Brazil Impeachment!
Keck, Margaret E.
Undone by charges of corruption and influence peddling, Brazilian President Fernando Collor de Melo has been impeached and faces trial by the Brazil-ian Senate. The removal of a Brazilian president...
...This is not to say that there haven't been moments of mobilization-in response to the Cruzado plan in 1986, for example, and around the presidential elections in 1989...
...Farias & Co...
...Not only was the government incompetent, it lacked dignity, and people cared...
...The motion was passed by an overwhelming majority in the Chamber of Deputies at the beginning of October...
...Dynamic moments like this sometimes provide opportunities for change, but they do not themselves signify change unless they become deeply embedded in new institutional practices...
...The high level of emotions in the movement to oust Collor has to be understood against this backdrop of repeatedly inflated expectations and repeated failure...
...Farias, face paint, and rap music...
...So it's hard to predict exactly what the long-term impact of this crisis will be, or even if it will have a long-term impact...
...The CPI was not a judicial process, but the material it collected subsidized future court proceedings...
...One of the remarkable aspects of the whole story has been the size of the paper trail...
...By late August some of the most important pillars of support for his government began to topple...
...The result was a congressional investigation, the Comissdo ParlementardeInquirito(CPI), whose report at the end of August documented corrupt activities by P.C...
...When he got to Brasflia, he insisted that he was not going to make political deals with politicians, but would get his support directly from the people...
...In response, opponents suggested that Brazilians instead take to the streets that day wearing black, the color of mourning...
...The memory of the diretasjddemonstrations is an important point of reference in this story...
...The removal of a Brazilian president in a constitutional process rather than by military coup is a noteworthy event-one which may do a great deal for the credibility of law in a country where laws have been applied with considerable discretion...
...In the past, the easy solution would have been to fire the finance minister...
...But in this case, Brazil's international credibility with creditor countries and international banks depended heavily on the confidence they had in the current minister...
...The charges, in turn, might not have amounted to much, had not Collor himself called the people out into the streets, which in turn mobilized the party leaderships...
...In May, 1992 the president's brother Pedro accused Collor and his old crony Paulo C6sar Farias of profiting from elaborate influence-peddling schemes...
...But the Margaret E. Keck teaches political science at Yale University...
...The series had a staggering impact on young people who had never heard the story of the student demonstrations of those years and the kind of violence with which they were putdown...
...What Collor did, essentially, was to provide an opportunity and a set of symbols for people to express and focus their extraordinarily diffuse frustration with the status quo...
...Since then, it has been hard work building democratic institutions in the context of ever deeper economic crisis and weak leadership at the national level (particularly under Jos Sarney, Collor's predecessor...
...A series of demonstrations built to crowds of several hundred thousand in large cities, and sizeable ones in smaller cities as well...
...But it's important to remember that many of the politicians in the leadership of the coalition to impeach Collor themselves have significant reputations for corruption-Orestes Quercia, for example, the former Sio Paulo governor and PMDB party leader who aspires to the presidency...
...The diretas movement was perhaps the last gasp of a relatively united opposition movement to the military regime-the last moment in which partisan distinctions were subsumed under at least an appearance of mass consensus, and for a short time there was a real and intoxicating sense of national purpose...
...There are elements of this in Collorgate, and one can only hope that they persist in its aftermath...
...The state of Alagoas is famous even in the context of Brazil's notoriously corrupt Northeast for the degree of impunity that politicians have enjoyed...
...are convicted should serve as a sobering reminder of how things really are...
...A striking element in these demonstrations was the number of young people involved in them--college and especially high school students, normally characterized as apolitical and interested only in going to shopping malls...
...Perhaps he was just too busy to notice the multimillion dollar renovation of the house and grounds where he was living...
...The case against the president has gone to the Senate, where a trial must be conducted within 180 days...
...Farias and several others...
...The investigation dug up evidence that money from bank accounts controlled by Farias had been deposited into bank accounts belonging to members of Collor's family, and had been used to pay for renovations to the house and garden of Collor's home in Brasilia...
...This incident was the basis on which he built his anti-corruption reputation...
...To get at what the Collorgate scandal might-and might not-mean, one must tackle three formidable puzzles...
...very few wore green and yellow...
...The finance minister who presided over that operation left the government after a scandalous affair with the married justice minister, and worse still, wrote an embarrassingly sentimental book recounting how they passed love letters back and forth in cabinet meetings...
...Gradually, the colors of the demonstrations changed, as the opposition to Collor reappropriated the colors of the flag...
...But however broad its support-and it was broad indeed-the movement for direct elections lost...
...Though this approach had worked well in the past, it didn't work this time around...
...But howevermuch evidence was emerging, prior to mid-August it still looked unlikely to endanger the president himself...
...But more than these, I think it was about repeatedly raised expectations and about repeated failure and disappointment...
...In a country where the image of corruption is a black suitcase full of cash, Farias' associates wrote checks, siphoning off millions of dollars at a time when most of the population was feeling the impact of a decade-long and extraordinarily deep recession...
...Finally, the size of the anti-Collor demonstrations appeared to convince many politicians that the president was a lost cause...
...Thus began the war of the colors...
...The first puzzle is why and to what extent corruption is suddenly being taken seriously...
...Although Collor managed to get around Marques Moreira' s resistance, there may simply not have been much money to spread around...
...What's Wrong With Corruption...
...So part of the answer to why corruption has become an issue lies simply in the radical disjunction between Collor's anti-corruption campaign platform and the actual practice of those in government...
...And before one concludes that the result of this process will be equal treatment before the law, the juxtaposition of the October prison massacre in Sio Paulo, in which over a hundred prisoners died, with the likely penalties if P.C...
...He also surrounded himself withmany old cronies from Alagoas, including some of those who have figured most prominently in the current scandal...
...Despite the abundance of stories of corrupt dealings in his governorship of Sio Paulo (1978-82) and his 1984 presidential campaign, Maluf decided in mid-August to support impeachment despite his history of close personal links with Collor (he was best man at the president's wedding...
...Through Collorgate, the Bra-zilian Congress-and large portions of the population-became active players in a game where for too long both had been sitting on the sidelines...
...By late August the demonstrators were wearing green and yellow...
...The CPI was not initially expected to come up with very much-after all, there have been countless such commissions...
...No Sale" Collor's initial strategy for securing support was to open up the public coffers to fund programs that would benefit political allies...
...While governor, he got a lot of media coverage for firing a group of state employees who collected paychecks without ever showing up for work...
...Until that point, the prospects for his impeachment were very low, and no compelling new information transformed the body of evidence already available...
...On that Sunday, thousands of people poured into the streets wearing black...
...The size of the demonstrations influenced wavering politicians...
...In the middle of August, in a speech to taxi drivers in Brasilia, Collor appealed to the "silent majority," who he claimed still supported him, to come out onto the streets of Brazil on Sunday, August 16, wearing green and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag...
...Moribund student unions were suddenly flooded with new members...
...But it's been a decade in which expectations were raised to irrational heights, only to be dashed over and over again...
...Second, in a period characterized by profound popular demobilization, what sparked the massive street demonstrations all over the country calling for Collor's impeachment...
...A second part of the answer lies in the scale of the corruption, the fact that it was traceable, and the degree to which "kickback inflation" appears to have alienated Brazilian businessmen...
...Such a wave of opposition had not been seen since the unsuccessful mobilizations for direct presidential elections in 1984...
...First, corruption and influence peddling in Brazil are nothing new...
...In the meantime, Collor stepped down, his Cabinet resigned, and Vice President Itamar Franco formed a new gov-emment...
...Subsequently, the Brazilian bar and press associations brought a motion before Congress calling for Collor's impeachment...
...The ministerial changes in Collor's second year showed some signs of turning this image around, when the corruption scandal broke...
...why should a president suddenly stand to lose his mandate because of corruption...
...In late July and early August, TV Globo-one of the pillars of Collor's support-ran a very popular mini-series based on Alfredo Sirkis' Os Carbondrios,a novel about the student movements of 1968 in Brazil and the beginnings of some of the guerrilla organizations that tried, with notable lack of success, to oppose the military dictatorship...
...As more and more information became public, the press helped to fuel public outrage...
...It may simply have never occurred to the Alagoans who went to Brasilia that they might be caught out...
...But it remains to be seen whether or not Brazilians will seize the rare opportunity to look beyond this particular drama towards more sweeping reform...
...Collor beat Workers Party candidate Luis Indcio Lula da Silva in a run-off election by six percentage points, becoming the first directly elected president of Brazil since 1960...
...More than any speech that a politician could have given, the mini-series appears to have awakened in literally thousands of young people a notion that they have a role to play in politics...
...Students gave the August demonstrations a special kind of tone-mixing protest with a celebration of public presence, complete with huge puppets of Collor and P.C...
...During his first year in office, he made little effort to win congressional support, in spite of the fact that the party to which he belongs has minimal representation in Congress...
...With considerable help from Brazil's most powerful television network, TV Globo, he built an image of himself as a young, energetic anti-establishment politician-in spite of his impeccable establishment credentials...
...Son of a former senator, Collor comes from one of the most powerful political families of the northeastern state of Alagoas...
...meaning of Collor's impeachment, like the Senate verdict, is still out...
...The rosiest interpretation of this course of events would be that a truly revolutionary assertion is emerging in Brazil-that the rule of law is something worth fighting for, and that it should apply equally to the powerful and the powerless...
...He began his political career as mayor of Macei6 as an appointee of the military government, and progressed through the Chamber of Deputies and the state governorship...
...Municipal elections were only a month away, and close identification with Collor began to look like political suicide...
...And third, in a political system where sitting presidents can normally co-opt enough congressional support at critical moments to survive such crises, why was Collor unable to do so...
...One reason was the unwillingness of Finance Minister Marcflio Marques Moreira to risk Brazil's shaky financial position on a questionable effort to insure the president's survival...
...Some limited reforms are almost certain to take place, such as the outlawing of bank accounts in false names...
...Politicians who themselves have a reputation for corruption were scrambling to condemn Collor...
...Paulo Maluf, president of the conservative PDS party and candidate for mayor of SIo Paulo, is a particularly notorious example...
...He did none of those things, and worse still, he alienated the middle class, whose standard of living has fallen precipitously over the last few years, by confiscating their savings accounts for 18 months without bringing down inflation...
...It was an extremely paradoxical campaign...
...This is not to say that Collorgate was not about corruption or about equal treatment...
...But there were surprises: witnesses who came forward with information that led to the paper trail of checks and phoney bank accounts, bank employees who resisted pressures to stall investigations of bank records, and members of Congress who became unexpectedly committed to the investigation...
...Collor ran for president in 1989 on an anti-corruption platform...
...Collor's efforts to turn accusations of corruption against his accusers were a complete failure, so his ouster can't be interpreted just as an anti-corruption movement...
...But because the opposition is so diffuse and diverse (as were its predecessors in the past), it has no project of its own...
...The idea seems to have spread primarily by word of mouth...
...Their interest was sparked by the broadcast of a television program--a chance confluence of events which reminds us of the role of coincidence in political history...
...But first, the story...
...Collor presented himself as the proverbial savior, the man on a white horse, who would clean out the corrupt politicians and speak for the marginalized poor...
...It's important to note that the president was not directly and personally implicated in any of the transfers uncovered, though members of his family and household were...
...Collor's Color War The answer to the second puzzle--where the extraordinary levels of mass mobilization came from-is that Collor himself called them into being...
...She is the author of The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (Yale University Press, 1992...
...Collor allowed them to become, once again, "the opposition," and to recapture an image of national unity and purpose that had been lost for close to a decade...
Vol. 26 • December 1992 • No. 3
