Aug 04 2023 | Nº. 78

Editorial

Interest rates in Brazil, among the highest in the world, finally began to come down this week. The head of the Central Bank, a hold-over appointee from former President Jair Bolsonaro, voted to lower interest rates by a half percent. The hope and the expectation is that lower borrowing costs will fuel increasingly positive economic indicators that are translating into growing credibility for the government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Although it cautioned against excessive optimism, a recent piece in The Economist highlighted this trend: “Six months after he took office, markets are warming up to Lula’s administration. In a recent poll of 94 Brazilian fund managers and analysts, just 44% had an unfavorable view of the government, down from 90% in March. On July 26, Fitch, a ratings agency, upgraded Brazil’s long-term foreign-currency debt for the first time since it was downgraded in 2018.”

Although the Central Bank did not lower interest rates as much as the government hoped, it is expected to signal further reductions in the months ahead. This could lead to more investment and more economic growth at home while Lula picks up his international commitments during a busy second half of the year. Next month, Lula is expected to meet with President Joe Biden in New York during the UN General Assembly and then, in December, Brazil takes over the rotating presidency of the G20. According to last Sunday’s Folha de São Paulo, the government sees its role in the G20 as a particularly impactful showcase for Lula’s leadership, even more so than the COP30 summit to be held in Brazil in 2025. This is in part because the country heading the G20 has considerable latitude in setting certain priorities for the intergovernmental forum made up of developing and advanced industrialized nations. Lula is expected to highlight the fight against inequality, an issue on which he has a concrete record as well as enduring challenges in his third term. 

Finally, it was reported this Thursday that a delegation of U.S. progressives will be visiting Brazil, Chile, and Colombia later this month. It is unclear whether Lula will meet with the group—which includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joaquin Castro, Nydia Velázquez, Greg Casar, and Maxwell Frost—but the goal of deepening ties among progressive forces across the hemisphere is one the president shares. “It’s long past time for a realignment of the United States’ relationship to Latin America,” Ocasio-Cortez told the Los Angeles Times, adding that “the U.S. needs to publicly acknowledge the harms we’ve committed through interventionist and extractive policies, and chart a new course based on trust and mutual respect.” 

Highlights

• POLICE VIOLENCE. The first week of August was marked by an explosion in the number of police operations that resulted in the death of dozens of people. In Baixada Santista, on the southern coast of the state of São Paulo, 16 people were killed by the police in an operation that had as its starting point the search for the killers of an officer who belonged to the force. In Vila Cruzeiro, Rio de Janeiro, at least 9 people were killed by the police in a single action. In Bahia, 19 were killed over three days in three different cities in the state.

• EXECUTIONS AND TORTURE. The Baixada Santista case was the one that had the greatest repercussions nationally due to complaints made by residents of the communities where the police operations took place. Human rights organizations collected reports of torture and summary executions, which commanding officer of the police has denied. Another factor that contributed to the case gaining attention is the fact that Tarcísio de Freitas, the governor of the state of São Paulo, who is a hardline reserve soldier and was part of the Jair Bolsonaro government, has political ambitions of one day becoming president. Tarcísio defended the police, did not criticize the 16 deaths, and said that the operation was exemplary.

• EXCHANGE OF ACCUSATIONS. After a break, the Mixed Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry – mixed because it is composed of members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate – returned to hear testimonies and collect documents related to the attempted coup d'état of January 8, 2023. The resumption of work is being marked by accusations exchanged between those responsible for the security bodies that had the task of protecting the headquarters of the Presidency, Congress and the Supreme Court, which were all attacked that day.

• AGAINST LULA. The first statements and documents that surfaced this week were negative for the Lula government. First, the army produced an internal inquiry in which it exonerated itself of any blame for inaction on January 8. The army document blamed responsibility on the Institutional Security Office (GSI), a body with ministerial status that was commanded by reserve General Gonçalves Dias, a person trusted by President Lula, who had taken over the role days before. This version was later reinforced by the testimony of Saulo Moura da Cunha, the former director of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN), who told the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry that he had warned General GDias, as he is known, several times about the risk that Bolsonaristas presented on the Esplanade of the Ministries that day in possibly invading the headquarters of the three branches of government, as in fact ended up happening. Cunha says that GDias ignored the alerts.

• IN FAVOR OF LULA. Both the army inquiry and the testimony of the former head of ABIN were celebrated by Bolsonaristas and criticized by members of the Lula government. Since the installation of the Joint Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, there has been a battle over different versions of the January 8 coup attempt. Bolsonaro's followers try to invert the facts and create a narrative according to which the Lula government is the one that failed to protect itself from the violence. But this version was refuted by Andrei Rodrigues, the current director general of the Federal Police. During an event in São Paulo, he blamed the army for having tolerated for months the fact that Bolsonarist militants remained camped out in front of the army headquarters in Brasília. Some of the demonstrators who attacked the headquarters of the three branches of government came from the campsite.

• CHANGES IN THE GOVERNMENT. President Lula should promote by the end of his first year in office a reshuffling of his cabinet to accommodate new names from parties such as the Popular Party and the Republicans. Both are right-wing parties that participated in the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, but both now have an interest in a circumstantial rapprochement with Lula, despite their underlying ideological differences. The movement is part of the Brazilian model of governance, dubbed coalition presidentialism, in which the president tries to increase his parliamentary base in exchange for sharing positions and funds with different political parties. There is no official information on which ministries will undergo changes, but the press, based on behind-the-scenes information, mentions the Social Development, Chief of Staff, Human Rights, and Defense portfolios, in addition to second and third-level positions at Petrobras and other state-owned corporations.

• HACKING ACTION. This week, the Federal Police carried out search and seizure operations at the residence and office of federal Congresswoman Carla Zambelli, a combative far-right figure and an unconditional ally of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The police discovered that Zambelli made cash payments to a hacker who had broken into the computers of the National Council of Justice (CNJ) and had tried, without success, to manipulate the electronic voting machines used in the 2022 presidential election. The congressional representative also introduced the hacker Walter Delgatti to Bolsonaro, who received him at the Palácio da Alvorada, the official residence of the presidency. The revelation further complicates the situation for Bolsonaro, who has already been convicted in the Electoral Court for promoting acts against electronic voting machines and the Brazilian electoral system. The conviction resulted in Bolsonaro being ineligible to hold a public office for a period of eight years.

• DEADLY OMISSION. In addition to the episode involving the hacker and voting machines, a new set of investigations was opened this week against Bolsonaro with the revelation that the former Brazilian president ignored and kept confidential more than a thousand reports produced by Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) about the Covid-19 pandemic. The reports, delivered to him throughout 2020 and 2021, reinforced vaccination and social distancing recommendations. Throughout the pandemic, Bolsonaro opposed vaccines and encouraged gatherings where people didn’t wear masks, contributing to the situation in which there were more than 700,000 deaths from the disease. ABIN's documents were obtained by the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, which made the request based on the Access to Information Law.

• SUSPICIOUS MONEY. On another front, the Council for the Control of Financial Activities (COAF) revealed that Bolsonaro received the equivalent of approximately US$ 3.5 million in more than 700,000 small donations made through PIX, a simplified banking system. The donations took place in response to an appeal made by the former president for his followers to help him gather the necessary funds to pay fines that were imposed on him by the Justice Department. The amount collected, however, is much greater than that of the fines levied against him. The case is reminiscent of what happened to Steve Bannon who, in the United States, was accused of diverting at least US$1 million from the US$25 million that had been collected in donations, under the pretext of financing the construction of a wall on the U.S. border with the Mexico.

NEWS FROM SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND MOVEMENTS:

RACIAL INEQUALITY. The Instituto de Referência Negra Peregum carried out an extensive survey in Brazil on the population's perception of racism. The result shows that 44 percent of Brazilians believe that race, color, and ethnicity are the main causes of inequality in the country. For 81 percent of respondents, Brazil is a racist country. The full survey is available at this link.

POLICE VIOLENCE. The Memory Coalition and the Vladimir Herzog Institute published a note repudiating police violence that led to the death of at least 16 people over the last week in Baixada Santista, on the south coast of the state of São Paulo. The organizations demand that the authorities investigate deaths in which there are “strong indications of summary executions and torture”. Read the full note at this link.

ENERGY TRANSITION. For the first time, Brazil hosted a meeting of the Latin American Extractive Industries Network (RLIE). The meeting, which took place from July 11 to 13, was promoted by IBASE. It discussed concepts in favor of a fair energy transition, as well as lithium mining and hydrocarbon policies in Latin America. The summary of the debates is available at this link.

G20. The Brazilian Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (ABONG) will coordinate, together with other NGOs, the process of consultation and advocacy by civil society at the G20, the meeting of the 20 largest economies in the world, to be held in Brazil in 2025. Athayde Mota, a member of the executive board of ABONG was tasked with chairing the Civil Society Working Group within the G20.

Feature Article

by Patricia Audi

RenovaBR and Anti-democratic Threat-proof Commitment and Innovation

In addition to the renewal of names on the ballot boxes each election year, our vibrant democracy increasingly needs qualified staff. New candidates for positions in the legislative and executive branches of government are not enough. Our representatives, whether new entrants into politics or old acquaintances of voters, need to be prepared to carry out transparent mandates that ensure ethical principles and dialogue, thinking about a national development project, and combating threats to democracy. That's where RenovaBR comes in.

We are a political training school that, since 2017, has been developing its own methodology and technology to transform the way politics is done in Brazil. We believe in using data and evidence to make decisions that impact the lives of thousands of people. Based on this principle, we offer, free of charge and in a variety of ways, without a partisan or ideological agenda, training paths that range from campaign organization to the creation of public policies, including the formation of a support network for leaders trained by the school.

Since the first class, in 2018, we have received more than 60,000 applications. We teach more than 600 hours of classes, train 2,000 leaders and support more than 175 people who are in elected offices. In 2022, we had seven leaders elected to the National Congress and eleven in the legislative assemblies. Last year our students received a total of 6.8 million votes. In addition to those who hold offices, today we have more than 470 RenovaBR leaders who have management positions in federal, state and municipal governments. One-third of the trained leaders already influence the lives of millions of Brazilian men and women.

For 2023, the challenge of training and educating leaders is even greater. First, due to the highly polarized environment of the last elections, which discourages many who do not fully identify with one of the poles from taking risks in politics, running for office is a task that naturally requires a series of personal sacrifices. With that in mind, RenovaBR redoubled its care when selecting the people taking its course, which this year alone attracted around 20,000 interested parties.

We developed an algorithm to evaluate responses to an extensive questionnaire applied by a chatbot to everyone who enrolls in the course. In addition, our selection team performs an accurate analysis of the candidates’ communication skills, among other criteria. In the second phase, the candidates are in virtual contact with us. At the end of the process, we will select up to 3,000 new leaders.

The effort can soon be seen in the next RenovaBR group that will prepare the names of those who intend to run in the municipal elections next year. This is committed work that can and should serve as an example for other public and private sector institutions. Reinforcing democratic values on a daily basis is a current imperative, and we hope it serves as an example for other initiatives.

As CEO of RenovaBR since January, I have been sharing with our team, our leaders and our supporters, the dream of a fairer and less unequal Brazil. We are living this dream together with valued partners, who dedicate themselves, invest and believe that the only way to improve politics and strengthen democracy is through politics. We will continue in our fight, keeping an eye on the new faces and the not-so-new faces that deserve their space to propose increasingly proactive and democratic policies. We call on everyone to do their part, study, inform themselves properly, support constructive debates and be aware of those that promise simple solutions and narratives for complex problems. Democracy in Brazil thanks you.

Patricia Audi is CEO of RenovaBR and Counselor for Sustainable Economic and Social Development of the Federal Government. She has more than 25 years of experience in Brazilian public management at the federal, state and municipal levels. Graduated in Business Administration and specialist in Public Policy and Government Management, Patricia Audi was Secretary of Transparency and Corruption Prevention at the Ministry of Transparency; INSS Benefit Director; Coordinator of the International Labor Organization in Brazil; Management Secretary at the Ministry of Planning, Budget and Management of the Federal Government and Secretary of the Council for Economic and Social Development of the Civil House. For the past four years, she has served as Vice-President of Communication, Marketing, Institutional Relations and Sustainability at Santander.

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