Mar 24 2023 | Nº. 59

Editorial

Looking ahead to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s trip to China this Saturday, the government decided to postpone the official announcement of the new fiscal framework prepared by Finance Minister Fernando Haddad. For weeks, Haddad had signaled the framework, which is intended to replace the draconian spending cap instituted by former President Michel Temer and then often ignored by his successor Jair Bolsonaro, would be ready for presentation before Lula’s next foreign visit. There have been some important snags, however. While Haddad has successfully prevented major leaks of what exactly his plan entails, some details have emerged. It has been reported, for example, that despite Haddad’s broad assurance that the new framework will be anticyclical in nature—essentially, that the government will spend in periods of economic downturn rather than embracing austerity— there will likely still be a mechanism to automatically curb spending in certain circumstances. This has concerned parts of the Lula administration worried about the government’s ability to deliver an ambitious social agenda under suboptimal economic conditions. Indeed, the idea to postpone the presentation of the framework was indirectly attributed to these enduring disputes.

Lula, of course, prides himself on his ability to mediate between differing policy positions. The challenge when it comes to the weighty issue of fiscal policy will be to balance Haddad’s standing within the administration and beyond with the desire to spend more freely on the types of social programs for which the Workers’ Party has been so renowned. Haddad insists both things are possible. 

Lula’s attention has understandably turned to his week-long trip to China, Brazil’s largest trade partner. Among other things, Lula is reportedly considering adhering to the Belt and Road Initiative, the massive global infrastructure program funded by the Chinese government. Unlike several Latin American nations that have welcomed investments from Beijing, which officials in Washington say comes at the cost of long-term sovereignty, Brazil has long resisted joining the program. The United States is openly concerned about further Chinese incursions in the Western Hemisphere, meaning that deepening ties between Brasilia and Beijing could possibly produce some friction with Washington. Lula has made clear, however, that his foreign policy is formulated in accordance with Brazilian interests rather than ideological considerations. Lula’s week-long trip to China, in other words, should not be seen as a kind of ideological approximation with Xi Jinping. It is perfectly rational for Brazil to want to sell more of its goods to China. Most intriguing regarding Lula’s trip to China will be what he has to say about current geopolitics. What does Lula have to say, for example, about Xi’s recent meeting with Vladimir Putin? Aside from talk of increasing trade, these strategic considerations are sure to be scrutinized closely from Washington.

Highlights

• ATTACKS ON AUTHORITIES. The Federal Police announced on Wednesday, March 22 that they had dismantled a plan by the criminal organization PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, First Capital Command) to kidnap and kill officials of the legislative and judiciary branches of the government. In all, 24 search and seizure warrants and 11 arrest warrants were carried out against members of the organization in four Brazilian states: Mato Grosso do Sul, Rondônia, São Paulo and Paraná. According to the investigation, the attacks were to be retaliations against authorities who, in the past and in the present, took or are taking actions that undermine the PCC, such as transferring its leaders from common prisons to maximum security units.

• ON THE LIST. According to the Federal Police, Senator Sérgio Moro was one of the names on the list of targets for PCC operations. Supposedly, the criminal organization is interested in retaliating against Moro for decisions he had taken against leaders of the group in the brief period between January 2019 and April 2020, when he was minister of justice for President Jair Bolsonaro. One of the twenty-one PCC members transferred from prison to maximum security during Moro's time as minister was Marcos Willians Herbas Camacho, known by the nickname Marcola, the main leader of the criminal organization. Moro also transferred another 113 prisoners to maximum security federal units and prohibited intimate visits, which involved physical contact between prisoners and visitors.

• CONTESTED VERSIONS. Another name on the list of those threatened is Lincoln Gakyia, coordinator of the main group that fights organized crime at the Public Ministry of São Paulo. Since 2018 has been responsible for a large number of decisions contrary to the interests of the PCC. Gakyia, who has been threatened for years and constantly lives with a police escort, said he was suspicious of the reasons why Moro would be on the list of those threatened. According to Gakyia, the measures taken by Moro against the PCC as minister of justice took place in 2019, but the former minister's name has never appeared on any list of PCC targets until now.

• WHO IS MORO? Sérgio Moro is the former judge who, in July 2017, sentenced former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to nine years and six months in prison for corruption and money laundering in a case involving the purchase of an apartment in Guarujá on the coast of São Paulo. The conviction led to Lula’s imprisonment in April 2018. He served 580 days and was prevented from running in the 2018 presidential election, which was won by Jair Bolsonaro. Upon taking office the far-right president appointed the then Judge Moro as his minister of justice. Lula was released in November 2019 after the Federal Supreme Court annulled the convictions as a result of the Lava Jato (Car Wash) operation. The ruling considered that Moro didn’t have legal jurisdiction to judge the case against Lula, who ended up winning the October 2022 elections and assuming, in January 2023, his third presidential term.

• POLITICIZATION OF THE CASE. In the same election in which Lula became president, Sérgio Moro was elected as a senator from the state of Paraná. The two are antagonistic figures in the political-ideological struggle in Brazil as a result of the Lava Jato investigation. The discovery of the kidnapping and death plan by the PCC was treated by the extreme right – a sector with close ties to Moro and Bolsonaro – as a plan linked to the interests of the Workers’ Party and Lula against Moro. The argument used to make this connection was the fact that, hours before the operation, Lula had said in a speech that, when he was in prison, he thought about getting out of prison and “fucking” Moro. Both the former judge and other conservative Brazilian congressmen published posts on social networks, made statements on the floor of Congress, and gave interviews trying to associate Lula with the actions of the PCC. The accusations were refuted by Lula's minister of justice, Flávio Dino, who highlighted the non-political nature of a police operation that also protected opposition politicians, such as Moro.

• BOLSONARO APPEARS. From Orlando, Florida, where he has lived since he lost the election to Lula on October 30, 2022, Bolsonaro published messages on his social networks attacking Lula and the Workers’ Party for the events involving the PCC. The former Brazilian president said that the Brazilian left was behind the death of Celso Daniel, the former Workers’ Party mayor of the city of Campinas, just as he was behind the attack against Bolsonaro in the 2018 election campaign, and now in the PCC's plans to kill Moro. The statements are not based on real evidence, do not correspond to any line of investigation by the police, and were seen by many observers as a way of encouraging the electorate of the extreme right to oppose the Lula government.

• HIGH INTEREST RATES. The Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank decided on Thursday, March 23 to maintain the basic interest rate in Brazil at the current 13.75 per cent level. The decision was justified as a way to contain rising inflation. This is the fifth time that the Committee has decided to maintain interest rates at this level. Two of those decisions were taken after Lula took office. The current interest rate is the highest registered in Brazil since 2016. Lula and Minister of Economy Fernando Haddad have been putting pressure on the Central Bank to reduce the interest rate on the grounds that it hampers economic development.

Feature Article

by Sofia Cavalcanti Zanforlin

Impressions from Fieldwork in Roraima

Data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM) show that 5.6 million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015. Between January 2017 and August 2021, Brazil welcomed 635,257 Venezuelans, after the influx skyrocket 922% in the previous two years. The Brazilian government adopted the strategy of offering shelter and locating Venezuelans in rural towns through the creation of the Refuge (Acolhida) Operation (OPA) in 2018. The effort is carried out by the Brazilian Army, the United Nations (through the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration, (IOM) and non-governmental organizations that work with immigrants in Roraima and in other states that receive them.

This situation stimulated a joint research project of the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) to work with an expansive notion of borders. The project wished to discuss the collaborations between the military and humanitarian organization. The project participants also wanted to listen to migrants who are  refugees in Roraima, as well as those placed in rural communities by the OPA.

During the first ten days of September 2022, researchers from UFPE and from UFRR carried out fieldwork in Boa Vista and Pacaraima. The research project, “Frontiers of Mobility in Contemporary Brazil: Communication and Migrant Experience in Ensuring the Reception and Social Integration with the Acolhida Operation,”was financed by the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). It allowed researchers to visit encampments and shelters where they discovered a paradox about the political positions of those Venezuelans they contacted . The answers to the interviews followed approximately the same script: a recognition of the importance and social changes that took place under Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the deprivations that have occurred since his death in 2013, and the rise to power Nicolás Maduro, including his military partnerships, militias, and groups involved in drug trafficking and mining. We then asked about politics in Brazil on the eve of the first round of elections on October 2, 2022. The answer was: “We support Bolsonaro.”

According to the interviewees, if Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – who is similar to Chávez, but is a supporter of Maduro –won the election, what had taken place in Venezuela would occur in Brazil. “Where shall we go?” they asked. For them, keeping things “as they are” seemed to be the safest approach to the current situation. In addition, they pointed out issues that circulated on radio programs, social media networks, and WhatsApp groups: “Lula will expel Venezuelan migrants from Brazil and end OPA activities on the border.”

It is important to point out that the interviewees offered eloquent set of answers with an analytics complexity about the political, economic, and social situation in Venezuela, the conditions and experiences with shelters, and the work of NGOs and humanitarian organizations. When they point out that that Brazil would become another Venezuela, they argued that social reforms will be overturned by economic sanctions and that the political and social situation will deteriorate in Brazil. The same people, however, seemed to be easy victims of lies about the peremptory expulsion of migrants. During conversations, when confronted with the similarities between Bolsonarism – synthesized by support for military participation in the government and for the defense of the relationship with the militias – and the Maduro government, the response was silence or reflective consent. When we pointed out that under the Lula government, the Immigration Law was slowly modified with an amnesty in 2009 during Lula’s second administration, in addition to issuing a humanitarian visa, again, the answers were silence and reflections.

The situation points to some questions about the importance of defending basic civil rights and paying attention to the ways communication works: migrants are equally immersed in the media ecosystem, which researcher Muniz Sodré conceptualizes as media bios, characterized by connections between the market, finance capital, and the diminishing role of state-run public programs. This ecosystem intensifies the circulation of information, since it adds to the binding experience of a common public sphere, which has inflamed the majority since the 2018 with elections lies circulating on official networks and in the underworld of fake news.

It is also important to take into account the experiences that guide work with migrants in Brazil. For the most part, migrants crossing the border are documented and sheltered by neoliberal pedagogy: by NGOs and the UNHCR that offer solutions emphasizing entrepreneurial activities that are individualistic and erase social complexities. The move to rural communities, on the other hand, takes place through precarious jobs, notably slaughterhouses, which urgently need to be investigated. “The crisis is within each one’s head” was an emblematic phrase also heard in the field by migrants who manage to support themselves through their businesses, whether it is the physical experience of selling food at a given location, working as an influencer, or acting as an intermediary in sending remittances through social networks.

Although migrants do not have the right to vote in Brazil, they are part of Brazilian society and are the focus of extreme right-wing groups. They feed on language that is based on lies and instills fear as means of maintaining support among already vulnerable groups. The researchers left the field with an impression, which will be explored more in the following stages of the study, that the paradox of the political positions of the Venezuelan migrants is much closer to portraying a structural problem, which is not just about clarifying lies, but calls for lasting solutions that in fact assure civil and human rights. Entrepreneurship, if it is the solution pursued, needs to be reformatted by the State, through public policies and economic and social institutions that encourage cooperation rather than that being the exception.

Sofia Cavalcanti Zanforlin is a professor and researcher in Communication Studies at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE). She received her doctorate from the School of Communication at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She is a member of the Núcleo Migra - Migrations, Mobilities and Contemporary Population Management and the coordinator of the Diaspora and Media Working Group.

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