But Lula’s program wasn’t fundamentally about the redistribution of wealth; it was about the redistribution of status. There were good reasons for the poor to feel they’d been denied the fruits of citizenship. With a good lawyer, the rich could exploit a lengthy appeals process to escape punishment for the worse crimes while the police meted out justice in the favelas with a harshness and capriciousness familiar to black Americans. Over the past decade, police have killed 8,000, mostly black men. (The Brazilian war on drugs is no more of a shining success than the American one.) Lula engineered a new sense of social inclusion. When he arrived in Brasilia, his Cabinet included three black ministers, an unprecedented integration of political power. João Moreira Salles, the publisher of Piauí magazine, followed Lula for a documentary about the campaign that finally brought him to the presidency. He recalls the emotional outpouring that greeted Lula’s arrival in the poorest neighborhoods: “Everyone was crying, because we the downtrodden had reached power.” [...]
This program had glaring faults, and these faults contributed to the current crisis. All those new cars and washing machines felt good, but they were less life-changing than Lula imagined—and sometimes they inadvertently changed life for the worse. New cars clogged the megalopolises; the government hadn’t thought to invest in the roads and mass transit that might manage the increased vehicular volume. And the toll of traffic fell hardest on the working poor, who suffered increasingly elongated commutes from their homes on the geographic fringes of economic life. Two- or three-hour journeys to work, inching through congestion, are commonplace—and brutal when paired with a return trip at the end of the day. When the mayor of São Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn’t a dramatic hike—just nine cents—but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight. [...]
But the public’s understandable despair isn’t wholly shared by the experts I spoke with. Stepping back, they saw unlikely causes for hope. Impeachment revealed the worst about Brazilian democracy—and the worst wasn’t so terrible. There’s no talk of returning to dictatorship, no real fear of a Hugo Chávez–like figure clouding the sky. Impeachment was a poor showing of democracy, but it was still democracy. Even with all the budgetary turmoil, Bolsa Família remains firmly ensconced. Austerity will whack the poor, yet Lula’s evolution of Brazilian social democracy won’t reverse course. Most important, the Petrobras scandal is so spectacular that its grasp on the popular imagination doesn’t seem to be slipping. Indeed, Temer’s impeachment gambit has yet to slow the Moro investigation. Brazil has a once-in-a-generation chance to untether its politics from its debilitating state of codependence with the big firms. Hosting the Olympics was never going to bring Brazil the national greatness Lula advertised. Freeing its democracy and economy from the plague of corruption could.
No comments:
Post a Comment