Brazil Apart

1964–2019

Perry Anderson

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781788737944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788737951
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What does Brazil's lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America's most populous society, and how has it come about?

Perry Anderson, foremost observer of the Brazilian scene in the English-speaking world, offers a matchless account of the country's recent political upheavals: after the dashed hopes of the Cardoso years, the soaring popularity of Luiz In?cio Lula da Silva; the parliamentary coup d'?tat against his successor, Dilma; and the sweeping election victory of Bolsonaro, backed by the Armed Forces and a youthful new right.

Always something of a world unto itself, under the Workers' Party, Brazil had bucked the global trend towards a tighter neoliberalism. With its lodestar, Lula, now behind bars, a weighing up of the PT's legacy, and of the contrasting Bolsonaro regime, is urgently needed.

1

LAUNCH

1994

Brazil today has a larger population and gross national product than Russia. Yet, against all reason, it continues to occupy a curiously marginal position in the contemporary historical imaginary. In fifteen years it has left virtually no trace in the pages of the London Review. Popular images, despite increasing tourism, remain scanty: folk-villains on the run, seasonal parades in fancy-dress, periodical football triumphs. In cultural influence, while the music and literature of Latin America have swept round the world, Brazil has receded. The rhythms of salsa have long eclipsed those of the samba, and the list of headline novelists conspicuously omits the country that produced the most inventive nineteenth-century practitioner of the form outside Europe, in Machado de Assis. Today Northern readers are more likely to get an impression of the country from Peruvian bombast than any native fiction.

If the largest society in the Southern hemisphere remains mentally off-screen for most outsiders, part of the reason lies in its recent political history. Since the sixties, there have been four major dramas in Latin America that have caught the attention of the world. Three of these were either by-passed or aborted in Brazil, and the other took a sui generis form. Internationally, the continent became news for the first time in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, when the spectre of guerrilla movements haunted Washington. Brazil was never in the forefront of this turbulence. Compared with Venezuela or Colombia, Peru or Argentina, its episodes of insurgency—largely urban—were brief and soon extinguished. Military dictatorship, on the other hand, arrived earlier—already in 1964, nearly a decade before Pinochet or Videla—and lasted longer, for over twenty years. The Brazilian generals were always the most adroit of the region, presiding over record rates of growth in the seventies, and opening a carefully calibrated re-democratization in the eighties, in a process whose outcome they controlled nearly to the end.

In 1984 huge demonstrations for direct elections broke out in the big cities, as a domesticated Congress prepared to pick a new president, under guidelines from the High Command. The regime did not yield. But fear of popular retribution split the civilian elites that had hitherto supported it, as many of the landed notables of the North-East—the core of its system of political alliances—defected to the opposition. The military held off the pressure from the streets, but at the cost of losing control of Congress, where a ‘liberal front’ of retrograde landowners and local bosses, hitherto pliable henchmen of the regime, switched from the official candidate to a moderate politician, Tancredo Neves, running as a symbol of constitutional principle and reconciliation.

Although Neves had never been an especially outspoken opponent of the dictatorship, and would not have won a competition under direct elections, his indirect adoption by Congress as the new president was nevertheless consecrated by public opinion, amidst enormous expectation, as the final victory of democracy over praetorian tyranny. His sudden death on the eve of his inauguration punctured all euphoria. The new president became instead a leading ornament of the dictatorship: José Sarney, a belle-lettrist oligarch from the latifundia of Maranhão, whom Neves had chosen as his running-mate to clinch the support of last-minute defectors from the regime in the North-East. The ideological anti-climax was acute. Brazil shuffled into the era of democratization, common to Latin America, bewildered and dispirited. There was no sharp discontinuity of institutions or persons, comparable to the fall of the junta in Argentina or the rejection of autocracy in Chile.

Trying to make good his lack of popular legitimacy, Sarney formed a government that was actually somewhat less conservative than the administration envisaged by Neves—a characteristic Brazilian move. But his presidency remained weak and erratic. When he came in, annual inflation was running at over 200 per cent; when he went out, a series of misfired shock treatments and emergency plans left it rising towards 2,000 per cent. The late eighties were a time of economic recession and growing social tension. In 1988 a new Constitution was adopted, with more democratic safeguards than hitherto, but otherwise an unwieldy and incoherent charter. When the first direct elections for president were held under it in 1989, the result was a tight contest between the Left, represented by Lula—Luiz Inácio da Silva, former auto-worker and trade-union leader—and the Right, in the shape of a playboy demagogue from one of the oldest and richest political families in the country, Fernando Collor de Mello. With stentorian backing from the Globo television empire, commanding 70 per cent of all viewers, and charismatic appeal to the unorganized poor, Collor won by a narrow margin. His inaugural address—drafted by José Guilherme Merquior, the most talented liberal intellectual of his generation, well-known as a diplomat in London—promised a sweeping demolition of state controls, and release of the spirit of freedom and individual enterprise, with due concern for the least advantaged. The hour of Latin American neo-liberalism, chiming in with the arrival of Salinas in Mexico, Menem in Argentina and Fujimori in Peru, seemed now to have arrived in Brazil.

But once more, the typical experience of the continent short-circuited. Collor did start to reduce tariffs, privatize public companies and cut bureaucratic payrolls. But his bid to beat down inflation by freezing bank deposits proved even more chaotic than Sarney’s efforts, antagonizing the well-off without achieving any stabilization. Then a family quarrel in his fief of Alagoas suddenly revealed a trail of monumental malfeasance, even by tolerant local standards: slush-funds of $200 million, extorted for political clientage and personal ostentation. Since Collor had based his electoral campaign on promises to root out corruption, such brazen looting stunned even close followers. As the charges mounted, Collor went on television and called the people to demonstrate their patriotic support for the president in his battle against an elite conspiracy by sporting the green and yellow colours of the nation. The next day the cities were decked in black. Within six weeks he was out of office. If democratization in Brazil had issued into ambiguity and confusion, liberalization ended in farce. By 1992, when Collor was ejected, the country appeared to have missed the trend of the times once again. While Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, Mexico, were posting much-touted economic recoveries under neo-liberal discipline, Brazil was still floundering in an inflationary morass, apparently rudderless.

Two years later, the scene suddenly looks different. In and through the inflationary spiral of the past decade, and the deep recessions of 1981 to ’83 and subsequently, the Brazilian economy continued to diversify. Unobtrusively, capital stock was modernized, productivity rose, and exports increased, from about $3–4 billion a year in 1981 to some $25 billion in 1994, yielding a positive trade balance and substantial reserves. By the mid nineties, the objective weight of the country in the new global order had altered. Richer and more orderly than Yeltsin’s Federation, Brazil is within sight of achieving the rank of a major power, to which it never—despite much over-blown rhetoric—came near in the past; and for the first time in its history, the country has acquired a ruler capable of putting it unmistakably on the international map. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, when he becomes president next year, will arguably be the most intellectually sophisticated head of any state in the world.

In Latin America, from the time of Sarmiento or Nabuco onwards, writers and scholars have traditionally played a major role on the political stage. Vargas Llosa’s ambition to govern Peru is a recent episode. Rómulo Gallegos, another novelist, was Venezuela’s first elected president after the war. The current foreign minister of Argentina, Guido di Tella, a distinguished economic historian, is a long-time fellow of St Anthony’s, Oxford. In that sense, Cardoso, co-author with Enzo Faletto of the most influential single work of South American social science in the sixties—Dependency and Development in Latin America—fits a regional pattern. His rise to power even has a wryly appropriate national touch. Brazil was the only country in the world where the inventor of sociology as a discipline, Auguste Comte, inspired the founders of the Republic, firing young officers to overthrow the Empire in 1889 and bequeathing the motto—Ordem e Progresso—that still unfurls across the national flag. A century later, on the same soil, Comte’s dream of the sociologist-ruler has come true.

There is, however, more than one irony in its fulfilment, for the kind of sociology that made Cardoso’s name was the antithesis of positivism. His work represented a Marxism whose point of honour was a dialectical understanding of society. In the Latin America of the sixties and seventies, that might seem commonplace. In fact, however, it emerged from an exceptional milieu, which is the key to Cardoso’s early career. He was the son of a nationalist general at a time when the Brazilian officer corps was sharply divided between anti-communist and left-nationalist factions. In the early fifties he studied at the University of São Paulo, where he soon got a teaching post. At that time—this is not something the Brazilian press, protective of the presidential candidate, cared to mention till after the elections—he was effectively a Communist. The PCB was then the only significant organization of the Brazilian Left, so there was little unusual about the choice. He moved away from the party in 1956, but for a good many years remained informally close to it—part of the linha auxiliar, as such sympathizers were called. More formative than this affiliation, however, was the institution at which he worked.

The University of São Paulo was founded in 1934 by a group of liberal oligarchs, led by the scion of the city’s newspaper dynasty, Júlio de Mesquita Filho. At the time German and Italian cultural influence was strong in Brazil—reflecting not only the importance of the two immigrant communities, but also the growing prestige of European fascism, which was to inspire the creation of the authoritarian Estado Novo by Getúlio Vargas three years later. The paulista liberals, resolved to create an institution with high intellectual standards, wanted European lecturers for it. For mathematics, natural sciences and classics they were willing to engage Italians and Germans. But for the social sciences and philosophy, where political issues were at stake, they contracted with the French state, whose teachers—they felt—could be relied on to uphold democratic values. The arrangement bore historic fruit in the series of great French names who, before they were known in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Fernand Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialized in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um Departamento Francês de Ultramar. By the late fifties this was an intellectual milieu—not unexpectedly—increasingly interested in Marx. In 1958 a group of young intellectuals from different disciplines—it included Cardoso from sociology, Paul Singer from economics, José Arthur Giannotti from philosophy, Roberto Schwarz from literature—started a seminar on Capital that became a legend, lasting five years and affecting the atmosphere of the Faculty for ten.

When the Armed Forces seized power in 1964, the immediate targets of proscription were mainly politicians, or those close to them. With a military search out for him, Cardoso chose flight to Chile. In the university, most of his colleagues continued to work relatively unmolested. In these years, when the dictatorship had radicalized intellectual opposition without yet repressing it, the Faculty on Rua Maria Antônia was an unforgettable place. An inconspicuous, squat building near the centre of the city, with a dingy façade and lugubrious interior, surrounded by a tangle of bars and lanchonetes into which its life continuously spilt out, it was like some magical cave of—mostly political—ideas and passions. The French connexion was still active: certainly, for anyone coming from London, the scene had elements of a tropical version of the sixième. But it was also in many ways livelier. Intellectually, the Faculty seminar on Capital predated the famous one at the École Normale. Here in São Paulo—it came as a shock to discover in 1966—there already existed a study of the Feuerbachian matrix of the young Marx, much more scholarly than any published by the Althusserian school, in Giannotti’s Origens da Dialéctica do Trabalho. The Marxism of the Maria Antônia was also more cosmopolitan than that of the Rue d’Ulm: the Frankfurt School, still a blank page in Paris, was a significant presence, as were Austro-Marxist traditions. All this mingled with the incomparable Brazilian sociability; the flow of equatorial batidas over the tiny counters; the enigma of women more independent than in Europe, emancipated by maids; an electric sense of upheavals to come. For the visiting student, a heady brew.

By 1968 political opposition to the dictatorship was mounting: parliamentary manoeuvres, industrial strikes, university rebellions, even scattered armed actions. In October a pitched battle broke out between students of Mackenzie College, the conservative private university on the other side of the Maria Antônia, opposite the Faculty building, and militants at the USP. Bombarded by the superior forces of the Right, the Faculty was burnt out, and one of its defenders killed—whereupon the army sent in the cavalry and closed the site permanently, bringing an era to an end. A few weeks later, the regime clamped down much more toughly than in 1964, with the Fifth Institutional Act that clinched its power for the next decade. Cardoso, who had returned to Brazil a few months earlier, was forcibly removed from the chair to which he had just been elected at the Faculty. But he had used his years abroad to good advantage, and with funding from the Ford Foundation helped set up a research centre in Sao Paulo, CEBRAP, that would later carry on much of the spirit of the Maria Antônia, in collective investigations of Brazilian society under the dictatorship. In this period, the dominant influence in his thought continued to be Marxist. In the early seventies, while pursuing empirical work, Cardoso was doing battle with Poulantzas over the definition of social classes, clarifying uses or misuses of the category of dependency, of a reserve army of labour, of marginality. A decade later, he was asking whether Gramsci’s concept of hegemony could still be valid when ‘liberal-democratic parliamentarism is disappearing as a principle of legitimacy in advanced societies themselves’: new forms of ‘state-bourgeois’ domination required, for the fight against them, the invention of new forms of ‘control of production’, respectful of initiatives and liberties, in the articulation of a ‘socialist utopia’.¹

In the mid seventies the military regime, confident that the country was now secured against subversion, started its slow institutional opening. As soon as it did so, the opposition party which it had itself created—the MDB—rapidly gained ground, as a united front against the dictatorship. In 1978 Cardoso ran for Senator on a sub-section of its ticket in São Paulo. He was uncomfortable on the hustings, and easily defeated. But he came in second, and so under a recent military law remained suplente—‘next in line’—behind the successful candidate. Four years later, when the Senator was in turn elected Governor, the substitute slipped into his vacant seat. It was a privileged entry into the world of high politics. He still had much to learn. In 1985, while still Senator, he ran for Mayor of São Paulo. Posing over-confidently for photographers in City Hall on the eve of the polls, he provoked a reaction and lost. The next year, however, there were new congressional elections. By now the omnibus party of which he had become a fixture, the PMDB, was no longer in opposition: it was the official base of President Sarney, whose Cruzado Plan—apparently quelling inflation with the issue of a new currency a few months before the election—gave it a landslide throughout the country, carrying Cardoso with a large margin back into the Senate.

Once the elections were over, the Cruzado Plan collapsed. Sarney lost all credit, and the PMDB—never more than a loose patchwork—came apart at the seams. In 1988 Cardoso, now president of the Senate, and a group of colleagues seceded from it to found the Brazilian Social-Democratic Party (PSDB). In his case, the move crystallized a political evolution. Within the PMDB, a catch-all front stretching from undeclared Communists to scarcely repentant collaborationists, ideological positions typically remained veiled or indeterminate. Over time, however, Cardoso came to favour with increasing clarity a political strategy close to that of Eurosocialism. The aim of the PSDB was to become a Brazilian version of the parties of González or Mitterrand. Initially, the project of a modernist social-democracy looked fragile. In the first round of the presidential election of 1989, the party’s candidate was easily outpolled by two rivals to its left, not only the radical trade-unionist Lula, running for the Workers’ Party (PT), but also the veteran populist Brizola. On the second ballot, after some hesitation, it backed Lula against Collor. But many of its voters—especially in São Paulo, where the electoral balance was critical—opted for Collor, helping him to victory.

The new president, catapulted into office through television, lacked any organized base in Congress. To start with, he tried to govern the country with a motley group of personal appointees, often amateurs without party background. But when these utterly failed to bring inflation under control, Collor changed tack and tried to draw politicians of some weight into his government. The PSDB was among the parties to which he made overtures. Invited to take office under Collor, its leadership divided. Cardoso was among those who favoured joining his Cabinet. A month later, the scandal of presidential corruption—already bubbling—boiled over. Once Congress had formally set up an enquiry, Collor became a political untouchable. This was a narrow escape for Cardoso. Had the investigation not started so quickly, he would have paid a stiff price for his willingness to work with Collor. In the subsequent congressional investigation, the PSDB did not play a leading part: success in exposing the president fell principally to the PT.

But by a strange twist, Collor’s impeachment gave Cardoso his breakthrough. Collor had picked a small-town politician from the backlands of Minas for his running-mate, with whom he had nothing in common, and completely ignored as vice-president. This individual, Itamar Franco, was now suddenly put, blinking with bewilderment, into the Presidential Palace. A pale, shapeless figure, he had never aspired to supreme office and few ideas what to do with it, although his instincts were humane and he was honest. Timid and provincial, he desperately needed counsel and reassurance. The PSDB came forward to help him, and he made Cardoso foreign minister. Soon he was captivated. Fernando Henrique—from this point we may drop the surname, as Brazilians now do—was everything Itamar was not. Strikingly good-looking, he combines a natural authority with an urbane charm whose flickering smile does not mask, but conveys inner reserve and strength of purpose. Within a few months, this cosmopolitan prince enjoyed an ascendancy over an awkward, nervous ruler more reminiscent of the position of a court favourite like a Buckingham or Godoy than of a member of a modern cabinet.

In the spring of 1993 Itamar gave him the most powerful job in the government, the Ministry of Finance. Inflation was still raging at a rate exceeded only by Serbia and Zaire. At the Ministry, Fernando Henrique assembled a group of gifted economists, long-time friends, who prepared yet another stabilization plan. This time it was a technically competent scheme, that did not rely on price controls that no Brazilian government has the power to enforce, achieved real cuts in public spending, and was phased in gradually, rather than decreed overnight. Crucially, there also for the first time existed substantial foreign reserves, capable of backing a hard currency. The initial measures, involving labyrinthine bargaining in Congress, were not dramatic. While they were being negotiated, the public mood was swinging rapidly against the government. Outside the hothouse of Brasília, popular disaffection with the political establishment was running high. The destruction of Collor and the interim of Itamar had left a political vacuum, in which only one oppositional force looked credible. This was the party headed by Lula.

The origins of the PT lay in the metal-workers’ strikes that had erupted in the industrial belt round São Paulo in the late seventies. There Lula rose to fame as a trade union leader in the same year Fernando Henrique (ten years older) first ran for Congress. The two were then allies. Out of the new working-class militancy, however, emerged a grass-roots determination to create a political party that would not be a new edition of traditional left populism, and could not be absorbed into the capacious folds of the PMDB. The aim of the PT, founded in 1980, was to develop an independent politics of labour in Brazil. Since its primar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Launch
• 2. Fernando Henrique
• 3. Lula
• 4. Dilma
• 5. Bolsonaro
• 6. Parabola
• Notes
• Index