Brazil

By Jonathan Power The Brazilians have an elected president. They must keep her. If Dilma Rosseff is pushed to resign democracy has failed. Two years ago she won re-election handsomely. That is the source of her mandate. From that she derives her legitimacy. The only thing that could topple her is if hard evidence emerges that she is crook- in her case supposedly stole millions of dollars from the Brazilian oil giant, Petrobras, of which she was once head of the board. Then Congress would be within its rights to discuss her impeachment. But there is no evidence of her personal corruption- although there is evidence aplenty that her party, The Workers’ Party, has received a lot of black money, not just from Petrobras. Brazil is not a parliamentary democracy. It is not necessary for her to have a majority in parliament to rule, anymore than Barack Obama does in...

s. In truth it is not difficult to be cynical about Brazil. It is a large land of both great potential and many lost opportunities- and yet whenever I visit it, as I have regularly over 40 years, I find the positive changes are immense. In my time I have seen growth rates year after year of 10% or more. I have seen the transformation of favelas- shanty towns- into solid working class housing. I have seen infant mortality rates plummet. (To capture the flavor of the lives of the poor a must read is the new top prize-winning novel, “Quarenta Dias” (Forty Days), written by Valeria Rezende, a nun.) And under Brazil’s last president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, leader of the Workers’ Party I have seen the almost unbelievable- capitalist economic progress and socialist social progress storming ahead hand in hand. Right now Brazil is in the middle...

it will be 5.1%. This is less than the 5.3% before the great recession (precipitated by American banks), but considering all its recent knocks, not least China buying less raw materials, Africa is holding up pretty well. In fact what we used to call the “Third World” is a mixed bag of good and bad news. Which would you like to read about first? More bad news? Here it is: Emerging markets for the sixth consecutive year face falling growth rates. Currencies have hit 15-year lows. Stocks, once soaring ahead of developed countries, have been flat for the last 6 years. Private sector debt has been increasing fast. The outflow of funds has accelerated and in the last year was over one trillion US dollars. Stock market and currency turbulence have raised questions about where China is going. The late president of France, Charles de Gaulle, once quipped about Brazil,...

They made it, with constructive alternatives – the New Development Bank and the Contingency Reserve Agreement–to the US-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Those two parts of Bretton Woods were basic pillars in the economic infra-structure of the US Empire in the hands of the US Congress. Loans were disbursed in return for “structural adjustment” –privatization, budget cuts, devaluation, repatriation of profit, also against BRICS countries. US companies were commissioned for huge jobs serving local elites. Untold damage was done in spite of some recent changes in rhetoric. The USA used them to export the US economic–and with it the social, political, cultural, military–order through loans, grafting it upon social bodies that after some time rejected the implants as foreign and incompatible. Even a decaying order however brilliant it may have looked to the untrained eye as late as the 1990s. What remains today of that US “order” is...

LONDON – It was the late president of France, Charles de Gaulle, who famously said, “Brazil has a great future, and it always will have.” With the first round of the Brazilian election over with the favourite to win, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, coming under increasing scrutiny for corruption – the seemingly eternal Brazilian political disease – many observers seriously wonder if Brazil can ever unlock its enormous potential. Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy of the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom, but all this has come at a price – the lack of discipline in both personal and public morality. The ingrained privileges of those who have already made it, together with the manipulative corruption of the established political class, make it difficult for Brazil to engage in the economic...

SAO PAOLO – It was Charles de Gaulle who once said, “Brazil has a great future. But it always will have.” Yet times are changing in Brazil and it is no longer inconceivable that Brazil will emerge in the next few decades alongside India and China as one of the world’s economic superpowers. As Dilma Roussef, chief of staff to President Luis Ignácio da Silva, “Lula”, put it to me with only a touch of hyperbole, “It’s more difficult to make this economy not grow than to make it grow.” Can Brazil move itself from Third World to First World? Can Brazil, the world’s most successful country in terms of growth in the twentieth century, repeat this achievement in the twenty-first? Many, viewing the dismal inflation-consumed performance of the 1980s and early 1990s, with a currency adding zeros faster than the printing presses could turn, believed Brazil could never make...

SAO PAOLO – For the best part of thirty years the President of Brazil, Luis Inácio da Silva, “Lula”, has been a rising star in the Brazilian firmament. From the days when he led the metalworkers of the car industry of Sao Paulo out on a strike against the military government he has been a darling of the workers, the Catholic Church, and the liberals. In those early days Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany and Prime Minister Adolfo Suarez of Spain came to seek him out, partly to bolster his stature against the generals and partly to attempt to discern where mighty Brazil, then far ahead of China and India, might be heading. I found him at the time living in a small worker’s house in one of those less than awe-inspiring suburbs on the outskirts of this immense, smog-filled, city of over 11 million. He was, as I discovered...

LONDON – In Recife one can see the real abomination of Brazil. Over the last 30 years I’ve watched this north eastern city’s population grow like a fungus. A quarter of the people of Brazil’s fourth largest city live in the crime-ridden, extremely violent, favelas (shanty towns), many of them without sanitation. After I walked these filthy, mud-laced streets and returned to stay at the house of the local Catholic priests deep inside one favela lines of a Kipling poem turned in my mind, “Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built on the silt/ Palace, byre, hovel- poverty and pride- side by side/ And, above the packed and pestilential town, Death looked down.” Last year the newly elected president, Luiz Inacio da Silva, “Lula”, brought his cabinet here. He was waylaid with placards reading, “Lula, only you can save us”. Can Brazil move from Third World to First World? Can it rid itself...

LONDON – There is a widely held opinion abroad that Brazil never had the chance of profoundly changing for the better- shedding its widespread poverty and dire income distribution- until Lula (President Luiz Inácio da Silva) came along last year. This is not entirely false, but neither is it entirely true. Brazil has long made a kind of progress- in the last century it was second only to Taiwan as the fastest growing economy in the world- but it has been appallingly uneven. Part of the story of contemporary Brazil is clear to the eye in this small village of 7,000 people in the arid north east, along with the Amazon the poorest part of this vast country. Twenty five years or so ago I used to come to Pilõezinhos regularly when I had a close friend living here, Valéria Rezende, a radical, grass roots-stirring nun, part of the Catholic Church...

LONDON – If Brazil has long lived out its personal fantasy as the archetypal relaxed, tolerant and gregarious country with Copacabana beach, the samba, the carnival and a great deal of sexual freedom it is now living out in real time its almost forgotten societal dream, an economic-cum-social revolution. Brazil has had economic growth before. For the first eighty years of the last century it was the country along with Taiwan with the world’s fastest growth rates. Even today after setback after setback it is the world’s eighth largest economy. Yet it has never kept up with its burgeoning population, the inequities of the feudal land system that cast millions into shanty towns and a murder rate that is more akin to a war zone than a normal society. But with a government led by a former lathe worker and union leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who is determined to...

LONDON – Twenty years ago when Luiz Inacio da Silva, “Lula” as everyone calls him, first started to make a splash in Brazilian politics both the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt and the Spanish prime minister Adolfo Suarez took time out on one of their Latin American trips to seek out the young trade union leader and talk over his political philosophy and how he saw the future of Brazil. They made it clear to journalists that they were impressed. So was I. I spent four hours in face to face conversation with Lula and we ranged far and wide. Uneducated in a formal sense, his facility for answering a difficult question well was awe-inspiring. “I think it is better just go forward one millimetre”, he told me, “but one down to earth millimetre, knowing that we won’t have to go two millimetres backwards later on”. That was two decades ago...

WASHINGTON DC–Brazil’s general election has produced the goods–continuation of sober government, fiscally conservative with a social conscience. With a bit of luck Brazil’s present role as the lynchpin that could make or break the world economy will, before too long, be regarded as an historical anomaly. Assuming–and a lot of hard work remains to be done–they can get their act together, the West’s Group of Seven and the International Monetary Fund will soon extend the large loan necessary to get Brazil over the hump of the stream of dollars hemorrhaging from the country. (A total of $50 billion is the quite mammoth loan talked about.) To let Brazil go on sliding down the financial chute would be to give another shove to the cannon-balls rolling and ricocheting round the deck of the good ship “World Economy”, with the likelihood they’ll puncture first the deck and then the hull. Fernando Henrique...