBLING TOWARD DEMOCRACY Brazil is "the land of the future," a wag said long ago, "and it always will be." Now, once again, the Latin American country...
...Almost certainly, the coalition will shrink if the implementation of structural changes-for example, even modest agrarian reform-begins to threaten conservatives...
...it will also entail encroaching on the privileges of the powerful, many of whom voted for Cardoso as a prudent alternative to what they perceived as the menace of ardent populism...
...The danger of reversion to nondemocratic rule is past, but the quality of democracy in Brazil is questionable...
...What really matters is governability: Questions of political form are secondary...
...One clear success has been the experience of the Iberian peninsula...
...It may be that the land of inspired soccer and appalling politics will continue to make up blueprints as it goes along...
...The real danger in Brazil is not a reversion to authoritarianism but the emergence of Darwinian democracy...
...But the military has shown no inclination to get back into politics...
...the typical response, even among the poor, refers not to social justice but to conventional affirmations of political liberty, freedom of expression, and the like...
...Some changes have been for the good...
...Troops have occupied parts of the favelas, the sprawling slums of Rio ruled by drug-traffickers, but poll-takers have reported that 80 percent of the slum-dwellers approve of the measure...
...The state, while not exactly threadbare, has still to marshal the personal and material resources to rule effectively...
...This was topped by a 90-percent approval rate among those living outside the favelas...
...A return to dictatorship appears to have been rendered obsolete by a process of learning on both sides...
...Security is fortress-like in the homes of the wealthy, with top-of-the-line systems that provide for three different entrance drills-for residents, for guests, and for servants...
...On the other hand, the government is barely able to collect taxes, especially from the well-off...
...PETER McDONOUGH Peter McDonough, author of Power and Ideology in Brazil (Princeton University Press, 1981), teaches political science at Arizona State University.tate University...
...The 1980s were the lost decade for economic growth in Latin America...
...The jury is still out, for example, on the post-Communist scenarios unfolding in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe...
...So far the authorities have looked the other way, for fear of provoking turmoil if they were to define this recreational gambit as "an intrusion...
...State-owned companies abound, and many of their employees collect salaries without showing up for work...
...Cardoso put together a broad conservative and centrist coalition to defeat his rivals on the left...
...Like the aerodynamically improbable bumblebee, Brazil doesn't quite crash...
...Two lessons can be drawn from these conditions and from the recent election...
...there is no going back for Portugal or Spain...
...When surveys ask, "What is democracy for you...
...As yet there is no distinctly Brazilian model of democratization...
...The good news comes none too soon for a country that has been wobbling toward democracy since 1985, when the military, which held power for nearly twenty years, stepped down...
...Still, there are inklings of the democratization of everyday life...
...At a recent academic meeting in Sao Paulo it was noted, half playfully, that if the armed forces were to contemplate such a move today they would first commission a public opinion survey...
...By 1993, however, a turn-around was evident, and the Brazilian momentum has been sustained...
...This creates a paradox at a time when democratization has been equated with privatization and the downscaling of government...
...It may be that to speak of a "model," in a country known for chronic improvisation, will turn out to be a contradiction in terms...
...A somewhat different route, involving a head start in social equity that may have compensated for the alien nature of Western liberal democracy, has been taken in South Korea and Taiwan...
...To reach this goal will mean not just belt-tightening that will pinch the impoverished even more...
...With the inauguration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso as president last month, Brazil at last seems close to reaching full-scale industrialization and a seat among the world's players...
...On the one hand, the government apparatus is bloated...
...The rate of population growth has slowed...
...Membership in voluntary associations is comparatively high...
...The distribution of wealth and income is more concentrated today than in recent memory...
...Mindful of the analogy with South Africa, Brazilians refer to the syndrome of poverty amid the promise of abundance as social apartheid...
...In this respect, Brazil stands about where Spain did nearly twenty years ago, when that country began to democratize after the death of Franco...
...Efforts at democratization, it was feared, could not withstand economic stagnation...
...Now, once again, the Latin American country whose territory is larger than that of the contiguous United States, with a population larger than that of Russia, is poised to become a major power...
...The landlocked city of Sao Paulo has no beaches, so on weekends many ordinary citizens decamp to the bucolic grounds of the University of Sao Paulo...
...The other lesson is that Brazilians want a government that works, pretty much regardless of "isms...
...Classified ads for condos in Miami are a regular feature of newspapers in Rio and Sao Paulo...
...For Brazil the lean years extended into the nineties, even as the economies of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico picked up speed...
...Of the several paths to democracy around the world that have been followed since the mid-1970s, when Portugal began what was to become a march away from authoritarianism, two have proved to be successful...
...For the others, the outcome remains doubtful, though hopeful...
...One is that ordinary, poor Brazilians are not politicized, in the sense of "seething with discontent...
...Most commentators attribute his victory to his skillful performance as finance minister, in particular to his stabilization of a notoriously inflation-prone currency...
...Material resources are concentrated in a few hands, the educational system fails to absorb and train as many citizens as it should, and the police routinely abuse their powers...
...But fear of social reform of the virulent sort that the Left was thought to represent was perhaps as big a component of the winning coalition as any principled adherence to monetary respectability...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 4
