Nov 17 2023 | Nº. 93

Editorial

President Lula created an awkward situation for Finance Minister Fernando Haddad in recent weeks by suggesting the federal budget need not be balanced by next year. Haddad, who has staked his reputation on a cautious fiscal approach, had been promising to erase the deficit by 2024, an ambitious goal he insists is the best way to attract new investment and push interest rates down. Others close to the president—reportedly including Chief of Staff Rui Costa and Gleisi Hoffman, the head of the Workers’Party (PT)—have argued that Haddad’s approach would limit the federal government’s ability to spend on public works and social programs. In late October, Lula seemed to embrace that view, dealing a political blow to Haddad. This week, however, the government signaled that it will not in fact move to make it easier for the government to spend more than it raises in tax revenue. 

Haddad’s ability to deliver on his priorities as finance minister is central to his political future. He is often talked about as a presidential contender for the PT in 2030 or 2026 should Lula not seek reelection. Another cabinet member whose name has also been floated as a future candidate is Justice Minister Flávio Dino. Indeed, earlier this year, Dino shone as a particularly effective advocate for the administration. He was frequently called in for tendentious questioning by the opposition following the January 8 insurrection in Brasília by supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro, for example. Dino handled those sessions with such withering sarcasm and rhetorical aplomb that it backfired on those members of Congress seeking to embarrass him and the Lula government. His visibility, combined with the assumption that he would be Lula’s likely pick for a seat on the Federal Supreme Court (STF), has made Dino an enduring target for right-wing opponents. Dino, for example, has been called to task for a spike in violent crime in major metropolitan areas like Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. This week, he had to contend with a scandal that threatened to seriously undermine his standing when O Estado de S. Paulo reported that officials in the Justice Ministry had met with an NGO delegation that included the wife of a major figure from one of Brazil’s largest criminal gangs. 

Dino insisted he did not personally meet with the woman in question, but the fact that some in his office did lead to calls for the justice minister’s impeachment from some opposition voices in Congress. That is unlikely at this point, but it was widely reported that this imbroglio probably did not help Dino’s chances of being formally nominated to occupy the STF seat vacated by Rosa Weber in September. While the government played defense on Dino’s behalf, it celebrated its diplomatic efforts in securing the safe return this week of 32 Brazilians and their families who had been stuck in Gaza under Israeli bombardment. Lula praised the wide-ranging efforts of the Brazilian government even as he harshly criticized the actions of the Israeli government. 

Highlights

• Record heat. This week, Brazilians suffered a record heat wave for the period. In several cities across the country, thermometers exceeded 42° C (107.6° F). In Rio de Janeiro, the thermal sensation reached 58.5° (137.3°F). The exceptional heat is caused by the combination of the atmospheric phenomenon El Niño with the effects of climate change, and is worsened by the inability of cities to adapt to the new reality, marked by increasingly sudden changes.

• Devastating effects. Some of the effects of this excessive heat and low air humidity are droughts and fires in the larger Amazon region, which especially affect the Pantanal sub-region, where the flames have already consumed an area eight times larger than the Rio de Janeiro area in 2023. Extreme weather events are also generating losses for agribusiness, one of the biggest drivers of the Brazilian economy. From January to September this year alone, losses reached the equivalent of US$6.8 billion.

• Argentine election. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said this week that Argentina needs a president who respects democracy and relations with Mercosur partners – a trading bloc of which both countries are founders. The message is clearly one of disapproval of the outsider and anarcho-capitalist candidate Javier Milei who is running in the second round against the current economy minister, the Peronist Sergio Massa. Milei has made many statements against Mercosur and against left-wing politicians in the region.

• Empty Brasilia. Brazil had two important holidays very close together, which left the congressional agenda and political life in the capital, Brasília, empty for two weeks. November 15th was the anniversary of the Proclamation of the Republic, and on the 20th, Black Awareness Day was celebrated. The two dates have a weekend in between, which caused many to “hang” working days – an informal expression that refers, in Brazil, to not working on business days located between holidays and weekends. President Lula even said that 2023 was a year of many long holidays, which has had a negative impact on the growth of the country's GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

• Bolsonaristas on the streets. Supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro took to the streets on the Proclamation of the Republic holiday, November 15, in an attempt to repeat the large far-right protests that marked Brazil in 2015/2016. The turnout, however, was deminished because of the heat wave hitting Brazil and the fear of the legal consequences of participating in public demonstrations that defend unconstitutional measures, such as a coup d'état. Public participation was very small and did not even achieve much impact on networks and in the media. The weakening of the extreme right on the streets comes at a time when Bolsonaro is already dealing with three convictions in the Electoral Court, which leave him ineligible for eight years.

• Bolsonaristas in DC. A group of Brazilian parliamentarians linked to former president Jair Bolsonaro went to Washington to meet with Republican parliamentarians. Among the members of the delegation was federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, one of the sons of the former Brazilian president. Among the offices visited was that of Republican George Santos, who is facing several lawsuits and was arrested in May. The group's agenda also included a trip to the headquarters of the OAS (Organization of American States). The group is bringing complaints against the Federal Supreme Court, which has been holding responsible Bolsonaro supporters involved in the frustrated coup attempt on January 8th.

• Brazilian Nazism. This week, police arrested seven people suspected of advocating for Nazism. The operations took place in the states of Santa Catarina, in the south of Brazil, and in Ceará, in the northeast region. Search and seizure warrants were also carried out in the states of Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo, where Nazi publications were seized, as well as replicas of uniforms and weapons, as well as literature on the subject. The investigation began following an anonymous tip and took seven months until the first arrests were made. The group, which will be indicated by a criminal association, had been making threats against Jewish entities in Brazil.

NEWS FROM SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND MOVEMENTS:

Domestic workers. Three organizations that work with the rights of domestic workers in Latin America and the Caribbean had a meeting with the Special Rapporteur for Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights of the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) on November 8th. The meeting was requested by Themis, Conlactraho (Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of Homeworkers) and Care Global, with the support and organization of the WBO. The request is for the rapporteur to prepare a special report sectors that were particularly affected by the economic, social and health effects of the pandemic.

New website. Assessoria Popular Maria Felipa launched a website this month. The organization has existed for seven years and works for Comprehensive Justice for women, black and peripheral women, mothers, victims of domestic violence and LGBTQIAP+ people as a mechanism for consolidating Brazilian Democracy. The website features services, projects, actions, impact data and articles from the organization, which is one of 53 affiliates of the WBO.

Public transparency. Transparência Internacional Brasil opened a selection notice for projects developed by civil society organizations that work to promote transparency and integrity in Brazilian municipalities. The intention is to select 12 organizations that will receive support to implement their projects through the Transparency and Public Governance Index. Registration is open until November 30th.

Feature Article

by Marcelo Paixão

Racial Equality in Times of Melancholy

One of the greatest fears of the founders of economic sciences was a dark scenario in which, due to the movement of capital accumulation, profit rates would fall to such a point that a great period of melancholy would begin. A century and a half later, Latin American economists such as Celso Furtado and dependency theorists such as Ruy Marini and Theotônio dos Santos would understand that the structural collapses of peripheral economies caused by the system of unequal exchanges and the concentration of income would make economic development impossible in the long term.

If in the long interregnum between 1930 and 1980 Brazilian GDP per capita grew at an annual rate of 4 percent per year, since then until the present day it has hovered around 1 percent. Since 1986, to focus only on the Cruzado Plan, we have collected a series of failed macroeconomic stabilization plans, which were reversed by the Real Plan of 1994. However, it established among Brazilians the harsh antinomy between inflation control and economic growth.

Meanwhile, the world was going through a profound productive transformation, resulting in the displacement of industrial chains to East Asia, but which went far beyond this sector, encompassing an equal revolution in the world of services and information. In the Brazilian case, this same moment was marked by an economy based on the export of primary goods. In 2022, almost two-thirds of our exports came from mining activities and the agro-industrial complex, in contrast to what happened in 1989 when two-thirds of the exported value was manufactured.

The long period of stagnation was accompanied by exponential voracity over natural resources and by a neo-messianic movement of the extreme right, especially in the south and southeast regions and in the extension of the geographically immense arc of deforestation.

Throughout the 1970s, the predominant interpretation was that capitalist economic development would be possible through the articulation between national and international private capital and state investments. If during the Economic Miracle of the early 1970s defenders of the dependency theory were unable to explain what was happening, after almost fifty years, all Brazilian economists have decided to retire the debate on the deeper reasons for the impasses that threw us into the most melancholic period of stagnation in history of the republic.

Brazilian developmental thought was initiated by Roberto Simonsen with História Econômica do Brasil (Economic History of Brazil) published in 1937. Not coincidentally, it was in that same decade that Casa Grande e Senzala (Masters and Slaves, 1933) and Sobrados e Mocambos (Mansions and Shanties, 1936) by Gilberto Freyre and Raízes do Brasil (Brazilian Roots, 1936) by Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda laid the foundations for the modern identity of the Brazilian people centered on the ideas of racial democracy and the cordial man. Therefore, these multiple readings about Brazil's past and future are organically interrelated.

Since this is so, it is impossible not to wonder if the impasse of the Brazilian economy is not directly linked to the ideological matrix that gave rise to it. Unfortunately, racial democracy and the cordial man cannot be dissociated from the Brazilian-style eugenicist logic that pointed to the progressive whitening of its population through miscegenation as the solution to our backwardness. Essential authors of the founding of the modern Brazilian State that emerged in the 1930s, such as Oliveira Viana, Fernando Azevedo, and Gilberto Freyre himself converge in this regard. Today we know that this matrix of thought has failed. Isn't it therefore time to revisit its influences on Brazilian economic thought to discover new horizons?

Currently, there is suspicion surrounding the idea that so-called identity policies compromise the principle of universality that should govern the actions of the Brazilian State. “Greeks were normal children” said old Karl Marx in his Eurocentric model of understanding universal history. Every social action encompasses an inevitable dimension of identity and alterity, and the model based on the unlikely hypothesis of the existence of a universal subject does not escape this understanding.

Gender and racial equality policies do not defend particularism as a principle. They only reveal the particularism hidden in worldviews, which make universal a specific particular type of gender (male-hetero) and racial (white, or in the world of racial democracy, white-mestizo) identity.

If racism and sexism are attitudes that permeate all institutions, it is illogical to assume that policies aimed at resolving the asymmetries derived from those power relations are only compensatory. Its actions are structural in relation to a new development model based on overcoming social inequalities alongside those of gender and race.

If it is true that long-term stagnation must force us to think outside the box, this is an invitation to revisit the terms of what we understand by structural collapse. Part of what is written in this article I delve into in The Legend of Enchanted Modernity. But for now, I'll stop here. As the Brazilian composer and singer/songwriter Raul Seixas says: “while Freud can explain things, the devil does the talking.”

Marcelo Paixão is Associate Professor at the University of Texas, Austin, affiliated with the Department of African Diaspora Studies (AADS) and the Teresa Losano Long Institute for Latin American Studies (LLILAS). This text was originally written for the WBO newsletter. Fill in the form at the bottom of the text to access and subscribe.

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