Does Brazil Still Need a Revolution?
Fraenkel, Carlos
POLITICS ABROAD Does Brazil Still Need a Revolution? CARLOS FRAENKEL As I walk to the Memorial of Resistance in Sao Paulo a few days before the election, I wonder whether a revolution is no...
...It takes half an hour of negotiating at the school's entrance before the two guards get permission to let us in...
...While the Gini index—the income inequality coefficient—fell from 0.59 to 0.54 during Lula's tenure, the gap between rich and poor in Brazil remains one of the world's widest...
...But how immature were my grandfather's ideals, I wonder, and how much "pragmatic" compromise would he agree to today...
...Brazilians can readily relate to this part of Lula's biography, because much of Brazil's best literature tells about the existential struggle of those who live in the Sertao...
...Serra himself spent fourteen years in exile...
...The goal, in other words, is not to change the system, but to move to the other side of it...
...But does the government have the power to democratize the education system and make sure that the right to education, guaranteed in the Constitution, doesn't mean different things to different citizens...
...After all, Lula hasn't touched any of their privileges...
...As we walk through an affluent neighborhood to the private school I went to in Sao Paulo in the early eighties, the villas often can't be seen behind the high walls that come with electric wire, video surveillance, frightening dogs, and armed door men...
...But even the seemingly all-powerful Lula cannot get them both elected...
...There is, for example, Plmio, who runs on a socialist platform (which gets him less than 1 percent of the vote...
...And then there is, of course, Dilma Roussef, who will succeed Lula as the president of Brazil...
...If I had doubts about this, they dissipate on the flight to Sao Paulo as I read an encomium on Lula's welfare programs in the Economist...
...On the connecting flight the excitement with Brazil's economic upturn is palpable...
...They are all equipped with big speakers that aim at making a jingle stick in minds, construed around the number of the candidate that must be typed in the voting booth...
...Much too late, in other words, to pay off at the next election...
...Every schoolchild, for example, reads Graciliano Ramos's 1938 novel, Vidas Secas (Barren Lives), the story of Fabiano and his family who fight to preserve their humanity amid heat, drought, and poverty until, in the end, they give up and set out to find a better life in the city...
...She doesn't think so...
...We're now delivering on this promise...
...Perhaps the revolution, then, must begin in the minds (pace Marx), and there is indeed hope that this might happen...
...645 US) per month per family...
...Playing by democratic rules comes with more than time constraints...
...What sometimes gets lost, I feel, in the eulogies and emotional recollections, is that today's Brazil is not the Brazil he fought for—first through the Communist Party, which he joined in 1931, and then as a leader of the armed struggle against the military regime from 1967 to his death...
...But can even a well-meaning government like the PT's democratize health care against the resistance of the elites...
...In this respect things look considerably better for Dilma...
...That's part of the background to the PT's greatest corruption scandal, the Mensalao affair in 2005, which almost cost Lula his job...
...Consider Marisete Cerqueira, for instance, who cooks and cleans for people in my apartment building...
...But I can't figure out why they like Serra and detest the PT so much...
...And in a televised debate of the elections, the moderator asks Serra what he considers Lula's greatest achievement: "that he abandoned the political program that got him elected in 2002 and continued the economic and social policies of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...As a consequence many families are lifted out of extreme poverty...
...But in the Iate Clube, the chichi restaurant overlooking the yacht port, where dinner for four costs what a domestic maid makes in a month, everyone, except for the waiters, is white, has a smart-phone, and exudes a sense of entitlement as if inequality were a law of nature...
...Cars are the ultimate mark of economic success...
...There surely is a correlation between formal education and political choice...
...The Classe C is all the rage these days...
...Favelas line the runway at Guarulhos airport in Sao Paulo...
...What the Mensalao affair shows is how difficult it can be to follow up on good intentions...
...A recent study, carried out by a consulting firm, casts light on the nexus between rising spending power, happiness, and the deeply entrenched class structure of Brazilian society...
...and needs more than an hour to get home by bus...
...It now includes more than 50 percent of the population...
...And the rich continue to be terrified of the poor...
...He's always been a diligent student," one teacher tells me...
...Teachers are collecting money to pay for a consultation with a private dermatologist for one of their students...
...Many key figures in the government of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) were fellow combatants of his in their youth...
...Now in their sixties, the ex-guerrillas have become part of Brazil's political establishment: center-left politicians, who, I often hear, have since sobered and matured...
...But having one in Sao Paulo means, above all, spending time stuck in traffic (when you're allowed to use the car at all...
...An acquaintance in Sao Paulo, a devout Catholic, lights candles and makes promises of good deeds to get her son into law school...
...Having to leave school to support the family at age twelve, cooking and cleaning for others six days a week for little money— isn't there something wrong with that...
...Many of those interviewed describe their purchases as the fulfillment of a dream...
...On the whole, then, there seems to be little desire for change...
...So why do people spend a large part of their meager income on things that have limited or no utility...
...From now on things will get better, one PT government at a time...
...Most people stranded here are migrants who, like Lula's family in 1952, wanted to escape the Sertao, the desert-like region in the North-East (Sertao is derived from Desertao—the great desert...
...As for Dilma, as a little-known politician who never held elected office, her victory is largely due to Lula's immense popularity (his approval ratings reach 80 percent during the two months I'm in Brazil...
...But on its own affirmative action may not be enough," he explains...
...Although the paintings cause considerable media stir, they do not reflect the mood in Brazil's intellectual circles...
...The township of Guarulhos has one of the highest concentrations of shanty towns...
...But if the new disciplines are well implemented, they could help embed change in the democratic process and give citizens the intellectual tools to take charge of their life...
...Many high school teachers I talk to argue that Brazil's elites are deliberately keeping the masses ignorant...
...The Socratic revision of beliefs will surely not change things as quickly as a socialist revolution...
...Perversely, Brazil's best universities are the free public universities funded by the federal government...
...At a family reunion with my upper-middle-class relatives in Sao Paulo, just before the run-off between Dilma and Serra, emotions and decibels run high...
...On the way back, another taxi driver tells me that he has never seen the people so satisfied with the government...
...What I fear is that quota students will simply reproduce the system of oppression, discrimination, and social exclusion of which they were victims...
...4342—vote X Y to see the great things he'll do for you" pretty much sums up the core message of all the jingles...
...Sometimes privilege is also seen as an expression of God's will...
...Leaving aside Lula's immense personal charisma as a man from the people who talks like the people and rose from shining shoes to the presidency, I wonder how a little improvement can have such a big effect...
...Dilma's stance on abortion becomes a major issue as the election goes into the second round...
...Some suspect Serra to be a closet politician of the Right who only poses as a social democrat...
...Would a Jose Serra government mean a real alternative...
...Key figures of the government, like Jose Dirceu, fell in the wake of the scandal, opening the way for Dilma's ascent, as she replaced Dirceu as Lula's chief of staff...
...Otherwise he wouldn't be able to afford to send his daughter to one of the top private schools in Salvador, where the monthly tuition is about 1,500 Reais (ca...
...We might, after all, be preparing the abduction of one of the rich kids who study here...
...In the 1960s, Serra was a prominent student activist in the left-wing Catholic youth movement that championed a "humanist socialism" and, like its Marxist counterparts, was persecuted by the military regime...
...In 1888, Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery...
...Like my parents, she became a member of a militant Marxist group as a student...
...I last visited Brazil in 2003, at the beginning of the Lula government, when some still hoped and others feared that Lula would pursue a socialist agenda...
...At this point health care in Brazil remains a two-class system...
...Companies grow to the satisfaction of the elites, which in turn generates new jobs...
...Although this is surely an exaggeration, Lula's critics on the Left concur that he hasn't fundamentally changed things...
...I get to see the fairy tale in Fabio Barreto's hagiographic movie, Lula, the Son of Brazil, the most expensive production of Brazilian cinema...
...and Paulo Vernucchi, Lula's minister of human rights, who represents the government at the ceremony in the Memorial of Resistance and recalls setting up a clandestine meeting for my grandfather under his code name of "Walter...
...According to the optimistic narrative we should see the gap close gradually until the right to health care, guaranteed in the Constitution, means the same thing to all citizens...
...Thus, both Geddel Vieira Lima and Jaques Wagner, political rivals for the office of Bahia's governor, pose throughout the city in Lula's company...
...A free magazine, O Mundo Corporativo (The Corporate World), explores the dilemma of company owners in a booming economy (should they grow or sell...
...To be sure, that's not social justice (or not yet on the optimistic view...
...The appointment he gets through the state system is in two months, which would force him to repeat the entire school year...
...His lifelong project was a socialist revolution...
...Every student now studies these disciplines over three years...
...115 US)—to families that are classified as extremely poor or poor, that is, have a monthly per capita income of 140 Reais (ca...
...During the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, the DOPS hunted down and tortured the regime's opponents, including my grandfather, killed through electric shocks in 1970...
...One taxi driver I talk to turns out to have a law degree, but drives a taxi to supplement his day-job salary...
...The PT was caught paying large sums to buy off votes in Congress...
...My apartment in Salvador has a view over the Farol da Barra, the old light house, one of the most picturesque and historical spots in town...
...But while they managed to escape to Europe as the repression turned violent at the end of the 1960s, Dilma was captured and tortured and spent two years in prison...
...The chief element of Lula's success formula is the bolsa familia, which transfers small amounts of money—up to a maximum of 200 Reais (ca...
...The memorial is symbolically located in what used to be the Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), the state's organ to suppress political resistance to the government...
...Carlos Minc, Lula's minister of the environment (one of the political prisoners set free in 1970 in exchange for the German ambassador Ehrenfried von Holleben...
...One can disagree with that mission, but one shouldn't feel embarrassed calling it by its name...
...More than twelve million families are currently enrolled, which has the virtuous side effect of keeping kids in school and getting them vaccinated, the two conditions families must meet to get the money...
...On the other hand, she keenly wishes for her daughter to become a lawyer...
...What distinguishes Lula from the inhabitants of Guarulhos is of course the fairy-tale ending: the boy from the North-East who, without completing high school, first becomes the leader of the powerful Steel Workers' Union in the industrial center of Sao Paulo and then, after three failed runs, is elected president of Brazil...
...In 2008, the Lula government passed a law that makes philosophy and sociology classes obligatory in all Brazilian high schools...
...Since 1988 the Constitution guarantees health care for all as a fundamental human right...
...In Salvador, the former center of the Brazilian slave trade, more than 80 percent of the population is of African descent...
...in the town hall, he's made an honorary citizen of Sao Paulo...
...29 US to $42 US—which lies just above the extreme poverty line of 70 Reais), the additional income gives the domestic economy a boost...
...That shouldn't affect his job prospects, though, because God has already arranged for his father to be a senior partner in a large law firm in Sao Paulo...
...The key to breaking the mechanism of social exclusion, however, lies not in prestigious research projects, but in the reform of the public school system...
...Lula himself wasn't able to complete high school because he had to help support his family once they settled in Sao Paulo (he started working as a shoe shiner and street vendor at age twelve...
...Another feature of the campaigns is the candidates' hope to piggyback on Lula's popularity...
...Members of the Classe C, the study finds, spend up to 60 percent of their income on luxury items: things like Nike shoes, perfumes, hand bags, flat screen TVs, and cars, paid off in small monthly parcelas (portions), often over years...
...In the memorial's crowded auditorium, the Commission for Amnesty of the Ministry of Justice solemnly apologizes for the crime committed by the Brazilian state and declares my grandfather a "hero of the Brazilian people...
...Poor kids, then, cannot get into the universities they can afford but can get into the less demanding private universities that they cannot afford...
...The rich may have more money," she explains, "but they really don't know how to throw a party...
...Marisete adds, alluding to Dilma's guerrilla past...
...When my wife wants to take a picture, we are politely but firmly advised that photographing the location is prohibited...
...Much more representative is a manifesto endorsing Dilma's candidacy, signed by more than five hundred Brazilian philosophers, that hails the Lula government for having stirred Brazil toward a "society based on freedom, justice, and solidarity...
...Carlos Fraenkel teaches philosophy and Jewish studies at McGill University in Montreal...
...Parties still have little binding power in Brazil, and members of Congress often cross party lines when they deem it advantageous...
...A skin disease has disfigured his face, preventing him from leaving the house...
...At age twelve she had to drop out of school because her father got fired and the burden to support the family fell on her and her siblings...
...This is not the only time I find that the social class structure has been internalized...
...traffic has gone so out of hand that road space is rationed with severe restrictions on car use according to a system that associates license plates with week days...
...Among his slogans: "I don't know what a congress man does, but vote me in and I'll tell you...
...What's important is that he has set the country in the right direction...
...As Lula's opponents point out, he hasn't invented bolsa familia but built on the foundation laid by Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...He dismisses the welfare programs bundled together in Lula's bolsa familia as bolsa esmola (charity fund) meant to appease the poor and points to a long list of unresolved issues: from the deplorable state of the public school system to the longstanding challenge to face up to a handful of powerful farmers and redistribute vast stretches of idle agricultural land to the landless masses...
...This narrative concedes that things in Brazil aren't yet perfect, but argues that one can't expect Lula to redress half a millennium of injustice in eight years...
...The political campaigns, at any rate, seem to take a dim view of the voters' intelligence...
...According to the study, these things are status symbols that give their owners the sensation of belonging to the rich...
...The largest number of votes for member of Congress goes to Tiririca, a popular TV clown, suspected to be illiterate...
...Once a critic of Lula's welfare programs and identified with the neoliberal agenda of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (under whom he served as a minister), he now promises to expand Lula's signature bolsa familia (family fund) and denies allegations of the PT campaign that he plans to privatize Petrobras, Brazil's powerful oil company...
...Since 2004, many public universities have adopted quotas according to varying racial and social criteria, although, as Naomar points out, the Lula government never succeeded in signing a comprehensive formula into law...
...and a street was named after him in Rio...
...82 US) or less...
...These jobs help to lift previously poor people into the so-called "Classe C," the low middle class, which starts at 1,100 Reais (ca...
...That makes them competitive with European and North American offers...
...the bishop of Guarulhos, for example—the shanty towns around Sao Paulo's airport—calls on his flock to vote against her for this reason...
...As far as I can tell there is not much at stake in the 2010 elections...
...Three of the four candidates were Marxists in their youth, and two of Dilma's opponents are themselves veterans of Lula's Workers' Party (PT) who only recently left it: Plmio de Arruda Sampaio in 2005 and Marina Silva, the candidate of the Green Party, in 2009...
...That's not only very expensive but also a long-term project that will take a generation or two to bear fruits...
...Since members of the Classe C also spend rather than save, the domestic economy is further stimulated...
...I get around much faster by metro and public busses, for which fast lanes are reserved on all the main roads...
...The extent to which Dilma herself took up arms is a matter of debate, but she certainly endorsed them as legitimate...
...how the Football Championship in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016 will further boost economic growth, and how best to benefit from the growing interest pharmaceutical companies are showing in the Brazilian market, one of the few to come out of the global recession relatively unscathed...
...900 US), almost three times Brazil's monthly minimum wage...
...Up until today, Afro-descendants, who make up about half of Brazil's population, are for the most part poor...
...There's plenty of symbolic recognition—a political biography has just been released...
...It seems like a paradox: on the way to a campaign event to hear Lula, Dilma, and Jaques Wagner in Salvador I ask the taxi driver whether things have gotten better since Lula took office...
...But she doesn't finish work until around 7 p.m...
...Vilma, who belongs to the generation of my parents and Dilma and likewise was part of the student groups opposing the dictatorship, is proud of the Brazilian health care system...
...Every campaign car stops here, and since voters are not only deciding about the president, the congress, and the senate, but also about state governors and state parliaments, this makes for a lot of cars...
...Among the main mechanisms of social exclusion in Brazil is the education system...
...a plaque will soon be unveiled in Jaboticabal, the city where he was born...
...Consider health care, for example: Vilma Santana, a public health professor at the Federal University of Bahia and a leading scholar on workers' health, tells me how her maid had a thyroid cancer removed...
...This is also a concern that Naomar de Almeida Filho, the president of the Federal University of Bahia, has about affirmative action programs (which his university was one of the first to propose...
...The goal is to "internationalize" Brazilian academia...
...Every candidate who is able to find a picture of himself or herself with Lula makes sure to put it up...
...CARLOS FRAENKEL As I walk to the Memorial of Resistance in Sao Paulo a few days before the election, I wonder whether a revolution is no longer necessary in Brazil...
...As the film ends, I cannot help wondering whether it is not a telling parable for the mechanisms of social exclusion that constrain the opportunities of so many here: it takes a miracle for a boy from a poor family in the North-East to get into a position of power...
...A few days later I witness an unsettling scene in a public high school in Cajazeiras, one of the poorest neighborhoods on the periphery of Salvador...
...I vote for Jose Serra," she says, "because Dilma is in favor of killing little children...
...He does get into law school, but only in a private university, not in a prestigious public one...
...Without access to education, land, or employment (new jobs went to European immigrants), the freedom of the former slaves wasn't worth much...
...Marisete, for example, tells me that if she could just get to school in time for the evening classes, she'd do it for the cash...
...While universities everywhere in the world are struggling with tight budgets, Brazil's are flourishing as never before...
...In addition to not paying a penny for the surgery and follow-up treatment, she received full compensation benefits during the recovery period...
...Stronger criticism comes from a radical fringe...
...So we want to help him out...
...Um pouquinho" (a little) he says...
...On the other side of the social divide, surviving in favelas or the desert does not loom large on peoples' minds...
...At the 29th Bienal in Sao Paulo, whose theme is the intersection of art and politics, I see a series of controversial paintings by Gil Vicente, who portrays himself as shooting and stabbing his "enemies," a group of prominent politicians including both Lula and Fernando Henrique Cardoso...
...On the back of every seat an advertisement from a large consulting firm alerts passengers that "the world is looking at Brazil, but may not be seeing your company" and then provides contact information...
...The philosophers' manifesto is an example of what I would call the optimistic narrative about the PT government...
...Among the left-wing governments that democratically came to power in Latin America over the last couple of decades, Lula's has arguably shown the least radical imagination...
...Only with the amnesty of 1979 did she get her political rights back, the same year my parents left Germany to return home...
...Little would be won, for example, by graduating black engineers, lawyers, and doctors who think and behave exactly like their present-day white colleagues...
...Since saving isn't an option when you rise from nothing to almost nothing (the average per capita income of the extremely poor went up from 49 to 72 Reais—ca...
...The deterioration of the public school system in recent decades has made it all but impossible to get into one of the coveted disciplines at a good university— mainly engineering, law, and medicine, which open the door to wealth and prestige...
...Lula never had a comfortable majority to get more radical projects off the ground—from investing into the public school system to redistributing agricultural land...
...Colleagues in Salvador encourage me to apply for a visiting research fellowship that is handsomely endowed with a 5,000 Reais monthly stipend, almost $3,000 US...
...They include Jose Dirceu, Lula's first chief of staff (one of the political prisoners set free in 1969 in exchange for the American ambassador Burke Elbrick, whose abduction my grandfather helped to organize...
...In fact, most of the money Lula assigned to education was spent on expanding federal universities...
...It would obviously be absurd to claim that the PT government has an interest in "keeping the masses ignorant...
...It's true that he has support in conservative circles...
...Her key campaign promise is unequivocal: to continue Lula's politics...
...And didn't she rob banks and kill policemen as a student...
...On several occasions I ask Marisete if she doesn't see herself as a victim of social injustice...
...In her view, his success depends on God, not on the fact that he went to one of the most expensive private schools and was enrolled in an equally expensive preparatory course for the entrance exam...
...These hopes and fears have long vanished...
...From rich to poor, in the end everyone's lot has gotten better—at least um pouquinho...
...My final destination is Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, and Brazil's third-largest city after Sao Paulo and Rio...
...The country with the world's highest number of cosmetic surgeries (adding a little here, taking away a little there is a popular gift for the daughters of the rich) is the same country in which students risk losing a school year waiting for their appointment...
...He spent part of his sabbatical in Salvador to learn about how philosophy is being taught in Brazilian high schools...
Vol. 58 • January 2011 • No. 1
