Emergent Brazil : Key Perspectives on a New Global Power [1 ed.] 9780813055381, 9780813060675

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Emergent Brazil

University Press of Florida Florida A&M University, Tallahassee Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers Florida International University, Miami Florida State University, Tallahassee New College of Florida, Sarasota University of Central Florida, Orlando University of Florida, Gainesville University of North Florida, Jacksonville University of South Florida, Tampa University of West Florida, Pensacola

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Emergent Brazil Key Perspectives on a New Global Power

Edited by Jeffrey D. Needell

University Press of Florida Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

Copyright 2015 by Jeffrey D. Needell All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book may be available in an electronic edition. 20 19 18 17 16 15

6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Emergent Brazil : key perspectives on a new global power / edited by Jeffrey D. Needell. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8130-6067-5 1. Globalization—Brazil. 2. Brazil—History. 3. Brazil—Foreign relations—20th century. 4. Brazil—Economic conditions. I. Needell, Jeffrey D., editor. F2523.E44 2015 981—dc23 2014048363 The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida. University Press of Florida 15 Northwest 15th Street Gainesville, FL 32611-2079 http://www.upf.com

Contents

ist of Figures vii L List of Tables ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: An Attempt to Grasp the Moment 1 Jeffrey D. Needell

Part I. Brazil, Today and Yesterday 1. The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past 13 Marshall C. Eakin

2. Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Autumn? First Impressions of the June Days of 2013 31 Fernando Lattman-Weltman

Part II. Brazil’s Political Scene 3. Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents 51 Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco Jr.

4. Too Soon to Give Up, Too Late to Really Matter: Impasses, SelfDeception, and Brazil’s Media-Democratization Agenda 68 Fernando Lattman-Weltman

Part III. Brazil’s Urban Scene 5. Crime Victimization in Brazil, 2009: Risks by Race, Class, and Place 89 Charles H. Wood and Ludmila Ribeiro

6. Pacification Urbanism: A View from Rio’s Old Industrial Suburbs 108 Mariana Cavalcanti

7. Popular Culture in Emergent Brazil 127 Bryan McCann

Part IV. Brazilian Religions and the World 8. Neo-Pentecostals on the Pitch: Brazilian Football Players as Missionaries Abroad 147 Carmen Rial

9. The Global Spread of Brazilian Religions 163 Cristina Rocha and Manuel A. Vásquez

Part V. Brazilian Forest and Field to the World 10. Biofuels: Energy for the World 183 Roberto Rodrigues

11. Agribusiness and Sustainability of the Orange Juice and Sugar and Ethanol Industries of São Paulo and Florida 199 James A. Sterns, Thomas H. Spreen, and Paula M. Mercadante

12. Environmental Governance and Technological Innovations for Sustainable Development in the Amazon 219 Judson F. Valentim

13. Emergent Socio-Environmental Development in Amazonia 241 Marianne Schmink

Part VI. Brazil’s New Diplomatic Role in the World 14. Brazil: An Emerging Nuclear Power 261 Carlo Patti

15. The Strange Case of the Missing Relationship: Brazil and the United States 275 Peter Hakim

List of Contributors 291 Index 295

Figures

3.1. Popularity of Brazilian presidents, 1985–2013 52 3.2. U.S. interest rates, world commodity prices, and GDP of Latin America, 1980–2010 58 3.3. Predicted and actual popularity of Brazilian presidents, 1987– 2013 61 5.1. Homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, in Brazil, São Paulo, Mexico, and the United States, 1995–2010 92 5.2. Robbery and assault in Brazil, 2009, by household income 97 6.1. Rocinha Overpass, designed by Oscar Niemeyer 113 6.2. Alemão Teleférico 113 6.3. Manguinhos Library 116 6.4. Aerial view of Bairro Carioca 123 6.5. Inside Bairro Carioca just before its partial inauguration 124 10.1. Grain harvests in Brazil, 1990–1991 to 2012–2013 184 10.2. Cattle productivity in Brazil, 1990–2012: Pasture area versus livestock herds 185 10.3. Matrix of domestic energy supply, 2012: World, OECD, and Brazil 186 10.4. World per capita energy consumption, 2012: A new global geopolitics 188 10.5. Life cycle of ethanol from sugarcane 191 10.6. Sugarcane agroecological zoning (ZAE Cana), a program for cane expansion in suitable areas 193 10.7. Sugarcane, ethanol, and sugar production in Brazil, 1975–2011 194

11.1. Brazilian sugarcane production and usage, 1970–2009 201 11.2. Brazilian sugarcane market, 1989–2010 202 11.3. U.S. sugarcane-sourced sugar production and sugarcane area in production, 1980–2012 203 12.1. Deforestation arc in the Legal Brazilian Amazon, 2006 223 12.2. Crop area, production, and productivity of annual grain crops in Brazil and the Legal Brazilian Amazon, 1990–2011 229 12.3. Evolution of the cattle herd and pasture area in Brazil and the Legal Brazilian Amazon, 1975–2006 231 12.4. Stocking rates in Brazil, the Legal Brazilian Amazon, and Acre, 1975–2006 232 12.5. Cattle herd and annual deforestation in the Legal Brazilian Amazon, 1990–2011 232

Tables

3.1. Exposure to commodities and international interest rates, 2000 57 3.2. Externally determined economies in Latin America, 1980–2011 59 3.3. Effects of political crisis on presidential popularity 63 5.1. Percent of people who were a victim of a crime in Brazil, 2009, by gender, residence, age, education, household income, and color 95 5.2. Percent of victims who called police in Brazil, 2009, by gender, residence, age, education, household income, and color 100 5.3. Likelihood of calling police in Brazil, 2009, by type of victimization (logistic regression) 102 11.1. Orange juice consumption in major consuming countries and regional unions, 2000–2001 to 2007–2008 200 12.1. Accumulated deforestation in the Legal Brazilian Amazon, 1977–2011 222 12.2. Social indicators in Brazil and the Legal Brazilian Amazon states, 2010 224

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Acknowledgments

This volume drew upon a collaborative conference at the University of Florida in 2013 by CPDOC/FGV (Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil/Fundação Getulio Vargas, the Center for Research and Documentation of Contemporary Brazilian History at the Getulio Vargas Foundation) and the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Florida (LAS). We are grateful for that opportunity, overseen and supported by CPDOC Director Celso Castro and LAS Director Philip Williams. The funding and sponsorship critical to the meeting drew upon LAS’s Title VI grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Resource Centers Program, the University of Florida’s Office of Research, the FloridaBrazil International Linkage Institute, and the Bacardi Family Eminent Scholar Endowment, as well as travel funding from CPDOC. Several images and data illustrating the volume were made possible by the courtesy of others. We wish to thank the Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro for permission to reproduce figures 6.4 and 6.5, both drawn from the Cidade Olímpica collection; BP p.l.c. for permission in figure 10.4 to use BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, http://bp.com/statisticalreview; Embrapa and Eduardo Delgado Assad, for permission in figure 10.6 to use the map on page 27 of Embrapa, Zoneamento agroecológico da cana-de-açúcar: Expandir a produção, preservar a vida, garantir o futuro, 2009 (Rio de Janeiro: Embrapa, 2009); and the journal Nova Economia, for permission in figure 12.1 to use the map produced by Sérgio Rivero, Oriana Almeida, Saulo Ávila, and Wesley Oliveira, in “Pecuária e desmatamento: Uma análise das principais causas diretas do desmatamento na Amazônia,” Nova Economia 19, no. 1 (January/April 2009): 41–66, http://dx.doi. org/10.1590/S0103-63512009000100003.

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Introduction An Attempt to Grasp the Moment Jeffrey D. Needell

In a near-mythological conversation in the 1960s, James Reston, a celebrated columnist for the New York Times, stated, “The people of the United States will do anything for Latin America except read about it.” He was promptly answered by Sol Linowitz, U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States, who rebutted, “I don’t believe that. I believe they will read, but I think reporters will do anything for Latin America except write about it.”1 Nowadays, at least in terms of Brazil, neither assertion is true, but the result is often problematic. That is, many Americans who want to be well informed will read about Brazil, and many reporters on the spot are writing about it, but there is a considerable problem about what is read and who is writing it. There are spectacularly talented and knowledgeable journalists covering Brazil, but, far too often, what drives the news is the superficial and the sensationalist—a glance not just at ephemera but at the most obvious or compelling aspects of them. This book is an attempt to offer the reader something else. We attempt to grasp the moment, the historical moment in which Brazil is emerging among the great powers. For centuries, Brazil has had one of the largest land masses among the world’s countries; for generations, Brazil has had the fifth-largest population. For decades, Brazil has had the largest industrial plant in Latin America. Now, it is a global contender. For most of the past twenty years, Brazil has had one of the ten largest economies in the world; in 2012 it was sixth, behind Germany and France but ahead of most European nations, including Britain. It

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is a significant nuclear power. Its diplomatic role, independent of the United States for some time, has reached beyond Latin America to the Middle East and to the United Nations. Yet it is also a nation that was marked in mid-2013 by spontaneous demonstrations concerning basic public services and the corruption of its public servants; it is a society with an extraordinary gap between its richest and its poorest citizens. While no book can explain all of this, this one will go a long way toward searching behind these headlines to probe the interlinked contexts without which they cannot be understood. The idea for this book came from an idea for a collaborative conference, and the idea for such a conference came from Celso Castro, the director of the Center for Research and Documentation of the Contemporary History of Brazil (Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, CPDOC), the preeminent historical research center in the nation, affiliated with the prestigious Getulio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getulio Vargas, FGV) in Rio de Janeiro.2 Noted for years as the best archival center for post-1930 Brazilian historical research, under Celso Castro’s leadership CPDOC has also created one of the top educational programs in Brazil. As part of this, CPDOC has been reaching out throughout the world to make contacts and alliances. In 2009 Castro, who had spent a year of research in the 1990s at the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, contacted Philip Williams, that center’s director, about setting up a formal relationship. The cooperative agreement that followed was immediately associated with a planning seminar to conceive and organize a conference in which both centers’ faculties could collaborate. As it happened, Manuel Vásquez, a professor of religion at the University of Florida, had just proposed to Philip Williams the possibility of using one of the Center for Latin American Studies’ annual conferences to discuss Brazil’s current impact on the world. Thus, Celso Castro’s proposal met with natural sympathy and immediate support. The conference that followed, “Emergent Brazil” (February 2013), was planned by both centers’ faculties. Faculty members from the two centers co-chaired almost all of the panels and in many cases were speakers as well. Each center’s potential for a conference on contemporary Brazil was clear. CPDOC’s mandate speaks to the origins of the Getulio Vargas

Introduction: An Attempt to Grasp the Moment · 3

Foundation, which has sought since 1944 to serve the nation by advanced training in public administration and research in the social sciences and economics. The FGV’s schools and programs have expanded over the years until it has become, in effect, one of the foremost universities in the nation, with alumni in the most conspicuous positions in the public and private sectors. CPDOC itself, founded as a history archive and research institute in 1973, has focused on the era associated with Getúlio Vargas, probably the single most influential Brazilian statesman of the twentieth century. In 2003 it launched its Graduate Program in History, Politics, and Cultural Legacies; in 2006 it inaugurated the Advanced School for the Social Sciences (an undergraduate program). The latter has only recently won first rank in a national survey by the federal government’s Ministry of Education and Culture. The University of Florida’s claims to general Latin American expertise go back to the early twentieth century. Its Latin American center’s origins in the Institute for Inter-American Affairs date to 1930, making it the oldest such Latin American studies center in the United States. Specifically Brazilian interest was signaled with the university’s first course in Portuguese, taught in 1914. By the 1920s, Brazilian institutional affiliations and research focusing on agriculture had begun; by the 1940s and 1950s, Brazilianists at UF were present in the social sciences and humanities as well. Indeed, the advanced and varied quality of Brazilian research at the university is indicated by the fact that more than three hundred graduate degrees concerning Brazilian research have been earned there by Americans and Brazilians since 1953. After the 1971 appointment of Charles Wagley, the celebrated anthropologist of the Amazon, as graduate research professor of anthropology and Latin American studies, the center hosted its first conference associated with Brazil, “Man in the Amazon,” in 1973. The increased strength of Brazilianists in the humanities is signaled by the leadership for the next Brazilian conference, “Black Brazil,” in 1993, chaired by Larry Crook, a scholar of music, and Randal Johnson, a scholar of literature and film, and featuring colleagues across the social sciences and humanities. At present, the center’s Brazilianist strength is suggested by established, flourishing affiliated programs such as the summer program in Portuguese (1982), the Florida-Brazil Linkage Institute (1986), the Tropical Conservation and Development program (late 1980s), and

4 · Jeffrey D. Needell

the Brazilian Music Institute (2001). Most significantly, its Brazilianist strength is signaled by the center’s faculty and affiliate faculty. To give an example, in 2013 the center’s first steering committee meeting for the 2013 conference “Emergent Brazil” was made up of senior faculty with degrees in agricultural engineering, anthropology, economics, history, literature, political science, religion, sociology, and urban planning. In effect, both centers’ faculties, in seeking to ally their strengths and to call upon colleagues from other universities, public life, and public policy, had the expertise, reputations, and connections to put together eight panels featuring twenty-four presentations over two days, drawing upon people from Australia, Brazil, Britain, and the United States. The fifteen texts derived from those presentations represent the insights of people who, in almost every single case, have devoted their careers to Brazil. The reference to “the moment,” like the title “Emergent Brazil,” points to the purpose of the conference and this anthology. At a time when so many outside of Brazil were hearing about the nation because of its hosting the World Cup and the Olympics, we felt we had the opportunity and the obligation to explain contemporary Brazil with informed, compelling studies from a variety of angles. Such an endeavor to capture the meaning of the present has its dangers—like many others, we too were surprised by the mid-2013 movement in the streets. Yet, again, we like to think that anyone interested in why such a movement might occur would find much to think about here. The anthology provides a grasp of context to provide the backdrop for such an occurrence; indeed, we were immediately able to call upon one of our number, Fernando Lattman-Weltman, a political scientist with the required expertise, to provide a preliminary assessment of what had happened. Moreover, the reader will find, in aspects of the chapters by Eakin, Campello and Zucco, Wood and Ribeiro, Cavalcanti, and McCann, key elements informing the movement—a new, engaged democratic culture, rapid social mobility, hungry material and educational aspirations, a tradition of elite political manipulation and corruption, a fluctuating economic context, persistent urban crime and fear, and cynicism about public service and public servants alike. While good journalists refer to many of these elements, the researchers involved in

Introduction: An Attempt to Grasp the Moment · 5

this anthology can address them with the depth that comes from years of broad, scholarly reading and deep field research. What this anthology brings to bear on such a current event is also evident more generally. The book, by bringing colleagues together from so many different disciplines and callings, provides an integrated effort in which echoes and references among chapters will occur naturally as the reader explores the different perspectives and foci provided. The celebrated Brazilian musician Tom Jobim once quipped that “Brazil is not for beginners.” Here, at least, the beginner and the scholar alike will find a good deal that addresses many of the most important complexities of the half-continent to which we have devoted ourselves.

An Overview The anthology provides an introductory couple of chapters on contemporary Brazil (Part I, “Brazil, Yesterday and Today”) and then moves on to three approaches. The first approach, evident in Parts II and III, tends to go from the outside in, to show the ways the larger world has affected Brazil and thus to introduce the reader to Brazil’s internal development and character. The second approach, clear in Parts IV and V, emphasizes the ways Brazil’s domestic realities and production are influencing (and may influence) the larger world. The third approach, seen in Part VI, addresses Brazil’s new role as an actor on the global stage. In the introductory two chapters, Eakin’s, the first, leads off with a magisterial history of how Brazil got to the present. It provides a superb survey of two centuries of development, explaining a society and a nation reaching up and out to the world and suggesting some of its unique characteristics today. Lattman-Weltman’s, the second chapter, is an essay on the mid-2013 movement that inserts the June Days of 2013 into that historical trajectory, deftly pointing to what is truly new and what speaks to recurring patterns in Brazilian political life. The next two chapters begin the approach from the outside in. They part the drapes on the current political scene, dominated by the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party), and the impact Brazil’s global economic role has on it. One chapter zooms out to suggest the global economic influence on Brazilian politics: Campello and

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Zucco use sophisticated statistical analyses and theory to make the provocative argument that the domestic political success of the PT is dramatically shaped by issues political actors cannot create—the market for commodities and the availability of foreign capital. The next chapter zooms in, focusing on a particularly telling aspect of domestic politics, as those politics are transformed by success. In it, LattmanWeltman examines the complicated ideological approach to the mass media by the PT as it metamorphosed from a leftist opposition party to a party long empowered and profoundly wedded to Brazil’s global economic triumphs. The three chapters after that focus more tightly still on the domestic scene. Wood and Ribeiro’s study of urban fear and crime provides a telling contrast to the nation’s recent achievements and a clear explanation for many Brazilians’ daily concerns. Cavalcanti then takes up a close case study of the contradictions, cynicism, and problematic quality of urban reform as Brazil began preparations to host the World Cup and the Olympics. By doing so, she adds to our grasp of just how uneven Brazilian achievement has been and how enduring its informal power brokerage and traditional inequalities are. If these two pieces focus on the harsher contradictions between deep-rooted domestic inequities and a new, globally informed reality, the one that follows them, McCann’s chapter on popular culture, provides another aspect. He uses three case studies to demonstrate how the tremendous impact of new global economic achievement, new access to international models, and new social mobility have transformed contemporary popular culture and consumption. He argues that the ambitious poor and a new middle class have provided the basis for a vigorous, broader set of assumptions that both reflect and redefine culture for most Brazilians. The next two parts flip things into reverse. They focus on the ways in which Brazil’s metamorphosis has influenced or worked within the larger world. Two related chapters on religion introduce this globalization. Rial’s chapter demonstrates how Brazil’s global preeminence in football (soccer) has provided a missionary vehicle for Brazil’s booming neo-Pentecostal movement—the Word spread to the faithful at home in Brazil as well as to Brazilian emigrants and other believers abroad. She explains how the religion enables and supports world-class players, strengthens what is now a global movement, and sanctifies material consumption in ways that reflect the values of a global consumer

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culture. Rocha and Vásquez’s piece goes beyond Rial’s focus to explore the rise of Brazilian religiosity more generally, explaining its growing influence internationally both between the First World and the Third and within the Third World—a new, Brazilian aspect of global modernity in which pilgrims come to Brazil and missionaries depart from it as they seek new faith in the troubling backwash of modernity. The religion chapters are followed by four that deal with an abiding aspect of Brazilian reality—the rural sector and commodity exports— but in the dynamic, global context in which Brazilian exports and Brazilian agricultural production affect that context and are changed in response to it. Rodrigues provides the reader with an informed sense of how Brazilian agricultural and biofuel technology do, can, and should influence the world as it is and as it could be, in terms of the biofuel Brazil has learned to produce, can still produce (without environmental damage), and teach the world to make and to use. Sterns, Spreen, and Mercadante give us a solid case study contrasting the way two successful key commodities have developed in the United States and Brazil. It is a useful, on-the-ground example with implications in regard to impacts that the domestic market, global markets and competition, and local conditions and policy have on one another. Furthermore, it overlaps with Rodrigues’s focus on biofuel, as one of the two commodities explored is cane sugar, the basis for Brazilian ethanol. Valentim takes a larger view as he demonstrates how sustainable economic developmentalism has affected environmental and economic policies in the Brazilian Amazon and the impact (and potential impact) of that upon the world in material terms and in terms of models. He provides an interesting regional illustration of the larger national perspective of Rodrigues, and, like the other chapters, his emphasizes what Brazilian rural development has done and can do in the larger world. Schmink takes a more local approach to Amazonia but likewise focuses on developmental policy. She demonstrates how global concern with the environment enabled and informed the unique traditions in one Brazilian state in Amazonia, Acre, developing into a political movement that has created and implemented policies of sustainable economic development with global impact. The concluding part of the book has two chapters that emphasize the third approach: Brazil’s new role in the world as an actor in global affairs. The reader may well be most used to journalism dealing with

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this sort of thing but now can appreciate this role in the context made clearer by the anthology’s preceding chapters. Thus, Patti’s chapter on Brazil’s new role as a nuclear policy leader can be understood in terms of the industrial ambitions traced by Eakin and the opportunities grasped by a PT transformed by global economic success and political consolidation. Patti gives us the particulars of how Brazil sought to increase and cap its recent global successes by nuclear power and nuclear policy initiatives, informed by the larger desire to secure and increase its economic and diplomatic successes and to claim the global prominence associated with them. Hakim’s chapter on Brazil–United States diplomacy focuses on perhaps the single most significant global relationship for the new Brazil. He provides us with an assured sense of why those relations are unique. He does this in part by deftly contrasting those relations with U.S. diplomacy vis-à-vis India and Mexico. In effect, a Brazil transformed internally and internationally over the past several generations cannot be fitted into a common Third World box. It is neither a military asset in the global war on terror nor a dependent economic asset in the global capitalism that is now larger than any one nation. Emergent Brazil is defining itself in a changing global reality in which neither the United States nor Brazil has yet defined how they can work together or apart. Hakim points to areas of environmental policy and nuclear policy, which are commonly seen as potential arenas for working together, and then he quickly shows why neither is a likely possibility. The reader, having seen Brazilian environmental policy and nuclear policy analyzed in previous chapters, will be in a better position to ponder Hakim’s conclusions. In effect, once again, the varied exploration of contemporary Brazil provided in the anthology helps one to make greater sense of each chapter—and of contemporary Brazil. Here, then, is our attempt to provide the reader with something special on Brazil—Brazil as it has become, Brazil as it is now. We cannot state that we have covered every critical aspect of Brazil. Yet we believe we have conveyed a great deal of the nation’s complexity, richness, and special place in the world at a level that does justice to the subject and to the reader’s need to know. Given the significance of emergent Brazil, there is a great deal to know, indeed.

Introduction: An Attempt to Grasp the Moment · 9

Notes 1. See John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky, Hold the Press: The Inside Story on Newspapers (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 72; and John Maxwell Hamilton, Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 126. 2. The Getulio Vargas Foundation registered its name in the older orthography, in which Getúlio was spelled without the acute accent mark over the “u.” Thus, here and elsewhere in the anthology, that spelling is used in reference to the foundation. Otherwise, the modern usage is employed.

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I

Brazil, Today and Yesterday

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1 The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past Marshall c. Eakin

Brazil is no longer condemned to be the “country of the future.”1 After seven presidential elections over the past quarter-century, the world’s third-largest democracy and sixth-largest economy now has nearly twenty years’ experience with low inflation and a political stability that few countries in the world can match. Although inequalities remain some of the highest in the world, the Brazilian middle class has grown dramatically over the past decade, becoming the single largest socioeconomic group.2 Self-sufficient in petroleum and on the verge of exploiting some of the planet’s largest and deepest offshore oil fields, Brazil has also become the world’s greenest large economy, with nearly three-quarters of its energy provided by hydroelectric and biofuels.3 In 2014 the country hosted the World Cup, and in 2016 Rio de Janeiro will follow up as the site of the Summer Olympics. As the great recession shook most of the world after 2008, Brazil posted impressive economic growth, in particular with the help of a world commodities boom.4 Although Brazil’s growth has slowed since 2010 and will continue to face substantial economic challenges, I believe the country has entered into a very elite group of nations—those capable of sustained economic growth, with mass participatory politics, and able to spread the benefits of economic growth and democracy to tens of millions of citizens. Equally important, along with these impressive economic and political achievements, Brazil is one of the most culturally cohesive nations on the planet. It boasts perhaps one of the least fragmented and contentious cultural systems of any large nation.

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In this essay I highlight what seem to me to be the key turning points in Brazil’s long and slow rise into this elite club of nations. I am a historian, and by nature, I believe that the present has been profoundly shaped and created by the past. Although Brazil has in recent years suddenly been discovered by the North Atlantic media and business communities, the rise to prominence has taken centuries, with the key pieces coming together over the past eight or nine decades and producing the rise of a new or emergent Brazil over the past generation.5 For decades Brazil has lived with the dubious reputation of being a country of enormous potential—always unfulfilled. In this essay I focus on the key factors over the past century that I believe have led to the emergence of Brazil into the ranks of a select group of nations that will shape the world in the twenty-first century. I emphasize the key historical moments and processes that have contributed to the emergence of Brazil on the world stage and the weight of the past on the country’s present and future. Let us begin by looking at how much Brazil changed in the twentieth century. In 1900 Brazil had a population of around 18 million inhabitants, nearly 90 percent of them were living in rural areas, and just three cities had populations of more than 200,000. Brazil was overwhelmingly an agrarian society; coffee provided the engine of economic growth, Rio de Janeiro had a population of 600,000, and São Paulo had fewer than 250,000. Belo Horizonte was a small town of some 50,000 inhabitants, and nine of every ten Brazilians lived within 200 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The country’s incipient industries primarily produced textiles, food products, and clothing for local markets. Agriculture made up the single most important sector of gross domestic product and occupied as much as 80 percent of the labor force. The long-standing inequities of landownership lay at the heart of the inequalities in power and wealth that were at the core of Brazil’s challenges. Fewer than 700,000 votes were cast in the 1902 presidential election (less than 4 percent of the population). The literacy rate was probably around 15 percent. Fast-forward to the year 2000. With a population of 170 million (nearly ten times larger than in 1900), fewer than 20 percent lived in rural areas, and more than a dozen cities had more than a million inhabitants. São Paulo had passed 11 million and Rio de Janeiro more than 6 million, while little Belo Horizonte had surpassed 2.5 million in-

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 15

habitants. Metropolitan-area populations for all three cities were more than double those numbers, and yes, nearly eight of ten Brazilians still lived within 200 miles of the Atlantic coastline. Industry accounted for nearly 50 percent of GDP and agriculture less than 10 percent. Only about 20 percent of the labor force worked in the agricultural sector in 2000. More than 80 percent of all Brazilians lived in urban areas, and the centuries-long land tenure problems had given way overwhelmingly to urban issues. Although still a potent force in Brazilian politics, the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Movement), even when building support among urban sectors, became increasingly the representative of a smaller and smaller group of rural Brazilians. In the 2002 presidential election, more than 85 million Brazilians cast votes (half the population and more than 80 percent of the electorate), and the literacy rate was approaching 90 percent. Per capita income was thirteen times what it was in 1900.6 Across the twentieth century Brazil moved in a great arc of development from an agrarian, rural society with little political participation and very low levels of literacy to one that is overwhelmingly urban and industrial with very high levels of political participation and literacy. Inequalities have persisted with impressive tenacity, but the country and its people are healthier, wealthier, and better educated by far than in the early twentieth century. So how did all this happen? What were the key turning points, flaws, and challenges in this great arc? As a “recovering” economic historian I am still marked by a profound respect for economics as the indispensable foundation for Brazil’s emergence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One does not have to adhere to a mid-twentieth-century version of Marxism to recognize the power of capitalism in transforming Brazil since 1900. As a late-industrializing nation, Brazil has in some ways experienced the “advantages of backwardness” by both industrializing and moving toward a post-industrial economy at the right time.7 For as much as so many of us long lamented Brazil’s slow and tortured path to industrialization, in the century before 1970 only Japan experienced more impressive growth in per capita income, and I firmly believe that Brazil is where it is today because various regimes—democratic and undemocratic, rightist and leftist—intervened to move the nation’s economy forward.8 We could argue all night (and probably for the rest of our lives) whether Brazil would have been better served to have missed all

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this state intervention, but the fact of the matter is, for better or worse, where Brazil is now is due to this intervention. The increasingly conscious and planned use of protectionism and the inward turn in the 1930s and 1940s put the process in full motion, Juscelino Kubitschek’s boosterism and profligate spending (for all its flaws) produced the second great leap forward in the 1950s, and the massive state intervention of the military regime (with even more flaws) ignited the third booster in the 1960s and 1970s and set the stage for the most recent economic transformations. Ironically, many of those “pharaonic” projects of the ditadura (dictatorship)—Itaipú dam, a telecommunications systems, highways, penetration into the Amazon, ethanol production—turned out to be fundamental for the enormous economy we now see emerging. The statism of the military was not pretty and has left many problems, but imagine a Brazil today without the telecommunications systems (Rede Globo!), highways, electrical grid, ethanol production, aircraft manufacturing (Embraer), and iron and steel industry (Vale) that the military pushed forward in the 1970s. “Love or leave it,” the military laid the final groundwork for this most recent stage of growth, characterized over the past generation by a moderate form of neoliberalism, ironically under three (Marxist, leftist) opponents of the military regime. In my view, one of the least heralded transformations initiated in this period was the foundation of the agricultural revolution that continues to change Brazil. At the heart of the transformation is Embrapa (Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária, created under the military regime) and the research and development that made possible the adaptation and redesign of crops whose expansion and productivity have boosted Brazil into the ranks of the great agricultural exporters in the world today—alongside the United States, the European Union, and Canada.9 This agricultural shift, accompanied by massive rural-tourban migration, has made possible the transition, albeit a very rough one, to an overwhelmingly urban society in which fewer and fewer Brazilians engage in agriculture. This is a long, long way from the Brazil that for centuries was dominated by a landowning class (of sugar, gold, coffee, and cattle wealth) wielding immense power over a vast, impoverished, rural peasantry. Landowners remain powerful today in Brazil, but as one elite interest group, not the elite interest group. At the heart of the most recent industrial and agricultural transfor-

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 17

mation is technological innovation. In previous writings, in an earlier life, I argued that Brazil in the twentieth century had industrialized but failed to produce an industrial revolution largely because of the failure to invest in the research and development that historically propelled technological change in industrial revolutions across the Northern Hemisphere. I think Brazil is now on the verge of this revolution, stimulated by an increasing investment in research and development. Embrapa is perhaps the most visible and noteworthy example of this change, but the immense technological research complex on the Ilha do Fundão on the road to Galeão, Rio’s international airport, is perhaps the most visible harbinger of the future.10 Brazil has now, finally, put into place the traditional key elements of earlier industrializers—a revolution in productivity and landholding in the countryside, vibrant urban centers, foundational industries (iron and steel, power generation, automobiles), and abundant energy sources (water, ethanol, and now petroleum). Ironically, Brazil has done this at the very moment that the older industrial world has already moved on to the next great revolution—digital information. Fortunately for Brazil, the barriers to entry into this more recent revolution are much lower than into those of the past. Brilliant entrepreneurs with radical new ideas do not need massive infrastructure. They need an environment that fosters creativity and allows them access to the great global capital markets of the twenty-first century. My hope is that Brazil will be able to combine the strengths of the old order (industrial infrastructure and agricultural productivity) and the emerging new order (electronic, digital creativity).11 This is all to say that Brazil has come a long, long way, having entered into the half-dozen largest economies on the planet, and is poised for even greater success if it can build on the substantial infrastructure that is now in place. Nevertheless, the greatest challenge to Brazil over the past two centuries has not been economic but rather social and political. Like much of Latin America, Brazil has long been characterized by deep and persistent inequalities. For centuries these inequalities were created and maintained through the enormous power of economic, political, bureaucratic, military, and ecclesiastical elites. In colonial Brazil, a small minority of sugar planters, gold barons, merchants, bureaucrats, priests, and military officers ruled over a huge majority of slaves, free blacks and mulattos, poor whites, and Indians. In the nine-

18 · Marshall C. Eakin

teenth century, the rise of coffee and later industry diversified the elites both economically and regionally. They continued to dominate politics but faced increasing challenges from below, especially in the so-called regional revolts and uprisings that frequently shook the always fragile façade of social peace. With the diversification of the economy over the past hundred years, the power of the landowning elites has diminished dramatically, although they remain a powerful force. Industrialists, bankers, and business executives have emerged as new elites. Although the landowning elites of the nineteenth century were not a monolithic block, they certainly shared more economic and ideological baggage than today’s elites. They were fewer in number, male, and generally descended from landed families. They attended the same schools and rose through the ranks of (primarily) the Liberal and Conservative Parties.12 Contemporary elites face the challenge of maintaining political power through the rules of modern, representative, democratic politics. They cannot rely on the exclusionary and openly repressive politics of nineteenthcentury constitutional monarchy. The profoundly hierarchical and skewed class structure in Brazil has long been one of the great challenges to the formation of the nationstate and to its success. How to move from a society dominated by a small group of elites ruling over a vast population of poor masses has been at the heart of this dilemma. The elites have constantly reinvented themselves over the past two centuries as they have diversified. Immigration, especially to São Paulo, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries infused the Brazilian elites with new blood. At the same time, the enormous rural peasantry and slave population that continued to define Brazilian society in the nineteenth century gradually and slowly gave way to an urban and increasingly diversified social structure. The abolition of slavery, waves of European immigrants, and growth of an incipient industrial working class between the 1880s and the 1930s were pivotal for the emergence of a modern, urban, industrial Brazil.13 In 1880 Brazil had a population of just 8 million, nearly a million of whom lived in slavery, and the “city” of São Paulo had just 40,000 inhabitants! By 1930, the population of Brazil had grown to 30 million and the city of São Paulo to more than a million, and the process of urbanization was just beginning. In the great internal migration that is arguably the most remarkable social

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 19

transformation of the twentieth century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, tens of millions moved from the countryside to the burgeoning cities as Brazil moved from less than 20 percent to more than 85 percent urban.14 This massive redistribution of people off the land and into the cities completely transformed Brazil. At first, the great migration steadily shifted the enormous inequities in Brazilian society from the countryside into the cities. The personalistic politics and clientelism of the countryside that had defined rural society for centuries took on new, urbanized forms. Although the great rural-urban shift did improve the quality of life of millions, for decades it appeared simply to transfer the massive inequalities of the countryside into the cities. One of the great challenges facing nearly all of Latin America in the decades after World War II was how to increase the size of the middle sectors and decrease the vast population of rural—now increasingly urban—poor. Beginning with Getúlio Vargas in the 1930s, the most powerful policy response was “inward-oriented development” through import substitution industrialization and the creation of government social programs. At times this developmental nationalism drew support from the political left and right—from political figures as diverse as Getúlio Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek, and Ernesto Geisel. Policymakers from Celso Furtado to Delfim Netto wanted to “grow the pie” but bitterly differed on how to distribute that pie as it grew. Right and left, I would argue, in a sense, sought the same goal—to provide many more Brazilians with a higher standard of living, be it through more or less state interventionism. Seemingly, by the 1980s they had all failed as the great decade of debt crisis blanketed most of Latin America and as staggering inflation ravaged Brazil. In retrospect, I think we can say that despite the long wait, the foundations for recent growth of the middle sectors were gradually taking shape. As the economic foundations of growth took shape in the decades after 1930, the resource base, industry, agricultural expansion, and financial structures very slowly converged, producing the possibilities of social change by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the political arena, the battle over the correct economic policies and the distribution of wealth that crystallized around Vargas in the 1930s dominated the populist politics of the 1950s and 1960s, polarized Brazilians in the era of the cold war, and continued under military rule and beyond. The generals pursued policies that favored free market

20 · Marshall C. Eakin

capitalism but produced a profoundly socialized economy. As much of Latin America adopted neoliberal policies in the 1980s and 1990s, the debates continued in Brazil. Perhaps the most striking feature of Brazilian politics (for me, anyway) is the ability of the constantly adapting and shifting elites to dominate the political process over five centuries and in a variety of regimes, from monarchy to republic to dictatorship. Despite the massive economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the past 150 years, a relatively small elite continues to dominate politics.15 Clearly, this is not the Brazil of 1800 or 1900 when a monarchy or an oligarchy and its powerful allies controlled the reins of political power. Under the Old Republic in the early twentieth century, about 4 percent of the population voted, as compared to 60 percent at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, new and refined forms of clientelism and patronage continue to characterize Brazilian politics. The state remains the most important source of patrimony and patronage, and although the absolute number of people with access to political power may have increased substantially, the percentage of people who wield real power in the political system remains problematic. The good news is that Brazil today is the third-largest democracy on the planet, with more than 110 million voters in national elections and universal suffrage for the first time in its history.16 This has not happened overnight. For all my skepticism about electoral politics in Brazil over the past two centuries, the country does have a long history of the forms and procedures of representative politics, even if the numbers voting were very small until the mid-twentieth century. For all his flaws, Vargas recognized the need to mobilize the masses in the 1930s (albeit under a dictatorship) and was wise enough to step aside (under pressure from the military) in 1945, opening two decades of an “experiment with democracy.”17 As Brazil more than doubled in size, from 35 million to 75 million inhabitants, tens of millions of people fitfully learned about mass political participation and elections. This experience provided the country with an important formative experience to which those opposing the military regime turned after 1964. Despite the flaws of the military regime, regular, if heavily controlled elections continued for the next two decades. As the nation transitioned from military to civilian rule in the long 1980s, the question was not electoral politics or dictatorship but rather continuing the con-

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 21

trolled and manipulated elections versus truly open and participatory electoral politics. This long, although flawed experience with electoral politics has served the country well since the 1980s. With seven national elections and many, many other state and municipal elections since 1989, representative electoral politics are now firmly entrenched in the Brazilian psyche. The challenge is no longer to extend suffrage to everyone but to expand full citizenship to all Brazilians—to make citizenship more than casting a ballot. As many social scientists have pointed out in recent years, the key to a democratic Brazil is in making Brazilians full citizens. This is, perhaps, the major challenge facing Brazil in the coming decades. Constructing citizenship and civic nationalism in Brazil, I believe, has long been outpaced by the construction of a national cultural marketplace and the emergence of a potent cultural nationalism. The 1930s, like so much else in Brazilian history, mark the turning point in the creation of a truly national community across the vast expanse of the Brazilian continent. In a society built for centuries on profound ethnic, racial, social, and cultural cleavages, Brazilians began to forge a sense of identity as a people and a nation in the decades after 1930.18 One of the great challenges Brazilians faced over centuries was how to pull together this “archipelago” of peoples and regions into a coherent, cohesive, and integrated nation-state. The central government over decades has struggled to rein in regional elites. Certainly, the centralizing forces that have characterized the colonial regime, imperial monarchy in the nineteenth century, and the various republican regimes in the twentieth century worked to stitch together a nation in all its facets—state power across vast terrains, a national economy, and an “imagined community” of peoples who would see themselves as Brazilians.19 Throughout the past two centuries, the countervailing forces of decentralization have periodically slowed and checked this process of national integration. The regional revolts of the early empire and the early republic, the challenges to the Vargas regimes such as in São Paulo in 1932, and the distinctly Brazilian federalist regime after 1988 have all presented challenges to the creation of the Brazilian nation-state.20 The great challenge for the Brazilian state from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century was in many ways geographi-

22 · Marshall C. Eakin

cal and technological—how to reach all those peoples living within the enormous, fluid, and ill-defined political boundaries of Brazil, across the vast archipelago. Before becoming Brazilian one must first become aware of the very notion of something called Brazil. The challenge facing the Brazilian state was not only to create myths, rituals, and symbols but also to make the millions of people of African, Native American, and European descent—and their descendants—aware of those myths, rituals, and symbols. In the terminology of anthropologist-philosopher Ernest Gellner, the state attempted to foster the nationalism that precedes the creation of the nation. Even more so than most nations, Brazil faced the daunting challenge of scale in a country of truly continental dimensions.21 The rise of Getúlio Vargas and new technologies after 1930 increased the ability of the Brazilian state to extend its power into the vast interior of the country. At the same time, the central government began systematically to create school curricula, museums, holidays, and national symbols to overcome the long history of regionalism and fragmentation that had characterized Brazilian society, culture, and politics since independence.22 The rise of radio in the 1930s and then film produced a powerful shift with the emergence of popular culture, especially popular music (samba, in particular), carnaval, and futebol (soccer) as shared national experiences.23 Post-1930 Brazil is a fascinating mix of the efforts of the state to impose an increasingly unified vision of brasilidade (Brazilianness), as a diverse set of regional symbols, music, dance, and popular culture is eventually broadcast and spread across more than 3.25 million square miles of national territory. The expanding mass media bring the local and the regional into the national arena. Eventually, a relatively select set of these myths, symbols, and rituals comes to be seen as defining features not of particular regions but of Brazil as a whole. At the core of these features, I argue, was Gilberto Freyre’s vision of mestiçagem. Freyre, like most Brazilian intellectuals in the early twentieth century, acknowledged that what made Brazilians distinct was centuries of biological and cultural mixing, in particular of Africans and Portuguese. Unlike his pessimistic, racist predecessors, Freyre glorified this mixture (mestiçagem or miscigenação) and argued that it made Brazilians superior to all other peoples and nations. Freyre

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 23

turned the racist social thought about mestiçagem on its head.24 In the words of Peter Fry, “All Brazilians, according to Freyre, whatever their genealogical affiliation, were culturally African, Amerindians, and Europeans.”25 Even those Brazilians who were not biologically mestiços were cultural hybrids. This is the essence of the Freyrean vision of Brazil, brasilidade, and Brazilian national identity. Between the 1930s and the 1980s—with government support and through many grassroots shifts in popular culture—the Freyrean vision of Brazil gradually became the most potent narrative of Brazilian nationalism.26 Freyre’s portrayal of mestiçagem gradually became the dominant narrative among the contending narratives in this national cultural conversation.27 From the 1930s to the 1970s, a growing and vibrant popular culture created contending forms of cultural nationalism and identity. The 1970s mark a turning point in the emergence of a civic nationalism and a struggle for citizenship in Brazil largely because of opposition to the military regime that took power in 1964 and instituted brutal repressive measures after 1968. These two powerful forces—civic and cultural—converge in the 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of national television and media as the principal vehicles facilitating the convergence. The process of “becoming Brazilian”—of creating one people and one nation—reaches its climax under the military regime in the 1970s and 1980s. Ironically, it culminates with the mass mobilization of Brazilians through the process of redemocratization (the rejection of the military regime), national elections in 1989, and the impeachment of President Fernando Collor in 1992. In the Diretas Já (Direct Elections Now) campaign in 1984 and the impeachment of Collor in 1992, tens of millions of Brazilians rallied around their flag, national anthem, and other national symbols to claim their rights as Brazilians.28 They fully and forcefully assumed their civic and cultural identity as Brazilians. Ironically, at the very moment of the greatest success of the Freyrean vision of Brazil, as this central mythology had become so deeply entwined in the fabric of thought in all sectors and social classes within Brazil, the vision’s hold on many Brazilians began to erode and disintegrate. The assault on this vision comes from two prominent directions—an intellectual elite and increasingly vocal groups within civil society organized around “black” and “Afro-Brazilian” identity.29 Al-

24 · Marshall C. Eakin

though I believe the 1990s mark the end of an era for cultural nationalism and the Freyrean vision in Brazil, the existence of this debate and vibrant civic organizations bodes well for Brazil. In a society shaped for centuries by a corporatist ethos, the pronounced hierarchy, inequality, clientelism, and patronage hindered the formation of civil society and civic organizations.30 The power of the state to repress and co-opt was enormous. Throughout the early twentieth century, grassroots struggles took shape against these forces of repression and co-optation as the povo (people) fought to establish their rights. As James Holston has argued, the very nature of citizenship in Brazil frustrated those who struggled to assert and claim their rights.31 The constitutional law that guaranteed equality also constructed privileges and hierarchies that denied rights to many poor Brazilians. Much like the histories of the United States and western Europe, Brazil experienced an ongoing struggle across the twentieth century as more and more Brazilians fought tenaciously to gain access to the political, legal, and social rights enjoyed by a minority of their compatriots. Both Holston and Brodwyn Fischer have brilliantly dissected this struggle in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. For so much of Brazil’s history, land tenure and ownership were the keys to this struggle, in the countryside in the nineteenth century and in the rapidly growing cities in the twentieth century. Fischer has shown for Rio de Janeiro that after 1930, the poor in the favelas managed “to claim some degree of urban permanence . . . to build a legal existence, establishing a critical foothold in the city of laws,” but the citizenship of poor people remained “incomplete and fragmented.” The poor “often used laws, but few have come to believe in them, and without that belief the rule of law has never become a dominant praxis.”32 Fischer also highlights the ongoing contradiction of the expansion of social rights after 1930 while political rights remain restricted. For poor Brazilians, even access to social rights were limited, given their inability to access legal rights and their employment overwhelmingly outside the formal sector.33 Consequently, the loyalty of the poor to the nation was less pronounced in the 1930s and 1940s than their commitment to family. Fischer observes that “alternate incarnations of Vargas’s core values did not generate rights, only vague claims to charity. Social and economic citizenship was a privilege, not an entitlement; thus, oddly, it often came to reinforce, not ameliorate, long-entrenched

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 25

inequities of power and opportunity.”34 The benefits Vargas offered Brazilians “became less a variant of citizenship than a sophisticated form of patronage, an uncertain basket of perks distributed to the skilled, the lucky, the well connected, and the bureaucratically agile. Poor people’s citizenship remained a partial and uncertain enterprise, defined by scarcity rather than security of rights.”35 In the decades after the 1930s, the poor in Rio (and by extension, in much of Brazil) became ever more deeply embedded in a system that both provided increasing social and political rights to those in the formal sector and made it difficult but not impossible for those in the informal sector to access those rights fully. Holston persuasively argues that Brazilian legal regimes across the past two centuries have created the parameters of citizenship, theoretically, for all, while legitimating privileges and inequalities. Poor people on the peripheries of cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have challenged this “entrenched” citizenship, especially over the past thirty years, with an “insurgent” citizenship. The former has long been a “formal membership, based on principles of incorporation into the nation-state; the other is the substantive distribution of the rights, meanings, institutions, and practices that membership entails to those deemed citizens.” Paradoxically, Brazilian national citizenship has been universal and inclusive while simultaneously “massively inegalitarian in distribution.” This form of citizenship, therefore, is “a mechanism to distribute inequality.”36 The work of Holston and others shows that in the 1970s and 1980s, movements began to emerge in Brazil as those who had not enjoyed the privileges of citizenship increasingly organized and fought for their rights as insurgents. The very language of citizenship emerged at the forefront of social and political movements.37 I believe that a half century of cultural nationalism constructed around the myth of mestiçagem laid much of the groundwork for the full-blown emergence of these citizenship movements. By the 1980s the work of constructing the nation—of creating a sense of loyalty and belonging to something called Brazil—had reached maturity. This notion of belonging to the nation and the repression of political rights under the military regime combined to produce movements across all of Brazil of tens of millions of people demanding their rights as Brazilians. In many ways, the decades of cultural nationalism, of identity construction, paved the way

26 · Marshall C. Eakin

and made possible the rise of movements dedicated to redemocratization and citizenship. These millions now saw themselves as Brazilians, with loyalties to the nation, and they demanded the rights promised to them by the state. This last development may be the most important in the set of economic, political, social, and cultural patterns that I have traced across the past century or so. Economic growth and diversification, the erratic yet steady evolution of representative democracy, profound socioeconomic inequalities that finally have begun to budge, and the development of a vibrant and cohesive cultural nationalism are the critical long-term trends that seem to me to characterize Brazil across the twentieth century. These combined and constantly intersecting secular patterns have brought Brazil to its enviable position as one of the emerging powers in the world at beginning of the twenty-first century. As I have noted, these long-term trends have not been smooth or without serious flaws, but they have laid the foundations for an “emergent Brazil.” I firmly believe that we are living through one of those pivotal turning points in world history, one that began in the 1980s with a global economic transformation and the collapse of the Soviet Union and a bipolar world order. In the coming decades those nations that wield the greatest influence will not necessarily require great armies and military power. They will shape global events through economic prowess, and Brazil will be one of those nations. Although there are many challenges facing Brazil in the coming years, from macroeconomic policies to corruption in politics to issues of public security, let me stress the need to invest in human capital. In my view, all the other challenges ultimately hinge on this factor. As I look back across the centuries of Brazilian history, especially the past two, the single greatest failure that must be remedied is the failure to invest in people. Now that Brazil has finally achieved nearly universal schooling in the elementary years, the challenge is to make sure that students stay in school longer and to improve the quality of their educational experience. The economic growth that will provide more jobs and the expansion of political participation and the middle class all require—or should I say, demand—greater investment in the Brazilian people to produce a nation that is truly developed. More than fifteen years ago I wrote an evaluation of Brazil at the end of the twentieth century, and I believe the words ring even truer now

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 27

than they did then: “The fate of Brazil, more so today than at any time in its history, is in the hands of Brazilians. The great powers still dominate and shape the international economic and political arena, but Brazil has significantly altered its position in the world during the past half-century. The Brazilians are neither autonomous nor free to dictate their own future, but they now have a greater ability to shape it than ever before.”38 Whatever the flaws of Brazil’s current economic path, it has at its disposal resources, industry, and agriculture that are the envy of most of the nearly 200 nations on the planet. Whatever the flaws of Brazilian politics, it is the third-largest democracy on the planet with sophisticated and substantial experience with the benefits and tribulations of mass democratic politics. Despite the decades and even centuries of profound socioeconomic inequalities, they may be easing, and Brazil now has one of the largest middle classes anywhere—and with enormous possibilities. Let me conclude not with economics, politics, and social questions, but culture. In comparing Brazil to other countries I am struck by one of the great advantages it has over other large nations. Perhaps no other country of continental dimensions has such a cohesive and integrated national culture. This is not to say that all Brazilians share exactly the same symbols, rituals, and beliefs but that the vast majority of them do share fundamental cultural patterns. Brazilian culture has its cleavages, such as the rapidly growing presence of evangelical Protestantism, but these cultural divisions are not as acute or deadly as those found in other large nations. Where else among these large nations of the world today—China, India, the United States, Canada, Russia, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan—can one find such linguistic, religious, and cultural cohesion? In each of these great countries, linguistic, sectarian, or ethnic differences—and in some cases all three—profoundly fracture their capacity to become more cohesive nations. Brazilians across all regions and classes have constructed a cultural universe that provides them with a cohesion and integration that should be the envy of other nations and that will provide Brazil with a powerful advantage in facing the economic, social, and political challenges of the twentyfirst century. Brazilians (and Brazilianists!) should be optimistic about Brazil. It is no longer the country of the future. Brazil is the country of the present.

28 · Marshall C. Eakin

Notes 1. The phrase is generally attributed to Stefan Zweig from his book Brazil: Land of the Future, trans. Andrew St. James (New York: Viking, 1941). 2. Amaury de Souza and Bolívar Lamounier, A classe média brasileira: Ambições, valores e projetos de sociedade (Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2010). 3. Ricardo Ubiraci Sennes and Thais Narciso, “Brazil as an International Energy Player,” in Brazil as an Economic Superpower? Understanding Brazil’s Changing Role in the Global Economy, ed. Lael Brainard and Leonardo Martínez-Díaz (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009), 17–54. 4. Ruchir Sharma, “Bearish on Brazil: The Commodity Slowdown and the End of the Magic Moment,” Foreign Affairs 91, no. 3 (2012). For the GDP figures see http:// www.tradingeconomics.com/brazil/gdp-growth. 5. Just a sample of recent books on “emergent Brazil”: Larry Rohter, Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Riordan Roett, The New Brazil (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010); Albert Fishlow, Starting Over: Brazil since 1985 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2011); Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira, Developing Brazil: Overcoming the Failure of the Washington Consensus (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2009); Lael Brainard and Leonardo Martínez-Díaz, eds., Brazil as an Economic Superpower? Understanding Brazil’s Changing Role in the Global Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2009); and Ignacy Sachs, Jorge Wilheim, and Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, eds., Brazil: A Century of Change, trans. Robert N. Anderson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 6. Hervé Thery, “A Cartographic and Statistical Portrait of Twentieth-Century Brazil,” in Brazil, ed. Sachs, Wilheim, and Pinheiro, 1–3. 7. The classic statement is from Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962). 8. Marshall C. Eakin, Brazil: The Once and Future Country (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 257. 9. André Meloni Nassar, “Brazil as an Agricultural and Agroenergy Superpower,” in Brazil as an Economic Superpower?, ed. Brainard and Martínez-Díaz, 55–80. 10. Marshall C. Eakin, Tropical Capitalism: The Industrialization of Belo Horizonte, Brazil (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Carlos Tautz, “Brains Made in Brazil,” Petrobras Magazine 62 (2012), http://www.petrobras.com/en/magazine/post/ brains-made-in-brazil.htm. 11. See, for example, Ondina Fachel Leal and Rebeca Hennemann Vergara de Souza, eds., Do regime de propriedade intellectual: Estudos antropológicos (Porto Alegre: Tomo Editorial, 2010). 12. See Andrew J. Kirkendall, Class Mates: Male Student Culture and the Making of a Political Class in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), and Jeffrey Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State,

The Country of the Present, or, Leaving the Future in the Past · 29

and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). 13. For a recent synthesis see Jeffrey Lesser, Immigration, Ethnicity, and National Identity in Brazil, 1808 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 14. “The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and the one which cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage, 1994), 289. 15. Eakin, Brazil, 114. 16. The number of voters in 1945 was just over 7.5 million. Leslie Bethell, “Política no Brasil: De eleições sem democracia a democracia sem cidadania,” in Brasil: Fardo do passado, promessa do futuro, ed. Leslie Bethell (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002), 9–43; Bolívar Lamounier y Judith Muszynski, “Brasil,” in Enciclopedia electoral latinoamericana y del Caribe, ed. Dieter Nohlen (San José, Costa Rica: Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos, 1993), 93–134; and Potencial Pesquisas, Evolução do eleitorado brasileiro, Brasil em dados (Salvador, Brazil, 2010), http://www.potencialpesquisas.com/downloads/Evolucao_Eleitorado_Brasileiro.pdf. 17. The classic analysis and the phrase come from Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy, 40th anniversary edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18. This is the focus of the book I am writing, Shadows in the Soul: Brazilian Identity in the Twentieth Century. 19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), originally published in 1983. 20. Aspásia Camargo, “Federalism and National Identity,” in Brazil, ed. Sachs, Wilheim, and Pinheiro, 245. 21. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 4-5. For a fine example of one part of this effort see Todd A. Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation: Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 22. See, for example, Daryle Williams, Culture Wars: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 23. The literature on the history of music in this period is rich: Hermano Viana, O mistério do samba (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1995); Bryan McCann, Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music in the Making of Modern Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); John Charles Chasteen, National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004); and Marc A. Hertzman, Making Samba: A New History of Race and Music in Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 24. “In its day, the single most important statement made in CGS [Casa Grande e Senzala, by Freyre] was its praise of miscegenation (miscigenação, mestiçagem), since to make this assertion was to turn conventional wisdom upside down.” Peter Burke and Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (Oxford, England: Peter Lang, 2008), 61.

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25. Peter Fry, A persistência da raça: Ensaios antropológicos sobre o Brasil e a África austral (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005), 215. 26. The most complete recent edition of Freyre’s magnum opus is Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarcal, 49th ed. (São Paulo: Global Editora, 2003). The English-language edition is Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946). See also Enrique Rodríguez Larreta and Guillermo Giucci, Gilberto Freyre, uma biografia cultural: A formação de um intelectual brasileiro: 1900–1936, trans. (from Spanish) Josely Vianna Baptista (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2007). 27. Renato Ortiz, Cultura brasileira e identidade nacional (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 2006). 28. Domingos Leonelli and Dante de Oliveira, Diretas já: 15 meses que abalaram a ditadura (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Record, 2004); Carlos Eduardo Lins da Silva, “Brazil’s Struggle with Democracy,” in Current History 92, no. 572 (1993): 126–29. 29. See Ollie A. Johnson III, “Afro-Brazilian Politics: White Supremacy, Black Struggle, and Affirmative Action,” in Democratic Brazil Revisited, ed. Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 209–30. 30. Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira, “From the Patrimonial State to the Managerial State,” in Brazil, ed. Sachs, Wilheim, and Pinheiro, 141–73. 31. James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 32. Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in TwentiethCentury Rio de Janeiro (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–8. 33. Ibid., esp. 63 and 90. 34. Ibid., 126. 35. Ibid., 147. 36. Holston, Insurgent Citizenship, 7. 37. Holston observes, “When I first went to Brazil in 1980, I barely heard the words citizen or citizenship in everyday conversation”; ibid., 4. 38. Eakin, Brazil, 262–63.

2 Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Autumn? First Impressions of the June Days of 2013 Fernando Lattman-Weltman

At the beginning of June 2013 I was visiting Turkey, and in the midst of the great popular mobilization that occurred in that nation’s important cities against its government, I was asked by local colleagues in the social sciences if demonstrations such as these also took place in Brazil. At the time, I could only recall a few demonstrations and local confrontations against the rise in urban transport fares, some years ago, nothing that might be compared to what was developing then in Istanbul, Smyrna, Ankara, and elsewhere. Two weeks later I received an e-mail from a Turkish colleague asking me (with a certain healthy dose of sarcasm, I believe) what I thought now about the protests that were shaking Brazil, bringing thousands of people to the streets of the greatest cities of the country. Surely, perhaps by ironic effect, the protests had indeed begun with complaints against the increase in bus fare, but then they immediately changed into something much greater and more complex (even though, at least at that initial moment, they still paled beside that which had occurred in Turkey and in other parts of the world). First as a reaction to the excesses of the police in repressing the street protests called by the organized Movimento Passe Livre (Free Pass Movement) against the rise of twenty cents on the regular bus fare of the city of São Paulo, in a few days there were simultaneous crowded demonstrations in many other big Brazilian cities, with a much wider and diverse agenda of complaints and a mixed portfolio of protesters. Thousands of people, ranging from members of radical

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leftist parties to those of right-wing groups as well as experienced trade unionists, militant students, and bunches of teenagers and newcomers showed up. They did so with slogans and placards demanding better services—not only public transportation but also protesting against the government, the political parties, the media, or the entire establishment and, of course, the World Cup of soccer to be held in Brazil in 2014. I confess that in that instant, I included myself in the legion of the perplexed. It seemed to me, at times, that I was confronting something new. This impression soon passed, and even that which was certainly unprecedented began to clothe itself in features that were older—much older—having to do with certain cyclical Brazilian political pathologies. However, let us deal with the immediate impression of novelty first.

The Impression of Novelty and the Antidemocratic Perspective So, why then such perplexity and such a strong impression of novelty? I believe that there are at least two principal reasons for surprise in the face of what some journalists immediately called the “Brazilian Spring” (forgetting, perhaps, that in this hemisphere we were at the end of autumn, ready to turn to winter). First, there is surprise at generalized protest in a context of complete democracy (without any concrete threat of a more authoritarian government intervention) and at a time of full employment and still relatively elevated economic expectations (even if some indicators, such as inflation and GDP, were not as encouraging as they had been until fairly recently). Or, to put it another way, anyone who seriously compared the economic or political context in Brazil of those days either with our own past or with that of other nations would ask: Doubtless we have many problems, but why is there such a general sense of revolt and dissatisfaction? According to this view, there were not any real reasons for great protest demonstrations. Second, there is surprise along lines exactly the reverse of the first. According to this perspective, nothing that was won in the previous few decades—democracy, economic stability, the growth and distribution of income—had any value, given that, in fact, Brazilian realities were always worthy of opprobrium—perhaps since Brazil began! What surprised one was not the revolt itself—that ought to be our normal position—but the reason for its manifestation now, so late! Or, to put

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it another way, we did not lack reasons for protest—we had enough for revolt. In the end, whatever might be the form of the surprise, what is important is to perceive that neither of these positions seems capable of explaining what might be the special quality, or special qualities, of the phenomenon. The first perspective—the optimistic one—certainly minimized the less auspicious aspects of our present reality as much as, above all, it minimized the relative autonomy of the movement that began with such a specific issue and its capacity to provide different ideological meanings and to mobilize a considerable part of the population (maybe “the new middle class”?1 elements incorporated into a new virtual political arena?). The second and negative perspective, in contrast, demonstrates by its surprise a profound difficulty in moving along with what we might call “the Brazilian people,” whether this is composed predominantly of the relatively important minority that went to the streets to protest (and according to the supporters of this position, until then never had the consciousness or the courage necessary to move itself ) or whether it is made up of the traditional, great silent majority that habitually does not involve itself in movements, whatever their causes, and limits itself to watching (whether with greater or lesser support for the protests or with greater or lesser mistrust and skepticism, one does not know). Both perspectives are in error because they reduce the multiple meanings of the process and the reasons for mobilization or dispersal after mobilization to motives more or less simplistic or to the pure and simple lack of any real motives. It is not by accident that the same motives are used to justify the choices of those holding both perspectives and that, typically, either group believes such motives could be generalized to all citizens or at least to the fractions of the citizenry with which they identify. In effect, translating these two antagonistic views into a more specific partisanship divide at present, we could argue, on the one hand, that some—mainly the supporters or sympathizers of the government led by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party)—believed in the eternal honeymoon of economic growth and foreign-policy triumph achieved by Brazil in recent years and were thus surprised by the strength of the demonstrations. On the other hand, their opposition

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has nourished resentment for some time, at least as long as the PT administrations (since 2003), with their successful policies of social inclusion and their mishaps in terms of corruption scandals.2 The mensalão, or “big monthly allowance,” was the name given to the scandal that exploded in 2005 during Lula’s first administration as president (2003–2007) and refers to a supposed scheme of vote buying from congressmen by the president’s party, the PT. According to the denunciations, the scheme was led from within the administration by a thencabinet minister, José Dirceu. In its defense, the PT alleged that it was making a caixa 2 (“box 2”), which means a common, if illegal, scheme of campaign resource employment made with parallel and unofficial accounts as the other parties did, too. After months of media exposure, various deputies of the PT and other parties were forced out of public life or resigned and were charged with corruption in the courts. Their cases in the Supreme Court only came up, however, in 2012, but did so with abundant coverage in the media and resulted in the convictions of the majority of the accused. Of course, scandals such as this strengthened the opportunity for a systematic process of public political alienation with respect to politicians and parties, further eroding the little credibility these institutions still had remaining to them from the past. Nothing of this was capable, nevertheless, of impeding the electoral victories of Lula’s party in 2006 and 2010 or the maintenance of the national power of the PMDB (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement), the PT’s principal ally in the government and Congress. Now, already tired of waiting for the redemption of its moral anxieties, the opposition was suddenly surprised by the masses’ capacity for mobilization in June. A wave of protests with, in many cases, its antipolitical and moralist discourse finally seemed to move in their direction.3 Thus, the explanation for these two mutually antagonistic kinds of surprise may be best understood in terms of a conflict that began years before the protests of June 2013, over the previous decade, as the nation began to grow again and enjoy impressive distribution of income. At the time, particularly after the crisis of the mensalão in 2005, the Brazilian political debate—especially among the elites—retreated to an ideological polarization comparable to that of the 1950s and 1960s, a

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kind of polarization one might have thought was rendered passé long ago. To make a long story short, we need to go back and understand the persistent political Brazilian legacy of the era of udenismo and its opponents. After the 1950s, Brazil’s first real experiment with mass democracy and with rapid economic development, the nation experienced a grave crisis in the beginning of the 1960s and ultimately the collapse of democratic institutions and the military coup of 1964. The polarization was not of the simple left-versus-right sort typical of that era of the cold war. Instead, it was something more specifically Brazilian, a visceral confrontation between the partisans of the so-called nationalist-developmentalist movement, particularly the followers of Getúlio Vargas, hardly committed to democracy, opposed by the udenistas, their powerful rivals in the UDN (União Democrática Nacional, the Democratic National Union), whose moralist, elitist (and frequently pro-coup) disposition also laid deep roots in the national political culture, as much on the left as on the right. It should be noted that Getúlio Vargas began his career among oligarchical circles at the end of the so-called Old Republic (1889–1930), led the Revolution of 1930, and governed the country until 1945— first as provisional chief of the revolution, afterward as constitutional president, and finally as dictator. He returned to power in 1951 as an elected president and governed until he committed suicide in 1954 in the midst of a very grave political crisis. His long time in power was marked by some of the most important transformations of the state and of Brazilian society. The UDN was formed in 1945 by a broad and broadly contradictory alliance of Vargas’s opposition. Although strongly supported by powerful conservative elements,4 the udenistas did not obtain success in their attempts to take state power by the vote. (Truth be told, they only won officially in 1960, with Jânio Quadros, but were immediately at odds with their unpredictable candidate, who, in the end, resigned the presidency a few months after taking office, in 1961.) The UDN had a great role in the preparation for the coup of 1964 but was blocked from power by the military. In a few words, udenismo—as originated in the 1950s and 1960s through the discourse and practices of the udenistas but essentially surviving today—can be defined in its present-day form as the strong

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belief that most urgent national problems are unilaterally due to the recurrent lack of moral commitment and associated lack of cognitive capacity (not to mention the probable lower social extraction) of political leaders. In a democracy, that is, a competitive political system in which, whatever the outcome, power is obtained by means of elections, such condemnation of the political leaders transfers much of the blame to the people who elect them. The syllogism of udenismo could be synthesized this way: 1) people (especially the poor) do not know how to vote properly or at least not as consciously as the elites; 2) then they choose badly or are easily manipulated by unscrupulous demagogues; and 3) inappropriate people are thus entitled to represent and to govern, giving way to bad policies and outcomes. The institutional corollary is thus obvious: in order to make things work properly there is the need to purge the electoral process, even if eventually we need to get rid of voting itself—and of democracy, as was done in 1964. A typical leftist version of the syllogism could be written similarly: 1) people (especially the alienated ones—which means almost everybody) do not know how to vote properly or at least not as consciously as the revolutionary vanguard; 2) they then choose badly or are easily manipulated by unscrupulous demagogues, especially the ones who favor capitalism and are favored by it, knowingly or not; and 3) inappropriate people are thus empowered to represent and to govern, giving way to bad policies and outcomes that also maintain class oppression. Again, as with udenismo, the institutional corollary is thus obvious: in order to make things work properly there is the need to purge the electoral process, even if eventually we need to get rid of voting itself—and of democracy—but, in this case, by means of a revolution. A revolution, after all, could give direct power to the people by placing its revolutionary vanguard in power, for only the vanguard is able to understand what the people’s true interests are. Of course, I am not saying that udenismo or its comparable leftist antidemocratic perspective alone can explain the Brazilian Autumn of 2013. Not at all. In fact, there were and still are plenty of good reasons to protest in this country. And, as we shall see, there are many other reasons that led lots of people, mainly young and politically inexperienced ones, to the streets in June. But the antipolitical, antidemocratic tone of much of the most strident participants and, even more, of the framing of the process itself by mainstream media coverage and

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last but not least by sectors of the Brazilian intelligentsia—which, of course, can also be ranked among other factors that contributed to add more people and issues to the gatherings—are unmistakably marked by such traditional, pervasive, elitist, and romantic but truly undemocratic attitudes. And I do not think that we can understand most of what goes on in the Brazilian public political debate of today without acknowledging the ways by which this kind of ideological construction deals with the tense, contradictory, and sometimes threatening links between effective democratic competition and social mobility in a dynamic and fast-changing society such as Brazil’s. In other words, what happened in June 2013 was basically an outburst of naturally erratic but true democratic vitality rather than a display of institutional malfunction. The elites’ assumption that it was the latter speaks more to our established political culture than to the post-1985 realities, after power was transferred from military to civilian leaders.

The Real Novelty of the June Movement Thus, what I have not yet been able to say more calmly to my Turkish colleague is that certainly we do not lack a tradition of great protests and popular mobilization in Brazil. In this regard, there is no great novelty in our June Days. We have often gone to the streets before: to elect presidents, for the simple right to elect presidents, and to pull presidents and others out of power; in various general strikes and those against corruption, dictatorships, and urban violence; for minority rights; even for or against God, the family, and property; and surely for an infinity of demands more concrete or specific.5 What, then, was really new about the Brazilian Autumn of 2013? There are three new, or perhaps contextually specific, aspects to the 2013 movement. First, the potential to organize new and different types of demonstrations using the new social media, made possible by the spectacular diffusion of the cell phone among us, eliminated the necessity—as in the past—of time to prepare or establish collective organizations such as parties, unions, professional associations, all with their administrative machinery. The IBOPE (Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião Pública e Estatística, the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics) research data demonstrate that from 2009 to 2013,

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the number of those connected to the new social networks in Brazil increased around 50 percent, from 31 million to 46 million users. One is dealing with a considerable contingent of citizens who can be mobilized rapidly to pour out into the street as a function of the most diverse social networks possible, without the necessity of any societal linkage (in the old Tonniesian sense, which distinguishes societal from communitarian human links),6 and with the most diverse motivations. Second was the specific opportunity made possible by the occurrence in June of the Confederations Cup in soccer, a test event that anticipated by one year the coming of the World Cup to Brazil, obviously a focus of anxiety in the “country of soccer” and something that had been awaited for more than sixty years. With the Confederations Cup, a great mobilization of media built a focus of international attention on Brazil, with the normal rise in nationalist temperature.7 Most importantly, in association with this, the event has been the occasion for beginning to enjoy the so-called legacy of the Cup and of the Olympics in Rio in 2016: a collection of urgently needed urban public works such as public transport, access routes, and airports that not only would meet the necessities of the exceptional number of tourists expected to come to the country but would remain after the great events to benefit generations of Brazilians in each locale. It is a legacy that has yet to be built.8 Third was the effect of popular demonstrations that happened in the previous two or three years in the United States with the Occupy movement, in Europe, and in Latin America (Chile, Venezuela) as well as the Arab Spring and protests in Turkey mentioned earlier. Although it may be difficult to measure the weight of this factor, it is possible to theorize about the influence of the images, of the exchange of information, of expectations, and even of the slogans or guiding ideas among the groups of militants or sympathizers, with the spectacle of their protests, their vigor and creativity, an influence carried by the Internet and transnational networks.9 The impact of such influence is all the more powerful when it is a commonplace to believe, erroneously, that only in Brazil do such movements not take place because of the supposed conformism or alienation of our society. With respect to the concrete demands of the demonstrations or their more profound or predominant social or political motives, there

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is a great deal to be said, and the choices are as easy as they are risky. Certainly the quality of public services was a strong theme, becoming even more eloquent, as mentioned, because of the sports events and their legacies, as much in the beginning as in the ebbing moments of the demonstrations. At the first moment, one heard complaints about everything, and most of them with a great deal of reason: the poor quality of urban transportation, health services, public education, public safety, and so on. And there were even more demands later. Indeed, the variety of demands and of those demanding and, above all, the contradictions in the demonstrators’ differing priorities, tactics, and methods of demonstrating fatally led them toward alienation and fragmentation. After all, there is a great difference between demanding the reduction of bus fares, the first great victory of the movement, and proposing an attack on public buildings or besieging members of Congress. There is also a great difference between demanding that Congress defeat a constitutional amendment project (PEC37) and violently impeding party militants and union organizers from participating in the protests.10 It is certain, too, that the violence against militants and organizers, not only physical but verbal as well, contributed to defining the boundaries of participation and repelling a more pacifist and perhaps more utopian element that might, initially, have brought in less experienced, newer voices to the protests. However, with the initial victory on the bus fare, it was foreseeable that it would be difficult to maintain the apparent cohesion of the early protests without a great unifying banner or some organization beyond the innumerable social networks or the provocation of a very violent and authoritarian reaction by the public powers.11 Doubtless the attempt was made and continues to be made, mainly by the media and its favorite pundits but also by politicians, to reduce the diversity of the protests to one single, basic cause: for some, an attack on corruption; for others, the widely recognized crisis of alienation with respect to the representative quality of political representation in Brazil; and for still others, both. If for the formal and informal forces of opposition to the government, corruption is an inevitable and understandable cause, both corruption and whatever one understands as political alienation seem popular among different groups of the na-

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tional intelligentsia. And everything indicates that the administration itself was convinced enough of the significance of the latter to emphasize that in its response to the protests, as we will see. Finally, if I had to summarize the June Days’ meaning with respect to past popular political practice in Brazil, I would have to say (perhaps disappointing many) that, putting aside its particular symbolic contents and contextual narratives—obviously always “new” in each successive historical conjuncture, given history’s constant movement, at least while our general cultural or “civilizing” perspective is dominated by a modern conception of history12—what is truly noteworthy is the use, power, and possible implications of widespread mobile communication and social networks. But this is a matter for another occasion.13

Of Rites of Passage and the “Eternal Return” of Routine About ten to fifteen days after the first demonstrations and her first anodyne, official speech, President Dilma Rousseff mobilized her cabinet and brought together the state governors to present to the public, on June 24, an agenda intended to respond to the demonstrators’ concerns. In the agenda were measures focused on the varied, substantive street demands in the areas of public health, transportation, and education. There were also others intended to content groups more or less well defined, such as a federal pact to balance the budget and harsher penalties for the corrupt. What stood out immediately, however, was the proposal for a plebiscite to decide whether to call an extraordinary constituent assembly intended exclusively to carry out political reform. Ironically enough, the issue of political reform has been raised in the country and debated unsuccessfully in Congress for almost twenty years and, properly speaking, does not seem to have been a great preoccupation of the June Days participants. The administration discarded immediately an exclusive constituent assembly.14 That was thought inadequate and inopportune by many, from judicial experts to academics; it was even tainted as preparation for a coup by the more excited (or paranoid) voices of the opposition. Instead, the administration proposed a plebiscite for the people to decide on a specific list of political reforms that should later be approved in its technicalities by the Congress. After the Justiça Eleitoral (Electoral Court) was consulted concerning practical issues,15 the

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Congress, as one would expect, decided that it was impossible in the time available to consult the people over themes so controversial as public or private finance of campaigns, a change in the present system of elections by proportional open lists, the end of reelection for executive positions, and more, soon enough to affect the general elections of 2014.16 However, Congress did not stand still. Besides the immediate rejection of the unpopular PEC37, as mentioned earlier, several long-delayed bills (some of them frankly demagogic, such as the end of secret votes in legislative sessions) were rapidly voted upon. Thus, congressional leaders said they had not blocked political reform. Indeed, on the contrary, they promised to hasten its debate, vote on it, and (perhaps) submit it to a popular decision, possibly in the form of a referendum or, who knows, in the elections of 2014 (which, of course, would delay their impact another two or four years). In effect, one way or the other, to the general rejoicing or scorn of the nation, the components of Brazil’s democratic establishment moved forward. The government and lawmakers did so not only in response to many of the concerns manifested in the street but mostly and anxiously because they accepted many if not all of the accusations made against them—and made against them for years. They accepted complete responsibility and, as is said in the tragic-comic jargon of police fiction, confessed every and any crime, particularly those that they themselves had not committed. Mea culpa, mea massima culpa! Perhaps the democratic establishment, particularly the administration and the Congress but also the parties, unions, courts, media, and others are all really guilty, at least partially, for the many faults attributed to them. As has already been said, the collection of complaints and resentments that appeared in the streets those days is so broad and diverse that anyone might make whatever use is desired of them. Even in this, democracy is democratic and plural. Yet a characteristic often conspicuous in protests such as these (and in this there is no novelty, not even with all of the technological, communication, ideological, contextual, or structural innovations that we might want to emphasize) is that the principal factor pushing forward and building up the wave of protests is simply the wave itself and not any one of its alleged practical, ethical, political, and/or ideological contextual motives. In other words, for many demonstrators, what is

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most important is to do something; it is to act, to feel oneself part of the protests and of their power, to be newly strengthened with their energy and simply to dream about (or to become drunk with) the utopian developments that such a prodigious force seems capable of making happen. Unhappily, the history of popular protests, movements, and revolutions has taught us, up to now, that most of the time they do not even get close to being effective unless such phenomena successfully usher in new nations, governments, or administrations that can put their ideas to work. Obviously, protest that does not produce new power fails. One is dealing, then, with a kind of very peculiar but common proactive exercise, with two basic effects. First, its best benefits are clear in the consciousness and in the identity of some of its participants: those who, thanks to this experience of initiation—this rite of passage—will never see politics and social life in the same way again; those who, so to speak, are contaminated by the virus of political passion, as happened in their own youth to many of the professional politicians so hated today—both those politicians who live “from” politics and those who live “for” politics. Second, it is an exercise that also produces other benefits, when its peculiar energy is absorbed as it ought to be by institutions and their agents. Explosions such as this can, in fact, reinvigorate the political game. They can, possibly, make mechanisms that have ground to a halt move forward again; they can, conceivably, raise up important actors once relatively resigned to the status quo, to review their habits, their presuppositions, and their strategies. It is an exercise that may even move forward toward the resolution of collective, concrete problems whose progress is submerged in a sort of inertia. Eppur se muove. In this sense, the protests in themselves and the democratic establishment’s response to them may be positive enough, despite the impressive, equally democratic—and in my modest judgment completely wrong—general consensus regarding a crisis in representation and the need for a profound reform of Brazilian politics. In any case, some hypotheses may be raised about certain impacts of the movement in the present context of Brazilian politics. In the first place, one must reflect on the roles of the republic’s presidency in the context of an “audience democracy” like ours and

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whether, in such a regime, there is a place for the managerial style of Dilma Rousseff.17 After a head of state, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was driven by the necessity of making great reforms and in one of his administrations concentrated all of his institutional strength on amending the Constitution of 1988, and after another president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who pushed his agenda forward by constant campaigns among the people, among organized social movements, and in foreign arenas, exploiting to the maximum his charisma and the symbolic weight of his position and of his social origins, Dilma paid a high price for basically dedicating herself to managing the federal public machine from within—well in accord with her personal style or image. Thus, with the quickly patched-together proposals Dilma offered to the protesters at June’s end, she may have unavoidably left many unsatisfied as well as having accepted too quickly and easily the criticisms made of her.18 It is true that in doing so, she exercised what may be her principal prerogative—one that no president of the Brazilian Republic or any other democratic leader in the present world can forgo—that of shaping the national political agenda’s principal issues, not, perhaps, those issues that “objectively” she should have introduced (Who can tell?) but any she thought might guide the behavior of others and mobilize the dynamic forces of society—something which, after all, her administration has not been doing for some time. In sum, until then, the greatest fault of Dilma’s administration was not its alleged distance from the protests or from the pulse of the streets, as it and its own party affirmed then along with other wellintentioned voices of our intelligentsia. It is, instead, the simple fact that she got comfortable with her popularity in the polls before June and dedicated herself exclusively to the daily labor of moving forward an ordinary but relatively successful administration, at least according to the opinion polls.19 She thus abdicated the role of defining and driving forward the principal themes of public national debate, allowing a vacuum to be created. Moreover, it was a vacuum that, this time, would not be occupied by the opposition but instead by the surprising mass of demonstrators of June 2013.20 The first, most effective signal of the negative impact of the June Days on the president’s popularity came immediately: a dizzy fall from 55 percent to 30 percent, in terms of approval, according to the Data-

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folha Institute. But it was still too early to say anything with respect to the elections of 2014, particularly given Dilma’s near-complete recovery in the polls within the months that followed.21 Other effects of the demonstrations have varied possibilities. For example, one cannot deny that the June demonstrations have already caused an enormous impact on the contemporary Brazilian political imagination and even on ideas cultivated abroad about Brazil, its politics, and its people. This is an impact that has been made clear in new debates and the creation of new arenas, especially on the Internet. And it is even possible that we could be witnessing the rise and incorporation of elements of the population new to the universe of more systematic political participation or the entrance to new political terrain in which to demand better public service and a more visible and concrete return on the excessive taxation to which the great mass of Brazilians is subject. Till now, however, these are only possibilities—maybe desired ones—that need to be empirically confirmed. As for the great or edifying causes unifying the movement—disgust with corruption and the crisis of representation—I have no doubt of their mobilizing power and their key significance in the demonstrations. Still, as I have said, there is nothing new in them, and it is difficult, as yet, to measure their impact after the demonstrations. Part of this difficulty stems from their very nature. They represent only the repetition of old, typical agendas of political romanticism, unhappily commonplace in modern democratic experience, perhaps with new clothing. Disgust with corrupt politicians always reflects the fears and prejudices most basic to the electorate: those of being manipulated and disrespected by its representatives, almost always the sacrificial lambs. The other alleged cause, the need for political reform, may sound supposedly more complex and sophisticated, but in reality it is burdened by intellectual mystifications as basic and primitive as the corruption issue, especially when it is well known (but too often forgotten) that it is very hard to define what really is, at any given moment, the true will of the people—its “general will”—and even less practical to reach any consensus on how to make that will real through effective policies. It is difficult to evaluate objectively the true representative quality of any given real democracy on the basis of such solemn but completely abstract notions.22

Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Autumn? · 45

Add to this narrative context a newly ample liberty of expression and, now, a newly abundant distribution of gadgets.

Notes 1. The term “new middle class” has been coined in Brazil recently, referring to a significant number of citizens—some estimates reach about 40 million people—who climbed the socioeconomic scale, leaving poverty and entering the middle class since 2003, due to economic growth and income redistribution policies; see Marcelo Néri, A nova classe média: O lado brilhante da base da pirâmide (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Saraiva, 2011). 2. The PT was raised to the Brazilian presidency—after more than twenty years of struggle—with the victory of its leader, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2002. 3. In fact, another important contextual element shaping the imagination of this opposition position seems to have been the experience, during all of 2012, of intense and extensive media coverage of the trials of the mensalão by the Supreme Court. The mensalão case reviewer at the court, the irascible judge Joaquim Barbosa, who severely judged the accused, was enthusiastically remembered in many of the June demonstrations (besides inevitably figuring in all of the current electoral research as a potential candidate in the next presidential election, in 2014). 4. Udenista support came from some of the old rural oligarchies as well as newer, urban elites and their middle-class adherents, almost all of the press at the time, the Church, and, last but not least, important factions within the military. 5. I am referring here to events that brought lots of people to the streets in many Brazilian cities, sometimes on a bigger scale than in June 2013, only in the past fifty years (not to mention the numerous minor cases of localized demands that evolved into public riots or demonstrations), events such as the 1964 Marcha da Família com Deus (March of the Family with God), against the João Goulart government soon after overthrown by the military; the 1968 Passeata dos Cem Mil (March of the Hundred Thousand) against the military dictatorship; the 1983–84 Diretas Já (Direct Elections Now) demonstrations demanding the right to vote for president; the 1989 massive rallies in the first presidential campaign after the dictatorship; and the 1992 Fora Collor (Out with Collor) movement demanding the impeachment of President Fernando Collor de Mello, accused of corruption. See their entries in the Dicionário Histórico-Biográfico Brasileiro: Pós-30 (Rio de Janeiro: CPDOC/FGV, 2001), http:// www.fgv.br/cpdoc/busca/Busca/BuscaConsultar.aspx. 6. I refer to the classic sociological distinction between the concepts of society and of community elaborated by Tonnies, according to whom there is an important difference between societal human links—which often connect (and separate) people, mainly voluntarily, in order to promote specific interests such as parties, unions, and associations—and communitarian relations, which often connect (and also separate) people in terms of previous and mostly involuntary traits such as re-

46 · Fernando Lattman-Weltman

ligion, ethnicity, gender, age, and vicinity, in order to reproduce or to strengthen identities. Here, the main issue is that while the first may depend heavily on previous organization, the second may develop more spontaneously and even effortlessly; Ferdinand Tonnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001 [1887]). 7. In this regard, I cannot neglect to mention the success—possibly unforeseen, in political terms—of an automobile advertising campaign that invited the Brazilian people to go to the streets to cheer for and accompany the games of our team. Its refrain was “Come to the street. It is the street that is the greatest grandstand of Brazil!” 8. As soon as Brazil began to prepare for the World Cup, there came about the debate on the high costs of such an enterprise. The slogan “Padrão Fifa” (FIFA Standard) was coined to denounce or ironize the high level of investment made for the building or renewal of soccer stadiums in order to fulfill the commitments assumed with the international association that rules soccer all over the world—in comparison with the (bad) quality typically associated with Brazilian public infrastructure and many important social services as well as with the current budget set aside to deal with them. 9. The unfailing Guy Fawkes masks from the film V for Vendetta were also here in our demonstrations, among many other globalized icons. A Brazilian version of the Black Blocs made a triumphal entrée, promoting riots and destruction in less crowded but surely louder appearances for many weeks after the height of the massive protests of June. 10. Here I refer to the defeat of PEC37 (Proposta de Emenda Constitucional 37, Constitutional Amendment Bill 37), widely thought to provide impunity to corrupt politicians by shielding them from investigation and prosecution, a victory rapidly obtained as a result of the demonstrators’ pressure. 11. In fact, the disproportionate, more violent reaction of the São Paulo police to the first protests against the rise in bus fare certainly provoked the growth of the protests and the number of their participants. Afterward, however, repressive forces seem to have chosen, whenever possible, to avoid confrontation, a behavior quite different from that of the police in Turkey when I was there. This initial shift in general Brazilian police behavior did not stop new, more focused, harsh confrontations in various subsequent demonstrations, and as expected, soon there were new violent occurrences, including examples of well-known forms of police brutality and intimidation not only against protesters but also the press. The escalation ultimately led to the killing of a cameraman in Rio de Janeiro in February 2014 when he was hit by a kind of mortar supposedly fired by two students; “Cinegrafista atingido por rojão em protesto no Rio tem morte cerebral,” Portal G1-Globo, February 10, 2014, http:// g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2014/02/cinegrafista-atingido-por-rojao-emprotesto-no-rio-tem-morte-cerebral.html. But even with the ongoing periodic demonstrations and the rise of violence in them, the protests never gained the same momentum again, being unable to fill the streets as was done in June 2013. 12. See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985).

Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Autumn? · 47

13. Among other novelties mentioned earlier, the second—the opportune linkage between the protests and the great events like the soccer cup—might perfectly figure in the traditional list of contextual circumstances, although it might be worth mentioning the novel role of the media and of the great companies, including advertising, that today dominate such events. The above-mentioned demonstration effect certainly includes new elements also linked to the globalization of communication. But, in effect, there is nothing so completely new; it is enough to think of the simultaneous quality of historical events of this genre such as the spring of 1968 or long before that, the revolutionary days of 1848. 14. There has not been any discussion yet with respect to the composition of such an exclusive constituent assembly or how it would be convoked. There has only been a proposal that just the themes of such a political reform should be debated. It was precisely with respect to the possibility of establishing this exclusive agenda that the debate developed and polarized. 15. Justiça Eleitoral is the component of Brazil’s judiciary power that is responsible for the organization and realization of elections. 16. Brazil’s representatives at all legislative levels are elected by a proportional system of open lists: the voter can vote for a party or for a particular candidate; after the elections, the votes for parties, if there is more than one party on the same slate, are totaled, and so is the vote for each individual candidate on the slate. Based on this total, the seats are distributed by the party or the party alliance among the candidates who won the greatest number of votes as individuals. 17. The concept is developed by Manin in his classic on the evolution of the modern representative system. According to it, modern democracies typically evolved from a first stage when politics was personally controlled by party leaders (parlamentarianism) to another, in which party machines held sway (party democracy), and then to a more contemporary form, “audience democracy,” when mass-mediated politics impose media logics on the political game; Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 18. As we say in Portuguese, Dilma may have erred by too rapidly deciding vestir a carapuça (to assume a blame that was not necessarily hers). In the Inquisition, the accused was forced to wear a special cap, the carapuça, which was thus a badge of guilt. To put on the carapuça is to assume the guilt of which one is accused. 19. Favorable opinion polls accompanied Dilma and her administration from her taking the oath of office in January 2011 until the June Days of 2013, when they dropped measurably but not very differently, or worse, than those of almost all other established politicians, such as some state governors. 20. The opposition, however, certainly tried at that time: it promoted the attack on PEC37 itself, with the instigation and exploitation of a conflict between the legislative and judicial powers, and pressed the debates over candidacies, new parties, and new rules for 2014. Still, these successes did not even closely compare to the spotlight that the opposition obtained in 2012 with the mensalão trials at the Supreme Court. 21. Dilma’s approval ratings rose to 54 percent by September 2013; Edgard Matsuki, “Dilma começa a se recuperar e aprovação sobe a 54%, diz CNI/Ibope,” UOL

48 · Fernando Lattman-Weltman

Notícias, September 27, 2013, http://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/ultimas-noticias /2013/09/27/dilma-cni-ibope.htm. In the beginning of 2014, the first election polls showed her in a very comfortable lead to be reelected, with possibilities of winning the race in the first round; “Dilma tem 47% das intenções de voto e venceria no 1o turno, diz Datafolha,” Portal G1-Globo, February 2, 2014, http://g1.globo.com/politica/eleicoes/2014/noticia/2014/02/dilma-tem-47-das-intencoes-de-voto-e-venceria-no-1-turno-diz-datafolha.html. 22. In regard to the extensive pathology of the term “crisis” in the modern context, see Reinhard Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). On the problems of the concepts of “general will” or “public interest” in democratic theory, see Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: HarperCollins, 1942).

II

Brazil’s Political Scene

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3 Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco Jr.

Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) finished his second term in office at the end of 2010 with more than 80 percent of Brazilians classifying his performance as good or excellent. To borrow an expression that President Lula himself was prone to use when talking about his government’s achievements in many areas, we could say that “never before in the history of the country” did a president enjoy such positive ratings. As figure 3.1 shows, Dilma Rousseff began her term in office with popularity ratings at around 50 percent, but at the time of writing of this piece, early in 2013, her popularity was heading upward and was already better than Lula’s at a similar time in his first term. Consider that both Dilma and Lula are from the nominally centerleft PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Workers’ Party), while all previous presidents were from the right or center-right of the ideological spectrum. Consider as well that both Dilma’s and Lula’s governments have combined relatively conservative macroeconomic management (which has become less conservative under Dilma than under Lula) with social assistance policies. Over the past decade, the share of Brazilians who are poor has fallen, and incomes, especially those of the poorest Brazilians, have risen considerably.1 On the surface, the antipoverty, proworker policies under Dilma and Lula appear to have led to an economic performance that has benefited a wide majority of Brazilians, causing the popularity of both presidents to skyrocket. These two Brazilian presidents, in short, have done better than earlier ones in citizens’ assessment, and we are tempted to con-

52 · Daniela Campello and Cesar Zucco Jr.

Figure 3.1. Popularity of Brazilian presidents, 1985–2013. Sources: Data compiled by the authors from sources identified in chapter 3 note 14.

clude that democracy is finally yielding the promised good governance that is expected when politicians have to compete for votes. Social science data, however, rarely speak for themselves, and we believe that the above account misses an important part of the issue. It is true that Dilma and Lula have been hugely popular; it is true that both governments have implemented redistributive policies, and it is also true that the lives of most Brazilians have improved. However, it is not obviously true, and we believe it is false to say, that the positive results felt by ordinary Brazilians should be credited exclusively to the decisions made by these two administrations. The gist of our argument is that both Lula, in his second term, and Dilma, in the first half of her first term, encountered a much more positive international economic outlook than any predecessor since the 1970s. In fact, “never before in the [recent] history of the country” have external conditions been as auspicious as in the period between 2006 and 2012. Plainly put, we show in this chapter that the international conditions facing Brazil explain a great deal of the variation in the performance and popularity of all presidents since the end of the military regime in 1985.

Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents · 53

Although this is not surprising given what political scientists and economists know about how the world economy works and how people respond to changes in their economic conditions, it has grave implications for democratic accountability. If voters cannot evaluate whether presidents are doing a good job or are just lucky, the incentive structure of democracy is in jeopardy, potentially decreasing governments’ electoral incentives to improve policymaking and loosening the connection between economic policy success and democratic accountability. This chapter is organized as follows. First, we briefly discuss what political scientists call “the economic vote.” Second, we examine why and how exogenous factors affect economic performance in Latin America, and we lay out our hypothesis that presidents in countries whose economies are particularly determined by exogenous factors— such as Brazil—are rewarded and punished based on luck more than merit. Third, we examine data on the presidential popularity of Brazilian presidents, showing that it can be predicted well by commodity prices and U.S. interest rates, with only a marginal deviation from what the world economy would predict and with noticeable but relatively little impact from domestic political crises. We conclude with a review of the findings and a discussion of their broader implications.

The Economic Vote In rare agreement, politicians, pundits, voters, and even political scientists believe that the political success of presidents is associated with economic performance. The economic vote is a widely accepted commonplace in the political science literature. Since Kramer,2 scholars have successfully demonstrated that a positive correlation exists between economic performance and the success of politicians and parties in office. In its simplest form, economic voting posits that citizens hold the government responsible for economic events, rewarding incumbents in good times and punishing them in bad times. Beyond this basic association, however, economic voting is a much more controversial topic. Scholars have debated, for instance, whether economic voting is a matter of sanction or selection (if it is retrospective or prospective) and if it is sociotropic (based on how well voters’ regional, ethnic, or religious groups are doing) or egotropic (based on

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how well the individual is doing). There has also been considerable debate about which branch or level of government gets punished and rewarded under different institutional settings and to what aspects of economic performance (unemployment, growth) voters respond. More directly relevant to our analysis, scholars have been increasingly interested in whether and how voters differentiate economic performance that results from policymaking from that determined by exogenous factors beyond a government’s control. One might consider the issue of responsibility for economic performance. Politicians often try to dodge the blame for poor performance, attributing poor economic outcomes to nature, the world economy, Congress, or their predecessors while at the same time claiming responsibility for good performance, even if was generated by perfect weather or favorable prices for the country’s exports. Students of economic voting have paid serious attention to the problem of assigning responsibility for economic performance. Most of this research examines institutional characteristics of political systems and how they concentrate or disperse responsibility for the economy among different branches of government. Less attention has been paid, however, to another aspect of the problem of assignment of responsibility: whether voters can identify (and if so, how they respond to) circumstances in which economic performance has an important exogenous component. This has become more of a concern with international economic integration, which, in theory, should increase the proportion of economic performance determined by exogenous factors. Alesina and Rosenthal offer a foundation for this analysis by proposing a model in which economic growth is established as a function of a natural rate plus unanticipated shocks that are caused by incumbents’ competence and/or by exogenous factors.3 In other words, growth is the product of a deterministic quantity but also is affected by random shocks of several possible origins. Voters only observe the combined result of all components, so they cannot clearly separate government’s competence from other factors in the short run. However, because voters see the variation in the shocks and growth over time, they learn something about the average size and direction of shocks, and with this experience they are able to at least partially discern how much of economic performance can be attributed to their leaders. Over time, in

Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents · 55

places more subject to exogenous shocks, voters will attribute less responsibility to incumbents for the economy than they would in places where competence is the main driver of growth. Scheve uses a similar framework to argue that globalization reduces the variance of exogenous shocks because, by exposing countries to many different economic partners, it serves as a hedge against severe economic swings.4 The consequence for economic voting is that with less variance in exogenous shocks, voters should have greater capacity to identify the role of competence and thus greater ability to punish or reward governments. Studies have shown that in highly integrated Europe, citizens who perceive domestic fluctuations as diverging from those in the overall European economy are more likely to register an economic vote, which suggests that there would be less evidence of economic voting in countries highly vulnerable to external economic conditions.5 It has also been shown that the connection between macroeconomic performance and incumbent success is weak in states dominated by natural resources and farming but strong elsewhere.6 Kayser and Peress similarly show that voters punish incumbents less when bad economic times hurt neighboring countries as well.7 Whether a much less informed electorate, in a much more inward-looking country such as Brazil,8 behaves in the same way remains to be seen.

Exogenous Determinants of Economic Performance in Dependent Economies We are able to separate the “exogenous” determinants of economic performance (the ones beyond a president’s control) from the endogenous ones because Brazil, like its fellow Latin American countries, is heavily dependent on international economic factors that have been extensively studied by economists. Here, we explore this crucial fact. More specifically, despite its image as a relatively industrialized country, Brazil remains mostly a commodity exporter. It also has very low levels of domestic savings and depends on inflows of resources from the rest of the world. The country’s economic performance is greatly affected by the behavior of commodity prices, which determine the value of most goods sold by Brazil, and by international interest rates, which directly affect capital flows into the country. Both

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of these processes are well known and have been extensively studied by economists. There are many reasons to believe that Brazilian voters are unaware of these cycles. Education levels and newspaper readership are considerably lower than in Europe and in the United States; the democratic process is still relatively young; and, at least since the turn to import substitution industrialization policies in the first half of the twentieth century (policies consciously directed toward the domestic market), administrations have maintained a relatively inward-looking pattern of economic development. As a consequence, Brazilians are less oriented toward the world economy than, for example, Europeans.9 In fact, with the exception of Mexico, all countries in Latin America are commodity exporters and therefore economies in which domestic economic performance is very dependent on internationally determined commodity prices. Most Latin American countries share Brazil’s low rates of domestic savings, which makes them reliant on inflows of foreign capital that are largely driven by fluctuations in international interest rates. When rates are low and liquidity is high, capital is more likely to flow to Latin America. When the opposite happens, international capital flees to safer havens.10 Brazil, it so happens, thus has a very typical Latin American economy when it comes to its insertion into the world market. This is true in spite of its greater level of industrialization and larger domestic market. Brazil trades less than most other countries in the region. Although larger countries typically trade less, relative to GDP, the comparison with Mexico shows that Brazil is much more inward-oriented than its largest regional counterpart. More importantly, although Brazil is less of a commodity exporter than most of its smaller neighbors, just under half of its exports remain commodities. Thus, despite its great advances as an industrializing nation exporting manufactures, its commodity exporting remains critical. Indeed, the proportion of commodities exported is considerably more than Mexico’s and enough to make Brazil extremely sensitive to commodity prices. In table 3.1, the last two columns show the levels of dependence on inflows of resources. All of Latin America has low domestic savings rates, which in itself points toward the need to attract capital to finance investment. This need is compounded by the fact that earnings from exports are low relative to external debt. As such, Latin American countries, and

Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents · 57

Table 3.1. Exposure to commodities and international interest rates, 2000

Trade (% of GDP)

Comm. (% exports)

Savings (% of GDP)

External debt (% of exports)

Argentina 28 69 27 450 Bolivia 22 84 10 302 Brazil 14 47 18 316 Chile 34 83 24 174 Colombia 15 62 14 222 Ecuador 25 90 19 261 Mexico 27 16 19 89 Paraguay 44 85 14 114 Peru 16 79 18 296 Uruguay 21 63 14 322 Venezuela 30 86 33 125 Source: World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” http://data.worldbank.org/ indicator.

Brazil among them, are dependent on international savings and very sensitive to periods of scarcity of hard currency such as U.S. dollars. As a result, Latin American countries tend to do exceptionally well when international interest rates are low and commodity prices are high, and they are likely to suffer when the opposite occurs.11 Figure 3.2 shows the strong association of commodity prices, international interest rates, and GDP in Latin America. Together, the two variables capture the main ways by which the global economy affects most Latin American economies. Analysis of the evolution of the region’s aggregate GDP, as seen in figure 3.2, shows that it is negatively influenced by U.S. interest rates and positively influenced by commodities prices.12 This does not mean that both variables are equally important at all times and in all places. However, fleshing out the nuances and intricacies of how and when each of the two variables affects each of the Latin American economies is beyond the scope of this chapter. Still, it is informative to have a rough sense of which countries fit the general argument we are making. Table 3.2 orders and groups countries by the extent to which domestic economies are directly impacted by international interest rates and commodity prices, the two variables that capture the state of the

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Figure 3.2. U.S. interest rates, world commodity prices, and GDP of Latin America, 1980–2010. Sources: U.S. 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate, computed and distributed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), available at http:// research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/tags/series; aggregate free market commodity prices index, computed and distributed by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), available at http://unctad.org/en/Pages/Statistics.aspx; GET Index, a principal-components decomposition of the two other series, computed by the authors.

world economy from the perspective of commodity exporting countries with low domestic savings. The ordering and grouping were done by estimating the impact of the two international variables on each country’s GDP in a regression that accounts for the time structure in the data. In this exercise, as in figure 3.2, international interest rates were measured by the U.S. 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate, provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), while international commodity prices were captured by UNCTAD’s aggregate “free market commodity prices” index.13 U.S. interest rates have a negative impact and commodity prices have a positive impact on the region’s aggregate as well as on each country’s GDP growth. However, the joint impact of these variables is only statistically significant in countries in the left column of the table (the “determined” economies, for lack of a better term). These are the

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Table 3.2. Externally determined economies in Latin America, 1980–2011 Determined economies

Nondetermined economies

Argentina El Salvador Bolivia Guatemala Paraguay Dominican Republic Uruguay Costa Rica Venezuela Nicaragua Chile Mexico Colombia Panama Brazil Honduras Ecuador Peru Sources: Computations by the authors using the U.S. 10-Year Treasury Constant Maturity Rate, computed and distributed by Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED); the aggregate free market commodity prices index, computed and distributed by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD); yearly GDP measured in constant local currency, by UNCTAD. See chapter 3 note 12 for additional details. Note: Countries are listed in the order of most to least externally determined economies.

countries in which our argument should apply, and Brazil is one of them. Determined economies tend to be in South America, which concentrates on commodity exporting and is comprised largely of inwardlooking countries. Mexico and Central America make up the nondetermined economies, which makes sense given that they are much more dependent on remittances from the United States and that Mexico produces manufactured goods sold to the United States. This distinction further underscores a general point worth noting, that we are not claiming the economies in countries in the right column of the table do not depend on international conditions. We are simply claiming that they do not depend on international conditions in the same way as the others. Their economies might (and probably do) follow other exogenous indicators beyond U.S. interest rates and international commodity prices. To rephrase our point, in regard to countries in the left column of table 3.2, economic performance is strongly determined by exogenous factors that we, as analysts, can observe. If voters do not know this or

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do not take it into consideration, presidents of the externally determined countries will typically be punished and rewarded on the basis of how favorable the world economy is, while those in the right column of the table will not. Brazil, in this sense, is a typical case among a class of countries that are commodity exporters and dependent on foreign inflows of capital, and the fate of its presidents might be determined by international conditions.

International Factors and Presidential Popularity in Brazil In this section we examine the popularity of Brazilian presidents between 1987 and 2012. We report results from statistical analysis that assesses the extent to which Brazilian voters discount economic performance that is attributable to factors beyond the president’s control when evaluating a president’s performance. Our hypothesis is that post-1985 Brazilian voters are oblivious to exogenous determinants of economic performance and therefore reward lucky incumbents in good times and punish the unlucky ones in bad times. In order to test the relationship between international factors and presidential success, we examine presidential popularity rates in Brazil to determine the extent to which they can be predicted by commodity prices and U.S. interest rates.14 The results that follow are based on the analysis of the series of observations of presidential popularity that are shown in figure 3.1. The statistical analysis employed is intended to measure the impacts that commodity prices, interest rates, and the publicity arising from political crises have on presidential popularity. We did this by estimating regression models that “explain” the variations in popularity shown in figure 3.1 using U.S. interest rates and the commodity price index as the main explanatory variables but also including indicators for when there was a political crisis in the country.15 The most important result is presented in figure 3.3. It shows actual popularity as well as the popularity that is predicted by the simplest possible specification (one that does not take into account how the past affects the future). This simple statistical model explains about 70 percent of the variation in presidential popularity. This means that without knowing anything specific about Brazil (without knowing the party of the president, whether she had a majority in Congress,

Understanding the Increasing Popularity of Brazilian Presidents · 61

Figure 3.3. Predicted and actual popularity of Brazilian presidents, 1987–2013. Source: Computed by the authors as described in chapter 3 note 14.

whether the country is growing or unemployment is high) it is possible to predict with considerable accuracy how popular the president will be based solely on factors beyond her control. For the sake of comparison, a model including only domestic economic variables (income, GDP, inflation in the preceding six months, and unemployment) plus the same indicators for pollster and time in office has almost identical explanatory power. The fact that a model relying on only two international economic variables can predict popularity as accurately as a model with several domestic economic variables is striking. It has important implications for democratic accountability, to which we return in the closing discussion. The results are also directly compatible with our theory. Even after accounting for the time dependence in the data, both commodities and interest rates have the expected effects, which are statistically significant and substantively important. Higher U.S. interest rates mean lower popularity for Brazilian presidents, while higher commodity prices are associated with considerably higher popularity.16

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These estimates translate into very substantive effects. As an example of the impact of world economic conditions, one can consider that Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s popularity at the eve of his reelection was 42.3 percent. Had he faced the same international conditions Lula faced at a similar point in his first term, Cardoso could have enjoyed a popularity rate of 50 percent. In contrast, Lula’s popularity at reelection was very close to its predicted value, at 49.7 percent. Had he faced the much more unfavorable conditions Cardoso faced, his popularity could have been as low as 34.5 percent. Figure 3.3 also shows when a president deviated from what is predicted by the model. It shows that Cardoso overperformed during most of his first term and Lula overperformed during his second term, which suggests that there is some room for deviations from the international determinants. Cardoso reaped the rewards of stabilization, and Lula probably reaped the rewards of increased redistribution. Though stabilization and redistributive social policy were at least partially made possible by a benign economic outlook, in both moments the presidents were able to make the most of good economic times. Our analysis also reveals that “purely political” domestic crises have a statistically significant effect on the popularity of presidents, albeit not a very large one. We coded political crises as events that made headlines in major newspapers for more than one month, that were driven either by corruption or incompetence in the federal government, that conceivably implicated or demanded action by the president, and that were not driven by economic issues. Taken together, during all of the episodes we coded as political crises, the president’s popularity was 2.22 percentage points lower (p-value < 0.01) than in months when there was no crisis (table 3.3). However, we also estimated one variation of the basic model in which each political crisis was coded separately. Given that there are relatively few months in which any given crisis was observed, it is not surprising that only one crisis, Collor’s impeachment, yields statistically significant effects. What is really interesting is that all crises produce effects that are roughly similar in magnitude, suggesting that the aggregate result is representative of the typical crisis. We also see that the first crisis under Lula (the bingo scandal, whereby members of the PT were accused of extracting bribes from a gaming mafia) had a larger effect than the potentially more devastating mensalão scandal,

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Table 3.3. Effects of political crisis on presidential popularity

Model 1

Model 2

Political crisis (all crises) -2.217 (Standard error) (0.863) Sarney’s congressional hearings -2.593 (2.178) Cardoso’s energy crisis -2.647 (1.921) Collor’s impeachment -2.178 (1.448) Lula’s mensalão corruption scandal -2.38 (1.829) Cardoso’s reelection scandal -0.192 (3.677) Dilma’s ministerial corruption scandal -1.272 (2.277) Source: Authors’ calculations Note: Table shows “effects” of political crises on popularity. Standard errors are shown in parentheses.

a scandal of bribes for legislative votes that almost brought down Lula’s government. In fact, the mensalão, under this optic, was no more detrimental to the government than the apagão (the energy-rationing crisis) was for Cardoso.

Conclusions and Implications In this chapter we have examined the hypothesis that voters reward and punish presidents for economic performance even when it is determined by external factors that are beyond a president’s control. We argued that in Brazil, as in most Latin American countries, international commodity prices and U.S. interest rates have strong effects on economic performance. We then showed in more detail that these same two international economic variables have substantial effects on the popularity of presidents in Brazil. Granted, our results provide some glimpses that presidents are able to marginally affect their own destinies by the way they respond to such exogenous circumstances. To be clear, we do not claim that presi-

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dents have no control over the domestic economy but rather that the constraints imposed by the international economy severely limit the options available. Evidence that two presidents (Cardoso and Lula) overperformed relative to the state of the world economy, which we did not fully explore here, suggests that presidents can make a positive situation better in electoral terms by engaging in redistributive policies. Presidents’ popularity, we also find, suffers (but very slightly) when there are domestic political crises. None of this is surprising. Our main finding, however, is that statistical models relying on just two international economic variables can predict popularity as well as a model with several domestic economic variables. This has potentially very important implications for understanding democratic accountability in Brazil and in Latin America more broadly. It implies, in essence, that incumbents are punished or rewarded according to luck, and not merit, much in the same way as voters have been shown to punish incumbents for shark attacks and droughts.17 These findings have important consequences for the study of economic voting. They suggest that in less developed democracies, uninformed voters are not always capable of correctly attributing responsibility to incumbents. If this is true, the linkage between punishment or reward and performance is broken, potentially decreasing governments’ electoral incentives to improve policymaking and loosening the connection between economic voting and democratic accountability. Particularly in Latin America, our findings fundamentally challenge the established notion of “ex-post accountability,”18 according to which incumbents’ frequent breaking of electoral promises does not affect democratic accountability because voters’ ultimate concern is with their material conditions, and they reward or punish incumbents depending on the economic impact of their policy choices. Ex-post accountability hinges on the capacity of voters to link results to performance. However, if economic performance is mostly determined exogenously, the ex-post logic cannot hold. This implies that democracy would not necessarily (or not always) provide positive incentives for politicians to focus on generating economic growth. We suspect, though we leave this for future studies, that if faced with uncertain electoral prospects, presidents will still face incentives to devote strong efforts to improving domestic economic performance. However, whenever conditions are so good that reelection is almost certain

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or so bad that electoral defeat is unavoidable, presidents will probably best devote their limited resources and effort to other activities, such as building a party, paying off supporters, or outright graft. Finally, our findings in this chapter suggest a word of caution for the study of politics. Even apparently domestic outcomes such as the popularity of presidents can be strongly determined by processes that transcend the borders of a country. If in the United States “all politics is local,” in the other America, “All politics is global” is probably a better adage.

Notes 1. Marcelo Côrtes Neri, De volta ao país do futuro: Crise européia, projeções e a nova classe média (Rio de Janeiro: FGV/CPS, 2012). 2. Gerald H. Kramer, “Short-term Fluctuations in U.S. Voting Behavior, 1896– 1964,” American Political Science Review 65, no.1 (1971): 131–43. 3. Alberto Alesina and Howard Rosenthal, Partisan Politics, Divided Government, and the Economy (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4. Kenneth Scheve, “Democracy and Globalization: Candidate Selection in Open Economies,” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001). 5. Raymond. M. Duch and Randy T. Stevenson, The Economic Vote: How Political Institutions Condition Election Result (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6. Michael Ebeid and Jonathan Rodden, “Economic Geography and Economic Voting: Evidence from the United States,” British Journal of Political Science 36, no. 3 (2005): 527–47. 7. Mark Kayser and Michael Peress, “Benchmarking across Borders: Electoral Accountability and the Necessity of Comparison,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 3 (2002): 661–84. 8. Averages for the 2009–2012 period show that Brazil’s exposure to merchandise trade at 19% of GDP is low even for South America’s low standards (the average for the region is 47%). It is much lower than Mexico’s (59%) or the average for Central America (73%) and pales in comparison to Western Europe’s (OECD members only) average of 83%. Differences for exposure to trade in services are also huge, with Brazil at less than 5% of GDP and Western Europe at 32%. World Bank, “World Development Indicators,” 2013, http://data.worldbank.org/indicator. 9. The empirical analysis in subsequent sections of this chapter assumes that there is no direct effect of the international economy on voter behavior. We believe this is a reasonable assumption based on the arguments just listed, but it is an assumption nonetheless; that is, it is not tested directly. We have tested it very indirectly (though we do not report our findings here because of space constraints) by looking

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at whether the economic performance of Brazil relative to its neighbors affects voter assessments of the presidents. We found no such effects. Results are available from the authors. 10. Javier Santiso, The Political Economy of Emerging Markets—Actors, Institutions, and Financial Crises in Latin America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 11. For example, see Guillermo Calvo, Leonardo Leiderman, and Carmen M. Rein­hart, “Inflows of Capital to Developing Countries in the 1990s,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 2 (1996): 123–39. 12. This classification of countries is obtained by regressing the regional GDP on international interest rates and commodity prices and correcting for the time structure in the data by estimating an AR-1 model with the inclusion of the lag of the dependent variable. 13. More specifically, we ran one regression for each country in which the dependent variable, GDP, measured in constant local currency, was normalized to an index in which the value of the GDP of each country in 1980 corresponds to 100. The explanatory variables were U.S. interest rates and commodity prices, and we dealt with the time structure by including the lagged dependent variable. 14. Approximately 70 percent of all our observations of the popularity of Brazilian presidents were compiled by journalist Fernando Rodrigues (“Pesquisas de opinião,” UOL notícias políticas, http://noticias.uol.com.br/politica/pesquisas). However, our data set expands the number of observations by using several other sources such as the websites of Datafolha (a polling firm), the CNI (Confederação Nacional da Indústria) and CNT (Confederação Nacional dos Transportes) business organizations that conduct surveys, and CESOP (Centro de Estudos sobre Opinião Pública), a repository of polls at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Datafolha poll results are available at http://datafolha.folha.uol.com.br/; CNT polls are available at http://www.cnt.org.br/Paginas/Pesquisas_Detalhes.aspx; CNI polls are available at http://www.cni.org.br/portal/data/pages/FF808081314EB36201314F226C890369. htm; and the CESOP repository can be found at http://www.cesop.unicamp.br/site/ htm/apre.php. The complete data set used in this paper is available from the authors. The series was built from 375 observations of presidents’ popularity taken by four polling firms and spanning the period between March 1987 and December 2012. We also dropped the observations for 2013, as no economic data were yet available at the time of writing. We converted these observations—originally taken at irregular intervals—into monthly observations by averaging multiple observations per month, which led us to 222 observations spanning 310 months, and imputed the missing 88 observations. For details about the multiple imputation software see James Honaker, Garry King, and Mathew Blackwell, “Amelia ii: A Program for Missing Data,” Journal of Statistical Software 45, no. 7 (2011): 1–47. 15. We first estimated one very basic linear regression model without taking into account the time structure of the data, which we used as the baseline to compare with models that rely on domestic economic factors. However, we also estimated other, more complex models and dealt with the time structure including the lag de-

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pendent variable and correction for AR-1 time processes, to which we refer when discussing the “effects” of the international factors. 16. The coefficient on U.S. interest rates was -0.52 (p-value = 0.048) and on the log of commodity price index was 4.312 (p-value < 0.01). 17. Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, “Blind Retrospection: Electoral Responses to Droughts, Floods, and Shark Attacks,” Estudios/Working Papers (Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Ciencias Sociales) 199 (2004): 1. 18. Susan Stokes, Mandates and Democracy: Neoliberalism by Surprise in Latin America (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

4 Too Soon to Give Up, Too Late to Really Matter Impasses, Self-Deception, and Brazil’s Media-Democratization Agenda Fernando Lattman-Weltman

With the rise to power of a strong leftist party in Brazil—with the electoral victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT, in 2002—sectors of Brazilian civil society renewed expectations that a long-awaited media-democratization agenda (MDA), a somewhat complex aggregate of demands also advocated by many in Brazilian social movements, could at last be implemented.1 In this chapter I will address the fate of this controversial agenda and why it seems to have been bypassed by the institutionalization of the Brazilian political system and the ongoing technological revolution.

The Emergence of the Media as a Political/Cultural Issue In order to understand these issues we must first take a look at the origins of this agenda. Great concern and research about media as a political and cultural issue began to grow in Brazilian academic circles mainly in the 1970s. This was due to a convergence of important changes that the country and society were facing at that time. First of all it must be said that it was exactly at this point that Brazil completed a decisive shift in its social morphology, becoming predominantly an urbanized and industrialized country, a big change that had gained speed since the end of World War II but accelerated in

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the 1950s and 1960s.2 At the same period, by the end of the 1960s, the military regime (1964–1985) completed the construction of a network that made it possible to connect the entire Brazilian subcontinent through a system of microwave transmitters. Part of a military strategy to integrate the vast national territory of Brazil, the network made it possible to broadcast television signals from the main media centers—Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in particular—to anywhere in the country, thus incorporating new audiences into the mass media markets. In a society that was still plagued by illiteracy and marked by comparatively low levels of press consumption, this not only meant a huge economic development—it meant also a great political and cultural change due to a significant increase of popular consumption of and participation in the information and symbolic markets. On March 31, 1964, when a coup d’etat gave birth to the military regime, roughly 10 percent of Brazilian households were equipped with TV sets. Twenty years later, by the end of the dictatorship, this number had grown to 75 percent.3 Among the main private players in the Brazilian media system that benefited from this huge public investment, no one did better than Rede Globo, the communication holding company owned and directed by journalist Roberto Marinho of Rio de Janeiro. Already powerful in the press segment, with the influential newspaper O Globo and many magazines, but also leading in the radio markets with its Sistema Globo de Rádio, the television network of Marinho was extraordinarily successful. It undertook a coherent strategy that allowed it to take advantage of the telecommunication infrastructure brought about by the military regime by creating the first national television network and establishing a new standard of TV broadcasting and production quality, the “Padrão Globo de Qualidade” (Globo Standard of Quality).4 In the beginning of the 1970s, with no other group able to compete with the Rede Globo, the network achieved hegemonic control of the media markets, and analysts began to talk about the rise of a true monopoly over meaning: an astounding capacity attributed to TV Globo that allowed it to dictate the dominant aesthetic patterns of modern Brazilian mass culture (a sort of new Brazilian Hollywood) as well as the country’s general political perspective.5 It is not surprising that this was the time when new interpretations

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of television and mass culture began to flourish in the Brazilian academy, leading to a new field—media studies. It was no surprise either that due to the zeitgeist and its important changes, these studies assumed a rather “apocalyptic” approach.6 I believe this was due to the impact and speed of Globo’s rise to power but also because its rise was made possible by a kind of alliance between that network and the military regime, which at that time—the beginning of the 1970s—was at the peak of its material and symbolic domination of Brazil’s politics, economy, and society.7 In a span of a few years, people stopped lamenting the backwardness of Brazil’s economy and society. Instead, they began to complain about the rapid and dehumanizing industrial and urban changes that were bringing on all the classic malaises of modernity. The pure, untouched, savage imagery of the country that was at once cherished and regretted by so many commentators was now being driven by another form of savagery: a predatory form of “feral capitalism” apparently welcomed by the military regime.8 Its most prominent façade was being constructed and broadcast by the powerful and innovative television station of Roberto Marinho.

Brazilian Media Malaises I cannot provide here a detailed account of the evolution of the field of media studies in Brazil, which did not vary greatly from the field’s transformation elsewhere, and its fate through such distinct and interesting but also problematic approaches such as the old “cultural industry” theory of Adorno and Horkheimer or the postmodern trends of the 1990s and 2000s, with their cultural studies, multiculturalisms, feminisms, communitarianisms, and some other “isms.”9 What really matters to us here is that, generally, according to these approaches to the late-twentieth-century development of the Brazilian mass media, those media were thought beset by many problems, problems that supposedly undermined their capacity to contribute fully to the advancement and promotion of Brazilian democracy. The issue is further complicated because it is very hard to reach an agreement on what this democracy should be. Moreover, to agree on a single, coherent approach articulating such a complex and contradictory set of academic theories about the relationship between mass media and the political arena in modern societies is impossible.

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In any case, in spite of these problems of theory, politics, and approach, a certain number of empirical traits of the Brazilian media system were, over time, seen by the critics—both in the academy and in the social movements—to be performing a strategic and recurrent role at the level of political discourse among certain actors in civil society during the past thirty or forty years. To those somehow influenced by media studies in the social movements of the time, these traits did suggest a relatively coherent agenda for media reform. To summarize these traits, I would categorize them under six headings: concentration and cross-ownership of main media vehicles; regional and cultural concentration of media production and news editing in Rio and São Paulo; partisan (“physiologic”) distribution of a considerable amount of TV and radio outlets,10 mainly to politicians of the center and/or right parties; spurious and unclear connections between partisan or corporate interests and the more prominent newsrooms; political, religious, and commercial subversion of the civic principles that ought to rule the concession of public radio channels; and spontaneous ideological or clearly intended agreement on the way to think about and portray reality, leading to a single discourse limiting the scope and interpretation of the news. Let us take each of these in turn. Concentration and Cross-Ownership of Main Media Vehicles The period of the popularization of mass media in Brazil was also a moment of great media concentration, with the disappearance of many traditional vehicles—especially newspapers and the main cities’ television channels.11 What is considered even more problematic and harmful to the desirable plurality of political perspectives is that this process of concentration was paralleled by a complete lack of state control to prevent the establishment of a few powerful media holding companies, with the same groups cross-owning different media vehicles, usually in the same city or region. Thus, Rede Globo had a TV network, a radio network, a newspaper, and magazines—mainly in Rio; later, it also controlled cable TV and provided access to the Internet. In the southern states of Brazil, Rede Brasil Sul (RBS), a regional partner of Globo, reproduced the same patterns, with television, radio, newspaper, and so forth. In São Paulo,

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however, groups like Rede Bandeirantes de Televisão (Bandeirantes), Sistema Brasileiro de Televisão (SBT), Rede Record de Televisão, the publishing house Abril (owner of Veja, the most successful and politically powerful Brazilian magazine), and the newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo competed with Globo in many different fields of media production. Least successful but momentarily important in that period were, particularly in Rio, competitors like Jornal do Brasil (once a prestigious newspaper and radio network), and Manchete (a formerly great publishing house that also owned networks on radio and TV). Regional and Cultural Concentration of Production and News Editing in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo The fact that these networks and holdings were generally based either in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, where they concentrated their units of production and main newsrooms, led analysts to the perception that both fictional and journalistic materials were destined to reflect and reproduce the regional culture of those centers and to privilege the coverage of events in light of their specific interests. This would reinforce unequal sociocultural tendencies that were already in place, detrimental to the survival of typical—and supposedly authentic—manifestations of other regions’ local popular cultures and/or local popular speech. In effect, this would export and impose popular culture from the hegemonic and industrialized centers to the entire nation in an unbalanced manner.12 Partisan Distribution of a Considerable Amount of TV and Radio Outlets, Mainly to Politicians of the Center and Right Parties Related to this complaint was the fact that TV and radio channels were subject to a regime of state-controlled concessions, which is simply mandatory due to technical limitations.13 In the 1970s and 1980s, however, state concessions were a subject of great political controversy because there were no clear rules and processes for their distribution. Concessions were settled by a kind of unclear bargain between the administrations (military administrations, one might add, until 1985) and the bidders, most of them, in reality, politicians who exchanged

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political favors—especially legislative votes and support—for the concessions. This was seen as a perversion of the ideal of the airwaves’ use as a public service—an opening to the corrupt politicization of a public service, with a clear risk to freedom and plurality of expression. The problem was obvious whenever the owner of the channel faced the dilemma of making or not making public any news affecting an administration’s interests. Most of the channel owners belonged to the center-right parties that at the time held the majority of seats in Congress, an arrangement that encouraged this interpretation and the denouncement of the state of affairs. It was obvious that the situation could be criticized in terms of accepted norms regarding the media and public service; it was also a matter of questioning the media’s political balance at a time when the Left was rising and attempting to challenge the status quo.14 Connections between Partisan and Corporate Interests to Prominent Newsrooms This is a classic accusation made against the media whenever there is some accepted, impartial code of journalistic ethics. No matter what the public commitments assumed in the name of objectivity, private media are dependent on the power of money (and political power), just as public media depend on the government (and indirectly on money). Such disagreeable realities force another issue to the fore: the predominance of neutral and impartial ethics entails the necessity for cloaking such realities—forcing these dependent relationships out of public sight. So, in a competitive, mostly private, and ideologically conservative market of communication such as Brazil’s, media objectivity is at the same time demanded, denounced (when not effective), and denied (as impossible, in the above-mentioned conditions).15 Subversion of the “Civic” Principles that Ought to Rule the Concession of Community Radio Channels Another area of public regulation of the media that generated great uneasiness and disappointment—especially among NGOs and leftist social movements’ militants—was the issue of community radio stations, seen from their inception as a kind of antidote to the typical

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economic and/or political vicissitudes of the mainstream mass media. The term “rádio comunitária” (community radio) in Brazil was intended to describe small-scale radio broadcasting enterprises run on a nonprofit basis (roughly the equivalent of the occasional U.S. lowpower community stations often run by dedicated volunteers). This is something that has sprung up in the past three decades with great support and expectations from NGOs, which hoped that such stations would fill a space not covered either by commercial or governmentowned stations. They were intended to reach small and poorly served audiences in impoverished communities, supply them with local and useful information, and help them to mobilize their own interests and scarce resources collectively to attain new levels of social and political awareness. In the 1990s, during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration, the government issued a law to regulate such radio activities, trying to end ongoing controversies concerning technical problems (frequency meddling) between the professional stations and these public radio stations and at the same time guaranteeing that the latter would not be diverted from their high civic responsibilities. Unfortunately, it seems that the regulation was not able to prevent those community radio stations from being used by local politicians or religious leaders or even local commercial interests. The regulation’s implementation was blamed for such manipulation and even denounced as a repressive tool that would not allow for the truly free emergence of new, authentic public radio stations.16 Development of a “Single Discourse” that Limits the Scope and Interpretation of the News This is probably the most interesting of the complaints about Brazil’s media system, as it is elsewhere. The critique charges that those directing the media act in a spontaneous way and in an intended way to build an ideological consensus about how to understand reality in general and consequently how to make sense of any specific fact or event: one simply places it within this dominating, general framework. Let us put aside the problems associated with how each of these alleged paths to such an ideological homogeneity is constructed—not to mention the question of whether they reinforce one another or alternate in arriving

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at the same position independently. The important thing here is clear: it is to affirm the one-dimensionality of the resulting perspective and thus to blame it for denying the opportunity for alternative descriptions or understandings of reality (or at least an alternative favored by the critic involved).17 So, to summarize a complex universe of resentments, we can say that according to this framework of six broad traits, the Brazilian media system was (and still is) concentrated in a few hands; regionally, culturally, and ideologically homogenized and exclusive; easily manipulated politically; and totally unbalanced in favor of economic power and/or government. Such views may not sound very original or so different from critiques of national media systems elsewhere (and it certainly is not). Still, it was through the lenses of this perspective that our mass communication vehicles were judged politically as Brazil returned to democracy at the end of the 1980s.

Malaise and the New Democratic Brazilian Experience In 1988 Brazil enacted its seventh constitution. The articles and norms on social communication in it were supposed to promote unrestrained freedom of expression and regional and cultural diversity, to be conceded by the government and used by concessionaries with all due respect for the public interest, and to be conducive to the maintenance of Brazilian sovereignty.18 One year later the entire new Brazilian political system established by the new constitution was to be tested with the long-awaited direct election of a president, the first since 1960. Amid a terrible economic crisis with hyperinflation just around the corner and great discredit to the political elite that had arisen after the military regime, the first round of the election was won by two self-described outsiders: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, the raucous former factory worker and union leader who created the PT; and Fernando Collor de Mello, heir of a traditional political family of oligarchic origins,19 ex-governor of the small state of Alagoas, and candidate of the little-known PRN (Partido da Reconstrução Nacional, Party for National Reconstruction). Collor identified himself as a champion against bureaucratic corruption: the hunter of maharajas (as he called the public officials of

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his native state who earned big salaries but did not work accordingly). While Lula was portrayed by the mainstream media as an outdated radical leftist, Collor was welcomed as a modern and energetic public manager attuned to the new neoliberal tendencies that were supposedly working well in many economies around the world at that time.20 When Collor defeated Lula in the runoff of the 1989 election, there was no rumor of fraud, no question about the legitimacy of the outcome (as there has not been since then). Nonetheless, the media’s behavior—and especially Rede Globo’s—was questioned by many analysts, mainly but not only from the Left. The four million votes that separated the winner from the loser were attributed by some of Lula’s supporters to a barrage of biased journalistic coverage against the PT’s candidate.21 In particular there was the strange editing of the last debate between Lula and Collor made by Rede Globo’s journalists, who were accused of highlighting the bad moments of the first candidate and the good ones of the latter. Whatever the truth of such claims and complaints, the hard-to-swallow electoral defeat was interpreted by the Left not simply as a possible outcome of a competitive yet unknown and mostly unpredictable electoral process—the first in a long time—but as the spurious result of undue media interference. The script was not much different five years later when the same Lula, of the same PT, was again defeated—this time, right in the first round, by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC), heading a coalition of his PSDB (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, Brazilian Social Democracy Party) with the PFL (Partido da Frente Liberal, Liberal Front Party). A well-known politician and respected intellectual, FHC benefited from the success and popularity of the famous Plano Real economic program that he launched as finance minister in President Itamar Franco’s administration (1992–1995), the plan that finally curbed inflation after the catastrophic, repeated failures of previous administrations.22 Once again, the favorable coverage received by FHC and by his Plano Real, especially in sharp contrast with the coverage that was given to Lula—who, it must also be said, opposed the Plano Real before its success—strengthened the argument that equated electoral outcomes with the undue political intervention of Brazilian mass media. This argument was reaffirmed when FHC was reelected in 1998. Curiously enough, it was strengthened yet again when Lula finally won,

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four years later. This apparent self-contradiction is easily explained. By 2002, the PT leader had changed so significantly that he became quite tolerable to mainstream media for the first time. Lula did this, first, by widening the range of alliances of his once very radical party, notably doing so by choosing a businessman as his running mate—José Alencar of the PL (Partido Liberal, Liberal Party).23 Lula also changed his marketing staff and his approach to the voters in the campaign. Instead of sounding radical and hostile, as he did in the previous elections,24 he smiled all the time and began to poke fun at himself as he did so, calling himself “Lulinha Paz e Amor” (Little Peace and Love Lula). Most important of all, Lula not only recognized the benefits brought to the poor by the economic stabilization process conducted by the former administrations of Itamar Franco and FHC, he embraced the Plano Real now and publicly accepted its economic stability mechanisms. In his famous “Carta aos brasileiros” (Letter to Brazilians), he committed himself to keeping inflation down and to promoting a plan of economic growth that did not risk a return to the economically unstable programs of the recent past. So, now, even if Lula and the Left had finally been raised to power democratically, the main argument of the Left against the media remained intact. According to the argument, Lula had had to compromise in order finally to win in 2002. His previous political defeats were not due to simple and contextual electoral reasons. They were due to the unfair behavior and illegitimate ideological privileges of the oligopolistic media in the new democratic Brazilian system. If it were not for inappropriate media influence, it was charged, the people would have freely voted according to their “own objective interests” from the beginning—they would have voted for the PT.25 This political argument had broader applications: the media must be reformed to let the cultural diversity and authenticity of true popular identities and interests surface, survive, and freely and spontaneously express themselves.

The “Lula Era” (2003–2011) and the Time of the MDA It took twenty-two years for the PT to achieve national power in Brazil.26 However, the main traits of the media-democratization agenda began being constructed a few years before the party was founded in

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1980, in the years during and immediately after the military regime. With the end of the regime and the party’s increased mobilization, the agenda gained momentum as the country finally transitioned to democracy in the 1980s with the National Constituent Assembly (1987– 1988) as the culminating step of this process. So, with the victory of Lula in 2002, it looked as if the MDA would finally reach its haven. Initially the prospects seemed good. “Lulinha Paz e Amor” won at the runoff, beating the PSDB candidate, José Serra, in an uncontested vote. Many analysts commemorated what was then understood as the final test of Brazil’s new democracy: the peaceful election of a leftist leader. Even the ceremony of his inauguration was a nice festivity in Brasília, with former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso smiling as he passed the presidential sash to Lula, his onetime friend and now political rival. It was a true celebration of political fair play and a joy to see the respected sociologist and the workingclass hero together, leaving aside their political differences and the mutual resentments between them and their parties. Some might think it easy for such a popular new incumbent to get approval for almost any kind of bill and agenda he felt inclined to pursue. Indeed, Lula was soon successful in complicated political maneuvers such as fiscal and social security reform, sometimes displeasing his own more radical supporters on the Left and even resorting to garnering votes from the opposition itself. Yet, such political success was not to be the case with the MDA. A few months after beginning the new administration’s first term in 2003, there was news of two distinct MDA projects that were being prepared: the first was the proposal to establish a kind of National Press Committee (Conselho Nacional de Jornalismo, CNJ), intended to regulate and discipline the exercise of the journalistic profession in the entire country; the second was the idea of creating a regulatory agency for movies and audiovisual production, the Agência Nacional do Cinema e do Audiovisual (Ancinav, the National Agency of Cinema and the Audiovisual Arts). As soon as they appeared, both projects faced harsh criticism from mainstream media and their representative associations and were attacked on the grounds of defense of freedom of expression. According to the critics, the CNJ was designed to exert censorship on behalf of the administration and its supporters, and Ancinav was set up to

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guide production in its field along questionable artistic or content lines also determined by the PT administration and its artists. After the expected immediate denial of such indefensible accusations—censorship and political/ideological control of artistic production—and in spite of its power and alleged commitment to these ideas, the administration did not waste too much energy or time. It quickly shelved the two proposals, to the great disappointment of many supporters of the MDA. The only other significant initiative of Lula’s two terms (2003–2011) in regard to the MDA was the summoning, in 2009, of the first Confecom (Conferência Nacional de Comunicação, National Communication Conference). Brazil has a long and increasingly consistent record of creating and maintaining forums between civil society and the state to debate matters of public interest, with health and education policies being the most traditional and long-lived concerns.27 Yet it was only in 2009—a few years before the end of Lula’s second term—that the area of communication policy finally had its first such opportunity (while others were much more active throughout the entire “Lula Era”). After a few days of debate, with the predictable tensions among most of the civil society leaders and the representatives of mainstream private media there, a set of demands was made public that gave the MDA a coherent and clear-cut appearance. Among these, the most noted was what conference participants called the marco regulatório (regulatory framework) proposed for governing mass communication in Brazil. The demands, however, were not implemented during the remainder of the administration. When the Lula era ended, the PT government did not, with the victory of Lula’s former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff in the 2010 elections. It was naturally expected that the MDA might be reinvigorated with the victory. There was public discussion about the implementation of the marco regulatório following the general outlines proposed in the first Confecom. However, it looks as if this expectation will have the same destiny as previous proposals (like the press committee and Ancinav). It is likely to be shelved. After more than a decade without successful implementation and with Dilma’s first term drawing nearer its big test in the 2014 general elections, such a move would seem late and unnecessarily provocative. The most ambitious trait of this MDA has been the will to intervene radically in the mainstream Brazilian media in order to make them

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more ideologically and culturally pluralistic, more committed to what some consider the public interest and more authentic forms of popular culture, whatever all this plurality, authenticity, and public interest may be; these will have to wait, perhaps indefinitely, to see the light of day.

Why Was It So? As described earlier, the first attempts made by the Lula administration to bring at least some of the more controversial aspects of the MDA to life were doomed by a strong mainstream media reaction. In fact, we could even speak of a kind of informal veto power exercised by these enterprises and by their associations.28 However, with due respect for the power of these groups, if Lula had wanted to override their informal veto, he, as a popular Brazilian president—with all the institutional resources granted to his position in our political system today—would have had the means to overcome it.29 There was, however, much more to be considered among the problems in implementing this agenda, especially when it concerns the charge of a government agency engaged in censorship. Although MDA supporters consistently denied any intention of censorship, it is hard to see as anything else the kinds of actions the agencies MDA supporters promoted to challenge “inappropriate” journalistic behavior unless defined with some kind of precision—which the usual civic codes and jurisprudence already do in Brazil today—how such government intervention would be exercised without becoming something that could be defined at least as a new form of censorship. There is a similar problem with the idea of creating an agency to oversee policies in the field of audiovisual production: How would one legitimize some universal tool like this, authorized by the government? After all, its goal is to protect privately owned and personally designed cultural objects and forms of art. How would the “authenticity” of such works be defined, and how would quality be ascribed to them, given their dynamic, creative, innovative origins in the field of audiovisual production—by itself intrinsically “inauthentic”?30 How would one set up such an agency without the risk of promoting some particular artistic forms or artists with special access or appeal to the administration that happened to be in power at the time? Moreover, given changes in

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administration, would this not impact the art and the artists favored from one administration to the other, in an effectively ephemeral, arbitrary application of the ideal of cultural authenticity? These are legitimate questions. Still, most important is the true role of the MDA with respect to the overall strategies of the PT administrations of Lula and Dilma. Unlike many of their supporters, the PT administrations seem to know very well (as was plainly demonstrated by the party electoral victories of 2006 and 2010) that there is not—or not any more—a decisive or autonomous political influence by Brazilian mainstream media on presidential elections. This is easily demonstrated. After all, the relative détente established between Lula and mainstream Brazilian media in the 2002 elections was completely abandoned in 2005 due to the mensalão scandal, when the leadership of the PT was accused of buying votes in Congress to gain support for Lula’s first administration and its agenda. All that year and the following, the year of Lula’s reelection, press coverage of the scandal was intense and negative. Yet, despite the scandal, the media could not prevent the president from winning again.31 The coverage of the second Lula term was even more negative, but again, it could not prevent another PT victory. Finally, Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s handpicked successor, followed the former president into power in 2010. In effect, in partisan terms, the MDA is unnecessary. Instead of spending political resources to implement the MDA, the Dilma administration has seemed to be focused on practical economic and infrastructural issues. It has promoted the fostering of digital inclusion and the building of a framework to regulate the process of technological convergence and its introduction in Brazil. Besides the strategic shift in favor of new digital media as the most important tools to empower and include people in the markets of information production and consumption, the emphasis on their popularization allows the government to circumvent the informal power of traditional mainstream media and their representatives. Indeed, this strategy facilitates the establishment of a new, opportune alliance with the sector of telephone service providers, a much stronger group in economic terms.32 However, this is only one side of the story. It is true that the new technologies may not be an ideal solution when, for instance, instead of fulfilling most of the promises of an authentic Habermasian “public

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sphere” of free and enlightened debate, they often serve much more prominently to reproduce sociocultural hierarchies and prejudices.33 Still, the unpredictable qualities of the digital revolution do take matters in another direction. The revolution can surely foster pluralism as no other medium can, with its many websites, blogs, and social media. As the street movement that began in June 2013 demonstrated, digital media can also improve decisively the speed and malleability of social movements and communitarian activity, helping to bring newcomers to the political arenas—especially young ones—through social networks and an unprecedented capacity for building immediate collective solidarity based upon personal and affective individual resources.34 In effect, the old problems of a lack of plurality or cultural diversity in the traditional mainstream media—especially TV and radio broadcasting, in need of state regulation and concession—can be overcome by the diffusion of cable TV, with its many channels, but even more by new digital media consumption and popular appropriation. The traditional mainstream media—or at least their traditional carriers (paper, TV, and radio gadgets) and business models—can also simply become obsolete when one considers that the new audiences are being predominantly socialized in the communication markets through the Internet, accessing every kind of content through their computers, tablets, and cell phones, content which they not only watch but also recast and reproduce in a variety of ways and aesthetic forms. This may not be any guarantee of authentic cultural and ideological plurality, but what else is a more likely possibility?35 In any case, if the media democratization agenda of the 1980s originated as part of an attempt to end the military regime and to challenge its socioeconomic supports, one could say that the subsequent events and technology have now made that agenda superfluous. There will still be enough room to improve the media and their regulatory framework as well as to believe in cultural authenticities, hegemonies, public spheres, and so forth. However, a society cannot be democratized through mass media alone. Nor is it necessary, when these always problematic media already function within a democratic society. For that is what Brazil is today—a democracy—regardless of its many typical or idiosyncratic democratic shortcomings.

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Notes 1. The anticipated MDA included regulatory agencies for the practice of journalism and audiovisual production but also a new press law, the requirement of a university degree to work as a journalist, and the end of political determinants of TV and radio channels’ public concessions, among other matters. 2. Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos, “A pós-revolução brasileira,” in Brasil: Sociedade democrática, ed. Hélio Jaguaribe (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1985), 223–335. 3. Fernando Lattman-Weltman, “Mídia e transição democrática: A (des)institucionalização do pan-óptico no Brasil,” in Mídia e política no Brasil, ed. Alzira Alves de Abreu, Fernando Lattman-Weltman, and Mônica Kornis (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2003), 140. 4. Alzira Alves de Abreu and Fernando Lattman-Weltman, “Momento de decisão: Os anos 1970 e a mídia no Rio de Janeiro,” in Um estado em questão: Os 25 anos do Rio de Janeiro, ed. Américo Freire, Marly Motta, and Carlos Eduardo Sarmento (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV/ALERJ, 2001), 349. 5. See Roberto Amaral and César Guimarães, “Media Monopoly in Brazil,” Journal of Communication 54 (1994): 26-38, and Elizabeth Carvalho, Maria Rita Kehl, and Santuza Naves Ribeiro, Anos 70/televisão (Rio de Janeiro: Europa, 1980). 6. The term was applied to certain streams of media studies by Italian writer Umberto Eco in Apocalípticos e integrados (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1970). 7. This was also a time of major economic growth, rapid urbanization, and huge investments in Brazil’s infrastructure, after a decade of economic difficulty. In this expansive era, when the Brazilian GDP achieved record growth, the regime and foreign observers took to calling the epoch that of the “Brazilian Miracle.” See Santos, “A pós-revolução.” 8. Perhaps the most coherent analysis of the political meanings of the economic policies brought about by the military regime was the one made by Fernando Henrique Cardoso at that time, O modelo político brasileiro (São Paulo: Difel, 1977). 9. One must not forget that among these theories were those of Gramscian/Althuserian Marxisms and ideas associated with Habermas’s “public spheres,” among others. 10. The term “physiologic” as attributed to politics in Brazil is related to an opposition between it and another way of doing things, which could be considered “ideological”: while the second implies some kind of coherent project to reshape or defend the status quo, the first is simply related to the struggle—or exchange—between immediate interests, with no real intention to change or preserve the status quo, in its bad or good features. According to historiographical tradition, the distinction was attributed to San Tiago Dantas, an intellectual and important politician of the 1950s and ’60s; see the entry on San Tiago Dantas in Dicionário histórico-biográfico brasileiro—pós 30, ed. Alzira Alves de Abreu, Fernando Lattman-Weltman, Israel Beloch, and Sérgio Tadeu Lamar (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2001). 11. Lattman-Weltman, “Mídia e transição.” 12. Even when these industrial products were based on so-called peripheral cul-

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tures and their languages and objects such as the popular soap operas set in a typical Brazilian Northeastern scenario, the production was sometimes denounced as reductionist, caricatured, or responsible for the reproduction of prejudices against inhabitants of poorer and underprivileged regions of the country. It is at least debatable to call works focusing upon such regions “peripheral” in Brazilian culture when they are so nationally popular and so officially recognized, as with the novels by consecrated authors like Jorge Amado, Dias Gomes, and João Ubaldo, for instance. Data on the 2009 regional concentration of Brazilian television production can be found; see “Produção regional na tv aberta brasileira,” Observatório do Direito à Comunicação, 2009, http://www.direitoacomunicacao.org.br. 13. The limited range of radio and VHF television channels makes it necessary to regulate their use in order to prevent interference in transmissions. 14. Taylor C. Boas, “Media Barons and Electoral Politics: Politically-Controlled Broadcasting in Brazil,” Boston University, March 18, 2013, http://www.bu.edu/ polisci/files/2010/10/media_boss_politics.pdf. 15. On the classic denouncement of the inherently private condition of media in capitalist societies and its implications for the fulfillment of journalistic objectivity, see P. Golding, G. Murdock, and P. Schlesinger, Communicating Politics (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986). On the main traits of the Brazilian media system and its implications for the enactment of classic liberal or conservative journalistic values, see Lattman-Weltman, “Mídia e transição,” and Afonso de Albuquerque, “On Models and Margins: Comparative Media Models Viewed from a Brazilian Perspective,” in Comparing Media Systems beyond the Western World, ed. D. C. Hallin and P. Mancini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 16. On the expectations for community radio channels, see Adilson V. Cabral F., “A promoção do desenvolvimento humano pelas rádios comunitárias do Estado do Rio de Janeiro,” paper presented at the 17th Compós Meeting, São Paulo, June 2008. 17. I do not address here the complex problem of why and which alternative accounts of reality should be expected from the media, in order to qualify them as more or less plural, more or less open to diversity. An example of the discurso único argument can be found in Francisco Fonseca, O consenso forjado: A grande imprensa e a formação da agenda ultraliberal no Brasil (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2005). 18. Articles 220 to 224 of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. 19. Fernando Collor de Mello is the son of former senator and governor Arnon de Mello and grandson of former labor minister Lindolfo Collor. 20. Fernando Lattman-Weltman, José A. D. Carneiro, and Plínio A. Ramos, A imprensa faz e desfaz um presidente (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1994). 21. Among other minor events, in the days before the election, entrepreneur Abílio Diniz was kidnapped and then rescued by the police. Media coverage of the events had plenty of suggestions about the supposed relationship between the kidnappers and the PT. 22. Itamar Franco was elected as vice president of Fernando Collor in 1989. When Collor was impeached in 1992—accused of corruption—Itamar formed a coalition

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supported by the PSDB, the PFL, and other parties, and he recruited Fernando Henrique Cardoso of the PSDB into his cabinet. 23. In Brazil, the term “liberal” does not apply to leftists or center-leftists but to liberals in the classic economic sense, that is, defenders of the free market against state intervention (although Alencar himself was not exactly a dogmatic liberal in his economic approach). In effect, simply by recruiting a PL member into his administration, Lula was making an opening to the Center, at least symbolically. It was a significant, strategic change for Lula and the PT. 24. In 1989 Lula was so angry and sometimes looks so ill-humored that Leonel Brizola, his greatest rival as leader of the Brazilian Left, used to call him the “bearded frog” (sapo barbudo). 25. There are many examples of literature on the subject of the media roles in those elections, and they vary in their conclusions. See Lattman-Weltman, Carneiro, and Ramos, A imprensa faz e desfaz um presidente; Antônio Fausto Neto, O impeachment da televisão: Como se cassa um presidente (Rio de Janeiro: Diadorim, 1995); Antônio Fausto Neto, Eliseo Verón, and Antonio A. C. Rubim, Lula presidente: Televisão e política na campanha presidencial (São Paulo: Hacker, 2003); Jefferson Goulart, ed., Mídia e democracia (São Paulo: Annablume, 2006); and Venício Lima, ed., A mídia nas eleições de 2006 (São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2007). 26. In 1980 the system of two vetted parties, one supporting the military regime and one opposed to it (a system established to suggest that the military ran a democracy rather than a dictatorship), was reformed. That was when the PT was created. The military undertook the reform as part of the regime’s carefully planned transition strategy, in which it sought to divide its opposition and to dominate the proadministration party that it expected to inherit the government. So, in line with this strategy, there was no restriction on the creation of new leftist parties such as the PT. Only the officially communist parties remained banned until 1985. 27. The first health conference was held in 1941; Cristina Fonseca and Gilberto Hochman, “A 1ª conferência nacional de saúde: Reformas, políticas e saúde pública em debate no Estado Novo,” in Capanema: O ministro e seu ministério, ed. Ângela de Castro Gomes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV/Universidade de São Francisco, 2000), 173–93. However, in the past two decades—and especially in the PT governments, since 2003—there has been an astounding proliferation of similar gatherings; see Thamy Pogrebinschi and Fabiano Santos, “Participação como representação: O impacto das conferências nacionais de políticas públicas no Congresso Nacional,” Dados: Revista de Ciências Sociais 54, no. 3 (2011), 259–305. 28. Among the most prominent of these associations we can rank the National Press Association (Associação Nacional de Jornais, ANJ), the Brazilian Association of TV and Radio Stations (Associação Brasileira de Emissoras de Rádio e TV, ABERT), and the National Association of Magazine Publishers (Associação Nacional dos Editores de Revistas, ANER). It is also worth mentioning the support these associations received from abroad by the Inter-American Press Association (Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa, SIP).

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29. About the prerogatives of the Brazilian presidency in the new constitution, see, for instance, Argelina Figueiredo and Fernando Limongi, Executivo e legislativo na nova ordem constitucional (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 1999). 30. Audiovisual production is necessarily “inauthentic” as the result of a creative—and thus artificial—intervention on some socially and culturally given raw material. 31. A good account of that election and the role played then by the media is Marcos Coimbra’s chapter, “A mídia teve algum papel durante o processo eleitoral de 2006?” in A mídia nas eleições, ed. Lima, 187–210. 32. This could be seen in 2011 when the Dilma administration allowed cell phone companies to provide cable television programming to customers against mainstream media groups’ resistance. 33. Fernando Lattman-Weltman, “O Rio nas cruzadas: Comunicação, democratização e usos da Internet numa eleição carioca,” Revista Eco-Pós 12 (2009), http:// www.revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/eco_pos/article/view/930. 34. On the movement of June 2013 in Brazil, see Fernando Lattman-Weltman, chapter 2 in this anthology, “Brazilian Spring or Brazilian Autumn?” 35. Recent research that confirms at least some of the expectations about the different uses of the new digital media among distinct sectors of the Brazilian audience has been published by the Brazilian government; Secretaria de Comunicação da Presidência da República, “Pesquisa brasileira de mídia 2014: Hábitos de consumo de mídia pela população brasileira,” http://www.secom.gov.br/sobre-a-secom/ acoes-e-programas/relatorio-final-da-pesquisa-brasileira-de-midia-2013-2014.

III

Brazil’s Urban Scene

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5 Crime Victimization in Brazil, 2009 Risks by Race, Class, and Place Charles H. Wood and Ludmila Ribeiro

The image of an “Emergent Brazil,” the title of this volume, deservedly underscores the social progress, economic growth, and political stability Brazil has achieved in recent decades. In coining the “BRIC” acronym, investment giant Goldman Sachs placed Brazil in the company of Russia, India, and China as the four emerging markets expected to comprise nearly half of the world’s GDP growth by 2020. Since 1985, when the Brazilian military returned to the barracks after twenty years of authoritarian rule, Brazil has been governed by a succession of elected presidents, the last three of whom articulated a compelling global vision, commitment to fiscal discipline, and attention to poverty reduction. Brazil has thus recast itself as a world power, showing every sign of breaking free of the historical legacies that have long shackled its extraordinary potential. Whether Brazil will continue to make progress in the years ahead will much depend on the country’s ability to redress the remaining challenges, not least of which are the fragile rule of law, high rate of criminality, and growing sense of insecurity among a public that lives in fear of becoming victims of crime and violence. The publicized accounts of crime and murder, etched in the mind by the gruesome photographs that punctuate daily headlines, make it easy to understand why fear of crime looms large in the public’s mind. When asked to single out the country’s major problem, one in three Brazilians who participated in a public opinion poll in 2010 pointed to violence and personal security, twice the proportion of people whose

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first choice was unemployment and poverty (16.6 percent). Seven out of ten respondents (71.6 percent) lived in fear of falling victim to crime in the neighborhood in which they lived, and nearly everyone (90.4 percent) was convinced that crime was on the rise.1 The pervasive fear of crime documented by the opinion poll gives us an insight into the attitudes Brazilians hold, but are people actually as vulnerable as they think they are? It is a hard question to answer for reasons that are not hard to imagine. Part of the difficulty is definitional. It is not uncommon for the law to define as criminal an event that people think is lawful, just as it is often the case that the law defines as legal an event that people think is criminal. In addition, many crimes, however defined, go unreported; and the crimes people do report enter into public records that are incomplete, inconsistent, and subject to political manipulation.2 Reliable estimates of the actual rates of crime and violence are nonetheless possible to generate, largely because of the availability of two sources of data: Brazil’s 2009 National Household Survey (PNAD 2009) and the number of murders documented by the Ministry of Health and various international organizations.

Data Estimates of the risks of robbery and assault come from the national household survey, the Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra Domiciliar (PNAD). The PNAD annual surveys began in 1967 and have been carried out nearly every year since then, except in those years when the demographic census was in the field (1970, 1980, 1991, and 2000). A main purpose of the PNADs is to track changes in housing, employment, and migration via information collected in the core questionnaire, the key elements of which have remained more or less unchanged since the PNAD was initiated. Additional information is collected through a supplemental questionnaire that explores a specific topic that varies from one year to the next. In 2009, the supplement to the basic questionnaire first asked whether the respondent was a victim of a robbery or an assault in the year prior to the survey, followed by a second question that asked whether the victim reported the crime to the police. We will use responses to the first item to generate estimates of crime victimization. We will interpret responses to the second as an

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indicator of the degree to which people have confidence in and access to the judicial system. Brazil’s Ministry of Justice and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) provide estimates of “intentional homicide,” a measure that excludes deaths related to civil or international conflicts, deaths caused by recklessness or negligence, and killings considered justifiable according to penal law, such as death inflicted by law enforcement agents in the line of duty. The exclusion of deaths committed by the police in the “line of duty” introduces a downward bias in the estimates of intentional homicide. In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo the police are responsible for around 1,000 killings every year, some of which take place during the legitimate use of force, referred to as “resistance killings.” Many others are the outcome of extrajudicial executions.3 Due to the sheer gravity of the offense, homicide is one of the most scrupulously recorded criminal events. In some circumstances, homicide represents a reasonable proxy for violent crime in general due to the invisible nature of less than lethal violent events, which often go unreported. Analysts thus interpret the homicide rate as the tip of the violence iceberg,4 and many think of homicide rates as the gold standard for comparative research.5

Victimization The Risks of Intentional Homicide Estimates compiled by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) put Brazil’s homicide rate into global perspective. The UNODC estimates that the number of intentionally inflicted deaths per 100,000 circa 2009 was 17.4 in Africa, 15.5 in the Americas, and 3.5 and 3.1 in Europe and Asia, respectively.6 That Brazil’s homicide rate of 29.9 in 2008 was substantially higher than the comparable estimate in Africa (17.4) is especially troubling. The rate of intentional deaths per 100,000 people in Brazil changed over the years 1995 to 2010, as shown in figure 5.1. Homicide rates rose from 25.7 in 1995 to reach a high of 33.1 in 2003. After that, the rate declined to 29.9 in 2008, thereby approaching its 1995 level. For additional comparative insights, figure 5.1 shows the changes after 1995 in the homicide rates for the United States. The rates re-

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Figure 5.1. Homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants, in Brazil, São Paulo, Mexico, and the United States, 1995–2010. Source: UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Study on Global Homicide (New York: United Nations, 2011).

mained in single digits over the period, reaching a low of 5.0 in 2007, the last year for which we have comparable data. The estimates for Mexico, also included in figure 5.1, are higher than those in the United States but lower and more erratic than Brazil’s. The steady decline observed in Mexico from 1995 (18.4) to 2007 (8.1) saw a sudden reversal in 2008. By 2010, the homicide rate reached a high of 21.5. The post2007 rise in intentional homicide was undoubtedly the consequence of the state’s attempt to bring drug cartels under control and the extraordinary violence unleashed by the “drug war.” The decline in the national homicide rate in Brazil that began in 2004 was largely due to the rapid drop in intentional violent deaths in the city of São Paulo, the largest metropolitan area in the country. The shift is evident in the steep decline in the homicide rate in São Paulo, from 20.8 in 2004 to 10.8 five years later. The decline in São Paulo’s murder rate has challenged analysts to explain the change. One line of reasoning points to legislation in 2003 that introduced tighter controls on firearms in conjunction with a dis-

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armament campaign.7 Another line of reasoning points to shifts in the city’s demographic and economic structure. For example, a study of the number of murders from 1996 to 2008 that took place in each of the municipalities that comprise the greater metropolitan area of São Paulo concluded that neither access to firearms nor arrest and incarceration rates had much effect. Instead, Peres et al. attribute the drop in the homicide rate to a change in the age structure of the population, specifically the smaller proportion of young people, and to a decline in the unemployment rate.8 Although we are far from being able to make firm statements as to the relative importance of the variables that may be implicated in changes in the murder rate, it seems reasonable to conclude that public security policies, demographic change, and economic conditions all played a role. The interplay of these factors likely contributed to the slight decrease in homicide rates after 2004 at the national level, but the effect of the various factors was noticeably stronger in São Paulo, where crime-reducing measures have been more assiduously enforced and where new policing methods have been in place for longer than in other places in the country.9 The recent experience of Brazil’s most populous city as well as the increase in homicide in Mexico suggest that public policy and actions of the state can influence the murder rate in the urban context. More ominous explanations for the decline in the homicide rate in São Paulo also have been offered.10 The decline in the official rate could be attributed not to a drop in the actual number of intentional deaths that occur but instead to procedures that classify a greater proportion of deaths to “legal” actions by the police, thereby eliminating such events from the official tally. Equally troubling explanations suggest that the decline in homicide rates in São Paulo has less to do with effective policing and more to do with the greater control criminal gangs exert in the city’s low-income neighborhoods, the effect of which has been to reduce the intensity of deadly intergang rivalries. From this standpoint, the drop in the homicide rate is, ironically, associated with greater, albeit less lethal, criminality in the poorer parts of the metropolitan area. Troubling as the homicide estimates may be, murder is nonetheless a rare event, at least compared to other types of crime. In the course of their daily lives people are far less likely to be murdered than robbed or

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assaulted. We turn, therefore, to a different source of data for estimates of crime victimization, namely the 2009 National Household Survey. The Risks of Robbery and Assault The supplement to the PNAD 2009 questionnaire asks individuals ten years of age and older whether in the previous twelve months they were victims of robbery or theft. The census bureau that carried out the surveys further classifies any attack that caused bodily harm through the use of a firearm or other weapon or the physical force of the aggressor as agressão f ísica, which we translate as “aggravated assault.” The estimates presented at the top of table 5.1 show that during the period September 17, 2008, to September 26, 2009, 7.9 percent of people were victims of robbery and 1.5 percent were victims of aggravated assault. At first glance, the two estimates may appear low, especially in light of the high proportion of people who expressed concern about the level of crime in the country and who feared becoming victims of crime. It is worth recalling, however, that both rates refer to the limited time frame of one year and not to “lifetime” victimization, which would produce a much higher number. Another way to put the estimates into perspective is to compare them to similar rates in the United States.11 Because the United States uses a different method to calculate crime rates, the estimates from the United States and Brazil are not entirely comparable. We nonetheless gain a sense of the orders of magnitude involved if only because the differences in the estimates between the two countries are so large that they cannot be fully explained by the procedures used to produce them. In 2010, for example, the U.S. Bureau of Crime Statistics reported a robbery rate of 2.2 per 1,000.12 For comparative purposes we can express Brazil’s estimate per 1,000 to conclude that the robbery rate in Brazil of 79 is about 35 times higher than in the United States. With respect to aggravated assault, the rate of 15 per 1,000 in Brazil is 4.4 times higher than the rate of 3.4 per 1,000 in the United States. Subsequent estimates presented in table 5.1 disaggregate the victimization rates by key subgroups of the population. Together they tell us much about the relative vulnerabilities associated with place, class, and race.

Table 5.1. Percent of people who were a victim of a crime in Brazil, 2009, by gender, residence, age, education, household income, and color





Robbery or theft

A. Brazil 7.9 N of victims 5,661,936 Population >=16 years 141,818,791 B. Region North 11.34 Northeast 8.25 Southeast 7.12 South 7.36 Center-West 9.31 C. Place of residence Urban 8.7 Rural 3.5 D. Gender Men 9.0 Women 6.9 E. Age 16–19 8.0 20–24 9.6 25–29 8.6 30–34 8.7 35–39 8.2 40–44 8.2 45+ 6.8 F. Education Illiterate 4.7 1–4 yrs school 6.6 5–12 yrs school 9.3 13+ yrs School 11 G. Household incomea No income 5.5