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NY Review of Books, APRIL 23, 2020 ISSUE
Brazil’s Dead End
by Larry Rohter
Brazil Apart: 1964–2019
by Perry Anderson
Verso, 224 pp., $26.95
The Edge of Democracy
a documentary film by Petra Costa
O Mecanismo [The Mechanism]
a television series created by José Padilha and Elena Soarez
For Brazilians, January 1, 2003, was one of those rare moments in
history when everything seems possible. It was Inauguration Day, and not
only was power being transferred from one democratically elected
civilian president to another for the first time in more than forty
years, but the man donning the green-and-yellow presidential sash, Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva, was a former lathe operator and union leader, and
the son of illiterate peasants—what Brazilians call povão, a man of the
people. Tens of thousands of ordinary citizens had traveled from every
corner of their vast country to celebrate his swearing-in, and they
flooded the esplanade in front of the presidential palace in Brasília,
waving banners, chanting “hope has vanquished fear,” and cheering the
incoming president’s promise of a new era of honesty and transparency in
government.
Sixteen years later, Lula, as he is universally known, was several
months into a long prison term, having been found guilty of corruption
and money laundering during and after his eight years in office. His
hand-picked successor, Dilma Rousseff (whom Brazilians usually call by
her first name), had been impeached, with the connivance of political
parties nominally allied with her, and the left-wing party Lula founded
and led, the Workers’ Party, had been all but obliterated in the
municipal elections that followed soon after. Encouraged by that
outcome, an obscure ultra-right-wing congressman from Rio de Janeiro
with no party support, Jair Bolsonaro, had launched an insurgent
campaign for president that, shockingly, was about to put him in control
of Latin America’s most populous nation.
How Brazil got from Lula to Bolsonaro in so short a time seems
unfathomable, even to many of the 210 million Brazilians who lived
through the process. Two main theories have been offered to explain the
momentous shift. One is that Lula, by presiding over the most corrupt
government in Brazilian history, betrayed those who believed in him and
that Bolsonaro became the instrument of their disgust and revenge. The
other is that Lula and his party were victims of a “parliamentary coup
d’état” and a campaign of judicial persecution, both aimed at restoring
to power the elites who scorned Lula and regarded him and his party as a
threat to their interests.
In Brazil Apart: 1964–2019, Perry Anderson, an emeritus professor of
history and sociology at UCLA, positions himself squarely in the second
camp. Lula is not only innocent of the trumped-up charges of which he
has been convicted, Anderson argues, but he and his party are solely
responsible for virtually all the social and economic advances Brazil
has enjoyed this century. From 2003 to 2016, he writes, Brazil was “the
theatre of a socio-political drama without equivalent in any other major
state,” making it for the first time in its history “a country that
mattered politically beyond its borders, as an example and potential
inspiration to others.” The collapse of that noble experiment, he would
have us believe, was the work of a jealous, vindictive, and treacherous
opposition, and he directs particular opprobrium at Lula’s predecessor
in office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the center-left party he then
led, the Brazilian Social Democratic Party.
About Bolsonaro, Anderson reiterates the obvious: he is a moral monster.
He spouts racist invective at black and indigenous Brazilians; is a
misogynist; uses the most vile language imaginable to refer to gay
people; extols the military dictatorship that tortured, exiled, and
killed Brazilians for twenty-one excruciating years; sees arming the
middle class as the solution to the country’s crime problem; wants to
hand the country over to the rapacious corporate interests that are
pillaging the Amazon and fouling pristine beaches; and is waging war
against a free press. If he has redeeming qualities, they are carefully
hidden, though Anderson generously describes him as “crude and violent
certainly, but also with a boyish, playful side, capable of a coarse, on
occasion even self-deprecating, good humor.”
Lula, on the other hand, is far more complicated and interesting. When I
first met him in 1978, he was leading a metalworkers’ strike in the
industrial belt around São Paulo and, at the age of thirty-three, just
emerging as a national figure. He seemed inspiring, a charismatic,
plain-speaking orator born in the parched and poverty-stricken interior,
the seventh of eight children in a family that, like millions of others,
had migrated to industrial cities in the south in search of a more
bearable life. He left school after the sixth grade, sold oranges and
shined shoes before getting a factory job, lost part of a finger in an
industrial accident, then lost his first wife during childbirth. As
Anderson writes, “Lula embodies a life-experience of popular hardship
and a record of social struggle from below that no other ruler in the
world approaches.”
That was Lula the labor leader. Lula the politician and president has
proved to be a rather different matter. From the time the Workers’
Party, founded in 1980 and often referred to as the PT, its
Portuguese-language initials, began winning mayoralties, it engaged in
the standard schemes to siphon money from public coffers that have
always contaminated Brazilian politics and invented a few new ones of
its own. Some of that graft inevitably found its way into the pockets of
party leaders. But PT stalwarts who brought the abuses to Lula’s
attention, thinking he would intervene, were instead drummed out of the
party, and in 2002, Celso Daniel, the mayor of a São Paulo suburb and
coordinator of Lula’s presidential campaign, was murdered—a case that,
though still unsolved and consigned by Anderson to a brief mention,
revealed an elaborate network of bribes, kickbacks, slush funds,
extortion, and other payoffs to the PT.
Referring to Lula and the corruption that was institutionalized during
his first term as president, Anderson urges the reader to brush aside
“lapses in the PT of which he had, of course, been unaware.” But that
assertion is challenged by the sworn testimony of associates of Lula who
turned state’s evidence, such as the former party treasurer Delúbio
Soares, barely noted by Anderson, and the former minister of finance
Antonio Palocci, whom he dismisses as a “toad” and a snitch. And all of
that was just a prelude to the wholesale pilferage of public assets that
provoked the Operation Car Wash investigations beginning in 2014:
billions of dollars stolen from Petrobras, the state oil company, and
distributed to the PT, its allies in Congress, and corrupt businessmen.
Inadvertently, Anderson is highlighting one of the central problems in
current Brazilian politics: the unwillingness of Lula and the PT to
accept the slightest responsibility for the corruption that flourished
during their years in power or even to concede wrongdoing. Lula,
Anderson claims, was jailed merely for “his inspection of a beach-side
condominium” and the “improvement of a friend’s retreat.” But Lula’s own
depositions, along with piles of documentary evidence, are available
online for all to see, and they point not only to his guilt on the
charges filed against him but also to several channels of malfeasance
that have yet to be judged, including the unexplained wealth of his son
“Little Lula,” a former zookeeper who became a millionaire during his
father’s time in office. And an “everybody does it” argument doesn’t
wash either: the PT came to power promising to hold itself to a higher
standard than its rivals, so the sense of deception and disillusionment
has been especially sharp.
The “parliamentary coup” theory also has enormous holes that Anderson
blithely ignores. Contrary to what he implies, the impeachment articles
against Dilma were largely drafted not by her opponents but by Hélio
Bicudo, a founder of the Workers’ Party and a distinguished jurist and
human rights defender who held senior posts in a pair of PT governments
in São Paulo; appalled by the thievery metastasizing around him, Bicudo
broke with Lula in 2005 but continued to espouse the party’s core values
of social justice. The articles included election fraud and negligence
as chair of the Petrobras board from 2003 to 2010, but Eduardo Cunha,
the devious president of the Chamber of Deputies, accepted only the
weakest one: that Dilma had illegally borrowed money from state banks to
make up for budget shortfalls.
Both Cunha and Dilma’s vice-president, Michel Temer, were members of the
Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, which has no defined ideology and
seems to exist only to enjoy the fruits of power and corruption. In a
political system with more than thirty parties, it has often provided
the support in Congress that any president needs in order to govern
effectively, for which it has exacted a high price in the form of
ministerial appointments and other patronage. Its alliance with the PT
was especially uneasy, and Cunha, whom Anderson describes as “an
exceptionally skilled and ruthless politician, a master of the black
arts of parliamentary manipulation and management,” held back the
stronger impeachment charges in hopes of saving his own skin; he too was
enormously corrupt, and the Car Wash investigation had already unearthed
a wealth of incriminating evidence against him. As Anderson
acknowledges, “he offered to freeze impeachment if the PT would protect
him from annulment of his mandate and expulsion from Congress.” Lula was
willing, even eager, to do this, but Dilma, not accused of personal
corruption herself, was not. So the impeachment went ahead, and she was
removed from office days after the end of the Rio Olympics in 2016. A
month later, Cunha was stripped of his seat, then arrested, charged with
hiding $40 million in payoffs in secret bank accounts, and convicted of
corruption and tax evasion; he is now serving a fifteen-year sentence.
What Brazil experienced that year, in other words, was a falling-out
between two gangs of thieves who had been working together but, as the
cops closed in, turned on each other. The public was furious and
demanded that all of the guilty parties be brought to justice: the
slogan heard on the streets and seen as graffiti at that time was “Dilma
out, Temer out, Cunha out, Renan out,” the last being the president of
the Senate and an ally of the other two men. Instead, Temer simply
outmaneuvered Dilma, orchestrating her impeachment behind the scenes and
eventually succeeding her. Thus the plundering continued for the more
than two years remaining in her term, to the public’s mounting rage.
When Anderson turns from the seaminess of politics to actual policy, a
different problem with his analysis emerges. In one typical passage, he
examines education programs and spending in Brazil, using cherry-picked
numbers to make questionable claims for progress and equality under
three consecutive Workers’ Party administrations, while minimizing
advances that occurred prior to its taking power. “Since 2005 government
spending on education has trebled, and the number of university students
doubled,” he states. In contrast, he alleges, under Cardoso “during the
nineties, higher education in Brazil largely ceased to be a public
function.” Anderson’s book lacks footnotes, so I’m not sure of the
source of those statements. But statistics compiled by the World Bank,
UNESCO, the OECD, and Brazilian government agencies would seem to
indicate that, at best, government spending on education rose about 100
percent in real terms over the period the PT was in power, significantly
less than Anderson claims.
The principal problem with his assessment, however, is what it leaves
out. During Cardoso’s eight years in office—1995 through 2002—his
administration focused on secondary education, having logically
concluded that it made no sense to prioritize investment in higher
education if a sufficient number of high school students were not
graduating. In that, the Cardoso administration excelled: high school
enrollments expanded by more than a third during his tenure, the number
of high school graduates increased by 35 percent, and the number of
children not attending school at all dropped to 3 percent, compared with
about 20 percent at the beginning of the decade. That is why, as Cardoso
was leaving office, the United Nations Development Program praised him
for having “overseen important human development progress,” especially
in the areas of education, health, and agrarian reform.
Had Cardoso’s party won the 2002 election, it planned to supplement
investment in secondary education with a similar push in higher
education, emphasizing public universities, to accommodate the growing
number of high school graduates. When Lula won, he took a similar path,
but rather than focus on the public sector, he allowed dozens of
fly-by-night private universities to proliferate, with the government
providing scholarships and loans to underprivileged and nonwhite
students. “However poor the quality of instruction—it is often
terrible,” Anderson argues, the program was “a great popular success,
sometimes optimistically compared for democratizing effect to the GI
Bill of Rights in postwar America.” Who besides Anderson makes that
comparison is never stated, but their numbers probably do not include
Brazilian graduates saddled with debt who find, when they apply for
jobs, that their degrees are deemed less worthy than those from public
universities.
Anderson’s unwillingness to give credit where credit is due emerges as a
major problem throughout Brazil Apart. He is skilled at turning the
snarky phrase; in a single paragraph he refers to Bolsonaro’s
“austeritarian overload” and the “salmagundi of conservative parties”
behind him. But when the subject is Cardoso, all he can summon is bile
and more bile. It is hard to say whether the origins of his animosity
are personal—Anderson and Cardoso moved in the same circles at the
University of São Paulo in the mid-1960s and were friendly until they
weren’t—or ideological, or some mixture of the two. A sociologist and
political scientist, Cardoso is the coauthor of Dependency and
Development in Latin America, a canonical text in economic
underdevelopment theory, but like many other Latin American
intellectuals, he long ago left orthodox Marxism behind. Anderson, a
founder of the New Left Review, has not, and accuses Cardoso of
“sacrificing his intellectual standards” to become “a lesser mouthpiece
for the guff of the Third Way,” personified by Bill Clinton, Tony Blair,
Gerhard Schröder, and Ricardo Lagos of Chile.
Anderson goes so far as to maintain that Cardoso’s criticisms of Lula
and the PT are motivated by jealousy and vanity rather than legitimate
policy differences. “For eight years, he suffered from comparison with
Lula, a far more popular president who repudiated his legacy and changed
the country decisively in ways he did not,” Anderson writes, adding that
Cardoso was “stung by the greater political appeal of a worker with no
education.” This seems exactly wrong, and on multiple levels. For one
thing, though Lula did complain of the “cursed inheritance” Cardoso
supposedly bequeathed him, he never really “repudiated” that legacy.
Instead, after losing three campaigns for president (including two to
Cardoso by wide margins), Lula embraced significant elements of his
predecessor’s policies and moved away from a hard-left position—so much
so that the Brazilian sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, a cofounder of
the Workers’ Party whom Anderson cites approvingly on other matters,
used to mordantly observe that Lula’s first year in office was actually
“the ninth year of the Cardoso Administration.”
Even Lula’s signature social program, the Bolsa Família (Family
Allowance), owes a significant debt to Cardoso. Anderson concisely
defines Bolsa Família as “a monthly cash transfer to mothers in the
lowest income strata, against proof that they are sending their children
to school, and getting their health checked.” But he refuses to
acknowledge the two principal authors of what he describes as “various
pre-existent partial schemes” that Lula consolidated. One was Cristovam
Buarque, who implemented such a program as governor of Brasília and
later became Lula’s first education minister before leaving the PT in
2005 in protest against corruption; the other was none other than
Cardoso, who, recognizing a good idea, expanded Buarque’s plan to a
nationwide effort.
If anything, it is Lula who over the years has seemed to suffer from an
envy complex. He and Cardoso were initially allies during the military
dictatorship, but differences of both substance and style drove them
apart. The Brazilian journalist Paulo Markun once wrote a dual study
called The Frog and the Prince, and there was no mistaking who was who.
Cardoso was the polished, erudite, multilingual one, while Lula was
gruff and canny but unlettered and, as Anderson puts it, “ungrammatical
in speech and untutored in government.” This always seemed to gnaw at
Lula, and once elected he began to lob potshots at Cardoso. “Never in
the history of Brazil,” he would often say after some routine measure
went into effect, had any president achieved what he had; another
favorite phrase was that “the lathe operator is doing what all the
professors could not.” So while Anderson may be correct in describing
Cardoso as “politically Lula’s arch-enemy,” the reverse has never been true.
Even more than Anderson’s book, Petra Costa’s film The Edge of Democracy
adopts a “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” attitude toward the
PT’s depredations. Nominated for an Academy Award in the feature-length
documentary category, The Edge of Democracy is visually powerful and
also benefits from behind-the-scenes access to Lula, Dilma, and their
advisers that would be the envy of any filmmaker or journalist. And it
is very much a personal story, attempting to link the Car Wash
investigation and Dilma’s fall from power to the story of Costa’s
parents, former supporters of the armed resistance who were jailed and
tortured during the military dictatorship. In one memorable scene, Costa
introduces her mother to Dilma, and the two women reminisce about the
time they spent in prison and in the underground.
But as a guide to what actually happened in Brazil in the middle of the
last decade, Costa’s film is unreliable. Instead, it plays as a
friend-of-the-court brief for Lula and the PT, and simply ignores or
seriously downplays evidence against them. Costa completely skips, for
example, the bribery case in which two major construction companies
spiffed up a weekend house for Lula in return for Petrobras contracts.
And though she takes note of a notorious phone call in which Dilma and
Lula arranged for his appointment as her presidential chief of staff to
provide him with immunity from prosecution, Costa’s indignation is
directed at the fact that the call was intercepted two hours and
seventeen minutes after legal authorization for a wiretap had expired,
rather than at the conversation itself, which clearly constituted
obstruction of justice and was therefore an impeachable offense.
The Edge of Democracy is streaming on Netflix and is worth watching for
the atmosphere of growing national division it portrays, but it is
another Netflix offering, José Padilha and Elena Soarez’s
sixteen-episode series The Mechanism, that provides the most
illuminating look at the Car Wash scandal and the fall of the PT. Though
ostensibly a work of fiction, all of the main characters in the series
have real-life counterparts who are easily identifiable—Lula is Gino and
Dilma is Janete—and significant chunks of dialogue among the corrupt
protagonists seem drawn from wiretaps or testimony under oath. Overall,
this appears a more truthful version of events, with no purely good
guys, just a nation in the grip of a corrupt cartel of construction
companies and bankers, regardless of which party is nominally in power,
and cops and prosecutors willing to cut corners in their attempt to take
down that “mechanism.”
Naturally Anderson expresses disdain for Padilha, accusing him of
“descending from the bitter documentary truths” of his early work to
low-grade action films. In general, Anderson’s view of Brazilian
culture, one of the most dynamic and creative in the world, is narrow
and sour. “Compared with the Brazil of fifty or thirty years ago, the
decline of political energy in cultural life is palpable,” he complains,
and results in a “neutralization or degradation into entertainment,” as
if culture and entertainment were utterly incompatible. In reality, the
political energy in Brazilian culture has merely shifted from posh
neighborhoods like Ipanema to gritty suburbs known collectively as “the
periphery,” and into new forms, such as rap: Anderson might want to give
a listen to artists like Gabriel o Pensador, Chico Science, Nação Zumbi,
Seu Jorge, Marcelo D2, Emicida, or Racionais MC’s.
This tendency toward overgeneralization permeates Anderson’s book, and
it weakens his arguments. He talks in broad, sweeping terms, for
example, of “the press” and “the military” as if they were monoliths.
They are not, and each institution, like the rest of Brazilian society,
has had to grapple with the shifting political landscape that Lula and
Bolsonaro have created. Anderson argues that an elite cabal of
newspapers, magazines, and television networks was motivated purely by
class resentment to bring Lula down: “For the first time, a ruler did
not depend on his proprietors, and they hated him for this,” he writes.
But Lula initially enjoyed broad support among reporters and editors,
and coverage reflected that. When the first giant corruption scandal
erupted in 2005, though, they did what journalists always do: they
chased the story to its origins, adhering to the Woodward and Bernstein
adage “follow the money.” Were they supposed to turn a blind eye to the
systematic looting of the national treasury simply because the PT was
now doing it?
This leads to a peculiar contradiction that underlines the biases
shackling Anderson. He has plenty of praise for articles published last
year by Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept Brasil that documented collusion
and other improper contacts between the chief judge in the Car Wash case
and prosecutors. This was journalism at its best, and in the resulting
uproar, Bolsonaro and his allies were so irate that there were calls for
Greenwald’s expulsion from Brazil. (This was something I also
experienced firsthand: in 2004 Lula ordered me expelled because he did
not like articles I had written on subjects ranging from the Celso
Daniel case to his well-known fondness for a drink or ten, and he backed
down only after the Supreme Court intervened.) Yet when Lula or Dilma is
the target of similar investigations into official misconduct, he
criticizes the press for its partiality and condemns the leaks that
inevitably are part of such probes.
In the most recent phase of Brazil’s crisis, the military has been even
more significant than the press, so Anderson’s oversimplification in
that area is particularly misleading. Many in the armed forces view
Bolsonaro not as a representative of their class but as a failed
soldier; no one leaves the army as a mere captain, as Bolsonaro did,
unless he has no prospects of advancing, which was his situation after
showing he was unable to submit to discipline. It is true that he has
turned to the military to staff many important ministries and advisory
posts, but that should not be taken as a blind show of military support,
and there has been a lot of turnover. As Americans have learned during
the Trump years from the example of generals like Jim Mattis, H.R.
McMaster, and John Kelly, military officers feel a strong pull of
patriotic duty even if—or perhaps especially if—their commander in chief
is incompetent. The same is true in Brazil.
Anderson does not tell us whom, if anyone, he has talked to in the high
command or officer corps. But conversations with members of those groups
reveal a deep-seated reluctance to be thrust back into a politically
prominent and sensitive position, especially in the service of an
administration that has every possibility of ending up a disaster. When
the military dictatorship ended in 1985, the armed forces had nearly
zero prestige among Brazilians, and it took thirty years for them to
claw back a degree of respect. Younger officers in particular have no
appetite for throwing that away on Bolsonaro’s mad adventures, such as
the gratuitous fights he has picked with traditional allies like France,
Germany, and Norway and his falling into lockstep with Trump on foreign
policy issues, nor do they want to inherit the mess he seems certain to
leave behind. Hence the distinct lack of enthusiasm for either an
old-fashioned military coup or for a Bolsonaro-led “self-coup” in the
style of Alberto Fujimori in Peru, specters Anderson raises in the last
paragraph of his book.
The sad truth about Brazil in 2020 is that there seems no logical way
out of its crisis, at least not until the next presidential election in
2022, and perhaps not even then. Lula was released from prison in
November to appeal the verdicts against him, and he now tours the
country, portraying himself as a martyr, even as Bolsonaro blunders from
one self-created controversy to the next—most recently his inept and
dismissive response to the coronavirus. The two men need each other as
foils, but neither can offer Brazil anything but dead ends and, in
different ways, both have shown themselves to be morally bankrupt. At
this juncture, even Anderson’s dreaded “guff of the Third Way” might be
welcome, but that pathway also seems closed because of the damage they
have inflicted.
—March 25, 2020
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