Jan 26 2024 | Nº. 101

Editorial

This week, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met with representatives of two automotive giants for conversations that were hardly just about cars. On Wednesday morning, he hosted executives of BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle company at the presidential palace. BYD has announced plans to build its first factory outside of Asia in Brazil in the northeastern state of Bahia. The company presented the presidency with one of its cars and offered a detailed account of its future investments in Brazil. As Lula noted on X, “it is estimated that more than ten thousand jobs will be created and R$3 billion in investments, promoting the local economy and contributing to greater production of sustainable vehicles based on clean energy.” Later, Lula announced that he had also met with GM executives, who laid out a plan to invest R$7 billion in Brazil by 2028.

That Chinese and U.S. automakers alike signaled their intention this week to remain active in Brazil is a good sign for the president’s ambitious plans to arrest Brazil’s alarming slide into deindustrialization. As The Economist observed in 2022, “no other country has seen manufacturing as a share of GDP vanish so fast.” Lula and those close to him made a point of stressing the need for concerted state-led efforts to kickstart industrial production during that year’s presidential campaign. Major agricultural interests, which formed one of Bolsonaro’s key pillars of support, have helped make up for the sagging fortunes of Brazilian manufacturing in the country’s balance of trade. But Lula has long believed that Brazil must also be an industrial powerhouse if it is ever to be taken seriously as a global player. Echoing that sentiment, the head of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) this week said that reviving the country’s shipbuilding will be a priority in the years ahead with billions in special credits.

Talk of robust state-led industrial policy has also revived criticisms, notably of the corruption scandals that plagued previous PT governments tied to major infrastructure works in Brazil and beyond. Another critique involves the use of scarce government resources on projects that arguably do not offer a worthwhile return on investment. Indeed, along those lines, the opposition also criticized Lula this week for signing off on a budget that includes R$4.9 billion in the electoral fund to be used by political parties in this year’s elections. That total is almost double of that allocated in the last municipal elections in 2020. While debates rage on  within the PT regarding the amount of spending the federal government can and should carry out, the priorities of the Lula administration remain clear and unchanged.

Highlights

• POLITICAL ESPIONAGE. On Thursday, January 25, the Federal Police launched an operation called Approximate Surveillance to investigate the use of software called First Mile by members of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), who during the government of President Jair Bolsonaro illegally monitored well-known Brazilian who were considered political opponents. The investigation into the software began in October 2023. In this new phase, the police are specifically investigating members of ABIN and the National Intelligence Center (CNI) linked to the then director of the Agency, Alexandre Ramagem.

• ABIN PARALLEL. The suspicion is that Ramagem created a kind of parallel ABIN within the official agency with the purpose of producing information about Bolsonaro's political opponents. In total, seven federal police officers were removed from their duties on suspicion of involvement in the case. After leaving the leadership of ABIN at the end of the Bolsonaro government, Ramagem was elected a federal congressman. In this Thursday's operation, agents searched and seized his offices in Brasília. Among those spied on were justices of the Supreme Court, journalists,and left-wing politicians, including the prosecuting attorney responsible for the investigations about the assassination of city councilwoman Marielle Franco, along with 30,000 other Brazilians. 

• TENSION WITH CONGRESS. The search of Ramagem’s office added fuel to the fight between right-wing and extreme-right parliamentarians against the Supreme Court and the Lula government. This more conservative sector of the Congress has been complaining about what it considers to be a political persecution orchestrated by the Left and the Supreme Court. Before the search of Congressman Ramagem’s office, the Supreme Court had authorized a similar operation against Congressman Carlos Jordy, another exponent of the extreme right in Congress, suspected of involvement in the failed coup attempt on January 8, 2023. Bolsonaro and his followers triggered a public communication campaign on the networks based on the version that a left-wing dictatorship was being implemented in the country. The sector will seek to approve legislative measures that limit the judiciary when the parliamentary recess returns in February.

• SERGIO MORO. The Brazilian political world lives in anticipation of a trial that could culminate in the revocation of the mandate of Congressman Sergio Moro, the former Car Wash (Lava Jato) judge and Bolsonaro's former minister of justice. The Electoral Court of the state of Paraná should soon begin judging a lawsuit filed by two political parties against him. Moro is accused of having used in his campaign for congress an enormous number of resources that had originally been raised for his campaign for the presidency of the republic. When he gave up running for president and started running for congress, these resources were redirected, which, according to the accusation, caused an imbalance in the conditions of the dispute with the other candidates. The trial is expected to begin in February, but the case may still be appealed to higher courts. Moro would only be forced to leave office is he loses on appeal.

• MARIELLE FRANCO CASE. A report published this week by the website The Intercept Brasil says that two suspects of having murdered councilwoman Marielle Franco and her driver, Anderson Gomes on March 14, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro had reached a plea agreement with the Public Ministry in which they point to Domingos Brazão as one of the masterminds of the crime. Brazão is a member of the Rio de Janeiro Court of Auditors and was a former councilman and a former state legislator. Brazão is already the target of the judiciary for having hindered the beginning of the investigations, but he denies involvement. Brazão's electoral stronghold is Rio das Pedras, a location in Rio de Janeiro where militias that were denounced by city councilwoman Marielle Franco operate.

• TIMEFRAME. This week, members of the European Parliament filed an inquiry with the European Commission about the possible effects of the recent changes approved by the Brazilian Congress on the “timeframe” in agreements between Mercosur and the European Union. The timeframe determines that the Brazilian State can only recognize as indigenous lands those places that had been claimed as such up until 1988, the date of the approval of the last constitution. President Lula had vetoed sections of the law, but Congress overturned the presidential vetoes and the matter ended up in the Supreme Court. The parliamentary question is whether a possible agreement between the two blocs would end up supporting and encouraging the behavior of Brazilian economic groups that carry out commercial activities on indigenous lands.

NEWS FROM WBO, ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS:

BRAZIL UNFILTERED. The newest episode of Brazil Unfiltered, a podcast in English, hosted by James N. Green, professor of Brazilian history and culture at Brown University and president of the WBO Board of Directors, is now live. In this episode, Green interviews Rafael Alcadipani, a police officer, criminal researcher and professor of administration at Fundação Getúlio Vargas in Brazil. They talk about violence and crime in Brazil.

G20 MEETING. The C20 Brazil website went live this week, created to bring together and organize the work of organizations and civil society movements that want to have an impact on the G20 meeting, which will take place in November 2024 in Rio de Janeiro, ending the period of the presidency exercised by Brazil at the head of the group. Interested organizations can sign up to one of the ten working groups proposed by the event organizers, which are run by the Brazilian Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (ABONG).

WAR ON DRUGS. The president of the board of Instituto Galo da Manhã, Beatriz Bracher, published in last Sunday's edition of the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, an article in which she discusses the failure of the war on drugs policy in Latin America. In the text, Bracher relates the criminal networks linked to the trafficking of girls and women, mining and deforestation with the growth of the prison population in which young people are recruited into criminal gangs that challenge the power of the State in the countries of the region.

ANNIVERSARY. The National Movement for Human Rights (MNDH) completes 42 years of activity this week. The movement was founded in l982 as a popular initiative to react to the systematic violations of basic rights committed by both private and public agents who had impunity for the actions.

Feature Article

by André Singer and Fernando Rugitsky

Slow Motion Lulismo

One year after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of his governing strategy. After his election in October 2022, at the head of a heterogeneous coalition hoping to protect Brazilian democracy from Bolsonarismo, the president revived the classic Lulista approach: wholesale concessions to the bourgeoisie along with retail measures to benefit the masses. When he first assumed the presidency two decades ago, this combination of elite pacts and gradual reforms was both innovative and troubling. Lula refused to break with the neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet he fought to raise living standards for the impoverished majority: expanding cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme, extending cheap credit and securing regular real-terms increases in the minimum wage. This social programme secured his 2007 reelection and took centre-stage in his 2022 campaign. Whether it can be sustained remains an open question.

From the outset, Lula’s ‘weak reformism’ was beset by a plethora of contradictions. To name just a few: gains in workers’ purchasing power were not accompanied by equivalent improvements in public healthcare, education, transport or security. Greater access to university degrees was not matched by decent employment opportunities. There was no coherent plan to stimulate domestic industry or shift away from raw material exports. Brazil’s decision to host the World Cup and the Olympics led to violent conflict and the displacement of communities. In the electoral sphere, however, weak reformism brought about a decisive realignment, with the poor supporting Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) en masse, while the middle classes coalesced around Cardoso’s centre-right Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). This model led to four consecutive presidential election victories for the PT. At its peak, a Rooseveltian dream of change without conflict won many hearts and minds.

Yet dissatisfaction, at both popular and elite levels, began to build in the 2010s. Mass protests erupted in 2013 after an increase in public transport fares. There followed a wave of judicial activism against the government, the illegitimate impeachment of Lula’s successor Dilma Rousseff, and finally the imprisonment of Lula himself. Having ascended to the presidency through a congressional coup in 2016, Michel Temer launched his ultraliberal ‘Bridge to the Future’ plan, tearing up workers’ rights and pushing through austerity policies, including a constitutional cap on public spending. The next few years saw a return to the backwardness associated with the military dictatorship of the previous century. Temer and Bolsonaro buried the dream of social justice beneath the rubble of Lulismo. Poverty and homelessness soared. Societal regression was compounded by political atavism, with the army aspiring to run the state again. In the wake of this demolition, Lula was called back to rebuild from the ruins.

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André Singer is a professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of São Paulo and author, among other books, of “O lulismo em crisis (2018)”. Fernando Rugitsky is Professor of Economics at the University of West of England Bristol, and co-director of Bristol Research in Economics.

Feature articles express the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or WBO.