Outside view: Brazil keeps going south
By Emily Sedgwick A UPI Outside view commentary From the Washington Politics & Policy Desk Published 1/8/2003 7:39 PM View printer-friendly version
SAO PAULO STATE, Brazil, Jan. 5 (UPI) -- Brazil has earned a long-standing reputation for political incongruity and curiously unrealized economic potential. The country's stunning beauty and the friendliness of its people can swiftly insulate a visitor from domestic concerns like poverty and bureaucratic waste.
All the same, the presence of the favelas, or slums, and graffiti-pocked cement city surfaces remains undeniably prevalent and disturbing.
At UNICAMP in the Sao Paulo state, where my brother is a university student, the contrast with universities in the United States and Western Europe couldn't be more striking. Communist-era architecture, poorly-kept grounds, and an enormous cement amphitheater covered with graffiti blemishes dominate the campus.
UNICAMP was established in 1969 by a leftist movement of academics, and the temperament of the students I met there suggests a strong connection to that history.
These students expressed to me a great sense of optimism regarding the recent election of Luis Inacio da Silva, or Lula -- "Squid" in Portuguese -- as he is affectionately called.
The young people I met unanimously supported his election and remarked upon it with an attitude of momentous expectancy.
Lula rose to notoriety in the 1970s as the leader of the Paulista steelworkers union, helping steelworkers to achieve higher wages and better working conditions.
His successes as a union leader have expanded the middle class but he opposes privatization, the elimination of tariffs, and a new free trade agreement for the Americas. These actions would further expand and empower Brazil's fledgling middle class and help to reverse the centralization of an entrenched and patrimonial government bureaucracy.
Yet Lula and the students that I met seem determined to enact policies of global isolationism and redistribution of wealth.
Scrawled on another cement amphitheater in the nearby city of Campinas is 'UTOPIA,' in orange spray paint, in a child's handwriting, suggesting little forethought or artistic intent.
Supporters of Lula castigate U.S. President George W. Bush for his background in the oil industry and draw tenuous parallels between that background and the possibility of a U.S. war with Iraq.
In Brazil, government bureaucrats rise to influence and power, and earn fortunes, by cultivating clientele in and out of government. Patronage is a tradition spanning the centuries since Portuguese arrival on this soil.
To reverse that tradition, one might think to expand economic opportunities for the majority of Brazilians, rather than pander to the so-far unproven and mystical concept of socialistic utopia.
The poverty, favelas, graffiti, and desperation in a country so beautiful lend urgency to radical change of any kind. Politicians here have spit liberal ideology into the wind for decades.
On the road to Maresais, through huge hills of dense jungle, we passed numerous favelas, most of which appeared to be empty. Upon inspection from the windows of city buses, clothing hung from lines, drying in the mildly humid and hot summer air, and trash and other evidence of life lay strewn about.
Telephone lines whiskered the hills, and the occasional disc-like antenna sprouted from a roof.
The colors of the favelas are drab terra-cotta oranges, browns, metallics, and dirty whites so that these settlements take on a uniformity and predictability. None of the windows appear to have glass, or even a bright piece of fabric strung across black openings that give the favelas a toothless and malnourished quality.
In a country where plant life tumbles all over itself everywhere, competing for sunlight, in the worst favelas that I've seen there are no broad-leaved trees. There are no flowering vines, coconut palms or any of the flora that should grow just about anywhere in this climate.
Instead, the geometric haphazard growth of a favela climbs up a hillside and spreads like a virus.
Brazil's political leaders have espoused fidelity to classical liberalism at least since 1985. But it would seem that with the exception of the vote, these principles are undone by a government bureaucracy that absorbs one in six salaried Brazilians, labor legislation that inhibits reform, and a general sense of cynicism about the efficacy of free market economics.
The emerging middle class, perhaps the one group capable of spurring genuine reform, could easily be spooked into supporting another military regime, as happened in 1964, and undermining the privatization and democratic progress already achieved.
The recent scandals revealing enormous payoffs and kickbacks to government officials of every rank fail to inspire any confidence in a system that hasn't addressed the concerns of the silent poor majority, or the middle class.
The challenges that Brazil must resolve may yet meet their match in the kindness and hope of its people. -0- (Emily Sedgwick is a tax policy analyst with Americans for Tax Reform, a pro-market organization based in Washington. "Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.)