BRAZIL-BETWEEN ROCK AND OCEAN
Rabben, Linda A.
At the end of the Copacabana beach in Rio stands a huge rock called the Morro do Leme. Slowly but remorselessly, the tides are turning the rock into sand. If we measure human change by this...
...286...
...He has become a martyr of democratization, despite the unlikelihood that he could have fulfilled the extravagant hopes of the public...
...The incident showed how vulnerable the PT is to such attacks, especially when the media give the government the headlines...
...DEMOCRACY COMES FROM THE PEOPLE, not from the state...
...The prime example of this ambivalence is the Workers Party (PT...
...12,000 landless farm families camp out by the sides of highways protesting the slowness of the government's agrarian-reform program...
...some seem afraid of actually winning...
...An amnesty has guaranteed that the leaders of the dictatorship and its torturers will not be prosecuted en masse...
...Sivio was back at work, protected twenty-four hours a day by coworkers...
...The grassroots religious groups (CEBs) try to organize the poor in order to pressure local authorities to provide public services...
...Still, the country has a far freer political atmosphere now than during the years of the military regime, which Brazilians refer to as aquele sufoco —the suffocating epoch from 1964 to 1985...
...But how effective can a new constitution be in guaranteeing democracy and preventing military takeovers...
...Lula countercharged that the government was looking for an excuse to declare the PT illegal...
...It has also become an easy target for establishment politicians...
...Neves's death moved Brazil to tears...
...All the candidates seemed to be making the same promises...
...The strongest opposition leaders have familiar faces, too...
...In 1982 Leonel Brizola, Goulart's brother-in-law, who spent years in exile, won the governorship of Rio de Janeiro state...
...The current one states, for example, that education is compulsory until age fourteen, but most Brazilians quit school before age twelve...
...Public interest in the shaping of the document has given way to speculation about presidential succession...
...Later, when the PT threatened to sue the government officials for slander, the officials backed off...
...This may go on for years, since the congress elected last November is busy writing a new constitution...
...On a visit to an encampment of landless farmworkers in southern Brazil, I met Miguel Sfivio, a rural union president who had been shot four times two months earlier by an unknown gunman, probably hired by a local landowner...
...They all represent a new kind of leadership in a country whose leaders have traditionally come from the upper classes...
...Too much success might weaken its peculiar power...
...It was I who felt honored to meet someone who risks his life working for agrarian reform, I said...
...In 1984 Brazil's congress elected the country's first civilian president in twenty-two years, an event hailed as proof of "redemocratization...
...But the new parties are themselves weak...
...Many of these promises cannot be kept because of Brazil's federal system, in which the central government controls most appropriations to local authorities...
...Many of the leaders of the national Landless Farmworkers Movement began their political careers in the CEBs...
...But they are creating something relatively new in Brazilian society: grassroots organizations that work to change the lives of their own communities...
...They remain outside the conventional political system, and so their accomplishments cannot be gauged by laws and policies...
...Before the constitutional delegates were elected in November 1986, a presidential commission presented a long list of suggested changes in the constitution...
...Tancredo Neves, who won the presidency in 1984 but died before he could take office, had been Brazil's prime minister in 1962, when the army and its allies introduced a parliamentary system to dilute the power of President Joao Goulart, whom they overthrew in 1964...
...A LONG TRADITION OF BYZANTINE maneuvers and secret deals has survived the change in government...
...The 1986 284 election campaign was marked more by accusations of corruption than by discussion of issues...
...the federal government imports thousands of tons of radioactive beef and milk from Europe to break resistance to its economic reforms—and one more day passes without congress managing to pass a law...
...This is all typical of Brazil's tough and dirty political game...
...Veteran politicians seem more concerned with guaranteeing their future power than with writing the new Constitution...
...Confronted by millions of peaceful demonstrators, the military did not feel free to impose its unpopular candidate on the country...
...But I'm sure you'd do the same if you were in this situation," he replied...
...Corruption eats away at the rest...
...I doubted that I would have so much courage...
...Now run by civilians instead of generals, the government continues to implement policies that no lawmaking body has ever approved...
...The constitutional assembly has become a mere backdrop for elite-politics-as-usual...
...Led by an outspoken unionist nicknamed Lula (Luis Inicio da Silva), the PT has gained plenty of national attention...
...The preponderance of the poor (at least 50 percent of the population, much more in the chronically depressed and crowded Northeast) also narrows the local tax base...
...A coalition of workers, unionists, progressive church people, and intellectuals, the PT has become a genuine representative of Brazil's working classes, winning few elections but mainly serving as a kind of conscience for the political system...
...The same is true of PT activists and other community leaders...
...THE CONVENTIONAL POLITICAL system reappeared out of the dictatorship's ruins, and many old politicians tried to reestablish their old domains...
...Repeated thousands of times, however, his example can make at least as much difference as the speeches of politicians...
...Extravagant promises are a traditional feature of populist politics in Brazil...
...Without federal money, state and municipal governments have few resources...
...The minister of justice unilaterally assumes the role of chief censor...
...The minister of justice and the federal police chief immediately blamed the PT for the deaths, citing testimony (later withdrawn) that the first shots had come from a car carrying PT officials...
...Thousands of local voluntary associations, newly established independent trade unions, lay religious groups, the landless who camp by the highways: all are trying to exercise a different kind of political power...
...But in Brazil itself significant events occur...
...Some of these groups have moved closer to new political parties in hopes of influencing power centers...
...Then a few articles appear in the Wall Street Journal, Brazil reaches a compromise with the lenders, and this vast country of 130 million people disappears again into the shadows of our ignorance...
...No wonder, then, that grassroots organizations are reluctant to get involved politically, even though they realize that politics is where the power lies...
...By these criteria, Brazil never has been a democracy...
...Although these rallies, the biggest in Brazil's history, did not achieve their objective— the presidential election took place in the congress—they did ensure Tancredo Neves's victory...
...The old faces, the old promises do not seem to inspire confidence...
...Future grassroots leaders are getting their political education by discussing liberation theology in Bible-study groups...
...At the end of our conversation, he said he was honored to have foreign visitors with "such a high level of education...
...José Sarney, who became president at Neves's death, had been the leader of the military government's tame political party before switching to the opposition in 1984...
...Huey Long would feel at home here...
...Eventually the ocean does turn the rock into sand...
...The National Information Service (Brazil's CIA) "advises" the president...
...It began in 1980 as an offshoot of independent trade unions that were beginning to make gains in the industrialized states of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais...
...It mandates "respect for the physical and moral integrity of prisoners," but the state tortured political suspects for years and continues to torture common prisoners...
...In talking to Brazilians, I found only one (who works for a political party) who did not express contempt for politicians...
...Along with this apparent reprise of Brazil's oldfashioned populism has come considerable disenchantment...
...For North Americans, Brazil gains attention only when it seems that it might not pay its international debts...
...If we measure human change by this standard, Brazil's 486-year history as colony and nation seems very short indeed, and the past few years mean almost nothing, just enough time for a few grains of sand to precipitate...
...They also act as consciousness-raising groups for people who have never before been able to act politically...
...In July 1986 the PT became involved in a strike of migrant farmworkers that turned violent...
...Among them is an explicit prohibition of military involvement in politics...
...If this kind of politics no longer inspires enthusiasm, hope did flash through the population in 1984, when huge demonstrations supported direct presidential elections...
...Civilian government in Brazil is still provisional and authoritarian, governing by the past dictatorship's or its own decrees...
...Lack of resources, the state's own manipulation of the law, and a bloated bureaucracy have led Brazilians to distrust the institutions of government as well as those who run them...
...Miguel Sfivio's influence may not travel beyond the limits of the small town where he lives and works...
...An official investigation exonerated the PT just before the November elections, but this news was buried on the back pages...
...Brazil's official unions had been government-controlled since the 1940s...
...If you consider a democracy to be a polity where there are free and fair elections, a functioning legislature, an independent judiciary, and complete freedom of speech, press, and religion, then the answer has to be "No, not yet...
...Since that time, the government has blamed every public disturbance and illegal strike either on the PT or the CUT, the trade-union central organization...
...Brazil's earlier constitutions were little more than statements of unattainable ideals...
...People say they vote in protest or disgust...
...They seem unsure of how to gain political leverage without becoming contaminated by political corn285 promise and corruption...
...Has Brazil indeed become a democracy...
...People complain that candidates show up in their neighborhoods right before the election, finally delivering some of the sewers, pavements, and electricity lines they promised four years before...
...Janio Quadros, president before Goulart, became mayor of Sao Paulo in 1985...
...Politicians are also famous for attending funerals and erecting billboards emblazoned with their names in front of any publicworks projects they sponsor...
...The vocation of civic activist is new in Brazil...
...Two bystanders died when troops apparently fired into rock-throwing crowds...
...And the military has stepped backstage, where it continues to wield considerable influence...
...Political opponents no longer disappear, the press is free of censorship, direct elections have taken place, voluntary associations and pressure groups are springing up...
Vol. 34 • July 1987 • No. 3
