CURRENT EVENTS
LATIN AMERICA

NOW IS BRAZIL’S MOMENT
A nation with the resources of a continent is emerging unharmed (if not better off) from the international economic crisis, has doubled its middle class, and has won the bids to host the Olympics and the World Cup. But its growth hides a “structural void.” Following the presidential elections that close the Lula era, we look to the “green and gold rush” to understand what lies behind it, and what is lacking.

by Alessandra Stoppa

It’s hung there. You can just make it out in the crazed geometry of the favela, the photo of a smiling girl. You notice it between the planks only when the car slows in the traffic. The shacks are a perspectiveless mass along the cement guardrail of the Marginal Tietê, the artery north of São Paulo, clogged day and night, that takes its indigenous name from a river that you cannot see, squeezed between eight road lanes that run a few steps from the indistinct chaos of the shantytown. It’s that photo hung there that puts everything in focus. It freezes you. It’s there to tell you that the sheet-iron is a wall, a house, someone’s life. You see it from a squared-off hole that is maybe a window.
Straight ahead is another world. The dashboard frames the skyline of São Paulo, its skyscrapers tall and promising. It is Brazil, and seen from afar, from the outside, everything is growing: the GDP, exports, currency stability, and inflation, too, but not enough to disturb the foreign investments and qualified immigration. The profile of Brazil, one of the four great emerging nations (along with China, Russia, and India) stands out like that of a future superpower.
In the world ranking by GDP, Brazil is close on the heels of Italy for seventh place. The final outlook for 2010 is a total growth of 5.5%, and industry has grown by 4% in a year. The country suffered the economic crisis less than others: the São Paulo stock market has the highest entry standard of all of South America, while the middle class has doubled, thanks to low-interest rates and easy access to credit. Then, more recently, unrepeatable factors have come into play, such as the discovery of new petroleum deposits, and victory in the nominations for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

The boom. It’s the green and gold rush, though it passes over the thirty million Brazilians living below the threshold of extreme poverty. In the midst of this visceral contradiction, the country is preparing to choose its new President. The October 3 elections will open the post-Lula era, as the world’s most influential leader (according to Time) is ending his second term, but the vote is decisive not only in the choice of a successor: the apple of the PT’s eye (Lula’s Partito dos Trabalhadores, the Workers’ Party), the red (in every sense of the word) Dilma Rousseff, former guerrilla, or José Serra, the candidate of the PSDB, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party. The historical moment of these elections is also the opportunity for us to stop to read in the present this country of the future, continually pushed forward.
The Brazilian boom is not a soap bubble. It is real, and sustainable. According to economists, an arrest in growth is entirely improbable. “Brazilian success is the fruit of economic directives that preceded Lula: a twenty-year journey that he has exploited.” In the study of Francisco Borba Ribeiro Neto–of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo–the walls are covered with photocopies of Russian icons. He speaks incessantly and fills sheets with illustrations and figures. “That journey meant privatization of firms and financial rigor, as in the highly criticized Plan Real of Lula’s predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The public deficit and taxation grew, it’s true, but in perspective, the economy began to move.” From the 1990s onwards, all the governments privatized most of the foundational industries: the iron and steel industries, petrochemicals, and energy. “Reducing nationalization has increased the market value of the gigantic wealth of natural resources” (Petroleo Brasileiro, Vale), from timber to agricultural products; from petroleum to iron.
Here lies the most powerful aspect of Brazilian success, a binomial of factors difficult to find elsewhere: a basis of natural resources that is almost unique in the world in a stable political-economic context. “But a cardinal point for growth remains unresolved,” continues the Brazilian professor, Director of the Faith and Culture Nucleus of the São Paulo university, “and that is the cost of the State.” It’s the great millstone, as the very heavy machine of public administration still devours 40% of the nation’s wealth.
“From the outside, everyone sees enormous potential for continuous growth, but if it is exaggerated, this reality becomes an idol, and takes over the whole scenario.” Giancarlo Petrini, Auxiliary Bishop of Salvador de Bahia, summarizes in a sentence the present state of Brazil: “It moves in a hurry and there is no totality.” But what is this totality? Does it mean eliminating the endemic inequality of a country where, in zones of the northeast, the very rich are interspersed with the very poor, and the middle class is nonexistent? Or where an entire state, such as Alagoas, is in the hands of 17 families who cultivate sugar cane?

The stray dog. It’s slippery to think about the “totality” in relation to an enormous country that entered the twentieth century as vira-lata, a stray dog. Today, Rio de Janeiro is a tourist capital, but at the beginning of the past century, the life expectancy age was 30, the same as in medieval Europe.
Instead, the “totality” Petrini refers to is more integral than the socio-economic imbalances. “It’s a vision of man.” Everything depends on the conception of the person: the perverse distribution of riches, administrative corruption, criminality, and, above all, the “banalizing culture that invades daily life. Adolescents are those most at risk.” Broad and deep education is lacking. Secondary education is entirely marginal. “Quality instruction is exclusively in the technical disciplines, because of a mentality that only looks ahead. From the perspective of development, the reduction of man seems to be a lever but, instead, it’s a trap,” one that pushes the nation into an individualistic and shamelessly radical vision, imitating the mentality dominant in Spain.
Last December, the Lula government presented the National Plan of Human Rights, a mammoth document that underpins every fragment of social life, from the suppression of religious symbols to the legalization of abortion and homosexual marriage, a programmatic text opposed by over half of the bishops of the Brazilian Episcopal Conference: “The measures have been set aside for the elections, but they’ll be taken up again.”
An attempt has already been made: the 19-page document baptized A Grande Transformaçao, presented as the PT program, the radical and statist theses (including abortion, media control, and incentives for occupation of lands) which were promptly “softened” by the presidential candidate Rousseff, who has been troubled from the beginning by the radical current of her party. “If the PT wins the elections,” says the founder of the Trabalhadores Sem Terra foundation, Marcos Zerbini (PSDB candidate for the Chamber of Deputies from the state of São Paulo), “there is the risk of a grave shift toward Zapateran policy…” A roar drowns out his words, as the thousands of association members gathered in an assembly applaud the news from the capital, Brasilia, of the passage of the law reducing costs and bureaucracy for registering the purchase of land. It is an achievement for everyone, in this warehouse in the Lapa de Baixo area. We’re still in São Paulo, but an abyss divides this area from the Avenida Paulista, the road in the business center that symbolizes this city.
The road is a canyon among the skyscrapers reflecting each other in their mirrored facades. Here, Lula held his first rally as President: “It is the victory of those ‘from below’ against those ‘from above,’ said the newly elected President-born-poor. Then he dazzled the people with sensational social policies, but if development isn’t integral, the poor never stop being poor, even when they’re given three meals a day or the dole, like the millions of families who benefited from the “Zero Hunger” programs of Lula, like the Bolsa Familia, the contribution given to 11 million families, from 15 to 95 reals a month ($8–$55). “This money ‘created’ people dependent on the State,” explains Zerbini: “Instead, poverty is transformed by education, where man is the true protagonist.” Outside of this, there is no construction, just a leveling out, based on a void.
“Social programs don’t change poverty, because they don’t challenge it structurally,” confirms Ana Lydia Sawaya, international expert of malnutrition and professor at the Federal University of São Paulo. “The capacity not to be poor is within man.” Public policies are only a consequence: “The problem is providing quality education that is accessible to everyone, that penetrates the social stratification, and changes the culture. It is a long process, but it is the only way.” With the AVSI Center for Nutritional Rehabilitation (CREN), she follows 8,000 children and their families a year. Only 9% of them qualify for government programs. The “true” poor are those outside all registers. They have no education or work. They don’t exist.

The heart of Fabiano. Many of them live in favelas like this one in Vila Jacui. Sawaya has just said hello to Fabiano, a visor over his eyes and hands in his pockets. This twelve-year-old gang leader throws his weight around and robs. He even robbed the CREN, which has opened a center here at the request of the parish priest. There used to be 22 homicides a month, but now, four years later, there are none. “When Fabiano stole, I asked him if he would help us in our work. He looked at me and said, ‘We’ll see.’” From then on, he began coming to the Center, going to lessons, and playing guitar. “It is at the secret level of the heart that you have to work,” she says. All the rest is an insurmountable wall, built upon slavery that ended just a hundred years ago, then the dictatorship, liberation theology, and elite democracy. “No policy can break this wall–it’s too high,” like the gray wall that surrounds her house in the residential area of Pacaembu, in the western part of São Paulo. You can’t see the villas from the road. From a booth at the end of the street, a man stands guard day and night. Brazil is very violent. The violence here is war. Daily. In one year, it reaps more victims than the conflict in Iraq.
“Change of mentality requires deep evangelization,” continues Sawaya. The Brazilian people are pulsating and combative, but with only a superficial religious education. “The consequences are evident: the absence of a tradition of social solidarity and the fragility of the family structure.” The infinite number of women alone with children is an example. “Here, there’s a need,” she concludes: “There is thirst for experiences of holiness.” Brazil has 500 years of history and only one saint born on her soil, Brother Antonio de Sant’Anna Galvão, whom Benedict XVI came to canonize in 2007. “Saints are the true reformers. Only from them, only from God, comes true revolution, the decisive change of the world,” she said that day.
“For the Brazilian church, it is a very delicate moment,” says Petrini. In the face of the formidable growth of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, Catholic numbers have fallen in 15 years from 83% to 67%. “Thank God there are living experiences of humanity, but what doesn’t enter into the public space doesn’t exist. And the Church finds it hard to be visible.”
A Catholic political presence is also far from forming. “Even before this problem of numbers, strong Catholic thought is missing. But the intellectual void is generalized.” These are the words of Guilherme Malzoni Rabello, young director of the cultural magazine Dicta&Contradicta. “It’s as if thought, here, is less important than elsewhere.” The deeper you go, the more the political problem reveals itself as pre-political. Look, for example, at the Ficha Limpa, the law to limit corruption in political parties. “It’s insufficient,” responds Rabello. “You need to be honest at a deeper level–living experiences are needed that incarnate values. If it’s not incarnate, a value doesn’t move you, doesn’t move.” The possibility for a living experience to become paradigm, political content, “requires true humanity, also in those who govern. This is the great road to pursue.” As Zerubini says, “The human is the first work that needs to be built.”