The Throes of Democracy

Brazil since 1989

By Bryan McCann

Fernwood Publishing and Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2008 Bryan McCann
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84277-926-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii,
Abbreviations, viii,
Glossary, x,
Chronology, xiii,
Map, xv,
Introduction, 1,
1 The rise of the left, 11,
2 Urban crisis, 50,
3 Back to the land, 73,
4 Different drummers, 95,
5 The Pentecostal boom, 116,
6 Making culture in digital Brazil, 131,
Conclusion, 156,
Further reading, 160,
Notes, 163,
Index, 167,

CHAPTER 1

The rise of the left

"They say politics is the art of swallowing toads. Wouldn't it be fascinating to make the elite swallow Lula, that bearded toad." Such were the sentiments of Leonel Brizola upon running third in the opening round of the 1989 presidential elections, behind Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Fernando Collor de Mello. Brizola, an old-school populist and the sitting vice-president of the International Socialist Organization, instructed his loyal followers to support fellow leftist Lula in the run-off election.

Brizola's support made the 1989 election close, but was not enough to overcome the concerted opposition of Brazil's business class, its landed gentry and, most importantly, its media titans. The Globo media empire cast its decisive weight behind Collor de Mello, the inexperienced scion of an oligarchic family from the impoverished northeastern state of Alagoas. Collor de Mello had little to recommend him for the nation's highest office, but most figures of influence found his message of market expansion more palatable than Lula's campaign for aggressive socialist reform. Economist Roberto Campos, Brazil's high priest of free-market discipline, famously quipped that if Lula were to be elected, there were only two possible outcomes (saidas), one via Galeao, the other via Cumbica – the international airports of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Campos merely expressed the consensus among most Brazilians of means that a Lula victory would bring economic disaster, at least for them.

Lula kept at it, running again for president in 1994 and 1998, finally winning in 2002 and securing re-election in 2006. But between his narrow loss in 1989 and his decisive victory in 2002, a remarkable transition unfolded. When the bearded toad finally stepped into office, the Brazilian elite, or what was left of it, barely burped and showed no signs of indigestion. The same Globo empire that had savaged Lula in 1989 shone a generously favorable light on his 2002 candidacy and his first year in office. The left's hard-won triumph was apparently categorical and complete.

Three factors enabled this remarkable transition: the decline of the old elite, the increasing willingness of Lula's Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Workers' Party, to work with big business, and the leftward shift of political discourse.

The old elite Brizola referred to in 1989 had largely disappeared by 2002. In 1989, Brazil still had prominent aristocratic figures like Carmen Mayrink Veiga, Jorge Guinle and Filomena Matarazzo Suplicy, privileged offspring of a hereditary oligarchy, born to power and not overly interested in the redistribution of wealth. By 2002, Carmen Mayrink Veiga and Jorge Guinle were both impoverished – by tycoon standards, that is, meaning their family wealth dissolved due to profligacy and bad luck, and they had fallen into the chilly depths of the middle class – and Suplicy's son was a senator for the PT. To be fair, Eduardo Suplicy was active in PT ranks before 1989, but back then he was considered a black sheep of his social milieu, and by 2002 he was recognized as simply ahead of the curve. By 2002 the reigning social figures in Brazil were people like soccer star Ronaldo, model Gisele Bündchen and singer Gilberto Gil. In other words, Brazil no longer had elites, it had celebrities. These celebrities had no inherent or inherited reasons to shrink from leftist politics, and the PT in particular eagerly cultivated their support. Not for nothing did Lula choose Gilberto Gil as his Minister of Culture. The decline of the elite did not turn Brazil into a land of economic equality – distribution of wealth remained extremely uneven. Nor was the importance of family ties lessened, as Chapter 6 will explain. But social and economic mobility increased dramatically, removing any quasi-aristocratic opposition to the left.

Lula and the most powerful faction of his Partido dos Trabalhadores ceased to advocate thoroughgoing socialist reform, at least in polite company, seeking instead to incorporate and appease organized popular movements while hewing largely to the orthodox economic strategy mapped out by Lula's predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. This enabled the PT to woo business elites as successfully as Cardoso had done during his eight years in office.

Most importantly, the PT, together with a host of like-minded organizations, successfully moved political discourse decisively to the left, and public acceptance of progressive reform – including acceptance on the part of the business sector – moved with it. In 1989, the PT's proposals for broad agrarian reform, for popular participation in municipal budgeting, and for greater political leverage for organized labor federations were all deemed unacceptably subversive by the country's reigning economic powers. By 2002, these and several other reforms initiated by Fernando Henrique Cardoso – race-based affirmative action, direct disbursement of social spending to poor families, greater restrictions on economic development in the Amazon – were deemed inevitable and, with the exception of affirmative action, largely unexceptionable elements of the political landscape by all but a few holdouts.

As these intertwining processes unfolded, the meaning of being leftist in Brazil also changed dramatically. During the military regime, being of the left entailed some kind of struggle against the dictatorship, and in the early stages of redemocratization, it entailed pushing for broader popular participation and the redistribution of wealth. While these latter goals remain rhetorically unifying, they have, in practice, largely been subsumed by the grinding political demands of stitching together governing coalitions and appeasing interest groups. The "rise of the left," then, really means the rise to power of former opponents of the military regime, and the increasing political leverage of the civil-society organizations that have supported them.

Ideology and physiology

A brief glance at the Brazilian political spectrum begins to reveal the nature and extent of the nature of this political transition. Since 1994, the PT's principal opponent has been Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, or PSDB, a party modeled on European social democratic counterparts, advocating a similar "third way" blend of targeted social spending and investment in market expansion. Cardoso himself was widely known as a political theorist and sociologist of the academic left before running for president and, contrary to popular allegations, did not renounce his early beliefs once in office. In early 2007, the Partido da Frente Liberal, or PFL, perceived in the Brazilian context as the last bastion of conservatives, changed its name to Demócratas (DEM) in explicit homage to the Democratic Party of the United States. Leaders of the renamed party expressed admiration for the US...