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Where to with Lula in his Second Term?
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"True to Foucault’s concept, in Brazil’s dense web of public sector 'illegalism', one’s only corrupt when the opposition declares it."
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Brazil’s President Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva may have lost his first bid at re-election by less than 1.5 percent, but federalism in Brazil is better off because of it. In the run up to the first round of the country’s general elections on October 1, 2006 President Lula sailed into rocky waters. For months, polls had given him a landslide sweep back to power. But Geraldo Alckmin, Lula’s main rival, cut short his lead and qualified with 41.4 percent, forcing another round on October 29. In the view of the PSDB (Social Democratic Party) candidate, the game was just starting. In the end, Lula was the one to master it. Only a few months earlier, scandal had been wearing down the incumbent’s credibility. May 2005 was the dark month of Lula’s first term. That was when a hidden camera caught a Postal Service manager pocketing a bribe. The position he held is one of the 26,000 up for grabs in political appointments. Refusing to take sole blame, his party boss, the infamous Roberto Jefferson (PTB: Brazilian Labor Party), broke ranks with the PT alliance to reveal how dozens of congresspersons were paid off in exchange for voting with the government on key legislation. It was the outset of the “Mensalão” crisis. Then, one scandal began following another. Each further removed the Workers Party (PT) from its pedigree of ethics and accountability. No less than four Federal Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry (CPI) worked on tracking down the pathways of slush funds, bribes, pay offs, fraud, embezzlement and dirty political tricks. Only two weeks prior to Election Day, some of Lula’s aids were nabbed in a bid to purchase a dossier for US$ 600,000 tying São Paulo Mayor José Serra to the “Bloodsucker” (Sanguessugas) scandal. Favored by a wide margin to take the São Paulo state gubernatorial race, Serra was linked in the dossier to alleged embezzlement of health funds and ambulance purchases while performing as Minister of Health under former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Among the fallen in that tribulation were Lula’s campaign director, former Minister of Labour, and PT President, Ricardo Berzoini (who has since returned to the latter post). In light of the incident, Lula decided not to appear in the presidential debate held on September 28. His standing dwindled in a matter of days from roughly 70 percent, according to late September polls, to a result of 48.6 in the elections. In the second round, after participating in the public debates, Lula achieved another landslide victory. As we look back at the presidential elections, the re-election of Lula da Silva to the presidency of Brazil is by any measure a remarkable turn of events. It is unclear what Brazil will be like in four years’ time, but at least one aspect of Brazil’s functional democracy is efficient. Civil society uttered its choice for a man it perceived as being hounded by the powerful. Brazil’s current federal constitution dates from 1988. When drafted, legislators debated whether to adopt the parliamentary or republican model of federalism. In the end, they chose neither. Every four years Brazil’s head of state is elected by direct vote. As for the 81 Senators and 513 members of the lower house, a proportional vote applies. Until last year, over twenty parties wielded representation in the Chamber. The number of votes for each deputy is summed to the number of votes gathered by the party, then divided proportionately by the number of seats each state is granted in the Chamber to determine how many deputies each party is entitled to seat per state. This system was professedly meant to curb an all-powerful Executive from the period of the military dictatorship. Yet what it produced in Brazil is a rank of rent-a-parties whose modus operandi was most explicitly borne out in the scandals that rocked Brazilian politics for over a year. In the wake of bribed lawmakers from small parties, the pro-government executive Board in the Congress recently forced through one of the points of a political reform agenda. A “barrier clause” is now in place cutting off parties with less than five percent of the national vote and two percent in nine states from receiving public reimbursement for campaign expenditures. When the catalyst of the string of corruption scandals that were to force Lula’s government into rearguard actions struck in June 2005, the last of the great myths of Brazil’s democratic opening fell. In those days, the Partido dos trabalhadores took on the banner not only of representative government, but also of “accountable” governance, which in Portuguese terms goes by the word “ética”. By the end of 2005 it became clear that the PT was just another Brazilian party. As with its other party mates, corruption became a necessary evil to achieve effective policy management. True to Foucault’s concept, in Brazil’s dense web of public sector “illegalism”, one’s only corrupt when the opposition declares it. This is partly why former PT strongman and chief of staff, José Dirceu, still adamantly claims his innocence today, after having had his political rights stripped in 2005. Dirceu was pinpointed by Jefferson, one of the country’s foremost political cranks and crooks, as the “gang leader” of the scheme to pay off federal congresspersons in exchange for votes on key pieces of legislation. But consider Dirceu’s record in Brasilia: Wasn’t one of his advisors a hustler active in corrupting all sectors of government, including blackmailing criminal elements of the semi-legal “bicheiro” lottery? Weren’t slush funds popping out of tax haven bank accounts at every turn of the various parliamentary inquiries into government funding sources, over which he was in charge? For Dirceu, neither of these practices was corrupt in itself. What marked true injustice was the betrayal of those who made no qualms about using illicit funds to advance political gain. Ironically, it was Dirceu’s line of argument – to this day he pleads for a fair trial in a bid to offset his eight year suspension from politics – which led to Lula’s rebirth. The reformed PT, abandoned by its intellectual base and rid of its managers in corruption, might have achieved transparency. Lula was elected as a candidate above the parties. In turn, if Lula continually pleaded ignorance, and by extension incompetence, over the funding schemes, whatever hypothetical involvement of his paled in comparison to what the CPIs revealed regarding congressional behavior. Brazil’s outgoing congress was caught in so many acts of wrongdoing that the population’s belief coefficient in political honesty hovers dramatically close to zero. It is possible to speculate over the reasons for such dramatic failure of democracy in Brazil. One can ferret out the annihilation of the political class during 20 years of military dictatorship followed by six years of oligarchic rule. In the light of the disaster, a very plausible conclusion would be for the need of deep-seated structural change, whose word revolution creates tremors for the violence it might unleash – for let there be no mistake, these are criminal elements at work in politics. Another option is to focus on what political will might achieve. That’s why I intend to examine the case of a government handout program that was largely responsible for Lula’s election: the so-called family fund (Bolsa familia). Then, I go on to examine voter tendencies in the two rounds of the general elections, which not only involved the federal executive and state governments, but also congressional seats at the state and federal levels alike. Finally, I close on considerations on legalizing the ultra-violent narcotics trade, a position that has been hinted at by Rio de Janeiro state’s new governor, Sergio Cabral. Brazil’s “Zero Hunger”: Displaced or Dead? Brazil’s slide into the stretch to the October 1st presidential elections brought the issue of the Fome Zero, anti-starvation and undernourishment program back to the front pages. Democracy in the federative republic of 188 million is thriving, despite the endemic violence, unending corruption scandals and rampant economic disparity bolstered by a welfare system for the rich and IMF strictures on social spending. President Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva’s solid victory was achieved without his flagship social policy program, Fome Zero, or Zero Hunger, which was all but uttered during the campaigning. Zero Hunger was initially a federal direct assistance program offering US $20 per month to Brazil’s undernourished households, and attending to an estimated 46 million people living in conditions of “extreme hunger”. The program was the brainchild of José Graziano, who became Special Minister of Food Security and Hunger Combat, and is now Latin America representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). From the troughs of scandal affecting the wings and depths of the federal executive and Congress, President Lula’s popularity with the country’s poor remained unshaken. Beyond his persona, Lula’s popularity clearly lay with his government’s assistentialist policies for the poor, of which Zero Hunger was the flagship. Thus the mystery: why was it so rarely referred to? According to the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, a leading business school, poverty fell from 27.3 percent of the population in 2003 to 25.1% in 2004. Inequality was reduced even further, with the government successfully raising the minimum wage – though by G7 standards both increases have been slight. Indeed, a September 2006 PNAD-IBGE survey points to reversed patterns. The Gini index of income dropped from its 2004 level of 0.547 to 0.543, overall 7 percent lower than in 1995. Meanwhile, 18 percent more youth in the 15-18 year-old age group were out of school than in 2004. With GDP projections lagging at below 3 percent, the federal government’s bet on trickle down economics to shift from the need for direct assistance did not materialize by election time. Making matters more difficult for a widespread concerted action plan on poverty was the PT’s shaky governance. Unethical political practices and media pressure led to the demise of many of Lula’s long time colleagues. The Zero Hunger action plan aimed to cut the number of Brazil’s poor in half by 2015. Hunger is most rampant in Brazil’s north-eastern states, which stand the most to gain from concerned sustainable development. It is also the region of Lula’s birth, and where his hopes for reelection were most solidly steeped. The silence over Zero Hunger did not necessarily signal failure, but it did point to significant changes brought to the program. By the end of Lula’s first term, there had been a shift in logistics from a private-public emergency aid partnership with a future ambition of social change to a hand-out program for the needy in the rough and tumble times of market liberalism. Still, Zero Hunger was once a program unto itself. Its official website nowadays refers to a group of some sixty social programs, including Zero Thirst (Sede Zero), Light for Everyone (Luz para todos) and, especially, Family Fund (Bolsa família). Indeed, in the run-up to elections, articles in the international press began focusing on Family Fund as if it were Zero Hunger. The strategy behind Fome Zero was by no means simple. At its early stage, the program sought to engage the private sector and international multilateral organizations in a massive emergency relief effort to rid the country of hunger and child mortality. At one point, it involved the Brazilian idea of the mutirão, a collective quasi-voluntary effort to collect food and money. As its designated spokesperson, Frei Betto, the left-wing Dominican Liberation Theology friar, organized a high-profile media campaign to reap donations from the private sector. Food and money were forthcoming in such abundance that the government opened bank accounts abroad to receive foreign donations. The only problem was distribution – the cost of shipping food to needy areas soon exceeded the price of buying it locally. Immediate priorities on servicing Brazil’s huge foreign public debt ended up channeling some of the collected financial resources, too. The early program was organized in tiers, truly akin to an emergency relief program. This meant that the poor drought-stricken north-east was first on the list. Although the region does show overall rates for highest misery in the country, the favela slums of Brazil’s huge center-east cities outrank the region in numbers of poor. Faced with the extra-legal infrastructure of many favelas, direct assistance from the federal government often ran into obstacles from criminal gangs controlling the community in unstable alliances with PT or pro-PT politicians at the local level. Despite that, the blame for Zero Hunger’s failure lies with the federal executive. In 2003, the program’s budget was set at US $1.5 billion. Merely half a year later, as the federal government faced budgetary stress due to its failure to substantially reform social security, Zero Hunger’s budget was slashed by a third. This was only enough to feed 46 million people at about US $10 per year for each household. A year later, about US $800 million was budgeted for the program, but only US $130 million of that was actually disbursed. In its analysis of Zero Hunger, published in a July 2005 report, the Washington-based think tank, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), found confused orientations regarding management of funds. Perceiving the program as on the brink of collapse, Caitlin Hicks wrote: “In order to make the impact that Lula originally envisioned when he first conceptualized his program, the government will have to improve its use of available funds, expand upon them and broaden the population base which could benefit from Fome Zero.” [1] The view, then, that Zero Hunger was a loose-ended direct assistance program with no link to the government’s economic policies of sustainable development became part of the consensus. It was at that time of growing skepticism that Family Fund (Bolsa Família) was set up, Graciano permuted and Frei Betto opted out. As policy, Family Fund is substantially different to Zero Hunger. It is very close in spirit to a federal social program of success, the “School Fund” (Bolsa Escola) launched by Lula’s much maligned predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The Family Fund gives up on transferring food, and returns to a meek attempt at economic integration. Targeted are families living below the poverty line, a reality afflicting from nine to eleven million families. Also, there’s a trade-off for receiving assistance, namely to send children to public schools until the age of 15 and have them follow regular medical check-ups. To curb mismanagement of funds, President Lula gave the program a gender specific flavor. Money is made available to mothers in a sign of trust in the household managerial capacities of the nation’s women. They have been given a magnetic card at post offices or banks to receive the money, thus ensuring direct control from the Federal level. Such transfer strategies avoid one of Zero Hunger’s persistent setbacks, i.e. infrastructural and logistical uncertainly regarding delivery of goods, and a risk of corruption at either state or municipal levels of government, PT-run or not. On the microeconomic level, Family Fund cost the State merely 0.6 percent of GDP. This is a sliver in contrast to the 13 percent the government has spent on the largely inefficient, let alone fair, federal pension system. The three leading opposition candidates who ran in the fall election each pledged to continue the program. Still, critics on the right were quick to point out its stark similarities with the Cardoso program. Former Governor of São Paulo State, Geraldo Alckmin, Lula’s main rival and Cardoso’s successor at the helms of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), claimed the program as being his party’s brainchild. On his official website, he wrote, “Family Fund is like a daughter who got married and changed her name, but she’s still our daughter.” Meanwhile, from the left, the government was accused of using the program as a thinly veiled vote-buying scheme. In early September, the presidential candidate of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), former Senator Heloisa Helena, lamented that Family Fund “takes advantage of the pain and poverty of a father or mother’s joblessness in order to grab votes. I want to link the program to professional training, insertion into the work force and full-time schooling. What I don’t want is the demagogical and election thing.” According to government statistics, Family Fund represents up to 40 percent of income in cities with less than 5,000 inhabitants. In Pernambuco state it reaches 70 percent. It is precisely in those regions where Lula’s popularity ranks highest. It underscores the point that in a federal system like Brazil’s, where voting is obligatory and over a third of the population lives in dire poverty, one needs to appeal to the poor to get elected. To govern, leaders must cater to the powerful and persuade the rent-a-parties. Lula’s Election Victory This is where the recently enacted “barrier clause” enters. As it stands, two of Lula’s three main rivals for the presidency are not entitled to public compensation. Heloisa Helena gathered 6.85 percent of the direct vote and scored as high as 17.5 in Rio de Janeiro State. But her party the PSOL (Liberty and Socialism) did not manage to rise above the threshold, thus barring Lula’s most consistent and eloquent critic from the refund. A professor of nursing at the Federal University of Alagoas state, Ms Helena held a high-profile federal senator’s seat for 11 years. She was part of a small group of long time PT members ousted in 2003 for having broken party ranks over social security reform, which she considered inadequate. Despite the onslaught against her image in the days when the PT was the media darling, the t-shirt borne candidate was able to gain widespread recognition for her participation in the first CPI dealing with corruption in the Postal Service. The polls had her hovering at 9 percent with a peak of some 13 in early September. Ms Helena’s final result is a disappointing sign from the Brazilian elector with respect to parties of innovation. The other main losing candidate, Cristovam Buarque, is a former governor of the Federal District of Brasilia. In President Lula’s first cabinet, he was Education Minister. Buarque incorporates the early spirit of the PT which allowed opposition to develop from within the party. Buarque’s personal mission to modernize the country’s public education system appeared to undermine the President’s credibility, despite the latter’s frequent trumpeting on the matter. Lula fired Buarque in the first cabinet reshuffle. Yet the ill-perceived event rendered Buarque with the clout of integrity as he became the thinking person’s candidate running under the wings of the PDT (Democratic Labour Party), as it also shone the spotlight on the PT’s pitiful record on education. (Since then, the President has publicly avowed the atrocious state of Brazil’s public education system.) The big winner in the first round was former São Paulo State governor, Geraldo Alckmin. Supported by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002), Alckmin was chosen as candidate over Jose Serra, Lula’s main rival in the 2002 race. He had to work hard to establish himself with PSDB alliance members, namely the PFL (now called the Democratic Party), the previously pro-dictatorship conservative party mainly representing the country’s northern land-based interests. Alckmin suffered in the polls as his worth failed to be tested adequately in the outbreak of urban violence which hit the city of Sao Paulo in mid 2006. Nor did his style and party coalition’s record convince the poorer sectors of Brazil’s population of his social priorities. Alckmin’s offer to the states and municipalities was not substantially different to the PT approach. However, he did not pledge to ratify the Fiscal Responsibility Law, one of the PT’s most efficiently applied constraints to state and municipal mismanagement. Judging by the allegations of wrongdoings in various sectors of the PSDB, Alckmin’s record at the helms in São Paulo surely benefited from the pressure to rid Brazilian politics from corruption. A lesser known fact is that Alckmin had blocked dozens of calls for CPIs in the São Paulo state legislature. Alckmin’s success in the run-up to October 1 certainly benefited from the panic struck in Lula’s camp over the alleged plan to discredit Serra in the gubernatorial race in São Paulo. PT strategists immediately withdrew Lula from the televised presidential debates of the first round, projecting him as triumphant against Alckmin only in the run-up to the second round. It may not have been the first time an incumbent refused to show up for the event. In 1998, Cardoso had opted out as well. Still, Lula’s credibility did not emerge unscathed from behind a shield of arrogance. He pleaded ignorance for the illicit activities of his PT mates. Nonetheless, his no-show hurt his standing more than campaign strategists had expected. The prospects of Lula and Alckmin alike looked daunting with respect to a governability pact with the Congress. This transformed the stretch to the runoff into a time of heady alliance building. The PFL earned the most seats in the Senate, bringing the alliance tally with the PSDB to 11. But in the Chamber of Deputies, the still intact PMDB and PT alliance registered 89 and 83 seats, respectively, and ended up carrying Lula on to victory. The crawling process of forming a new cabinet has been the result of promises made to the PMDB in terms of administration portfolios in and out of government. Two results in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro states spelt surprise victories. In Bahia state, one of the PFL’s most conservative fiefdoms, Lula’s main conciliator in the post-scandal period, Jacques Wagner, then Minister of Labour and for Political Articulation, took everyone by surprise with his landslide victory in the gubernatorial race. While for the sole Rio de Janeiro Senate seat, progressive feminist Jandira Feghali (PCdoB – Brazilian Communist Party) was flattened by conservative Francisco Dornelles’ 612,000 votes for the Progressive Party (PP), despite polls repeatedly forecasting her victory. The defeat of Ms. Feghali, who happens to be a pro-choice advocate, further adds to the dearth of female representation in all sectors of Brazil’s federal system. Yet a gender quota adopted for the 1996 elections purportedly sets aside 30 percent of candidacies in the proportional elections to women. This year women managed to get representation for barely 13.9 percent of the disputed seats. They secured 45 seats in the lower house and 14 in the Senate, representing a mere 8 and 17.2 percent, respectively. Gubernatorial Races The large state of Minas Gerais ushered Aécio Neves back in as governor. As grandson to Tancredo Neves, Brazil’s first elected president after the military dictatorship, who died dramatically on the eve of taking power in 1985, Neves pulverized his rivals with 77 percent. He has demonstrated a vitality making him the country’s most obvious presidential hopeful after Lula’s constitutionally-limited two-term maximum has passed. By contrast, the high profile head of the Postal Service CPI, Delcício Amaral (PT) lost in the gubernatorial dispute in Mato Grosso do Sul state to Puccinelli of the PMDB. In Rio de Janeiro state, passionate campaigning by former judge Denise Frossard catapulted her from 9 percent in August to her final 23.8 in October. In the end, she could not overcome Senator Sergio Cabral, even though she did force him into a runoff decision. Cabral’s campaign had been ambiguous to say the least. A key member of the outgoing Rosinha Garotinho evangelical government, he seemed to shoot himself in the foot by castigating its record on containing violence. Predictably, though, he won by adopting a populist tone, while ensuring his miserable constituents that the degree he earned at Harvard qualified him to manage their lives. During the past 6 years of Garotinho government in Rio de Janeiro state, the public elementary and secondary school network has been the breeding ground for evangelical religions despite Brazilian law officially stipulating secularism (“laicidade”) in state affairs. Ms Garotinho sought to curb science teaching by hiring religion teachers for public education instead of reducing the deficit of science teachers. Indeed, Geraldo Alckmin’s conception of public education has differed only in confession, as the São Paulo state schools literally became a wing of the Opus Dei under his term as state governor. Still, Sergio Cabral’s tone has taken a sharp and stunning turn since investiture. His social commitment has been sound and solid. Apart from advocating a pro-choice position on abortion, he has also sparked debate on decriminalizing possession of pot, however modestly it must be said. If these are more than passing indications, Rio de Janeiro state might experience a break with the past eight years of disastrous, authoritarian evangelical rule. Cabral has held firm to a clumsily formulated joint action-plan to fight arms smuggling with fellow governors with neighboring states, even visiting Medellin to study its administration’s success in slashing homicides by almost half over a decade. There is little doubt legalization not just of pot but also of cocaine is necessary (please see the 12-point proposal below). Even voicing the mere possibility of such policy, as well as legalizing abortion, has pitted Cabral against religions. In turn, he has asserted the secular nature of the Brazilian state. Meanwhile, in Rio Grande do Sul, former governor Olivio Dutra (PT) was beaten by upstart Yeda Crusius (PSDB) Dutra was part of the state-municipal PT tandem in Porto Alegre that led to the founding of the highly influential World Social Forum. Federal Deputies and Senators With scandal affecting both the Executive and Congressional wings, the federal Congress has undergone a 50 percent overhaul. Yet there is no chance for majority rule in either of the Houses. Securing an alliance with the broad ranging PMDB will determine from the top who will have the best chance for governing. That there is little unity within the party merely underscores the terms according to which its members can be coaxed into the most self-interested alliances. Back when Lula was favored in the polls, its majority wing set its hopes in a future PMDB-PT alliance at the federal level and aspired for one at the state level, with the main exception being Rio. The PT still maintained a delicate alliance with a large portion of the PMDB, which is why the latter party chose not to run its own presidential candidate. On the other hand, federalism and democracy have proved only moderately successful in barring indicted politicians from reelection. Only 5 of the 70 some deputies involved in the “Bloodsucker” scandal have been re-elected. But eleven deputies linked to the Mensalão scandal in some form are back, including former lower house leader João Paulo Cunha (PT) and disgraced former leader of the PL party, Valdermar Costa. Even more surprising were the electoral victories of Paulo Maluf (PP), the former São Paulo state governor indicted last year for tax evasion, who received the highest number of votes overall for a deputy at some 739,827. Disgraced former Minister of Finance, Antonio Palocci (PT), was also reelected. In recognition for their civic devotion, Osmar Serráglio and Gustava Fruet, Reporter-General and Assistant-Reporter of the Postal Service CPI, respectively, were rewarded with reelection. By contrast, Antonio Biscaia, the head of Sanguessugas Commission was less successful in Rio de Janeiro, from where, not coincidentally, the “bloodsucker” mafia ran their ambulance business. Voter unpredictability granted Clodovil Hernandes (PTC), an eccentric 70-year-old fashion celebrity, an impressive tally of 493,951 in São Paulo for his first term in the Chamber. When questioned about politics, he confessed to having none. His massive vote tally, however, did allow the fashion victim’s unlikely co-party member, the notorious Colonel Paes de Lira to squeeze by and snatch a seat in the Chamber in his bid to defend the values once dominant under the military dictatorship. The future of intergovernmental relations now stands in wait. Its first signs of tension have perhaps been most manifest in the election of deposed President Fernando Collar de Melo (1990-1992) to the Federal Senate with a seat from Alagoas state—ironically taking over the one vacated by Heloisa Helena as she went on to pursue her presidential candidacy last fall. As one of the most despised political figures in Brazil’s recent history, Collar’s endorsement by Lula within days of the elections has benumbed the entire political community. The President has gone on record to declare that Collar has been “punished enough” and “could, if he wishes, do exceptional work in the Senate.” Since the democratic opening to a multiparty system in 1988, the alliance factor has blended the most adverse political groupings in exchange for portfolio seats in the federal cabinet as well as in any of the nation’s 26,000 political positions in administration and industry. These are the key positions that will determine the success – and accountability – of the next federal government in its relations with the states and municipalities well after the composition of Lula’s cabinet is finally settled. Real power, however, lies in the hypocritical autonomy imposed by Brazil’s central bank. According to the tenets of market fundamentalism, the central bank must itself be subject to the will and whims of the market, with independence from party politics. Nonetheless, its president is named by the Executive. To the public, the central bank stutters the dogma that to keep inflation down, the prime lending rate, as well as the primary budgetary surplus, must be kept as high as feasible – without destroying the cash flow altogether by stifling credit. In Brazil’s case, this policy amounts to one of the highest prime interest rates in the world at 12.75 percent. Where the measure turns into delusion is on the other end of the market fundamentalist doctrine. For Brazil’s central bank to be independent from government might make sound monetary sense provided it also manages to stimulate both production and consumption. Upon a closer look at the breakdown of the last GDP, however, a striking 38 percent is reaped from taxes (Source: IBGE, Banco Central). A substantially high prime lending rate matched with a banking sector growing at six times the nation’s GDP, and Brazilian production and consumption sectors overburdened with taxes all amount to a disastrous policy for growth. Brazil failed to edge above three percent over the past four years, whereas other emerging markets are exploding. With public expenses on the rise for ten years, the American-educated economists unashamedly dress up a decrepit situation in which the country is parasitically gnawed from within by public sector priviledges stretched between the feudal oligarchies in the north-east and the banking sector barons in Sao Paulo. Need for Real Action Recent news in Brazil’s all but silent civil war has taken the shape of the take-over of some 80 favela communities in Rio de Janeiro by so-called “militias”. Brazil’s explosive rate of homicides cleared the 54,000 per year mark in 2005, i.e. six times the amount in the US, and two-fifths that of Iraq under American occupation. Among the worst trained and paid police force in any industrialized nation are Brazil’s so-called “military police” (PM). The corps is a remnant of the military dictatorship. Its jurisdiction in Rio de Janeiro state involves traffic control as well as crime. But for the officers dealing with tourist-friendly areas, their ambiguous relationship with civil society is what most stands out. For PM complicity in crime, corruption, kidnapping and death-squads is rampant. In light of the up-coming Pan-American games, set to begin in early July, a covert action began to oust drug-traffic gangs from favela communities. It was the TV Globo conglomerate that first picked up on the movement. The militias have occupied some 80 favelas over the past year. They are said to be made up of both active and non-active military police, firemen (who in Brazil are part of the military) and other elements. Their initial purpose was to stifle the drug trade and “eliminate” traffickers. But, as is typical with military police in Brazil, they soon began to extort a protection fee from shops and then from residents themselves. This paramilitary occupation of favelas led to increased actions by criminal elements against military police and active duty, who became easy targets in the Carioca night for drive-by shootings. The up-front State-sponsored scheme for providing security for the Pan-American games is the deployment of a military security force directly under the orders of the Federal government. It is to ensure protection of the game sites as well as on the two main highways in and out of Rio de Janeiro, the so-called yellow and red lines. However, it has also been deployed in favelas. One of the immediate consequences of the effective stifling of the narcotics trade has been to send criminal elements into the streets. Assaults of citizens on the street or in cars (a Brazilian specialty) have sky-rocketed since the beginning of the year. In this climate of small, generally localized private wars with substantial death tolls, we return to a proposal on legalizing narcotics. Little has changed in the three years we first drafted this 12-point plan. Back then, an invasion of the Rocinha community by a rival gang sparked off an urban battle. On their way to the community, a woman was murdered while driving her family through their barricade. The fighting contrasted little with scenes projected on TV screens from ten thousand miles away in the heat of the desert sun. At dawn, after a night's violence, residents fled their homes. Earlier in the darkness tracer bullets had lit up the sky, with helicopters flying permanently overhead beaming search lights into the hillside maze and being hit with shots in return. Such a daring act of “resistance” should not be in any way surprising in a State where the sole response to violence is further violence—despite the 28,000 citizens living ordinary, working lives in the Rocinha favela. A few days earlier, after a police shooting incident had left a four-year-old boy dead in another favela, the State security secretary, Anthony Garotinho, was reported to have told residents the child died because he lived in a neighborhood that housed violent criminals. His solution for containing violence at Rocinha was a parody of Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to wall off the Palestinians. Just that now Rocinha's residents would be sealed in by a wall supposedly to ward off outside invasions. Apart from having one of the most spectacular views in Rio, Rocinha is otherwise a model community as far as poverty goes. State infrastructure is relatively present here. There are banks and post offices, and many people actually pay for electricity. Even tours are organized for tourists. After the violence came to an end, the Carioca (residents of Rio de Janeiro) were nonplussed. It would happen all over again, if not in Rocinha then elsewhere in the city's 120 favelas. Television cameras were set on the husband of Telma Veloso, the middle-class woman slain earlier. He challenged the city's narcotics consumers—especially those from the middle classes—to abstain from their habit for a month, and then analyze the financial state of the drug gangs. Specialists spoke of reorganizing the city's police forces. Federal politicians debated over whether it was necessary to send in the army. And Rio de Janeiro's nepotistic evangelical State government, shifted power from an altogether absent governor, Rosângela Rosinha Garotinho Barros Assed Matheus de Oliveira, better known as Rosinha Matheus (apparently soaking up the sun unperturbed in the resort of Angra dos Reis) to the man she appointed to handle security questions, her own husband, Anthony Garotinho. Meanwhile the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Cesar Maia, slid in the stupid idea again of declaring an emergency security state in which civil liberties would be partly suspended. Yet few dare whisper an obvious option: complete legalization of pot (maconha, in local parlance) and cocaine. Not the media, nor sociologists, nor middle class substance consumers, let alone the government. If drugs are a plague, prohibition is their infectious vector. But current governor Sergio Cabral, still within his first hundred days of office, has uttered the key word of decriminalization, at least insofar as pot is concerned. In a bid to provide a forum for this discussion and of the need to legalize all narcotics, we reproduce a twelve-point proposal. Its purpose is to argue why decriminalization of narcotics use and legalization of their production may be the only viable way to fight Rio's drug problem efficiently and peacefully—to say nothing of the world's drug problem insofar as it is a problem. Ever since the 19th century "opium wars" waged by England to smash China's tea monopoly, drugs have indeed been the underhand to international trade. The drug business traces the labyrinthine antechambers or back alleys of the World Trade Organization. This is why the issues discussed here apply not only to the neglect of Rio's terrible condition, but to the fact that curbing one focal point alone is utterly useless. These prescriptions therefore also apply to the United States and Canada. 1) In the drug question, abuse or addiction is merely a medical issue; its social dimension is secondary to the question of legalization. The drug business is a trade in the full market sense of the term. The ability to rationally discuss legalization, however, entirely depends on explaining away abuse and addiction as the reason for the trade. Otherwise the use of prohibited drugs is easily co-opted as a vice, indeed a sin, given the persuasive power of religions in Rio de Janeiro. Or it's exalted by the jet set for its wealth-specific glamour and decadence. In the meantime, any one can drink alcohol (cachaça being as "hard" a drug as cocaine), smoke tobacco, drink coffee, to say nothing of consuming anti-depressives, Prozac, sleeping pills and any other substance arbitrarily deemed acceptable by the medical and legal communities to consume. 2) As a trade, narcotics—renamed here in economic terms, "substances"—are lockstepped with an enormous network of production, distribution, consumption and investment. Its structure is purely commercial despite being illegal—which is precisely why legalization with a view to better controlling them is entirely feasible. 3) "Taking" or "using" drugs (that is, substances) is neither entirely the result of their being illegal and therefore a kind of temptation, nor is it a sinful vice in even the mildest of senses. As with other substances, i.e. body additives, they stimulate neurotransmitters, such as adrenaline and dopamine, in order to give the body certain desired pleasures. Consuming substances may be done for purposes of insomnia, stress, fatigue, depression, and other moods disruptive of an individual's capacity to work. Enjoying other substances may be done to stimulate creativity, sexuality, spiritual exercises or muscle tone. Among the mid-range mood-altering drugs, alcohol is universally legal in Christian countries (which is the domain to which this analysis applies), although some higher potency alcohols are prohibited with respect to specific national jurisdictions (e.g. absinthe in France, moonshine in Canada and the U.S.). What is quite accepted by the international medical community is that alcohol is one of the most addictive drugs. For the year 2000 in the US, alcohol consumption caused an estimated 3.5 percent or 85,000 deaths (without counting the 16, 543 alcohol-related automobile fatalities). It was led only by poor diet physical inactivity and the ravages of another addictive pleasure: tobacco (16.6 percent, 18.2 percent respectively). Moreover, alcoholism is regularly cited as one of the main vectors of household violence. But our society has unwittingly accepted alcoholism as a necessary risk, or side effect for the availability of alcohol. To be sure, not only is it symptomatic for an alcoholic to deny her illness, but most drinkers still refuse to consider alcohol a drug. 4) Criminalization of substances, i.e. "drugs" or "narcotics", is orchestrated on behalf of the State's vision of order. The modern State was built upon a principle best defined by Max Weber. It is a "human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory." Since the defeat of fascism in the 1940s—which was a continuation of the modern state into paroxysm—this monopoly has been increasingly contested by the population (i.e. civil society), grown in strength as a function of the middle-class consumer state. This contestation has taken the shape of a deep critique of the State's monopoly of violence as incompatible with the aspirations of a democratic society, or indistinguishable from a doctrine of State terror. Meanwhile, the full-scale revolution triggered in the 1960s by the affluence of the Western middle classes expressed a broader quest for citizens' equal rights to those of the State. Prohibition of cocaine and alcohol in the United States in 1914 and 1920 respectively, but especially the banning of marijuana and LSD in the late 1960s, and the declaration of war on drugs by the first Bush administration in the late 1980s, are nothing but renewed attempts by the State to reassert its monopoly on using force legitimately over and above citizens' demands. 5) Legalizing narcotics is a sound principle in market terms, individual rights as well as political egalitarianism. Its basic premise is to make the illegal drug trade accountable to society by taxing it. The citizens of Rio de Janeiro are absolutely right to demand that middle class drug consumers be "stuck with some shame in their faces", in a bad translation of a great Portuguese expression. Owing to a lack of cogent discussion on the subject, however, the ends of this rationale are mistaken. For various reasons, the sharp urbanization and rural depopulation our societies have undergone in forty years has made drug consumption a common practice. Yet the State has refused up until most recently to allow mind altering drugs to freely circulate (see reason 4). Prozac has opened new possibilities, though, which is why it can be claimed that the State has been typically more receptive to lobbying pressures from the huge biotech sector to allow certain substances on the marketplace which only they produce—instead of the natural products anyone else can grow and develop at very low costs and to greater psychotropic effect. What also blocks marijuana from decriminalization today is the same patent lobby copyrighting your genome variation and various herbal substances found in the world's rain forests. It also points to those who control the manufacture of AIDS medication and its costs. 6) The Brazilian substance trade cannot be compared to the Netherlands, Canada or Switzerland, but must be to the U.S. The Netherlands legalized all narcotics in the 1970s. In the age of AIDS, where one of the quickest vectors of infection is needle sharing among heroin and crack cocaine users, the Netherlands boasts of their success at keeping AIDS at a minimum, and with just cause. The Canadian provinces of Quebec and British Columbia have shown in practice great tolerance toward marijuana and hashish use. Some provinces have distributed needles for free. But in recent years, Quebec faced a gang war of unprecedented violence. Its municipal and provincial police forces, and the Canadian police force in general, have been relatively restrained in their use of violence to curb the drug trade. The Quebec situation proved that tolerance is not enough. It leaves a vacuum in which criminal factions can easily enter to take advantage of legal loopholes and end up controlling what the State has thus far shied away from. As on many other issues, the Canadian Supreme Court has shown itself particularly sensitive to citizens' rights. It has refused to reinforce a ban on substance use for medical purposes as well as for possession in small quantities for personal use. In May 2003, Canadian Parliament decriminalized the personal use of marijuana, making possession of the drug a noncriminal offense punishable with a ticket and a fine, similar to those issued for traffic violations. Yet it has failed to take a firm position on use per se, and policing has been reinforced regarding production, targeting even small producers. But the cat is out the bag, and a broad segment of Canadians no longer chastises pot as the source of social ills – though this remains to be seen in the plausible progression of the current pro-Bush government of Stephen Harper from minority to majority government. The Brazilian situation is not completely unique, nor typically "third world". It is most akin to the total repression by the State apparatus characteristic of the US war on drugs and tolerance-zero policy. In turn, it has triggered widespread violence, turning life in its major cities into a daily confrontation with risk. 7) As predicted by Aldous Huxley, substances are simply one among various pleasure products offered by modern consumer society. With the social malaise and anomy that increasingly began to affect Western society in the wake of the defeat of the reform movements of the 1960s, whose purpose was to grant increased political and economic power to the middle classes, Western societies have witnessed the installation of a stark shareholder capitalist economic model matching the general regression of middle class political power. One of its main characteristics has been to unfold "globalization", foremost an intense movement of capital. Internationalization had long been an idea of Marx's and amongst communist social reformers. Globalization calked itself atop its communist version’s social and cultural accomplishments, especially to open capital markets to transnational trade. This in turn led to the explosion of factory relocations and the rule of tax havens, i.e. national banks opening branches and subsidiaries along the Swiss model of secrecy throughout the Caribbean islands, European principalities and smaller nations, and certain African and Asian states. As important work from the French think-tank ATTAC and retired French criminal prosecutor specialized in white-collar crime and corruption, Eva Joly, has described, tax havens have flattened the difference between legally and illegally acquired revenues. To further their point, one need only examine the phenomenon of money laundering. The trade in prohibited substances, be it drugs, prostitution or arms, cannot survive without money laundering. Yet after having been laundered the money sits in tax havens the world over in a system set up and sponsored by the Bretton Woods institutions and the international banking community. 8) Legalization is a country's full commitment to its population. It cannot succeed without a solid taxation system, public information and education as to what substances can do, and objective analysis on why their use is hardly a matter for social breakdown. It is high time to bring substances out of the shadow to give individuals control over quality in goods and services. Parents who do not believe their children are tempted by substances are in denial: if they do care about their children, they should ensure that their child knows about the substances with which they may or may not experiment. We must ensure quality control, and the availability of proper medical assistance should any malaise be triggered. Moreover, it is pure hypocrisy for parents with a background of legal pill-popping to chastise their children for smoking grass. The legalized apparatus of narcotics is something we owe to our kid's safety, as is the harmony of the society we are passing on to them. 9) The prohibition and criminal circulation of drugs is both a direct and indirect way of keeping poor communities preoccupied with other issues than social change. Legalization should not be pursued for the sake of further disrupting these communities. Besides, we need the pre-existent infrastructure to organize the substance market, i.e. the self-generated trading network that has brought income into areas touched little, if at all, by oligarchic capitalism. In Brazil, the long overdue abolition of slavery led to a jump-start of a proletarian sector with no industrial park to integrate. To this day, remnants with a wage still provide domestic tasks on the fazenda-estates littered across the burnt soil mountains of the Paraiba do Sul Valley. The producers, distributors, dealers and delivery personnel to middle class districts must all be kept. Their members, those with no history of murder, ought to be given pardons once decriminalization measures have been implemented. Market conditions regulating best prices must be implanted. But cartels have to be identified and penalized. Money deposits and receipts distributed. Tax exemptions of enterprises in the slums imposed. Smuggling must be combated, but an affluent smuggling trade must be recognized as a sign indicating when taxation has not reached critical mass. In turn, normalized education and professional training must be delivered. Bringing back capital punishment is a nihilistic move for a corrupt state used as an alibi to do nothing. Killers must be kept properly jailed, indeed. But their transformed behavior will be the litmus test for the soundness of the legalization process proposed. The option of severely policed parole ought to remain a viable option. 10) As in Canada and Holland, the only way legalization can work is with the complete State control of guns and a commitment to phasing out the arms industry as whole. These industrial parasites are among the world's lowliest beings. As a major small arms exporter, Brazil has a lot of potential to enforce arms control in its own society. Yet in the 2005 referendum on arms possession, the people lost to an arms lobby orchestrating a publicity campaign based on projecting onto the population as a whole the “terror” only felt by a latifundia owner whose land has been invaded by landless peasants. Rational measures are needed to push through an arms prohibition law, just as they are required to survive a typical street-side robbery in any of Brazil’s largest cities. Guns are no option. 11) Implementation: the time to launch the process is obviously here and now. 12) As the U.S. War on drugs is fundamentally opposed to the previous eleven points for religious, political and commercial reasons (though not in that specific order), it is impossible to realistically conceive of legalization in either Brazil or Colombia. So hold on tight, because living in the postmodern metropolis is only going to get much worse: - for the lower classes and the violent battles over the drug trade, - for the middle classes and the evaporating safety of public space, - for the upper class despite their expensive private security apparatus that they shamelessly finance to the detriment of participating as citizens in building a state-of-the-art public police apparatus. Instead, its vulture-like behavior sends a message right down through the ranks of civil society, its institutions and various distributions in the polity that corruption and impunity pay when good money’s involved. There is no moral, indeed legal, justification for the concentration of wealth that ranks Brazil amongst the least equitable of countries in the world. Conclusion With ever increasing high unemployment among the youth, the State's financial apparatus will keep clashing with this population, whether poor or affluent. Yet violence only incites more violence. In turn, authoritarian violence provokes criminal violence. Prisons are schools for crime. Filling them will only create more outlaw behavior. Breaking this cycle is an optimal moment for showing Brazil's famed espertismo. When a government at least appears to be receptive to novel ideas, the opportunity to open debate on legalizing the substances presently known as narcotics must be seized. This appeared true in 2004, as it does even more today. A Canadian, Norman Madarasz is associate professor of philosophy at Universidade Gama Filho. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
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