Here's an excellent editorial from the Christian Science Monitor about Barack Obama, Brazil's President Lula, and the future of U.S.-Brazil relations. It's a great supplement to the post below. Enjoy!
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/1112/p08s01-comv.html
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Obamamania in Brazil: Change we can believe in, or more of the same (only jazzed up)?
Like a proud Brazilian soccer fan wearing his team’s jersey on the day after they won a huge match, I went to class November 5th with my Obama ’08 T-shirt that my friend Pamela had brought me from home when she visited back in June. It’s true: if I didn’t make it obvious already through trying oh so hard to be objective in the analyses here in this blog, I am, in fact, an Obama supporter. As someone who has heard and empathized with the voices of world citizens frustrated not only with the policies, but with the arrogance of the Bush Administration, I have long been pulling for Obama in hopes of, as the President-elect himself puts it, “restoring America’s image in the world.”
November 5th seemed to show that such a restoration was beginning. That Wednesday was like a second birthday. Classmates and professors greeted me with a smile and a “parabéns!” (congratulations!). Others exclaimed joyfully, “Ele ganhou!” “He won!” As for the throngs of unknowns I ran into that day, pretty much all of them stared at my chest as if I were Dolly Parton. Yet none of these gawking strangers said anything. Either they didn’t care (more on this later), or they were just behaving like they would any other day, not interfering with a stranger’s business, even a stranger with the name of the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world on his chest.
And that’s fine. Really, I wasn’t expecting complete strangers to stop me and congratulate me for the results of an election that wasn’t their own. While Obama may be the next “most power man in the world,” he’s America’s president, not Brazil’s. To think otherwise would be to continue the same arrogance that tainted the last eight years. I wasn’t wearing Obama’s name to be arrogant. I wore it out of pride. Since my first trip to Spain in March 2001, every time I have traveled abroad I have done so with the dark cloud of George W. Bush hanging over my head. W will still be president by the time I leave Brazil, but until that day the promise of a brighter future under an Obama Administration will wash out the shadows cast by Bush’s cloud. For these next three-and-a-half weeks, I can proclaim my nationality with greater pride than ever before.
Among the international hoi polloi, Obama is perhaps even more revered in Brazil than he is in Europe, where he drew a crowd of 200,000 at a speech in Berlin back in July. This because, aside from his fresh politics, the fact that he is black (or, perhaps better put, “biracial”) makes him more identifiable with the more than 40% of Brazilians who would list their skin color as “black” or “brown.” The notion of race in Brazil and the difference between it and the notion of race in the U.S. are very complicated subjects. In a nutshell, populations of color in both countries have been historically marginalized, though through different forms of discrimination. The U.S. wrote its discrimination into law, and despite the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, blacks and whites (and Latinos and Arab-Americans, etc.) still live very much separated from one another, culturally, linguistically, economically, and geographically speaking. While racial prejudice in Brazil has never been made law, and people of all colors can quite often be seen interacting together almost as if on the set of a P-C Bud Light commercial, discrimination still exists latently and subtly in Brazil’s often-fabled “racial democracy,” popping up in places like idioms and soap operas every now and then. The bottom line: for Afro-Brazilians to see an African-American elected president is to receive the hope that a member of their own minority could one day too rise up to lead both minority and majority.
One could argue that Brazil has already witnessed an election as historic as Obama’s. In 2002, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist trade unionist, the son of a poor working class family, with no formal education to his credit, (not to mention he's missing his left pinkie finger), became the first Brazilian president to come from outside the traditional political elite. He, too, was elected on a platform of change, and during his 6 years in office he has delivered on many of his original campaign promises, such as helping the poor and growing Brazil’s economy independently from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF (corruption and the drug wars in the country's favelas remain to be tackled). Brazil now enjoys one of the world’s top 10 economies, it is nearly completely energy independent, and it is by far Latin America’s dominant political and economic actor, especially as U.S. influence has retreated from the region. Lula’s popularity rating is as high as Bush’s is low. Hence, perhaps, the apathy of my anonymous passers-by last Wednesday: Brazil has become so powerful, why should the results of a U.S. election, even one so historic, matter to the average Brazilian?
The U.S. presidential race reflected waning North American influence (and interest) in Latin America. Only in the final debate between McCain and Obama did such subjects as Colombian and Peruvian free trade agreements, Brazilian ethanol, and what to do with Hugo Chávez get touched, albeit very briefly. The fact is that the economy, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and healthcare all weigh heavier than virtually any policy toward Latin America in the mind of the average American. Even immigration, the Latin-flavored hot button issue 3 years ago, was hardly broached. Brazilians are certainly content to welcome a U.S. president that’s more humble and open to dialogue and diplomacy than his predecessor, with the end to the internationally deplored war in Iraq probably in sight. But what does an Obama Administration have to do, specifically, with Brazil?
After the euphoria of this last week has begun to settle, I’ve found that some members of the Brazilian media, as well as friends, classmates, and professors are asking exactly that question. The only concretely known agenda of Obama’s in relation to Brazil is his plan to continue to protect the American ethanol industry, subsidizing research and production at home and slapping tariffs on imports of the Brazilian stuff, policies which John McCain opposed. However, a slight sense of optimism might be in the air in Brazil with relation to U.S. protectionism. A recent article in the right-wing weekly Veja magazine insinuated that Brazil’s ethanol industry is so superior to the United States’, that corn is becoming so much more valuable for food instead of fuel in a world with ever more mouths to feed, and Obama is so bent on achieving near total independence from foreign oil in the next decade, that the U.S. will have no choice but to open its ports to Brazilian ethanol. We shall certainly see.
The only other and much more vague policy of Obama’s toward Brazil has to do with deforestation in the Amazon. In an earlier post I outlined the general argument surrounding the issue of sovereignty and deforestation of the Amazon. According to a recent article on the BBC News website, Obama said he values “incentives to maintain Latin American forests.” As the skilled politician he is, Obama is most likely being deliberately vague to appease both the Brazilian and the European-North American environmentalist sides of this delicate issue. Yet anything short of giving full support to 100% Brazilian sovereignty of the Amazon (or at least the two-thirds that lie inside Brazil’s borders) could be seen by Brazilians as tantamount to a call for the forest’s internationalization, a definite no-no. Indeed, Obama will have to tread very carefully when approaching this issue.
On the bright side, when the time comes to address American relations with Brazil on issues known and unknown, a more dialogue-oriented Obama Administration will have some influential Brazilian figures to guide it. According to the same Veja article mentioned above, Brazil’s current Minister for Strategic Affairs, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a respected figure in his country on the issue of the Amazon, was once Obama’s professor at Harvard. Unger and current Brazilian Ambassador to the U.S., Antonio Patriota, will act as the initial go-betweens with the new Obama Administration in hopes of creating stronger diplomatic ties, paving the way to deal more fruitfully with what issues may come.
Still, however successful those ties become may not be known for some time, according to the same BBC article. With the aforementioned top priorities already piled high on Obama’s plate, direct dealings with Brazil and other Latin American nations—apart from the next meeting of the Organization of American States in April—may not come about until 12 to 14 months from now.
In the meantime, while hope-filled Obamaniacs in Brazil join those around the world to watch Obama’s every move as president as diligently and expectantly as they would follow the 8 o’clock novela, many of my colleagues at PUC have already formed their opinion about the extent of change an Obama Administration will bring: none. My “Political Economy of Africa” professor remarked that systemically, no great changes could possibly happen in the world over the next 4 years. He argued, rather, that global systemic pressures would be too great for Obama to overcome, and that the very nature of the American democratic system, homogeneous behind the façade of polar Republican and Democratic ideologies, would likewise fetter Obama’s idealism. My “History and Culture of Minas Gerais” professor echoed my Africa prof. She expounded to the class her belief that American foreign policy will always remain the same, no matter who leads it. She went on to say Obama would do little more than defend the interests of the United States in the midst of its decline, thus leading not to more diplomacy, but more wars, the soonest of which would be with Iran. She criticized the Brazilian press for sensationalizing the Obama phenomenon, instilling false hope in average Brazilians, making them wait with bated breath at the next American President’s each and every move. Students around me nodded in agreement and proceeded to vent the frustrations that I have heard all too often about how American culture and way of life would continue to alienate those of Brazil. If anything, such alienation would only increase with all of Brazil tuned in to follow the "Obama Years."
What this says is that the present generational crop of budding Brazilian academics will continue to carry the flag of pessimistic Marxist ideology, denouncing the U.S. government until the candidate of the American Socialist Worker’s party is elected president (i.e., hell will freeze over first). I know I’ve expressed my conditional sympathy with my colleagues' ideals here in this blog in past posts, conditional in that in the end I don’t believe a classless society is the answer to the criticisms of capitalism that have only crescendoed around me since the financial crisis deepened in September. Neo-liberalist capitalism may be showing its inherent fallibility with the present crisis, yet communism proved itself a nonviable option throughout the 20th century. A middle road is necessary, one in which government can trump an out-of-control market, and can protect human rights around the world to such things as economic development, education, health care, and a clean environment, rights that the market alone fails to provide. The hope that Obama's campaign and subsequent election instilled in me has not made me naïve enough to think that a President Obama can provide that perfect middle road. Yes, systemic pressures will hold back his idealistic visions of America and the world; it doesn't take a Marxist outlook to believe so. But I do believe he, more than anyone else who could’ve been chosen to fulfill his new role, has the capacity to push back at those pressures. Exactly how well he deals with each of his unenviable number of pressures, be they in America, Iran, or Brazil, remains to be seen by more than 6 billion pairs of eyes.
And I’ll be frank: nothing would give me greater pleasure than to report back to my non-believing PUC colleagues in 4 (and hopefully 8) years’ time and remind them just how well he did.
November 5th seemed to show that such a restoration was beginning. That Wednesday was like a second birthday. Classmates and professors greeted me with a smile and a “parabéns!” (congratulations!). Others exclaimed joyfully, “Ele ganhou!” “He won!” As for the throngs of unknowns I ran into that day, pretty much all of them stared at my chest as if I were Dolly Parton. Yet none of these gawking strangers said anything. Either they didn’t care (more on this later), or they were just behaving like they would any other day, not interfering with a stranger’s business, even a stranger with the name of the soon-to-be most powerful man in the world on his chest.
And that’s fine. Really, I wasn’t expecting complete strangers to stop me and congratulate me for the results of an election that wasn’t their own. While Obama may be the next “most power man in the world,” he’s America’s president, not Brazil’s. To think otherwise would be to continue the same arrogance that tainted the last eight years. I wasn’t wearing Obama’s name to be arrogant. I wore it out of pride. Since my first trip to Spain in March 2001, every time I have traveled abroad I have done so with the dark cloud of George W. Bush hanging over my head. W will still be president by the time I leave Brazil, but until that day the promise of a brighter future under an Obama Administration will wash out the shadows cast by Bush’s cloud. For these next three-and-a-half weeks, I can proclaim my nationality with greater pride than ever before.
Among the international hoi polloi, Obama is perhaps even more revered in Brazil than he is in Europe, where he drew a crowd of 200,000 at a speech in Berlin back in July. This because, aside from his fresh politics, the fact that he is black (or, perhaps better put, “biracial”) makes him more identifiable with the more than 40% of Brazilians who would list their skin color as “black” or “brown.” The notion of race in Brazil and the difference between it and the notion of race in the U.S. are very complicated subjects. In a nutshell, populations of color in both countries have been historically marginalized, though through different forms of discrimination. The U.S. wrote its discrimination into law, and despite the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, blacks and whites (and Latinos and Arab-Americans, etc.) still live very much separated from one another, culturally, linguistically, economically, and geographically speaking. While racial prejudice in Brazil has never been made law, and people of all colors can quite often be seen interacting together almost as if on the set of a P-C Bud Light commercial, discrimination still exists latently and subtly in Brazil’s often-fabled “racial democracy,” popping up in places like idioms and soap operas every now and then. The bottom line: for Afro-Brazilians to see an African-American elected president is to receive the hope that a member of their own minority could one day too rise up to lead both minority and majority.
One could argue that Brazil has already witnessed an election as historic as Obama’s. In 2002, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a leftist trade unionist, the son of a poor working class family, with no formal education to his credit, (not to mention he's missing his left pinkie finger), became the first Brazilian president to come from outside the traditional political elite. He, too, was elected on a platform of change, and during his 6 years in office he has delivered on many of his original campaign promises, such as helping the poor and growing Brazil’s economy independently from international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF (corruption and the drug wars in the country's favelas remain to be tackled). Brazil now enjoys one of the world’s top 10 economies, it is nearly completely energy independent, and it is by far Latin America’s dominant political and economic actor, especially as U.S. influence has retreated from the region. Lula’s popularity rating is as high as Bush’s is low. Hence, perhaps, the apathy of my anonymous passers-by last Wednesday: Brazil has become so powerful, why should the results of a U.S. election, even one so historic, matter to the average Brazilian?
The U.S. presidential race reflected waning North American influence (and interest) in Latin America. Only in the final debate between McCain and Obama did such subjects as Colombian and Peruvian free trade agreements, Brazilian ethanol, and what to do with Hugo Chávez get touched, albeit very briefly. The fact is that the economy, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and healthcare all weigh heavier than virtually any policy toward Latin America in the mind of the average American. Even immigration, the Latin-flavored hot button issue 3 years ago, was hardly broached. Brazilians are certainly content to welcome a U.S. president that’s more humble and open to dialogue and diplomacy than his predecessor, with the end to the internationally deplored war in Iraq probably in sight. But what does an Obama Administration have to do, specifically, with Brazil?
After the euphoria of this last week has begun to settle, I’ve found that some members of the Brazilian media, as well as friends, classmates, and professors are asking exactly that question. The only concretely known agenda of Obama’s in relation to Brazil is his plan to continue to protect the American ethanol industry, subsidizing research and production at home and slapping tariffs on imports of the Brazilian stuff, policies which John McCain opposed. However, a slight sense of optimism might be in the air in Brazil with relation to U.S. protectionism. A recent article in the right-wing weekly Veja magazine insinuated that Brazil’s ethanol industry is so superior to the United States’, that corn is becoming so much more valuable for food instead of fuel in a world with ever more mouths to feed, and Obama is so bent on achieving near total independence from foreign oil in the next decade, that the U.S. will have no choice but to open its ports to Brazilian ethanol. We shall certainly see.
The only other and much more vague policy of Obama’s toward Brazil has to do with deforestation in the Amazon. In an earlier post I outlined the general argument surrounding the issue of sovereignty and deforestation of the Amazon. According to a recent article on the BBC News website, Obama said he values “incentives to maintain Latin American forests.” As the skilled politician he is, Obama is most likely being deliberately vague to appease both the Brazilian and the European-North American environmentalist sides of this delicate issue. Yet anything short of giving full support to 100% Brazilian sovereignty of the Amazon (or at least the two-thirds that lie inside Brazil’s borders) could be seen by Brazilians as tantamount to a call for the forest’s internationalization, a definite no-no. Indeed, Obama will have to tread very carefully when approaching this issue.
On the bright side, when the time comes to address American relations with Brazil on issues known and unknown, a more dialogue-oriented Obama Administration will have some influential Brazilian figures to guide it. According to the same Veja article mentioned above, Brazil’s current Minister for Strategic Affairs, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a respected figure in his country on the issue of the Amazon, was once Obama’s professor at Harvard. Unger and current Brazilian Ambassador to the U.S., Antonio Patriota, will act as the initial go-betweens with the new Obama Administration in hopes of creating stronger diplomatic ties, paving the way to deal more fruitfully with what issues may come.
Still, however successful those ties become may not be known for some time, according to the same BBC article. With the aforementioned top priorities already piled high on Obama’s plate, direct dealings with Brazil and other Latin American nations—apart from the next meeting of the Organization of American States in April—may not come about until 12 to 14 months from now.
In the meantime, while hope-filled Obamaniacs in Brazil join those around the world to watch Obama’s every move as president as diligently and expectantly as they would follow the 8 o’clock novela, many of my colleagues at PUC have already formed their opinion about the extent of change an Obama Administration will bring: none. My “Political Economy of Africa” professor remarked that systemically, no great changes could possibly happen in the world over the next 4 years. He argued, rather, that global systemic pressures would be too great for Obama to overcome, and that the very nature of the American democratic system, homogeneous behind the façade of polar Republican and Democratic ideologies, would likewise fetter Obama’s idealism. My “History and Culture of Minas Gerais” professor echoed my Africa prof. She expounded to the class her belief that American foreign policy will always remain the same, no matter who leads it. She went on to say Obama would do little more than defend the interests of the United States in the midst of its decline, thus leading not to more diplomacy, but more wars, the soonest of which would be with Iran. She criticized the Brazilian press for sensationalizing the Obama phenomenon, instilling false hope in average Brazilians, making them wait with bated breath at the next American President’s each and every move. Students around me nodded in agreement and proceeded to vent the frustrations that I have heard all too often about how American culture and way of life would continue to alienate those of Brazil. If anything, such alienation would only increase with all of Brazil tuned in to follow the "Obama Years."
What this says is that the present generational crop of budding Brazilian academics will continue to carry the flag of pessimistic Marxist ideology, denouncing the U.S. government until the candidate of the American Socialist Worker’s party is elected president (i.e., hell will freeze over first). I know I’ve expressed my conditional sympathy with my colleagues' ideals here in this blog in past posts, conditional in that in the end I don’t believe a classless society is the answer to the criticisms of capitalism that have only crescendoed around me since the financial crisis deepened in September. Neo-liberalist capitalism may be showing its inherent fallibility with the present crisis, yet communism proved itself a nonviable option throughout the 20th century. A middle road is necessary, one in which government can trump an out-of-control market, and can protect human rights around the world to such things as economic development, education, health care, and a clean environment, rights that the market alone fails to provide. The hope that Obama's campaign and subsequent election instilled in me has not made me naïve enough to think that a President Obama can provide that perfect middle road. Yes, systemic pressures will hold back his idealistic visions of America and the world; it doesn't take a Marxist outlook to believe so. But I do believe he, more than anyone else who could’ve been chosen to fulfill his new role, has the capacity to push back at those pressures. Exactly how well he deals with each of his unenviable number of pressures, be they in America, Iran, or Brazil, remains to be seen by more than 6 billion pairs of eyes.
And I’ll be frank: nothing would give me greater pleasure than to report back to my non-believing PUC colleagues in 4 (and hopefully 8) years’ time and remind them just how well he did.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Brazil and the Global Financial Crisis - Parte Dois
In the last post I posted a link to a NY Times article that described how Latin American countries, including Brazil, aren't immune to the financial plague that's spread out from Wall Street. The Brazilian real went from around 1.75 to the dollar to nearly 2.50 to the dollar in the course of a couple weeks. It has since stabilized at around 2.10 - 2.15 to the dollar in recent days, which, according to my limited economic knowledge, probably actually sits pretty well with exporters of Brazilian commodities - high enough to drive down the price of their products, not so high as to preclude returns on past investments. Access to credit, however, will still be hard to come by, as firms around the world are finding out.
So no, Brazil, like pretty much everyone, won't escape this crisis unscathed. Yet compared to most countries, Brazil, it seems, should weather the storm fairly well. In the latest weekly issue of Istoé magazine, a quote from the Director General of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahnn, received some considerable attention. "In 2009," he said (and this is my translation from Portuguese), "developed countries will grow near 0%; in other words, 100% of growth will come from developing countries and countries with little wealth." The IMF predicted Brazil will grow 3.5% in '09. Certainly a modest prospect, though nothing like China's projected 9.3% or India's 6.9% growth. 2009 growth for the United States will be around 0.8%, with the Eurozone economy growing an equally paltry 0.7%, according to the IMF.
Why is Brazil sitting so pretty? Istoé highlights a few reasons:
A week-and-a-half ago, President Bush got on the red phone to Presidente Lula and asked that the G-20 (the group, led by Brazil, that represents the world's 19 wealthiest nations plus the whole of the European Union) convene for an emergency summit in Washington immediately after a similar meeting by the G-7. Oh how the tables have turned. Now Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega would come to Washington with $20 billion dollars to offer to inject into gasping credit markets, unlike predecessors who showed up at the thrown of the Empire on their knees.
It's no wonder that Lula has an air of Chicken Little about him: "It's their crisis," he said earlier this month.
So no, Brazil, like pretty much everyone, won't escape this crisis unscathed. Yet compared to most countries, Brazil, it seems, should weather the storm fairly well. In the latest weekly issue of Istoé magazine, a quote from the Director General of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahnn, received some considerable attention. "In 2009," he said (and this is my translation from Portuguese), "developed countries will grow near 0%; in other words, 100% of growth will come from developing countries and countries with little wealth." The IMF predicted Brazil will grow 3.5% in '09. Certainly a modest prospect, though nothing like China's projected 9.3% or India's 6.9% growth. 2009 growth for the United States will be around 0.8%, with the Eurozone economy growing an equally paltry 0.7%, according to the IMF.
Why is Brazil sitting so pretty? Istoé highlights a few reasons:
- Stricter banking regulation, and banks that have recently proven themselves three times more profitable than U.S. banks
- A reserve of $200 billion, which the Brazilian government can use to ease credit concerns for some of the country's larger indebted firms, as well as guarantee national foreign debt
- An agricultural export economy that will see little drop in demand for coffee, soybeans, ethanol, and orange juice from markets in Europe and Asia
- A robust domestic economy on which to prop the country up if the export market goes lean, and a booming consumer market that's starting to attract the attention of foreign investors
- An ever-diversifying industrial sector, manufacturing everything from flex-fuel cars to regional jets to laptops to feed the high domestic demand for consumer goods
A week-and-a-half ago, President Bush got on the red phone to Presidente Lula and asked that the G-20 (the group, led by Brazil, that represents the world's 19 wealthiest nations plus the whole of the European Union) convene for an emergency summit in Washington immediately after a similar meeting by the G-7. Oh how the tables have turned. Now Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega would come to Washington with $20 billion dollars to offer to inject into gasping credit markets, unlike predecessors who showed up at the thrown of the Empire on their knees.
It's no wonder that Lula has an air of Chicken Little about him: "It's their crisis," he said earlier this month.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Latin America in the wake of North America's financial crisis
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 wrested the Americas from the European sphere of influence and effectively claimed it (all of it) for the United States. In its 19th century context, the Doctrine sought to protect the self-determination of newly independent countries throughout the hemisphere, with the United States acting as those countries' shepherd, ever-vigilant of the wolves of Europe.
In the 20th century, and especially during the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine gained new life in a new geopolitical context. The United States' new mission was to shepherd North and South America economically, expanding free markets and stamping out communism (ruthlessly) wherever and whenever it sprang up: Chile 1973, Guatemala from 1966 up through the 1970s, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Only Cuba managed to stay a red thorn in the U.S.'s side during the Cold War era.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, an emboldened United States sought to further its neo-liberal influence throughout Latin America. The Washington Consensus became the credo of the Western Hemisphere. Through such organs as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. imposed its economic and political influence on the newly revived democratic regimes of Argentina and Brazil. Deregulation and integration into the global capitalist system - headed by the world's now lone superpower - became the key to economic development. More than the key, it was the only option.
After 9-11, the United States began to tend less and less to its backyard, and more toward the Middle East, where 1) radical Islamist terrorists could be hunted down, and 2) where the vast majority of the world's remaining oil supplies could be secured and controlled. In the wake this shift, many a Latin American government moved left. Particularly in South America. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, and has consolidated his power with evermore vocal anti-Americanism since his first reelection in 2000. Evo Morales took control of Bolivia in 2006, and has since nationalized the country's natural gas reserves and become Chávez's number one ally. Rafael Correa has similarly shifted Ecuador away from free-market policies since assuming the presidency in 2007. Meanwhile, Lula's Brazil, the Argentina of the Kirchner couple, Vázquez' Uruguay, Bachelet's Chile, Alan García's Peru and Fernando Lugo's Paraguay have all adopted policies that blend socialism with neo-liberalism. Only Colombia, under the mandate of the right-leaning Álvaro Uribe, has remained a firm foothold for North American influence in the region, due exclusively to the billions of dollars in military aid the U.S. pumps into Colombia to fight the Marxist FARC guerilla faction, an officially declared terrorist organization.
This so-called "loss of Latin America", for which the Bush Administration has been blamed, has revealed a United States less able to wield its political and economic influence certainly in the region, but throughout the world as well. Brazil, with a steadily growing economy that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the economic output of South America, has gradually wrested control of the region from U.S. hands. The EU-like continental common market MERCOSUL is still in the development stages, but as it grows, dependence on the United States diminishes.
Yet the current financial crisis has proven that Latin America has not yet achieved complete economic independence from the United States (or, as Chávez put it, "uncoupled itself from the wagon of death.") I invite you to read the New York Times article below to better understand how the region is coping with North America's mess:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/world/americas/03latin.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
It's hard not to agree with Lula's analysis. The same deregulation the U.S. has always preached to its neighbors to the south is the same deregulation that led us all down the path to financial mayhem.
In regards to the fall of the Brazilian currency, the real, I'll admit, I'm currently enjoying an exchange rate of 2.30 reais to the dollar. When I arrived back in February it was 1.80 to one. That rate declined to about 1.54 to 1 in late July. As the crisis deepens, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate ballooned even more: just yesterday it was 2.17 to 1, and two days before it was 2.02 to 1. Yet my gain is Brazil's potential loss. Brazil, since colonial times, has depended on the export of commodities such as coffee, sugar, and now soy for economic growth. The IMF's forecast for Brazil in 2008 was growth of around 5%, due in large part to the expected growth in the agricultural export sector. While it is true that a weak real makes Brazilian commodities cheaper and thus more attractive, an overly devalued real would make Brazilian producers reap smaller returns on their investments of previous years when the currency was stronger. To make matters worse, the weak real makes foreign capital that much more expensive, which is further complicated by the fact that frozen global credit markets have little to offer Brazilian Agrobiz even if it did want to invest in more expensive capital.
The bottom line: 5% growth may now be out of reach, and prospect of a prospering and evermore economically independent Brazil may not come about as quickly as many Brazilians had hoped.
As karma would have it, heightened anti-American angst among many of my Brazilian acquaintances has been the price of the exchange rate I currently enjoy. Just when they saw their country almost free from North American economic domination, with prosperity and growing regional power on the horizon, the present crisis threw a wrench in their expectations. More than ever during my stay down here I'm hearing claims that current events are a sign that U.S. world hegemony is all but at an end (here's a good BBC report on just that topic). And now I hear this with an air of "good riddance." It makes being an ambassador of goodwill that much harder, and I'm starting to feel a little more thankful that I only have two months left here.
One thing I do tell people is that, well, if the U.S. does lose its hegemonic status, so what? When you're on top of the mountain, everybody resents you. Everybody is either trying to knock you off, cheering for you to be knocked off, or predicting when exactly you will get knocked off. I can't deny that my tiny vindictive side would love to see carefree Brazil assume that onerous position. It's no enviable position, and quite frankly any prosperity that comes from there isn't worth it. We Americans need to take this crisis as a wakeup call. We are not at the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama boasted shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. History, just as it always has, is only beginning. More than ever we need to realize that we are fallible, we are vulnerable, and we can easily (and perhaps gleefully in the eyes of many around the world) be replaced atop the mountain by a China, India, Russia, Japan, or even Brazil. If we want to have more friends than enemies (or any friends at all) going into the second decade of the millennium, we need to willfully reach down and collaborate with the throng of hands below our perch, not beat them back with a stick. If we're lucky, we can turn that mountain into a plateau, where we can be equal partners with B.R.I.C., Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other powerhouse nations, and where we can work together to pull up other impoverished nations one by one to join us. If not, we'd better get used to the view from the bottom of the mountain, because that's how low we will fall. And fall hard.
In the 20th century, and especially during the Cold War, the Monroe Doctrine gained new life in a new geopolitical context. The United States' new mission was to shepherd North and South America economically, expanding free markets and stamping out communism (ruthlessly) wherever and whenever it sprang up: Chile 1973, Guatemala from 1966 up through the 1970s, Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. Only Cuba managed to stay a red thorn in the U.S.'s side during the Cold War era.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, an emboldened United States sought to further its neo-liberal influence throughout Latin America. The Washington Consensus became the credo of the Western Hemisphere. Through such organs as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the U.S. imposed its economic and political influence on the newly revived democratic regimes of Argentina and Brazil. Deregulation and integration into the global capitalist system - headed by the world's now lone superpower - became the key to economic development. More than the key, it was the only option.
After 9-11, the United States began to tend less and less to its backyard, and more toward the Middle East, where 1) radical Islamist terrorists could be hunted down, and 2) where the vast majority of the world's remaining oil supplies could be secured and controlled. In the wake this shift, many a Latin American government moved left. Particularly in South America. Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela in 1998, and has consolidated his power with evermore vocal anti-Americanism since his first reelection in 2000. Evo Morales took control of Bolivia in 2006, and has since nationalized the country's natural gas reserves and become Chávez's number one ally. Rafael Correa has similarly shifted Ecuador away from free-market policies since assuming the presidency in 2007. Meanwhile, Lula's Brazil, the Argentina of the Kirchner couple, Vázquez' Uruguay, Bachelet's Chile, Alan García's Peru and Fernando Lugo's Paraguay have all adopted policies that blend socialism with neo-liberalism. Only Colombia, under the mandate of the right-leaning Álvaro Uribe, has remained a firm foothold for North American influence in the region, due exclusively to the billions of dollars in military aid the U.S. pumps into Colombia to fight the Marxist FARC guerilla faction, an officially declared terrorist organization.
This so-called "loss of Latin America", for which the Bush Administration has been blamed, has revealed a United States less able to wield its political and economic influence certainly in the region, but throughout the world as well. Brazil, with a steadily growing economy that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the economic output of South America, has gradually wrested control of the region from U.S. hands. The EU-like continental common market MERCOSUL is still in the development stages, but as it grows, dependence on the United States diminishes.
Yet the current financial crisis has proven that Latin America has not yet achieved complete economic independence from the United States (or, as Chávez put it, "uncoupled itself from the wagon of death.") I invite you to read the New York Times article below to better understand how the region is coping with North America's mess:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/world/americas/03latin.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
It's hard not to agree with Lula's analysis. The same deregulation the U.S. has always preached to its neighbors to the south is the same deregulation that led us all down the path to financial mayhem.
In regards to the fall of the Brazilian currency, the real, I'll admit, I'm currently enjoying an exchange rate of 2.30 reais to the dollar. When I arrived back in February it was 1.80 to one. That rate declined to about 1.54 to 1 in late July. As the crisis deepens, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate ballooned even more: just yesterday it was 2.17 to 1, and two days before it was 2.02 to 1. Yet my gain is Brazil's potential loss. Brazil, since colonial times, has depended on the export of commodities such as coffee, sugar, and now soy for economic growth. The IMF's forecast for Brazil in 2008 was growth of around 5%, due in large part to the expected growth in the agricultural export sector. While it is true that a weak real makes Brazilian commodities cheaper and thus more attractive, an overly devalued real would make Brazilian producers reap smaller returns on their investments of previous years when the currency was stronger. To make matters worse, the weak real makes foreign capital that much more expensive, which is further complicated by the fact that frozen global credit markets have little to offer Brazilian Agrobiz even if it did want to invest in more expensive capital.
The bottom line: 5% growth may now be out of reach, and prospect of a prospering and evermore economically independent Brazil may not come about as quickly as many Brazilians had hoped.
As karma would have it, heightened anti-American angst among many of my Brazilian acquaintances has been the price of the exchange rate I currently enjoy. Just when they saw their country almost free from North American economic domination, with prosperity and growing regional power on the horizon, the present crisis threw a wrench in their expectations. More than ever during my stay down here I'm hearing claims that current events are a sign that U.S. world hegemony is all but at an end (here's a good BBC report on just that topic). And now I hear this with an air of "good riddance." It makes being an ambassador of goodwill that much harder, and I'm starting to feel a little more thankful that I only have two months left here.
One thing I do tell people is that, well, if the U.S. does lose its hegemonic status, so what? When you're on top of the mountain, everybody resents you. Everybody is either trying to knock you off, cheering for you to be knocked off, or predicting when exactly you will get knocked off. I can't deny that my tiny vindictive side would love to see carefree Brazil assume that onerous position. It's no enviable position, and quite frankly any prosperity that comes from there isn't worth it. We Americans need to take this crisis as a wakeup call. We are not at the end of history, as Francis Fukuyama boasted shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union. History, just as it always has, is only beginning. More than ever we need to realize that we are fallible, we are vulnerable, and we can easily (and perhaps gleefully in the eyes of many around the world) be replaced atop the mountain by a China, India, Russia, Japan, or even Brazil. If we want to have more friends than enemies (or any friends at all) going into the second decade of the millennium, we need to willfully reach down and collaborate with the throng of hands below our perch, not beat them back with a stick. If we're lucky, we can turn that mountain into a plateau, where we can be equal partners with B.R.I.C., Japan, South Korea, Europe, and other powerhouse nations, and where we can work together to pull up other impoverished nations one by one to join us. If not, we'd better get used to the view from the bottom of the mountain, because that's how low we will fall. And fall hard.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Space: The Final Brazilian Frontier
It’ll be a shock getting behind the wheel for the first time only a few months from now. To get around here in Belo I’ve been walking, taking buses, the metro, or taxis, or getting rides from friends. We’ll have to see if driving a car is “just like riding a bike.” I’ll come home out of practice to say the very least.
There are certainly times I’ve missed having a car here in BH. Just read my last post and you’ll understand why. While I’m all for a greener world—politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in efficient and clean public transportation, even in sub-100,000-population cities like Iowa City—there is no beating the freedom a car can give us. (Meaning politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in more fuel-efficient cars and raise CAFE standards well beyond the provisions of 35mpg per fleet by 2020 set by last year’s Energy Independence and Security Act).
Anyway, yes, though it'll mean increasing my carbon footprint, I’ll thoroughly enjoy having my car back. And not only because I won’t have to worry about catching or missing a bus that comes only twice an hour. I’m certainly not going to miss the Brazilian ritual of getting on a bus.
Bus stops in Belo are laid out about every hundred meters or so on main roads throughout the city. Some stops only serve several lines, and sometimes only one line in more remote areas of the city. Others, like most in the heart of downtown, serve 10 to 20 lines. These stops tend to be packed with people. When a desired bus approaches, those who want it to stop stick out their arm to signal it to do so.
The elements in this ritual that are certain: which lines stop at which stops, and how to make the bus stop.
The uncertain element: exactly where the bus will come to a stop, due to a combination of the driver’s speed and the volume of both bus and car traffic around the stop at any given time.
Thus, when worn brakes squelch a bus to a stop, chaos is destined to ensue. Let’s say I, along with 7 other strangers, want to get on bus 9410 at a major downtown stop in order to head back toward Coração Eurcarístico and PUC. The bus stops about 10 feet away from where the 8 of us are huddled in a bunch. From here, it’s survival of the fittest: whoever has the quickest reflexes that start her off toward meeting the bus door by the time the bus stops will more than likely get on first. Behind her the rest of us group up. And it really is group up, not line up. You don’t line up in Brazil to get on a bus. You get in a cluster and anarchically clamber into the door and up the steps. And if you want to assure your place in the cluster, you can’t give up an inch of space. If you do, that’s just a window for another to jump in front of you. Kindergarteners would cry if someone “cut in line” in such a way. Here, that’s not the case.
Just as with time, as I wrote in the post below, you can’t claim that Brazilians don’t have
“respect” or “regard” for filling space in an orderly fashion. Order might be on the Brazilian flag, but it's not necessarily in their cultural vocabulary. Or, better, we don't share the same idea of order. Like time, space is a cultural impasse between Brazilians and Gringos. We Gringos like our personal bubbles, and we don’t like it when they’re burst. We march through elementary school hallways in straight lines, and we’re scolded if we jump out or cut in front of someone else. When we line up at a lunch counter or to get on a rollercoaster, we will deride and then shun someone with the nerve to jump ahead of those of us who had been patiently waiting.
The first shall always be first, and the last last in America. And perhaps not just physically speaking…
The orderliness of our persons translates into the orderliness we Gringos practice—generally—on the roads. If someone cuts you off, he’s apt to get a horn and a finger. Lane lines are strictly obeyed. It's illegal for motorcycles to pass between lanes of cars. We may not always come to complete stops at stop signs, but only crazies fling themselves halfway into an intersection before proceeding through or making a turn.
In the end, our behavior in going to great pains to order ourselves amongst ourselves within a given space, be it walking, driving, or riding a motorcycle, is based on our mutual respect for one another’s personal bubble, and on our shared manic fear of anarchy.
In Brazil, that personal bubble lies about a millimeter off the surface of your skin. Men and women great each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Both friends and strangers commonly touch you on the arm to emphasize a point their trying to make with you. When I first met my friend Adriano shortly after arriving, I thought that he was gay because of how much he touched my forearm while talking to me. Now that I've become acculturated, I touch him, and other friends, back. Beware friends back home…
Instead of being subconsciously focused entirely on not bursting another’s bubble or wasting time with the formality of lining up for anything, Brazilians are tuned into making efficient use of every last shred of space. That juicy inch in front of me, which I’ve grown up conceding the person just ahead of me, would go to waste if someone just to my left didn’t pounce in to claim it, whether at the bus stop, the copy counter, or the lunch line.
I won’t lie, it’s hard to keep my blood from boiling when this happens, accustomed as I am to my own country’s version of “order and progress.” Two deep breaths and reminding myself about the values of cultural relativism usually do the trick to calm me down. It’s not disrespect I’ve been the victim of. It’s ingenuity. Forming a line immediately before getting on a bus takes twice as long as the Brazilian method. We may actually be too stuffy on this one. The Brazilian way may not be pretty, but it appears to get results.
We're like the Red Coats who quickly learned that they couldn’t fight a war marching in a single-file line, beating drums and blowing bugles, after French and Indians hiding in trees picked them off mercilessly and with ease.
So, when it comes to space, Brazilians may have the edge. But there is one sense of spacial consciousness that I cannot give Brazilians even the slightest bit of cultural relativist sympathy: their practice of filling space vocally. I already wrote about this phenomenon in a previous post.
No other manifestation of my Brazilian culture shock has been so shocking as the impunity with which students converse with one another while a professor or a peer is addressing the class, or when grown adults overtly show that they’d rather not listen to you speak by talking amongst themselves. Professors may hold up a hand and shush the class if the noise gets out of control, but almost always to no avail. Even when one of my most vocal professors screamed over the din of a particular class, pleading for silence, not everyone took her seriously. Some still continued to talk in the back of the room, the so-called fundão. Of what they’re discussing I have no idea; I’m too busy straining my ears to tune into the one channel of Portuguese that actually matters.
Sometimes students will shush their peers when they have an interest in hearing what a prof or another student has to say. But then and only then. These students are just as likely to talk to one another when they don’t have the slightest interest in classroom material.
I am currently taking a course on the political economy of Africa with a professor who is half Greek, half American, yet conducts the course in nearly perfect Portuguese. I gleaned from him that he did his undergrad at Denver University, and so he’s most certainly used to the American classroom behavior of respecting your teachers with silence. If you don’t want to pay attention, you tune out, and the loss is yours alone. You don’t keep fellow students who do give a hoot from enjoying an atmosphere conducive to learning. Hence my empathy for Professor Yeros when he has to clap his hands and scold students a good half-dozen times per class for talking in the back.
Really, that vacuum of silence is to Brazilians students (not all of course, but certainly most, and, as I mentioned above, adults are just as apt to do this) as that inch-wide vacuum of space is for that person next to me wanting to get on the same bus. It has to be filled. Keeping quiet right next to your best friend in the fundão would be a waste of precious talking time. Indeed, life is short, so we should tell the ones we love as soon as we can that we love them. Or that it’s their turn to buy the beer this weekend.
Thus, because this behavior shares cultural roots with the practice of piloting your body around in space, I should probably just accept it as it is. Yet, I can't in all good consciousness do such a thing. I’m sorry, but just because you could do something like talk in the middle of class does not always mean that you should. That’s why we have no smoking signs in certain public areas. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but don’t pollute my lungs along with yours. You smoke in designated areas. You talk to your friends when class is over. The classroom is meant for learning, and any talking should be directed to that purpose alone.
But then again, what do I know? I'm just a Gringo sem graça.
There are certainly times I’ve missed having a car here in BH. Just read my last post and you’ll understand why. While I’m all for a greener world—politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in efficient and clean public transportation, even in sub-100,000-population cities like Iowa City—there is no beating the freedom a car can give us. (Meaning politicians, if you’re listening, the time is now to invest in more fuel-efficient cars and raise CAFE standards well beyond the provisions of 35mpg per fleet by 2020 set by last year’s Energy Independence and Security Act).
Anyway, yes, though it'll mean increasing my carbon footprint, I’ll thoroughly enjoy having my car back. And not only because I won’t have to worry about catching or missing a bus that comes only twice an hour. I’m certainly not going to miss the Brazilian ritual of getting on a bus.
Bus stops in Belo are laid out about every hundred meters or so on main roads throughout the city. Some stops only serve several lines, and sometimes only one line in more remote areas of the city. Others, like most in the heart of downtown, serve 10 to 20 lines. These stops tend to be packed with people. When a desired bus approaches, those who want it to stop stick out their arm to signal it to do so.The elements in this ritual that are certain: which lines stop at which stops, and how to make the bus stop.
The uncertain element: exactly where the bus will come to a stop, due to a combination of the driver’s speed and the volume of both bus and car traffic around the stop at any given time.
Thus, when worn brakes squelch a bus to a stop, chaos is destined to ensue. Let’s say I, along with 7 other strangers, want to get on bus 9410 at a major downtown stop in order to head back toward Coração Eurcarístico and PUC. The bus stops about 10 feet away from where the 8 of us are huddled in a bunch. From here, it’s survival of the fittest: whoever has the quickest reflexes that start her off toward meeting the bus door by the time the bus stops will more than likely get on first. Behind her the rest of us group up. And it really is group up, not line up. You don’t line up in Brazil to get on a bus. You get in a cluster and anarchically clamber into the door and up the steps. And if you want to assure your place in the cluster, you can’t give up an inch of space. If you do, that’s just a window for another to jump in front of you. Kindergarteners would cry if someone “cut in line” in such a way. Here, that’s not the case.
Just as with time, as I wrote in the post below, you can’t claim that Brazilians don’t have
“respect” or “regard” for filling space in an orderly fashion. Order might be on the Brazilian flag, but it's not necessarily in their cultural vocabulary. Or, better, we don't share the same idea of order. Like time, space is a cultural impasse between Brazilians and Gringos. We Gringos like our personal bubbles, and we don’t like it when they’re burst. We march through elementary school hallways in straight lines, and we’re scolded if we jump out or cut in front of someone else. When we line up at a lunch counter or to get on a rollercoaster, we will deride and then shun someone with the nerve to jump ahead of those of us who had been patiently waiting.The first shall always be first, and the last last in America. And perhaps not just physically speaking…
The orderliness of our persons translates into the orderliness we Gringos practice—generally—on the roads. If someone cuts you off, he’s apt to get a horn and a finger. Lane lines are strictly obeyed. It's illegal for motorcycles to pass between lanes of cars. We may not always come to complete stops at stop signs, but only crazies fling themselves halfway into an intersection before proceeding through or making a turn.
In the end, our behavior in going to great pains to order ourselves amongst ourselves within a given space, be it walking, driving, or riding a motorcycle, is based on our mutual respect for one another’s personal bubble, and on our shared manic fear of anarchy.
In Brazil, that personal bubble lies about a millimeter off the surface of your skin. Men and women great each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Both friends and strangers commonly touch you on the arm to emphasize a point their trying to make with you. When I first met my friend Adriano shortly after arriving, I thought that he was gay because of how much he touched my forearm while talking to me. Now that I've become acculturated, I touch him, and other friends, back. Beware friends back home…
Instead of being subconsciously focused entirely on not bursting another’s bubble or wasting time with the formality of lining up for anything, Brazilians are tuned into making efficient use of every last shred of space. That juicy inch in front of me, which I’ve grown up conceding the person just ahead of me, would go to waste if someone just to my left didn’t pounce in to claim it, whether at the bus stop, the copy counter, or the lunch line.
I won’t lie, it’s hard to keep my blood from boiling when this happens, accustomed as I am to my own country’s version of “order and progress.” Two deep breaths and reminding myself about the values of cultural relativism usually do the trick to calm me down. It’s not disrespect I’ve been the victim of. It’s ingenuity. Forming a line immediately before getting on a bus takes twice as long as the Brazilian method. We may actually be too stuffy on this one. The Brazilian way may not be pretty, but it appears to get results.
We're like the Red Coats who quickly learned that they couldn’t fight a war marching in a single-file line, beating drums and blowing bugles, after French and Indians hiding in trees picked them off mercilessly and with ease.
So, when it comes to space, Brazilians may have the edge. But there is one sense of spacial consciousness that I cannot give Brazilians even the slightest bit of cultural relativist sympathy: their practice of filling space vocally. I already wrote about this phenomenon in a previous post.
No other manifestation of my Brazilian culture shock has been so shocking as the impunity with which students converse with one another while a professor or a peer is addressing the class, or when grown adults overtly show that they’d rather not listen to you speak by talking amongst themselves. Professors may hold up a hand and shush the class if the noise gets out of control, but almost always to no avail. Even when one of my most vocal professors screamed over the din of a particular class, pleading for silence, not everyone took her seriously. Some still continued to talk in the back of the room, the so-called fundão. Of what they’re discussing I have no idea; I’m too busy straining my ears to tune into the one channel of Portuguese that actually matters.
Sometimes students will shush their peers when they have an interest in hearing what a prof or another student has to say. But then and only then. These students are just as likely to talk to one another when they don’t have the slightest interest in classroom material.
I am currently taking a course on the political economy of Africa with a professor who is half Greek, half American, yet conducts the course in nearly perfect Portuguese. I gleaned from him that he did his undergrad at Denver University, and so he’s most certainly used to the American classroom behavior of respecting your teachers with silence. If you don’t want to pay attention, you tune out, and the loss is yours alone. You don’t keep fellow students who do give a hoot from enjoying an atmosphere conducive to learning. Hence my empathy for Professor Yeros when he has to clap his hands and scold students a good half-dozen times per class for talking in the back.
Really, that vacuum of silence is to Brazilians students (not all of course, but certainly most, and, as I mentioned above, adults are just as apt to do this) as that inch-wide vacuum of space is for that person next to me wanting to get on the same bus. It has to be filled. Keeping quiet right next to your best friend in the fundão would be a waste of precious talking time. Indeed, life is short, so we should tell the ones we love as soon as we can that we love them. Or that it’s their turn to buy the beer this weekend.
Thus, because this behavior shares cultural roots with the practice of piloting your body around in space, I should probably just accept it as it is. Yet, I can't in all good consciousness do such a thing. I’m sorry, but just because you could do something like talk in the middle of class does not always mean that you should. That’s why we have no smoking signs in certain public areas. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, but don’t pollute my lungs along with yours. You smoke in designated areas. You talk to your friends when class is over. The classroom is meant for learning, and any talking should be directed to that purpose alone.
But then again, what do I know? I'm just a Gringo sem graça.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
On Brazilian Time
There are some things in life that will always keep this planet a house divided.
Many of humanity's thousands of cultural wedges are petty and cause us to simply chide and tease each other: Coke vs. Pepsi, Iowa vs. Iowa State, the chicken vs. the egg. Others lead us to take up arms: pro-life vs. pro-choice, Israel vs. Palestine, Shiite vs Sunni.
And then there are those culturally-constructed hurdles that we can laugh and joke about when we find them in our way, but leave us nonetheless frustrated when we struggle to get over them. They are not so serious as to make us want to kill each other, but there are times when they can make even the most sensitive cultural-relativist harbor an ethnocentric thought or two. In a nutshell, whatever leads to a feeling of culture shock falls under this category.
Between Brazilians and Gringos there are several such barriers that make cultural rapprochement difficult if not virtually impossible. I plan to focus the next several posts on such impediments, starting today with one of the most evident: time.
The snag lies in our respective appraisals of a minute. We manic Americans inflate a minute's value. "Time is money" is the metaphor we live by. We "spend time" with friends. We "budget our time," lest we "waste it," and the most expensive of all minutes to spend or waste is a New York one.
In Brazil, you "passa tempo" (pass time), as if the act of moving from one minute to the next were as natural as breathing, and time itself as abundant as air. Indeed, for those looking for the antidote to the New York minute, Brazil in general, and the state of Bahia in particular, is the place to go. Two years ago when I studied in the city of Salvador (in Bahia) a bunch of us students ordered a round of beers at a bar on an island that our program was spending the weekend at. The entire island had been in a blackout all day (not a rare occurrence we found out), and we begged the server to find us some cold beers, not expecting at all that they would even exist due to the power outage. "Um minuto baiano," he lilted in reply, "Just a Bahian minute." About 10 minutes later we got our beers. And yes, amazingly, they were cold.
Good things come to those who wait. An axiom for cultural reconciliation?
In the U.S., everything starts when we say it starts: classes, work shifts, events, the end of happy hour. (The one exception of course is that bohemian jazz hole in every major city where a gig always starts 30 minutes late or more.) We get marked tardy if we arrive to class so much as 5 minutes late, and now businesses have made computers that will prevent a cubicle-dweller from logging in if she doesn't do it by 8am sharp. Should she get to her desk at 8:05, she'll have to confront her supervisor, who will log her in using a special supervisor's password before writing her up for being late to work.
In Brazil, on the other hand, your 7am class won't start until 7:15 on average, and some professors may not even show up until 7:30. A party doesn't start at 9:00, rather more like 10:00 or 10:15. This extra allotment (whoa, easy there, metaphor!) of time functions as something of a cushion, allowing people to collectively move relaxedly from one place and time to another in healthy accordance with their customary pace, as well as accounting for any unforeseen obstacles that could arise: traffic jams, running into an old friend, etc. This custom is not necessarily a conscious action. Sometimes Brazilians just lose track of time completely. One night I was out with Ricardo and some friends, and by the time midnight rolled around Ricardo turned to me and asked, "Hey Brett, what time is it?" When I told him midnight he was shocked that it wasn't in fact 11:00 as his internal clock had presumed.
Yet Brazilian tempo isn't uniform across the whole fabric of society, and this disparity can lead to conflict. Buses are a good example. A city bus in Belo Horizonte will follow its itinerary to the minute. During the week this isn't that big of an issue; if you miss your 8:10 bus due to an unhurried breakfast, you can still catch another in the next 8 to 15 minutes. On weekends, however, many buses only pass by certain stops once or twice an hour, behooving Brazilians to put a little more pep in their step, which can prove a to be struggle, as I experienced on a Saturday evening a little over a month ago.
Five friends and I had decided to go see a movie downtown (movies also are exempt from adhering to Brazilian time), and the only bus that would take us from near my apartment to the movie theater passed by only once every half hour. Approaching the time when the last bus that would get us to the theater on time was to pass by, my Brazilian friends were still lounging around, watching TV and chatting. I had to play the part of the annoying American: "We're gonna have to leave in 5 minutes," I announced to everyone. Really it was more like 10, but I adjusted accordingly. My friends got up leisurely and declared their need to brush their teeth and go to the bathroom before heading out. One friend casually talked to his brother while brushing his teeth, making the process last almost the entire 5 minutes I had "afforded" him (there's that metaphor again...). Finally walking out the door with what I thought was about a minute to spare before the bus would come - and with a 3 minute walk to the bus stop ahead of us - I seemed to be the only one worried that we would miss the bus and thus miss the movie. As it turned out, the bus arrived about 10 seconds after we did, and to my carefree friends it was as if this stroke of sheer luck was ordained by the natural and proper flow of time. Had we arrived 20 seconds later, it wouldn't have been our fault. "We were just following our natural rhythm; it's the bus company's fault for not offering more buses on a Saturday," my friends would have complained.
One would think that after a little over 7 months living amid this climate I would have grown accustomed to it. I sort of have. Old cultural customs are hard to break. Gringoisms still dominate my identity, preventing full Brazilianization. Take this past weekend for example.
Sunday, September 7th, Brazil celebrated its 186th Independence Day. My friend Adriano and I had planned to meet up downtown in the morning to take in the parade commemorating the holiday. Adriano told me to meet him at 8:30, which, of course, meant something closer to 8:45 or 9:00, said my Brazilianized side. Working backward from 8:45 or 9:00, my Gringo side came up with the following plan: Of the 4 buses that I could take from my neighborhood to downtown, I would have to find out which one stopped a few blocks from my place between 8:15 and 8:30, as the trip would take 30 to 40 minutes depending on the route (there it is again... for us trips take time, for Brazilians they demora (last) time). I consulted a timetable online and found the perfect plan: Bus 4111, stopping at 8:20, 35 minute ride. Brilliant!
In very Gringo fashion I left the apartment that morning at 8:10, giving myself plenty of time (yet again...) just to be sure I didn't miss my bus. It just so happened that as I was walking out of the entrance to my building, I saw the Sunday edition of the Estado de Minas newspaper lying on my neighbor's doorstep, and on the front page was an article about foreigners living in Minas Gerais. My impulsiveness kicked in; I just had to buy a copy and read about how my fellow foreign brethren were faring here. The nearest banco de jornal (kiosks on the street that sell a variety of newspapers and magazines) was about twice as far away as the nearest bus stop, yet it itself was only half a block from the next nearest stop. I calculated on the spot that I had enough time (...) to walk to the kiosk (6 or 7 minutes), pick up a paper, and walk to the nearby stop in time to catch Bus 4111.
By the time I got to the banco my watch read 8:18. I approached the owner of the stand, a short, squat, hunchbacked man with a scrunched face and dark yet graying comb-over, as he was undoing bundles of the day's newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, O Tempo, Super, and of course, "Um Estado de Minas por favor!"
"Um momentinho," came the little man's reply. Or at least that's how I perceived his mumbly , heavier-than-normal Mineiro accent. He proceeded to slowly lift up one bundle after another, read the invoice, comment on something incredulous about it, and arrange the papers on his stacks. I looked at my watch. 8:19. Within a few minutes 4111 would pass by, and although I was within 100 feet of the stop, I wouldn't be able to see the bus until it had continued on its way due to a building blocking my view of the stop. In other words, I wouldn't be able to wait for 1) my little friend to sell me a paper, or 2) the bus to show itself and prompt me to ditch the effort at the last second and run to catch it. I tried to take control of the situation:
"Could you just grab an Estado de Minas for me please? I'm kind of in a hurry to catch my bus."
In Brazil, "hurry" is a dirty word. Using it was a last resort. The little man shot a glance at me, shook his head, shrugged, and said something in completely unintelligible mineirês. Probably something to the effect of, "I'm going as fast as I can, let me do my job, I've been doing this the exact same way for years, you ain't gonna change me, missing the bus is your problem." I looked at my watch again. 8:20. If I bailed now the worst that would happen would be my not having a paper to read on the 40-minute bus ride, a paper that I could always pick up later. If I waited another minute, I risked missing the bus, a good chunk of the parade, and having an even grumpier newspaper stand owner on my hands. I gringoed out, erring on the side of caution. "Obrigado," I said, "I'll stop by later." An unintelligible goodbye shot back as I was already walking away.
Astonishingly, the bus didn't come for another 5 minutes. Thus, I probably could've waited for my paper, but then again, hindsight is 20-20.
Instead of reading about foreigners living in Minas, I used the 40-minute trip (one last metaphor sighting) to reflect on the life of this particular foreigner and what had just happened to him over the course of the last 5 minutes, the last hour, the last 7 months. In the U.S., treating a customer as this newspaper stand owner had treated me would be the first ticket to losing your newspaper stand. Time is money. Asking a customer to wait on you for the sake of routine amounts to wasting time, wasting money. Yet maybe there's something to be said about routine; if routine means following a healthy rhythm of life, and a healthy rhythm of life leads to greater longevity, then perhaps my not receiving my paper that morning was a good thing for reasons greater than that very moment: this man would live longer, he and his friends and family would be happier, as would the friends and family of his friends and family, and so on and so forth. Strange logic? Fuzzy math? Definitely. Such a philosophy is as foreign to us Americans as eating large lunches of meat, rice and beans and taking a sesta (Portuguese for siesta) afterward - we'd be wasting time eating anything more than a sandwich, an apple, a Coke and some chips, which would only keep us from stoically withstanding our 30-minute or hour-long lunch breaks. In Brazil, such cultural behavior may not be good for business, but it preserves the fabric of Brazilian society as well as (and perhaps better than?) our on-demand culture preserves ours.
As for my elaborate plan this morning, it was further proof that any Brazilianization of my Gringo mind was hopeless. While I had adapted to the habits of my hosts, it was that adaptation itself - or rather my particular calculating way of adapting - that kept me from truly being baptized Brazilian. To be perfectly native, I'd have to leave the house at 8:30 and show up at the bus stop with the vague hope that the right bus would soon come. If it didn't, I'd take solace knowing that one would come eventually, and that I'd get there when I got there.
I won't lie, I've missed American efficiency over the last 7 months. Following the like-clockwork rhythm of society, as if you yourself were a sprocket in the works, may seem cold and inhuman, especially after living this long outside of it. Yet that is my home, and I could never be parted from it.
I think we've reached the time when the sterility of pure post-modern cultural relativism has become fruitless and inutile. We can deconstruct a culture and say that it's different from ours because of x, y, and z. But to what end? To simply be satisfied with the knowledge that it's different? Maybe academics can afford that luxury, but the rest of us need to understand that in this ever more connected world there is so much we can not only learn from one another, but allow to change one another for the sake of improving our own societies and strengthening the ties that bind one culture to the next. It would be easy for us Americans to say that Brazilians need to respect the value of a minute if they ever hope to advance economically to our level. I'm not going to deny that that's not true. But what we haughty Americans must also do is respect the Brazilian value of a minute. The efficiency of our society doesn't have to come with a more stressful marking of time, nor the heart disease that follows. Does that mean allowing students to show up late to class should they choose? Not necessarily. If anything, we show up on time for class out of respect more for education than for the sake of being on time. What I believe we can take from the Brazilian concept of time is the ability to laugh and be happy even when efficiency breaks down. When traffic makes us late for work. When it takes us a minute longer than normal to get our morning pick-me-up from our local coffeeshop. We shouldn't get mad at ourselves when finishing the last page of that gripping novel makes us miss our bus and "sets us back" 15 minutes.
Time may indeed be money. But it can be so much more. It can be the key to a happier, healthier life, if used wisely. If used Brazilianly.
Many of humanity's thousands of cultural wedges are petty and cause us to simply chide and tease each other: Coke vs. Pepsi, Iowa vs. Iowa State, the chicken vs. the egg. Others lead us to take up arms: pro-life vs. pro-choice, Israel vs. Palestine, Shiite vs Sunni.
And then there are those culturally-constructed hurdles that we can laugh and joke about when we find them in our way, but leave us nonetheless frustrated when we struggle to get over them. They are not so serious as to make us want to kill each other, but there are times when they can make even the most sensitive cultural-relativist harbor an ethnocentric thought or two. In a nutshell, whatever leads to a feeling of culture shock falls under this category.
Between Brazilians and Gringos there are several such barriers that make cultural rapprochement difficult if not virtually impossible. I plan to focus the next several posts on such impediments, starting today with one of the most evident: time.
The snag lies in our respective appraisals of a minute. We manic Americans inflate a minute's value. "Time is money" is the metaphor we live by. We "spend time" with friends. We "budget our time," lest we "waste it," and the most expensive of all minutes to spend or waste is a New York one.
In Brazil, you "passa tempo" (pass time), as if the act of moving from one minute to the next were as natural as breathing, and time itself as abundant as air. Indeed, for those looking for the antidote to the New York minute, Brazil in general, and the state of Bahia in particular, is the place to go. Two years ago when I studied in the city of Salvador (in Bahia) a bunch of us students ordered a round of beers at a bar on an island that our program was spending the weekend at. The entire island had been in a blackout all day (not a rare occurrence we found out), and we begged the server to find us some cold beers, not expecting at all that they would even exist due to the power outage. "Um minuto baiano," he lilted in reply, "Just a Bahian minute." About 10 minutes later we got our beers. And yes, amazingly, they were cold.
Good things come to those who wait. An axiom for cultural reconciliation?
In the U.S., everything starts when we say it starts: classes, work shifts, events, the end of happy hour. (The one exception of course is that bohemian jazz hole in every major city where a gig always starts 30 minutes late or more.) We get marked tardy if we arrive to class so much as 5 minutes late, and now businesses have made computers that will prevent a cubicle-dweller from logging in if she doesn't do it by 8am sharp. Should she get to her desk at 8:05, she'll have to confront her supervisor, who will log her in using a special supervisor's password before writing her up for being late to work.
In Brazil, on the other hand, your 7am class won't start until 7:15 on average, and some professors may not even show up until 7:30. A party doesn't start at 9:00, rather more like 10:00 or 10:15. This extra allotment (whoa, easy there, metaphor!) of time functions as something of a cushion, allowing people to collectively move relaxedly from one place and time to another in healthy accordance with their customary pace, as well as accounting for any unforeseen obstacles that could arise: traffic jams, running into an old friend, etc. This custom is not necessarily a conscious action. Sometimes Brazilians just lose track of time completely. One night I was out with Ricardo and some friends, and by the time midnight rolled around Ricardo turned to me and asked, "Hey Brett, what time is it?" When I told him midnight he was shocked that it wasn't in fact 11:00 as his internal clock had presumed.
Yet Brazilian tempo isn't uniform across the whole fabric of society, and this disparity can lead to conflict. Buses are a good example. A city bus in Belo Horizonte will follow its itinerary to the minute. During the week this isn't that big of an issue; if you miss your 8:10 bus due to an unhurried breakfast, you can still catch another in the next 8 to 15 minutes. On weekends, however, many buses only pass by certain stops once or twice an hour, behooving Brazilians to put a little more pep in their step, which can prove a to be struggle, as I experienced on a Saturday evening a little over a month ago.
Five friends and I had decided to go see a movie downtown (movies also are exempt from adhering to Brazilian time), and the only bus that would take us from near my apartment to the movie theater passed by only once every half hour. Approaching the time when the last bus that would get us to the theater on time was to pass by, my Brazilian friends were still lounging around, watching TV and chatting. I had to play the part of the annoying American: "We're gonna have to leave in 5 minutes," I announced to everyone. Really it was more like 10, but I adjusted accordingly. My friends got up leisurely and declared their need to brush their teeth and go to the bathroom before heading out. One friend casually talked to his brother while brushing his teeth, making the process last almost the entire 5 minutes I had "afforded" him (there's that metaphor again...). Finally walking out the door with what I thought was about a minute to spare before the bus would come - and with a 3 minute walk to the bus stop ahead of us - I seemed to be the only one worried that we would miss the bus and thus miss the movie. As it turned out, the bus arrived about 10 seconds after we did, and to my carefree friends it was as if this stroke of sheer luck was ordained by the natural and proper flow of time. Had we arrived 20 seconds later, it wouldn't have been our fault. "We were just following our natural rhythm; it's the bus company's fault for not offering more buses on a Saturday," my friends would have complained.
One would think that after a little over 7 months living amid this climate I would have grown accustomed to it. I sort of have. Old cultural customs are hard to break. Gringoisms still dominate my identity, preventing full Brazilianization. Take this past weekend for example.
Sunday, September 7th, Brazil celebrated its 186th Independence Day. My friend Adriano and I had planned to meet up downtown in the morning to take in the parade commemorating the holiday. Adriano told me to meet him at 8:30, which, of course, meant something closer to 8:45 or 9:00, said my Brazilianized side. Working backward from 8:45 or 9:00, my Gringo side came up with the following plan: Of the 4 buses that I could take from my neighborhood to downtown, I would have to find out which one stopped a few blocks from my place between 8:15 and 8:30, as the trip would take 30 to 40 minutes depending on the route (there it is again... for us trips take time, for Brazilians they demora (last) time). I consulted a timetable online and found the perfect plan: Bus 4111, stopping at 8:20, 35 minute ride. Brilliant!
In very Gringo fashion I left the apartment that morning at 8:10, giving myself plenty of time (yet again...) just to be sure I didn't miss my bus. It just so happened that as I was walking out of the entrance to my building, I saw the Sunday edition of the Estado de Minas newspaper lying on my neighbor's doorstep, and on the front page was an article about foreigners living in Minas Gerais. My impulsiveness kicked in; I just had to buy a copy and read about how my fellow foreign brethren were faring here. The nearest banco de jornal (kiosks on the street that sell a variety of newspapers and magazines) was about twice as far away as the nearest bus stop, yet it itself was only half a block from the next nearest stop. I calculated on the spot that I had enough time (...) to walk to the kiosk (6 or 7 minutes), pick up a paper, and walk to the nearby stop in time to catch Bus 4111.
By the time I got to the banco my watch read 8:18. I approached the owner of the stand, a short, squat, hunchbacked man with a scrunched face and dark yet graying comb-over, as he was undoing bundles of the day's newspapers: Folha de São Paulo, O Tempo, Super, and of course, "Um Estado de Minas por favor!"
"Um momentinho," came the little man's reply. Or at least that's how I perceived his mumbly , heavier-than-normal Mineiro accent. He proceeded to slowly lift up one bundle after another, read the invoice, comment on something incredulous about it, and arrange the papers on his stacks. I looked at my watch. 8:19. Within a few minutes 4111 would pass by, and although I was within 100 feet of the stop, I wouldn't be able to see the bus until it had continued on its way due to a building blocking my view of the stop. In other words, I wouldn't be able to wait for 1) my little friend to sell me a paper, or 2) the bus to show itself and prompt me to ditch the effort at the last second and run to catch it. I tried to take control of the situation:
"Could you just grab an Estado de Minas for me please? I'm kind of in a hurry to catch my bus."
In Brazil, "hurry" is a dirty word. Using it was a last resort. The little man shot a glance at me, shook his head, shrugged, and said something in completely unintelligible mineirês. Probably something to the effect of, "I'm going as fast as I can, let me do my job, I've been doing this the exact same way for years, you ain't gonna change me, missing the bus is your problem." I looked at my watch again. 8:20. If I bailed now the worst that would happen would be my not having a paper to read on the 40-minute bus ride, a paper that I could always pick up later. If I waited another minute, I risked missing the bus, a good chunk of the parade, and having an even grumpier newspaper stand owner on my hands. I gringoed out, erring on the side of caution. "Obrigado," I said, "I'll stop by later." An unintelligible goodbye shot back as I was already walking away.
Astonishingly, the bus didn't come for another 5 minutes. Thus, I probably could've waited for my paper, but then again, hindsight is 20-20.
Instead of reading about foreigners living in Minas, I used the 40-minute trip (one last metaphor sighting) to reflect on the life of this particular foreigner and what had just happened to him over the course of the last 5 minutes, the last hour, the last 7 months. In the U.S., treating a customer as this newspaper stand owner had treated me would be the first ticket to losing your newspaper stand. Time is money. Asking a customer to wait on you for the sake of routine amounts to wasting time, wasting money. Yet maybe there's something to be said about routine; if routine means following a healthy rhythm of life, and a healthy rhythm of life leads to greater longevity, then perhaps my not receiving my paper that morning was a good thing for reasons greater than that very moment: this man would live longer, he and his friends and family would be happier, as would the friends and family of his friends and family, and so on and so forth. Strange logic? Fuzzy math? Definitely. Such a philosophy is as foreign to us Americans as eating large lunches of meat, rice and beans and taking a sesta (Portuguese for siesta) afterward - we'd be wasting time eating anything more than a sandwich, an apple, a Coke and some chips, which would only keep us from stoically withstanding our 30-minute or hour-long lunch breaks. In Brazil, such cultural behavior may not be good for business, but it preserves the fabric of Brazilian society as well as (and perhaps better than?) our on-demand culture preserves ours.
As for my elaborate plan this morning, it was further proof that any Brazilianization of my Gringo mind was hopeless. While I had adapted to the habits of my hosts, it was that adaptation itself - or rather my particular calculating way of adapting - that kept me from truly being baptized Brazilian. To be perfectly native, I'd have to leave the house at 8:30 and show up at the bus stop with the vague hope that the right bus would soon come. If it didn't, I'd take solace knowing that one would come eventually, and that I'd get there when I got there.
I won't lie, I've missed American efficiency over the last 7 months. Following the like-clockwork rhythm of society, as if you yourself were a sprocket in the works, may seem cold and inhuman, especially after living this long outside of it. Yet that is my home, and I could never be parted from it.
I think we've reached the time when the sterility of pure post-modern cultural relativism has become fruitless and inutile. We can deconstruct a culture and say that it's different from ours because of x, y, and z. But to what end? To simply be satisfied with the knowledge that it's different? Maybe academics can afford that luxury, but the rest of us need to understand that in this ever more connected world there is so much we can not only learn from one another, but allow to change one another for the sake of improving our own societies and strengthening the ties that bind one culture to the next. It would be easy for us Americans to say that Brazilians need to respect the value of a minute if they ever hope to advance economically to our level. I'm not going to deny that that's not true. But what we haughty Americans must also do is respect the Brazilian value of a minute. The efficiency of our society doesn't have to come with a more stressful marking of time, nor the heart disease that follows. Does that mean allowing students to show up late to class should they choose? Not necessarily. If anything, we show up on time for class out of respect more for education than for the sake of being on time. What I believe we can take from the Brazilian concept of time is the ability to laugh and be happy even when efficiency breaks down. When traffic makes us late for work. When it takes us a minute longer than normal to get our morning pick-me-up from our local coffeeshop. We shouldn't get mad at ourselves when finishing the last page of that gripping novel makes us miss our bus and "sets us back" 15 minutes.
Time may indeed be money. But it can be so much more. It can be the key to a happier, healthier life, if used wisely. If used Brazilianly.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Projeto Rondon
The town of Jeribá is little more than a large cursive ‘T’ on the face of the planet. A main arterial dirt road connects the top of the ‘T’ with Dois de Abril to the east and Palmópolis to the west. The trunk of the ‘T’ is a 15%-or-so grade hill (i.e. pretty darn steep) paved with jagged cobblestones, linking the “center” of Jeribá at the bottom with its school at the top. Even from halfway up, the view from the hill is breathtaking: mile after mile of rolling green mounds, too small to be called mountains, too large to be hills. Further off to the north, a trio of giant odd-shaped rocks juts out to reign over the landscape. In the late afternoon, when the sun gives off its daily hour of rich, soft, indirect light, the view becomes ten times more photogenic.
Just before the 5:30pm Brazilian winter sunset, our band of 16 “Rondonistas” left an afternoon of sex ed classes for adolescents and general health classes for Jeribá’s elderly at the school at the summit and headed downhill toward our modest lodging for the day near the intersection of Jeribá’s ‘T’. The deep azure sky specked with orange and purple clouds hovering over an ever-darkening terrain made us pull out our cameras and capture what would be our last sunset in Jeribá.
What a spectacular view this town is blessed with.
That was my first thought. A strange thought at that for a town that has next to nothing, that sustains itself (barely) through small-time agriculture and exporting workers to the industries of São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. Jeribá isn’t even a town; it, along with its sister Dois de Abril, is a mere district of Palmópolis, a metropolis in microcosm. All political and virtually all of the scant economic power is concentrated in this latter town of 7 or 8 thousand, 10 times larger than satellite Jeribá and 4 times that of Dois de Abril.
As the countryside grew darker, so too did the luster of the view from Jeribá’s hill. My mind drifted to earlier that morning. There, after several hours of fun and games with Jeribá’s kids at the school, 9-year-old Débora, her hair shorn like a boy's to a mere couple of inches because of a bout of head lice, remarked how hungry she was. A fellow Rondonista told her not to worry, she’d be heading home soon for lunch. Débora sadly replied, “But there’s no food at home.” The image of this poor girl walking up Jeribá’s enormous hill on an empty stomach, only to find a school with only so much potential to enrich her mind and classmates only too eager to make fun of her haircut that would be beautiful anywhere else in the world but traditional rural Brazil, made the view from the top of the hill at once turn ugly. What if Jeribaenses never even bothered to spend a few seconds of their day to take in the vista? Who’s to say they didn’t deliberately ignore it, seeing it as a curse, beauty forever mocking their plight? Who were we to suddenly gain the right to appropriate this view in little digital boxes?
How did we get so lucky to be the ones wearing the T-shirts with "Projeto Rondon" written on them, taking views like Jeribá's as a sort of "payment" for our volunteerism?
The Projeto Rondon is named after Brazilian Army Marshall Cândido Rondon, whose life and mission spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. Rondon, of indigenous descent, is renowned for his many explorations of the Brazilian hinterland—including a famous expedition to the Amazon with U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt in 1914—to get to know Brazil’s numerous indigenous tribes and help to integrate them into modern Brazilian society. One of his mottos, used today by the Projeto, was “Integrar para não entregar,” “Integrate, don’t give up.” Give up a people, give up a land, give up the dream of a country united in its forward march marked by order and progress.
The first time university
students were sent in Rondon's footsteps to better understand their diverse, continent-sized country was in July of 1967, when 30 such students from Rio were flown by military aircraft to (appropriately) Rondônia, the western Brazilian state named after Rondon whose inhabitants live isolated behind the curtain of the Amazon Rainforest. Further joint university-military missions (keep in mind this was at the height of military rule in Brazil, which lasted from 1964-1985) continued sporadically until the mid-70s, when the Projeto was lost to the ever-changing and always tense political atmosphere of the military state. Further missions of integration would have to be made under other auspices until the Projeto Rondon was officially revived in 2003, the first students intervening in January of 2005 in the town of Tabatinga, located on the border with Colombia in far western Amazonas state.
The present-day Projeto continues Rondon's goal of integrating the far-flung peoples of Brazil. The Projeto's flagship programs are found at the national level, where students from the developed southern and southeastern regions of the country connect with their compatriots in the less developed northeast and north. Teams are made up of students from a range of "majors" (to use American terminology), and through a variety of workshops these teams share their collective knowledge and experience with health, literacy, business, valuing and preserving culture, leadership skills, and much more with targeted communities.
But these communities aren't limited to those hidden in the rainforest a thousand miles away from the sands of Ipanema or the hustle and bustle of the Avenida Paulista. Even within the most well-developed states in Brazil's southern half, dozens of poor, rural municipalities exist far outside the orbit of an industrialized metropolis. Thus the need for the Projeto at the state level.
The first interventions in Minas Gerais embarked in July of 2005 for communities with Human Development Indexes under 0.7. Interventions followed in December of 2005, and July and December of 2006, and this year-and-a-half span saw over 1,800 PUC students, educators and staff members bring the project to 53 Mineiro communities, touching the lives of between 50,000 and 60,000 people per trip. Ventures have continued semi-annually since.
I first found out about the Projeto Rondon at an informal get-together for PUC's international students all the way back in February, where a woman involved in the Projeto's administration gave a short presentation. It took about a month for my piqued interest to turn into action. Feeling that my time on this Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship was lacking a service side to its ambassadorialship, I decided to attend a more detailed informational meeting. Alongside about 500 fellow PUC students, I became sold on the Projeto's mission of bringing integration and solidarity to rural Minas, and the opportunity it offered me to get to see a side of Brazil that I would otherwise never have seen.
After sacrificing 6 of our Saturday afternoons throughout the Brazilian fall semester to prepare for our two weeks as Rondonistas through a series drudging workshops, teams of around 15 students and a coordinator were assembled literally on the eve of departure. For our team of 16, the first few hours on a winding 14-hour bus ride had to suffice for introductions and first impressions before everyone leaned
their seats back and tried to catch a few uncomfortable winks. Our team comprised of PUC students from health sciences to social sciences, biology and psychology, engineering and law. The youngest was an 18-year-old freshman, the oldest our coordinator Ana Luísa, a recent PUC grad in psychology and a mere 25. Our destination: Palmópolis, a rural community in the northeast corner of Minas Gerais that was officially established as a municipality in 1992, finally giving its inhabitants, mainly temporarily contracted workers in cattle fields and banana groves, a place on the map. Palmópolis, along with other targeted communities, was chosen for its low HDI score: 0.615. What does that mean? Palmópolis is closer to “less developed” than “highly developed” for a variety of reasons: poor education, lack of basic infrastructure, low GDP per capita, limited access to healthcare, among others.
Ana Luísa had been a Rondonista in Palmópolis before, and after graduating college she lived and worked there for nearly a year. Her experience in Palmópolis, particularly her contacts with those in positions of power, proved invaluable. In a country where mobility is based far more on who you know than what you know, her tireless efforts to talk with just the person who could facilitate our every action made the difference, in my mind, between a successful mission and a potential failure.
Weary from lack of sleep and bruised from every bump of the final three hours of the ride on a dirt road, we nonetheless donned brightly colored costumes and, like a band of traveling minstrels, paraded through the streets of Palmópolis singing, banging drums, and making our presence known. After about an hour, children began to follow us a la the Pied Piper toward the main plaza, at which point songs and games ensued. After a few hours of singing and playing, more tired than at any point so far that day, we headed back to our headquarters, a social services shelter with Spartan facilities, and wrapped up the day with a series of meetings to prepare for the days ahead, as well as “get-to-know-each-other” games that made up for what was lacking in several waking hours on a bus. We ate our first of two weeks’ worth of delicious, home-cooked, natural and organic meals that we’d wolf down ravenously, and then fell asleep together on the same hard, cold, tiled floor almost the very second we laid prostrate on our inch-thick mats.
Days two and three involved walking up and down the sinuous, spaghetti-bowl streets of Palmópolis,
knocking on doors and taking surveys of the town’s inhabitants regarding their access to basic utilities and their monthly income. Only a handful, we found, had no electricity. Slightly a few more had no running water, and hardly anyone enjoyed a sanitary sewage system. As for monthly income, the highest recorded was around 3000 reais (~$1800), belonging to a local government minister (the mayor was unavailable for interview—surely his would have broken this mark). The lowest was around 60 reais (~$38), from a widow who cooked the rice and beans bought with this pension check with water from the river, the same river that acted as the local sewer and laundromat.
More than once, the divide between “developed” interviewers and “developing” interviewees became cause for the latter to lash out at us with an indignant “what are you doing here?”, or “we have nothing here, and how are you going to help us out?”. Near the end of each day, our band would meet for an hour to decompress from dozens of interviews, share our perspectives of the town, and tie tighter the bonds we had been continuing to weave together. The evening would be capped off—as would be the case for the remainder of our days as Rondonistas—with a three-hour-long rotation to take a much-coveted shower.
On day 4, a Thursday, our interaction with the people of Palmópolis began in earnest. The morning began with a series of games at the local school: soccer, hopscotch, peteca (an indigenous game played like badminton, only you use your hands, see photo at left), and, an American classic, tossing around a Frisbee. In one of the last games, played mainly with smaller children, the de facto motto of our intervention was born: “Todo mundo ganhou!” “Everybody wins!”
Our hope with the morning of games was to rile the kids of Palmópolis up enough so that they’d be somewhat calm for more serious activities in the afternoon: talks about familial relations and storytelling and literacy activities. Not to be. The same kids from the morning were twice as rambunctious, chasing each other and climbing trees and distracting those few who wanted to participate. From American eyes, it suddenly became easy to see where lay the roots of a society that has minimal respect for law and where discipline is toothless. Meanwhile, a second contingent of our team was working with Palmópolis’ elderly on how to properly exercise in their twilight years. In our meeting later that evening the discussions generated by both halves of the team revealed yet another divide taking place all over Brazilian society—really, all over the world: the age divide. Kids solely seeking new and better means for stimulation have no patience for the repositories of wisdom, traditions and values, stories of a hard yet glory-filled past. What would the wild and crazy kids from today’s activities have to tell their grandkids 60 years from now? How they ran around and hit each other, then went home and watched cartoons?
The morning of day 5 introduced us to a group of kids in whom seeds of tradition were being carefully planted. Our planned activity for the morning was to show a film for the kids of Palmópolis, with the objectives being to 1) pull kids off the streets, and 2) give less fortunate children the opportunity to see a movie they may never have the chance to see. The movie: The Incredibles. The locale: Palmópolis’ Casa da Cultura, the House of Culture. There, along with a handful of kids we had coaxed from kicking dirt in the street, we bore witness to one of the bright spots of the town: the children’s Afro-Dance and Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) class. We let the class continue for an hour or so, about half its normal time, and even participated in some of the dance steps and percussion. At the end of the class, after the 20 or so kids had gracefully flowed through dance after dance, the three teachers had the chorus of students shout out the class rules:
1. Respect your teachers
2. Respect your classmates
3. Don’t fight
4. Don’t skip class
5. Respect all the mestres (Capoeira masters) that came before you
I wonder if one of these kids will grow up to write the book "Everything I Every Need to Know, I Learned in Afro-Dance Class."
The class went to wash up, and then came back and sat down to watch the movie. The transition seemed all too strange. Don’t get me wrong, The Incredibles is a fantastic movie, and I do believe showing it had the potential to expand the budding imaginations of all the kids in that room. But to cut into a class that taught these kids the values of their own cultural heritage, only to show them a film that had nothing to do with their lives, that didn’t teach them order and respect, it seemed terribly out of place. Marx would call it alienation of one culture by another. I’m no Marxist, but I’d have to agree with him on this one.
Day 5 ended with a raucous meeting of the youth of Palmópolis, in which Rondonistas and local teenagers worked together to diagnose the ills of the town, as well as prescribe solutions. The atmosphere was electric with hope for real change and a future generation of concerned leaders. The question was, how long would the charge last?
After the meeting, our spirits dampened with some tragic local news that we received from Ana Luísa: a mother of twin infants had committed suicide after discovering that her lover and the father of her children had a mistress. The hardships of daily life being a poor mother in rural Brazil became that much more hard for her to bear. What this meant for our intervention was that the carnival we had planned for the following afternoon for the children of Palmópolis would have to be postponed for the following Saturday. Really, all we could do in the wake of this tragedy to not disturb an already tense and troubled population was spend some much needed R&R.
We slept in a few extra hours Saturday morning before ultimately heading out together to the weekly market near the edge of town, where we perused cheap clothes and plastic knick-knacks from Paraguay, fresh spices, and even fresher cuts of raw meat left exposed to the elements.
That afternoon, we hiked for a few miles outside of Palmópolis along the lone dirt highway toward one of the more beautiful (and less polluted) waterfalls in the area for a picnic lunch. The hour trek was a display of the harshness of rural Brazilian geography: a merciless sun, interminable rolling hills, acidic red-clay soil. And yet the emerald green that such a land could still produce was mesmerizing.
We arrived at the waterfall, cracked open a couple 2-liters of Coke, and devoured ham and
cheese sandwiches to refuel from the hike before taking a hoard of pictures and dipping our feet in the icy flowing waters of the cachoeira (waterfall in Portuguese). In a country where eco-tourism is fast becoming a lucrative business, I couldn’t help but think of this cachoeira one day opening up a tiny stream of income for Palmópolis that could then continue to grow. One day. A day when people had reason to come to the area for other than humanitarian motives. When bureaucracy and corruption stepped aside and finally let basic infrastructure be built in Palmópolis. When the town’s youth finally received the education that could give them the mobility to make something of themselves, coupled with a reason and a will to then return and prevent a paralytic brain drain. Such a mound of goals seemed Sisyphean. But if we weren’t there for even our too-short two-week stint, Palmópolis’ boulder would never get its first push up the hill.
Sunday came and offered us another day of rest, though we used most of it to prepare for a solid second week of intervention, as well as write and present the final chapter of our radio soap opera “Chamas na Bananeira,” “Flames in the Banana Grove,” which we had been broadcasting on the local FM channel for the last few nights. The radionovela told the story of Zé Bananeira, an alcoholic and abusive husband stuck in his traditional machista ways; his neglected elderly mother; his passive yet dignified wife; the couple’s hard-working son looking to get into college; and their young daughter who falls in love with Gringo Zezinho Lima-Lemon (me), who may or may not be the father of her unborn child. With our script—always written at the very last minute—in hand, we’d run to the radio with hopes of giving the people of Palmópolis a half-hour of comic relief, life up their values, and share a pinch of education to spice up the end of their workday.
Sunday also gave us the opportunity to use three of the few computers in town with Internet. Even before checking email I opened up BBC News’ site. In the last week, Iran hadn’t bombed us, we hadn’t bombed Iran, Barack Obama hadn’t been assassinated, John McCain hadn’t died of a heart attack, and overall the world hadn’t come to an end. In Palmópolis, it certainly could have and we wouldn’t have realized it for some time.
Monday morning we loaded into a minibus and endured the bumpy hour-long ride to Dois de Abril. There, job one was administering the survey once again. Do you have water? Electricity? A bathroom? One half-toothless woman with six kids answered this last one thus: “We got a shitter in back, but it ain’t nuthin proper, no.” Not exactly the Portuguese you learn in the classroom. Not exactly the Brazil you see in postcards.
Afterward we divided our remaining day-and-a-half in Dois de Abril into two-hour blocks, broke up into our spontaneous teams, and gave workshops on basic health and hygiene, sex ed, self esteem for women and the elderly, environmental ed. In the latter I got to share with the kids of Dois de Abril one of the greatest works of one of the greatest of American poets: “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. In a less light-hearted yet equally troubling story, a young girl in the sex ed class told of three friends, aged 15, 16, and 17, who had all gotten pregnant from three brothers all over the age of 30. The three “men” all got the hell out of Dodge when they learned they’d all be dads. In a week that had been free of all political discussion, I raised the issue of whether abortion should be legalized in Brazil to protect uneducated young women such as these three from becoming mothers before their time, or from dangerous illegal abortion operations, which one of the girls informed she had already had. I equated their case as something closer to rape than consensual relations. From even some of my more liberal female team-members, I was met with resistance.
We closed our two days in Dois de Abril with a small play on the importance of preserving the environment, a few last games and songs with the kids, and a bevy of photos of Rondonistas with said kids. It was a rehearsal for a greater and more difficult goodbye to come.
We left for Jeribá at 7:00 the next morning by public bus. Halfway between the two towns, the 30-year-old diesel-belching bus stopped in the serene morning mist to let half-a-dozen men get off and commemorate another day of work under a tympanic sun, surrounded by green shrubs and red earth. We continued on. We reached Jeribá. We climbed up and down its hill several times. We put on our play again, said our goodbyes all too soon, packed up and returned to Palmópolis in an even older bus. We ate. We showered. We slept.
We never had the chance to put on our play in Palmópolis. The Rondon mother ship called us
from Belo Horizonte late on our last Friday to inform us that the bus that we thought would be taking us back home early Sunday morning would in fact be there and set to leave before midnight Saturday. More than any previous day, we realized that every last second and every last drop of our energy and will would have to be squeezed out of us on our last, packed day. Our postponed carnival went off with the mirth that was absent from a Saturday prior. Then, after a lightning-fast turnaround, we returned to the main plaza for what was originally planned to be a relaxed closing ceremony for our intervention. With us having to be on board our bus 
by 11pm, an evening in which Palmópolis elderly, its church youth groups, and its Afro-Dance and Capoeira classes all had an opportunity to show us their stuff, all while we said our goodbyes to the dozens of Palmopolenses great and small that had touched our hearts, turned into a frenetic and slightly awkward event. Our last hours as Rondonistas were thus rushed beyond the threshold of Brazilian comfort. But, as the classic cliché would have it, all good things must come to an end, and perhaps this end had to be rushed for the two Brazils of Rondon to take their places back in reality, albeit a reality now imbued with the memories of each other, and the realization of their shared destiny.
And as for me…
...I left Palmópolis knowing that I had just completed the greatest challenge of my life. There are few feelings greater than sitting in a bus or train or plane traveling back home (wherever home may be at any given time), looking out the window and thinking simply, "I did it." Your flesh and bones are weary, but your spirit is stronger than ever before. You've got a rucksack full of laundry to do, hundreds of pictures to edit and catalog, and ten times more memories that are already at work reordering the fabric of your mind. Where you go next after some much needed time at home is for tomorrow to tell, as are what parts of here and now you will bring to there and then. You know there's a story to tell. The words still need time to incubate. More than anything, when you look out that window and see that slight reflection of your face flying by mile after mile, you realize how in transition your life really is. Whether or not you believe that the experiences you accumulate one after another are progressively linked by divinely defined destiny, a purpose greater than yourself that the vessel of your body is driven to fulfill, quite honestly doesn't really matter; this is a question that belongs to the sanctity of the faith that each and every one of us has. What we can all agree on is that with each passing challenge, from our first day at school to our first day in a forgotten Brazilian world, we do grow, we do become better human beings, we do see the world that much more clearly. Like the view from the top of a big hill. Maybe not too unlike the hill in Jeribá.
Para todos os meus colegas rondonistas de Palmópolis de julho, 2008.
Amo vocês com todo meu coração.
Obrigado pelas memórias que nunca vou esquecer.
Just before the 5:30pm Brazilian winter sunset, our band of 16 “Rondonistas” left an afternoon of sex ed classes for adolescents and general health classes for Jeribá’s elderly at the school at the summit and headed downhill toward our modest lodging for the day near the intersection of Jeribá’s ‘T’. The deep azure sky specked with orange and purple clouds hovering over an ever-darkening terrain made us pull out our cameras and capture what would be our last sunset in Jeribá.
What a spectacular view this town is blessed with.
That was my first thought. A strange thought at that for a town that has next to nothing, that sustains itself (barely) through small-time agriculture and exporting workers to the industries of São Paulo or Belo Horizonte. Jeribá isn’t even a town; it, along with its sister Dois de Abril, is a mere district of Palmópolis, a metropolis in microcosm. All political and virtually all of the scant economic power is concentrated in this latter town of 7 or 8 thousand, 10 times larger than satellite Jeribá and 4 times that of Dois de Abril.
As the countryside grew darker, so too did the luster of the view from Jeribá’s hill. My mind drifted to earlier that morning. There, after several hours of fun and games with Jeribá’s kids at the school, 9-year-old Débora, her hair shorn like a boy's to a mere couple of inches because of a bout of head lice, remarked how hungry she was. A fellow Rondonista told her not to worry, she’d be heading home soon for lunch. Débora sadly replied, “But there’s no food at home.” The image of this poor girl walking up Jeribá’s enormous hill on an empty stomach, only to find a school with only so much potential to enrich her mind and classmates only too eager to make fun of her haircut that would be beautiful anywhere else in the world but traditional rural Brazil, made the view from the top of the hill at once turn ugly. What if Jeribaenses never even bothered to spend a few seconds of their day to take in the vista? Who’s to say they didn’t deliberately ignore it, seeing it as a curse, beauty forever mocking their plight? Who were we to suddenly gain the right to appropriate this view in little digital boxes?
How did we get so lucky to be the ones wearing the T-shirts with "Projeto Rondon" written on them, taking views like Jeribá's as a sort of "payment" for our volunteerism?
The Projeto Rondon is named after Brazilian Army Marshall Cândido Rondon, whose life and mission spanned the 19th and 20th centuries. Rondon, of indigenous descent, is renowned for his many explorations of the Brazilian hinterland—including a famous expedition to the Amazon with U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt in 1914—to get to know Brazil’s numerous indigenous tribes and help to integrate them into modern Brazilian society. One of his mottos, used today by the Projeto, was “Integrar para não entregar,” “Integrate, don’t give up.” Give up a people, give up a land, give up the dream of a country united in its forward march marked by order and progress.The first time university
students were sent in Rondon's footsteps to better understand their diverse, continent-sized country was in July of 1967, when 30 such students from Rio were flown by military aircraft to (appropriately) Rondônia, the western Brazilian state named after Rondon whose inhabitants live isolated behind the curtain of the Amazon Rainforest. Further joint university-military missions (keep in mind this was at the height of military rule in Brazil, which lasted from 1964-1985) continued sporadically until the mid-70s, when the Projeto was lost to the ever-changing and always tense political atmosphere of the military state. Further missions of integration would have to be made under other auspices until the Projeto Rondon was officially revived in 2003, the first students intervening in January of 2005 in the town of Tabatinga, located on the border with Colombia in far western Amazonas state.The present-day Projeto continues Rondon's goal of integrating the far-flung peoples of Brazil. The Projeto's flagship programs are found at the national level, where students from the developed southern and southeastern regions of the country connect with their compatriots in the less developed northeast and north. Teams are made up of students from a range of "majors" (to use American terminology), and through a variety of workshops these teams share their collective knowledge and experience with health, literacy, business, valuing and preserving culture, leadership skills, and much more with targeted communities.
But these communities aren't limited to those hidden in the rainforest a thousand miles away from the sands of Ipanema or the hustle and bustle of the Avenida Paulista. Even within the most well-developed states in Brazil's southern half, dozens of poor, rural municipalities exist far outside the orbit of an industrialized metropolis. Thus the need for the Projeto at the state level.
The first interventions in Minas Gerais embarked in July of 2005 for communities with Human Development Indexes under 0.7. Interventions followed in December of 2005, and July and December of 2006, and this year-and-a-half span saw over 1,800 PUC students, educators and staff members bring the project to 53 Mineiro communities, touching the lives of between 50,000 and 60,000 people per trip. Ventures have continued semi-annually since.
I first found out about the Projeto Rondon at an informal get-together for PUC's international students all the way back in February, where a woman involved in the Projeto's administration gave a short presentation. It took about a month for my piqued interest to turn into action. Feeling that my time on this Rotary Ambassadorial Scholarship was lacking a service side to its ambassadorialship, I decided to attend a more detailed informational meeting. Alongside about 500 fellow PUC students, I became sold on the Projeto's mission of bringing integration and solidarity to rural Minas, and the opportunity it offered me to get to see a side of Brazil that I would otherwise never have seen.
After sacrificing 6 of our Saturday afternoons throughout the Brazilian fall semester to prepare for our two weeks as Rondonistas through a series drudging workshops, teams of around 15 students and a coordinator were assembled literally on the eve of departure. For our team of 16, the first few hours on a winding 14-hour bus ride had to suffice for introductions and first impressions before everyone leaned
their seats back and tried to catch a few uncomfortable winks. Our team comprised of PUC students from health sciences to social sciences, biology and psychology, engineering and law. The youngest was an 18-year-old freshman, the oldest our coordinator Ana Luísa, a recent PUC grad in psychology and a mere 25. Our destination: Palmópolis, a rural community in the northeast corner of Minas Gerais that was officially established as a municipality in 1992, finally giving its inhabitants, mainly temporarily contracted workers in cattle fields and banana groves, a place on the map. Palmópolis, along with other targeted communities, was chosen for its low HDI score: 0.615. What does that mean? Palmópolis is closer to “less developed” than “highly developed” for a variety of reasons: poor education, lack of basic infrastructure, low GDP per capita, limited access to healthcare, among others.
Ana Luísa had been a Rondonista in Palmópolis before, and after graduating college she lived and worked there for nearly a year. Her experience in Palmópolis, particularly her contacts with those in positions of power, proved invaluable. In a country where mobility is based far more on who you know than what you know, her tireless efforts to talk with just the person who could facilitate our every action made the difference, in my mind, between a successful mission and a potential failure.
Weary from lack of sleep and bruised from every bump of the final three hours of the ride on a dirt road, we nonetheless donned brightly colored costumes and, like a band of traveling minstrels, paraded through the streets of Palmópolis singing, banging drums, and making our presence known. After about an hour, children began to follow us a la the Pied Piper toward the main plaza, at which point songs and games ensued. After a few hours of singing and playing, more tired than at any point so far that day, we headed back to our headquarters, a social services shelter with Spartan facilities, and wrapped up the day with a series of meetings to prepare for the days ahead, as well as “get-to-know-each-other” games that made up for what was lacking in several waking hours on a bus. We ate our first of two weeks’ worth of delicious, home-cooked, natural and organic meals that we’d wolf down ravenously, and then fell asleep together on the same hard, cold, tiled floor almost the very second we laid prostrate on our inch-thick mats.Days two and three involved walking up and down the sinuous, spaghetti-bowl streets of Palmópolis,
knocking on doors and taking surveys of the town’s inhabitants regarding their access to basic utilities and their monthly income. Only a handful, we found, had no electricity. Slightly a few more had no running water, and hardly anyone enjoyed a sanitary sewage system. As for monthly income, the highest recorded was around 3000 reais (~$1800), belonging to a local government minister (the mayor was unavailable for interview—surely his would have broken this mark). The lowest was around 60 reais (~$38), from a widow who cooked the rice and beans bought with this pension check with water from the river, the same river that acted as the local sewer and laundromat.More than once, the divide between “developed” interviewers and “developing” interviewees became cause for the latter to lash out at us with an indignant “what are you doing here?”, or “we have nothing here, and how are you going to help us out?”. Near the end of each day, our band would meet for an hour to decompress from dozens of interviews, share our perspectives of the town, and tie tighter the bonds we had been continuing to weave together. The evening would be capped off—as would be the case for the remainder of our days as Rondonistas—with a three-hour-long rotation to take a much-coveted shower.
On day 4, a Thursday, our interaction with the people of Palmópolis began in earnest. The morning began with a series of games at the local school: soccer, hopscotch, peteca (an indigenous game played like badminton, only you use your hands, see photo at left), and, an American classic, tossing around a Frisbee. In one of the last games, played mainly with smaller children, the de facto motto of our intervention was born: “Todo mundo ganhou!” “Everybody wins!”
Our hope with the morning of games was to rile the kids of Palmópolis up enough so that they’d be somewhat calm for more serious activities in the afternoon: talks about familial relations and storytelling and literacy activities. Not to be. The same kids from the morning were twice as rambunctious, chasing each other and climbing trees and distracting those few who wanted to participate. From American eyes, it suddenly became easy to see where lay the roots of a society that has minimal respect for law and where discipline is toothless. Meanwhile, a second contingent of our team was working with Palmópolis’ elderly on how to properly exercise in their twilight years. In our meeting later that evening the discussions generated by both halves of the team revealed yet another divide taking place all over Brazilian society—really, all over the world: the age divide. Kids solely seeking new and better means for stimulation have no patience for the repositories of wisdom, traditions and values, stories of a hard yet glory-filled past. What would the wild and crazy kids from today’s activities have to tell their grandkids 60 years from now? How they ran around and hit each other, then went home and watched cartoons?
The morning of day 5 introduced us to a group of kids in whom seeds of tradition were being carefully planted. Our planned activity for the morning was to show a film for the kids of Palmópolis, with the objectives being to 1) pull kids off the streets, and 2) give less fortunate children the opportunity to see a movie they may never have the chance to see. The movie: The Incredibles. The locale: Palmópolis’ Casa da Cultura, the House of Culture. There, along with a handful of kids we had coaxed from kicking dirt in the street, we bore witness to one of the bright spots of the town: the children’s Afro-Dance and Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) class. We let the class continue for an hour or so, about half its normal time, and even participated in some of the dance steps and percussion. At the end of the class, after the 20 or so kids had gracefully flowed through dance after dance, the three teachers had the chorus of students shout out the class rules:1. Respect your teachers
2. Respect your classmates
3. Don’t fight
4. Don’t skip class
5. Respect all the mestres (Capoeira masters) that came before you
I wonder if one of these kids will grow up to write the book "Everything I Every Need to Know, I Learned in Afro-Dance Class."
The class went to wash up, and then came back and sat down to watch the movie. The transition seemed all too strange. Don’t get me wrong, The Incredibles is a fantastic movie, and I do believe showing it had the potential to expand the budding imaginations of all the kids in that room. But to cut into a class that taught these kids the values of their own cultural heritage, only to show them a film that had nothing to do with their lives, that didn’t teach them order and respect, it seemed terribly out of place. Marx would call it alienation of one culture by another. I’m no Marxist, but I’d have to agree with him on this one.
Day 5 ended with a raucous meeting of the youth of Palmópolis, in which Rondonistas and local teenagers worked together to diagnose the ills of the town, as well as prescribe solutions. The atmosphere was electric with hope for real change and a future generation of concerned leaders. The question was, how long would the charge last?
After the meeting, our spirits dampened with some tragic local news that we received from Ana Luísa: a mother of twin infants had committed suicide after discovering that her lover and the father of her children had a mistress. The hardships of daily life being a poor mother in rural Brazil became that much more hard for her to bear. What this meant for our intervention was that the carnival we had planned for the following afternoon for the children of Palmópolis would have to be postponed for the following Saturday. Really, all we could do in the wake of this tragedy to not disturb an already tense and troubled population was spend some much needed R&R.
We slept in a few extra hours Saturday morning before ultimately heading out together to the weekly market near the edge of town, where we perused cheap clothes and plastic knick-knacks from Paraguay, fresh spices, and even fresher cuts of raw meat left exposed to the elements.
That afternoon, we hiked for a few miles outside of Palmópolis along the lone dirt highway toward one of the more beautiful (and less polluted) waterfalls in the area for a picnic lunch. The hour trek was a display of the harshness of rural Brazilian geography: a merciless sun, interminable rolling hills, acidic red-clay soil. And yet the emerald green that such a land could still produce was mesmerizing.
We arrived at the waterfall, cracked open a couple 2-liters of Coke, and devoured ham and
cheese sandwiches to refuel from the hike before taking a hoard of pictures and dipping our feet in the icy flowing waters of the cachoeira (waterfall in Portuguese). In a country where eco-tourism is fast becoming a lucrative business, I couldn’t help but think of this cachoeira one day opening up a tiny stream of income for Palmópolis that could then continue to grow. One day. A day when people had reason to come to the area for other than humanitarian motives. When bureaucracy and corruption stepped aside and finally let basic infrastructure be built in Palmópolis. When the town’s youth finally received the education that could give them the mobility to make something of themselves, coupled with a reason and a will to then return and prevent a paralytic brain drain. Such a mound of goals seemed Sisyphean. But if we weren’t there for even our too-short two-week stint, Palmópolis’ boulder would never get its first push up the hill.
Sunday came and offered us another day of rest, though we used most of it to prepare for a solid second week of intervention, as well as write and present the final chapter of our radio soap opera “Chamas na Bananeira,” “Flames in the Banana Grove,” which we had been broadcasting on the local FM channel for the last few nights. The radionovela told the story of Zé Bananeira, an alcoholic and abusive husband stuck in his traditional machista ways; his neglected elderly mother; his passive yet dignified wife; the couple’s hard-working son looking to get into college; and their young daughter who falls in love with Gringo Zezinho Lima-Lemon (me), who may or may not be the father of her unborn child. With our script—always written at the very last minute—in hand, we’d run to the radio with hopes of giving the people of Palmópolis a half-hour of comic relief, life up their values, and share a pinch of education to spice up the end of their workday.Sunday also gave us the opportunity to use three of the few computers in town with Internet. Even before checking email I opened up BBC News’ site. In the last week, Iran hadn’t bombed us, we hadn’t bombed Iran, Barack Obama hadn’t been assassinated, John McCain hadn’t died of a heart attack, and overall the world hadn’t come to an end. In Palmópolis, it certainly could have and we wouldn’t have realized it for some time.
Monday morning we loaded into a minibus and endured the bumpy hour-long ride to Dois de Abril. There, job one was administering the survey once again. Do you have water? Electricity? A bathroom? One half-toothless woman with six kids answered this last one thus: “We got a shitter in back, but it ain’t nuthin proper, no.” Not exactly the Portuguese you learn in the classroom. Not exactly the Brazil you see in postcards.
Afterward we divided our remaining day-and-a-half in Dois de Abril into two-hour blocks, broke up into our spontaneous teams, and gave workshops on basic health and hygiene, sex ed, self esteem for women and the elderly, environmental ed. In the latter I got to share with the kids of Dois de Abril one of the greatest works of one of the greatest of American poets: “The Giving Tree” by Shel Silverstein. In a less light-hearted yet equally troubling story, a young girl in the sex ed class told of three friends, aged 15, 16, and 17, who had all gotten pregnant from three brothers all over the age of 30. The three “men” all got the hell out of Dodge when they learned they’d all be dads. In a week that had been free of all political discussion, I raised the issue of whether abortion should be legalized in Brazil to protect uneducated young women such as these three from becoming mothers before their time, or from dangerous illegal abortion operations, which one of the girls informed she had already had. I equated their case as something closer to rape than consensual relations. From even some of my more liberal female team-members, I was met with resistance.
We closed our two days in Dois de Abril with a small play on the importance of preserving the environment, a few last games and songs with the kids, and a bevy of photos of Rondonistas with said kids. It was a rehearsal for a greater and more difficult goodbye to come.
We left for Jeribá at 7:00 the next morning by public bus. Halfway between the two towns, the 30-year-old diesel-belching bus stopped in the serene morning mist to let half-a-dozen men get off and commemorate another day of work under a tympanic sun, surrounded by green shrubs and red earth. We continued on. We reached Jeribá. We climbed up and down its hill several times. We put on our play again, said our goodbyes all too soon, packed up and returned to Palmópolis in an even older bus. We ate. We showered. We slept.
We never had the chance to put on our play in Palmópolis. The Rondon mother ship called us
from Belo Horizonte late on our last Friday to inform us that the bus that we thought would be taking us back home early Sunday morning would in fact be there and set to leave before midnight Saturday. More than any previous day, we realized that every last second and every last drop of our energy and will would have to be squeezed out of us on our last, packed day. Our postponed carnival went off with the mirth that was absent from a Saturday prior. Then, after a lightning-fast turnaround, we returned to the main plaza for what was originally planned to be a relaxed closing ceremony for our intervention. With us having to be on board our bus 
by 11pm, an evening in which Palmópolis elderly, its church youth groups, and its Afro-Dance and Capoeira classes all had an opportunity to show us their stuff, all while we said our goodbyes to the dozens of Palmopolenses great and small that had touched our hearts, turned into a frenetic and slightly awkward event. Our last hours as Rondonistas were thus rushed beyond the threshold of Brazilian comfort. But, as the classic cliché would have it, all good things must come to an end, and perhaps this end had to be rushed for the two Brazils of Rondon to take their places back in reality, albeit a reality now imbued with the memories of each other, and the realization of their shared destiny.And as for me…
...I left Palmópolis knowing that I had just completed the greatest challenge of my life. There are few feelings greater than sitting in a bus or train or plane traveling back home (wherever home may be at any given time), looking out the window and thinking simply, "I did it." Your flesh and bones are weary, but your spirit is stronger than ever before. You've got a rucksack full of laundry to do, hundreds of pictures to edit and catalog, and ten times more memories that are already at work reordering the fabric of your mind. Where you go next after some much needed time at home is for tomorrow to tell, as are what parts of here and now you will bring to there and then. You know there's a story to tell. The words still need time to incubate. More than anything, when you look out that window and see that slight reflection of your face flying by mile after mile, you realize how in transition your life really is. Whether or not you believe that the experiences you accumulate one after another are progressively linked by divinely defined destiny, a purpose greater than yourself that the vessel of your body is driven to fulfill, quite honestly doesn't really matter; this is a question that belongs to the sanctity of the faith that each and every one of us has. What we can all agree on is that with each passing challenge, from our first day at school to our first day in a forgotten Brazilian world, we do grow, we do become better human beings, we do see the world that much more clearly. Like the view from the top of a big hill. Maybe not too unlike the hill in Jeribá.
Para todos os meus colegas rondonistas de Palmópolis de julho, 2008.
Amo vocês com todo meu coração.
Obrigado pelas memórias que nunca vou esquecer.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
All (Brazilian) Politics Is Local
In typical Brazilian fashion, the debate started at 7:30pm instead of 7:00, though we were happy to have gotten to PUC’s auditorium by 6:55 and been spared from having to squat in the aisles or crowding in the back near the exits.
Is it really any wonder there’s no adherence to fire codes in Brazil?
Ricardo and I found seats near the front right of the auditorium. For a half-hour we watched photographers and TV cameramen get in position to immortalize the Belo Horizonte mayoral debate that was about to take place. As the seats filled up, foot soldiers (“militantes”) pushed pamphlets and platforms of their respective candidate from the 8 parties represented in the debate. By 7:29 we had collected a dozen new brightly colored leaflets to add to our collection in the drawer below our TV that had been growing steadily in the last few weeks as the campaigns for the October 5th vote started to pick up speed.
And then, in the name of progress, order was called for by PUC’s student body president. He and a gray-haired local journalist—who a generation ago was likely taking part in a different kind of manifestation of political culture in a different kind of political climate—laid down the rules they would follow to moderate the debate. Each of the 8 candidates would have 2 minutes to introduce him or herself and his or her campaign. Next, 2 journalists from local newspapers would ask a question for 4 of the candidates to answer in 2 minutes each. In part three, volunteers would draw the names of 2 students from a box placed in front of each candidate, and these lucky 16 would ask a question of their chosen candidate, who would, again, have 2 minutes to answer each question. The debate would then wrap up with a (wait for it…) 2-minute closing statement from each candidate.
While it was at first a shock, after 6+ months living with virtually no reverence for time, to see the giant timer projected behind the stage counting down each 2-minute segment, I was glad to see it. If it weren’t there, the longwinded-squared nature of these 8 being both Brazilian and politicians would have taken the debate into the next morning.
The 8 candidates represented the following parties:
PDT: Partido Democrático Trabalhista, Democratic Labor Party
PCO: Partido da Causa Operária, Workers’ Cause Party
PMDB: Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
PRTB: Partido Renovador Trabalhista Brasileiro, Brazilian Labor Renewal Party
PSB: Partido Socialista Brasileiro, Brazilian Socialist Party
PCdoB: Partido Comunista do Brasil, Communist Party of Brazil
PSTU: Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado, Unified Socialist Workers’ Party
DEM: Democratas, Democrats
According to the greatest of all references, Wikipedia (see article), there are 27 "official" political parties in Brazil. Of these 27, Wikipedia classifies 6 as “major”: PDT, PMDB, DEM, along with PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Labor Party), PSDB (Partido Social Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Social Democratic Party), and PP (Partido Progressivo, Progressive Party). (PT, PMDB, and PSDB are the juggernaut parties nationally, with PP, DEM, and PDT a tier behind and more influential at the state level). Left to right on the political spectrum, these 6 go like this:
Of Wikipedia’s 6 “medium level” parties (which I won’t bother listing), the PCdoB and PSB supported candidates for the debate, while the PCO, PRTB, PCB, and PSTU represented the 15 “minor parties” in Brazilian politics at the debate.
I should note how municipal campaigns work down here.
First, there are the mayoral candidates themselves, affiliated with a particular party.
Piece of cake.
Beneath them are candidates for a given number of seats as vereadores, something along the lines of city councilors, who, if elected, will be in charge of drafting policies for a particular area of government (i.e. health, education, transportation, etc.). Each candidate for vereador affiliates him or herself with a particular party. All vereador candidates in one party share party resources for publicity (TV ads, cartels, leaflets, bumper-stickers, etc.), yet all compete against each other as well as against candidates from other parties.
Some parties, usually small ones having no candidate for mayor themselves, will form alliances among themselves and with larger parties supporting a candidate. In such a symbiotic alliance, the larger party’s mayoral candidate will ideally gain the votes of the rank-and-file of smaller parties, and the candidates for vereador from small parties will have a more “name brand” candidate to latch onto in their quest for a piece of power.
I should probably take a step back and answer the obvious question: why all the parties?
At the municipal level, and when voting for Brazil’s equivalent of congressmen and women at the national stage, Brazil’s electoral system is proportional. Extremely so. In 2006, for instance, winning 0.3% of the vote got some parties at least 1 seat in Brazil’s equivalent of the House of Representatives. Thus, there’s plenty of incentive for small parties to get out there and try their hand at government. At the gubernatorial and presidential levels, a candidate wins by an absolute majority, giving the country’s major parties an edge (like in France, a run-off is held between the top two first-round finishers if there is no absolute victor). Current President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” for short) is from PT.
What are the consequences of Brazil’s hyper-proportional system that makes even Israeli politics look exclusivist?
First, obviously, there’s division, most especially on the left. Historically, this is nothing new; divergence in the leftist camp starts at the roots, with discrepancies among Lenin, Trotsky, Tito, Stalin, and Mao and their interpretations of Marxist thought, not to mention the differences between all those who have tried to follow in these giants' footsteps. Alliances must thus be made to avert the complete fracturing of the Brazilian left, though these alliances aren’t guaranteed to last from one election to another and will change with the variable winds of politics. Alliances also must be formed in Congress to assure that bills get passed by simple majority. In such a climate of mutual back-scratching, gridlock and spectral antagonism tend to be less prevalent than strictly two-party systems such as our own. A definite plus in my book. On the negative side, an interesting analysis would be to see whether within these multiple points of political bargaining exists the roots of Brazil's rampant culture of political corruption.
Another plus for Brazil's proportional system: direct participation in politics becomes more active, with more people fighting for the votes of an ever more pluralist electorate. One could maybe argue that a proportional electoral system leads to an increase in voter participation, as there exists a greater probability that a given party’s platform will match a voter’s beliefs, giving her greater incentive to vote. In Brazil, however, that argument is a moot point, as voting is compulsory.
In sum, Brazil’s electoral system is a far cry from our own, where two giant heavyweights duke it out at every level of politics for a majority of votes. Personally, while I wouldn’t favor a system in which I’d have to argue why the American Democratic Party is better than the Democratic Party of America, a little variety in our Redemopublicratican reality would be refreshing. Right Greens? Libertarians?
All right, back to the debate. Each candidate carefully carved out 2 minutes worth of thanking student government, introducing him or herself, and towing the party line through well-tuned sound bites, which received a din of cheers, boos, and the occasional chant or two. Then came the journalists’ questions, one having to do with BH’s health services, the other about which aspects of the present city administration should change and which should remain the same. As good politicians do, each spun the questions to his or her liking.
Then the fun started.
It’s no secret that young people the world over, especially
college students, tend toward the gauche of the political spectrum. This is perhaps more true in Brazil than anywhere else on the planet. Che Guevara, maybe the only Argentine a Brazilian ever liked, is more than a pop culture icon in Brazil; he’s a god. Dependence Theory—the Marxist school of thought that blames Brazil’s economic backwardness on an omnipresent, unscrupulous, capitalist, imperialist metropolis, be it Portugal, Britain, or the U.S.A.—has been the mode in Brazilian economic thought since then economist and future President Fernando Henrique Cardoso first penned it in the 1960s. College professors, who a generation ago were revolutionary youth mixed up in the chaff of military repression, have resurged to breathe new life into their leftist ideals in classrooms nationwide.
But perhaps the one element that catalyzes the formation of Brazilian youth’s political ideology (and this is a half-baked hypothesis, mind you) is Brazil’s bacchanal bar culture. At even (perhaps especially) the most hole-in-the-wall bars, hedonism flows by the liter, spreads with each random kiss, and gives Brazilians of all ages—but especially college students—a no-stress identity that they would never trade in even to become the world’s wealthiest nation. Brazil’s botecos have become the coffeehouses of Voltaire’s France, where revolutionary fraternité grows with every reason to drink to the end of the self-righteous, stuffy, and moralistic hegemony of the United States.
So, one by one, names were drawn and students rose and addressed each candidate in front of their peers in a room full of revolutionary iconographic T-shirts and dreadlocks. The questions were politically savvy, having to do with how candidates would work for social integration, more organized public transportation, free or reduced bus fares for students, greater environmental stewardship, and better healthcare for BH, among other things. Order was broken once when an elderly woman in the back of the audience cried out for the interests of her demographic not to be forgotten. The moderators gave her the floor for the standard 2 minutes, allowed a couple of the candidates a short response, and then continued through the scheduled format. With each
question, candidates did their best to give a general yet satisfying analysis of the issues, sketch out a few specific solutions, and throw out phrases to rile the demographically and ideologically biased audience into a frenzy: “Free bus fares for all students!” “More investment in public education!” The firebrand candidate for the PCO went off on a tirade against the oppression of the Catholic Church in keeping abortion illegal in Brazil, and somehow managed to connect that with a jab at American imperialism, which would have probably won a greater reaction from this crowd had it been better timed and the candidate running for a position higher than mayor of Brazil’s 3rd largest city.
By 10 o’clock, Ricardo and I both decided we’d had enough and decided to leave before the closing statements. We weren’t alone; the tired crowd had already begun to dwindle, and we followed others out the door like fans at a lopsided basketball game. On the way out, we a caught a glimpse of an anarchist’s half-hearted handiwork: a graphically designed sign that read “Question all authority” beneath a grouping of blank white faces in suits, and a handmade one that said simply “Não vote, fume!” “Don’t vote, smoke!”
As we approached the campus exit, we saw we’d have to run the gauntlet through a half-dozen or so foot soldiers aiming to get rid of their 2-inch thick stacks of leaflets. One girl gave Ricardo not one but three such political trading cards of a particular candidate for vereador. The ever quick-witted Ricardo shot back, “Are you promoting the guy, or the cards?” Perhaps his quip was unjust; she may truly have sympathized with the candidate and his policies. But when you see people daily in front of PUC handing out leaflets for this restaurant, that English school, or another transport service, and when smalltime politicians like vereadores project themselves as products to be bought, with unique names like Antônio Cowboy and Amigão and catchy TV jingles to win votes, you have to wonder if he indeed had a point.
Is it really any wonder there’s no adherence to fire codes in Brazil?
Ricardo and I found seats near the front right of the auditorium. For a half-hour we watched photographers and TV cameramen get in position to immortalize the Belo Horizonte mayoral debate that was about to take place. As the seats filled up, foot soldiers (“militantes”) pushed pamphlets and platforms of their respective candidate from the 8 parties represented in the debate. By 7:29 we had collected a dozen new brightly colored leaflets to add to our collection in the drawer below our TV that had been growing steadily in the last few weeks as the campaigns for the October 5th vote started to pick up speed.And then, in the name of progress, order was called for by PUC’s student body president. He and a gray-haired local journalist—who a generation ago was likely taking part in a different kind of manifestation of political culture in a different kind of political climate—laid down the rules they would follow to moderate the debate. Each of the 8 candidates would have 2 minutes to introduce him or herself and his or her campaign. Next, 2 journalists from local newspapers would ask a question for 4 of the candidates to answer in 2 minutes each. In part three, volunteers would draw the names of 2 students from a box placed in front of each candidate, and these lucky 16 would ask a question of their chosen candidate, who would, again, have 2 minutes to answer each question. The debate would then wrap up with a (wait for it…) 2-minute closing statement from each candidate.
While it was at first a shock, after 6+ months living with virtually no reverence for time, to see the giant timer projected behind the stage counting down each 2-minute segment, I was glad to see it. If it weren’t there, the longwinded-squared nature of these 8 being both Brazilian and politicians would have taken the debate into the next morning.
The 8 candidates represented the following parties:
PDT: Partido Democrático Trabalhista, Democratic Labor Party
PCO: Partido da Causa Operária, Workers’ Cause Party
PMDB: Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Democratic Movement Party
PRTB: Partido Renovador Trabalhista Brasileiro, Brazilian Labor Renewal Party
PSB: Partido Socialista Brasileiro, Brazilian Socialist Party
PCdoB: Partido Comunista do Brasil, Communist Party of Brazil
PSTU: Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado, Unified Socialist Workers’ Party
DEM: Democratas, Democrats
According to the greatest of all references, Wikipedia (see article), there are 27 "official" political parties in Brazil. Of these 27, Wikipedia classifies 6 as “major”: PDT, PMDB, DEM, along with PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Labor Party), PSDB (Partido Social Democrático Brasileiro, Brazilian Social Democratic Party), and PP (Partido Progressivo, Progressive Party). (PT, PMDB, and PSDB are the juggernaut parties nationally, with PP, DEM, and PDT a tier behind and more influential at the state level). Left to right on the political spectrum, these 6 go like this:
PDT – PT – PMDB – PSDB – DEM – PP
Of Wikipedia’s 6 “medium level” parties (which I won’t bother listing), the PCdoB and PSB supported candidates for the debate, while the PCO, PRTB, PCB, and PSTU represented the 15 “minor parties” in Brazilian politics at the debate.
I should note how municipal campaigns work down here.
First, there are the mayoral candidates themselves, affiliated with a particular party.
Piece of cake.
Beneath them are candidates for a given number of seats as vereadores, something along the lines of city councilors, who, if elected, will be in charge of drafting policies for a particular area of government (i.e. health, education, transportation, etc.). Each candidate for vereador affiliates him or herself with a particular party. All vereador candidates in one party share party resources for publicity (TV ads, cartels, leaflets, bumper-stickers, etc.), yet all compete against each other as well as against candidates from other parties.
Some parties, usually small ones having no candidate for mayor themselves, will form alliances among themselves and with larger parties supporting a candidate. In such a symbiotic alliance, the larger party’s mayoral candidate will ideally gain the votes of the rank-and-file of smaller parties, and the candidates for vereador from small parties will have a more “name brand” candidate to latch onto in their quest for a piece of power.
I should probably take a step back and answer the obvious question: why all the parties?
At the municipal level, and when voting for Brazil’s equivalent of congressmen and women at the national stage, Brazil’s electoral system is proportional. Extremely so. In 2006, for instance, winning 0.3% of the vote got some parties at least 1 seat in Brazil’s equivalent of the House of Representatives. Thus, there’s plenty of incentive for small parties to get out there and try their hand at government. At the gubernatorial and presidential levels, a candidate wins by an absolute majority, giving the country’s major parties an edge (like in France, a run-off is held between the top two first-round finishers if there is no absolute victor). Current President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” for short) is from PT.
What are the consequences of Brazil’s hyper-proportional system that makes even Israeli politics look exclusivist?
First, obviously, there’s division, most especially on the left. Historically, this is nothing new; divergence in the leftist camp starts at the roots, with discrepancies among Lenin, Trotsky, Tito, Stalin, and Mao and their interpretations of Marxist thought, not to mention the differences between all those who have tried to follow in these giants' footsteps. Alliances must thus be made to avert the complete fracturing of the Brazilian left, though these alliances aren’t guaranteed to last from one election to another and will change with the variable winds of politics. Alliances also must be formed in Congress to assure that bills get passed by simple majority. In such a climate of mutual back-scratching, gridlock and spectral antagonism tend to be less prevalent than strictly two-party systems such as our own. A definite plus in my book. On the negative side, an interesting analysis would be to see whether within these multiple points of political bargaining exists the roots of Brazil's rampant culture of political corruption.Another plus for Brazil's proportional system: direct participation in politics becomes more active, with more people fighting for the votes of an ever more pluralist electorate. One could maybe argue that a proportional electoral system leads to an increase in voter participation, as there exists a greater probability that a given party’s platform will match a voter’s beliefs, giving her greater incentive to vote. In Brazil, however, that argument is a moot point, as voting is compulsory.
In sum, Brazil’s electoral system is a far cry from our own, where two giant heavyweights duke it out at every level of politics for a majority of votes. Personally, while I wouldn’t favor a system in which I’d have to argue why the American Democratic Party is better than the Democratic Party of America, a little variety in our Redemopublicratican reality would be refreshing. Right Greens? Libertarians?
All right, back to the debate. Each candidate carefully carved out 2 minutes worth of thanking student government, introducing him or herself, and towing the party line through well-tuned sound bites, which received a din of cheers, boos, and the occasional chant or two. Then came the journalists’ questions, one having to do with BH’s health services, the other about which aspects of the present city administration should change and which should remain the same. As good politicians do, each spun the questions to his or her liking.
Then the fun started.
It’s no secret that young people the world over, especially
college students, tend toward the gauche of the political spectrum. This is perhaps more true in Brazil than anywhere else on the planet. Che Guevara, maybe the only Argentine a Brazilian ever liked, is more than a pop culture icon in Brazil; he’s a god. Dependence Theory—the Marxist school of thought that blames Brazil’s economic backwardness on an omnipresent, unscrupulous, capitalist, imperialist metropolis, be it Portugal, Britain, or the U.S.A.—has been the mode in Brazilian economic thought since then economist and future President Fernando Henrique Cardoso first penned it in the 1960s. College professors, who a generation ago were revolutionary youth mixed up in the chaff of military repression, have resurged to breathe new life into their leftist ideals in classrooms nationwide.But perhaps the one element that catalyzes the formation of Brazilian youth’s political ideology (and this is a half-baked hypothesis, mind you) is Brazil’s bacchanal bar culture. At even (perhaps especially) the most hole-in-the-wall bars, hedonism flows by the liter, spreads with each random kiss, and gives Brazilians of all ages—but especially college students—a no-stress identity that they would never trade in even to become the world’s wealthiest nation. Brazil’s botecos have become the coffeehouses of Voltaire’s France, where revolutionary fraternité grows with every reason to drink to the end of the self-righteous, stuffy, and moralistic hegemony of the United States.
So, one by one, names were drawn and students rose and addressed each candidate in front of their peers in a room full of revolutionary iconographic T-shirts and dreadlocks. The questions were politically savvy, having to do with how candidates would work for social integration, more organized public transportation, free or reduced bus fares for students, greater environmental stewardship, and better healthcare for BH, among other things. Order was broken once when an elderly woman in the back of the audience cried out for the interests of her demographic not to be forgotten. The moderators gave her the floor for the standard 2 minutes, allowed a couple of the candidates a short response, and then continued through the scheduled format. With each
question, candidates did their best to give a general yet satisfying analysis of the issues, sketch out a few specific solutions, and throw out phrases to rile the demographically and ideologically biased audience into a frenzy: “Free bus fares for all students!” “More investment in public education!” The firebrand candidate for the PCO went off on a tirade against the oppression of the Catholic Church in keeping abortion illegal in Brazil, and somehow managed to connect that with a jab at American imperialism, which would have probably won a greater reaction from this crowd had it been better timed and the candidate running for a position higher than mayor of Brazil’s 3rd largest city.By 10 o’clock, Ricardo and I both decided we’d had enough and decided to leave before the closing statements. We weren’t alone; the tired crowd had already begun to dwindle, and we followed others out the door like fans at a lopsided basketball game. On the way out, we a caught a glimpse of an anarchist’s half-hearted handiwork: a graphically designed sign that read “Question all authority” beneath a grouping of blank white faces in suits, and a handmade one that said simply “Não vote, fume!” “Don’t vote, smoke!”
As we approached the campus exit, we saw we’d have to run the gauntlet through a half-dozen or so foot soldiers aiming to get rid of their 2-inch thick stacks of leaflets. One girl gave Ricardo not one but three such political trading cards of a particular candidate for vereador. The ever quick-witted Ricardo shot back, “Are you promoting the guy, or the cards?” Perhaps his quip was unjust; she may truly have sympathized with the candidate and his policies. But when you see people daily in front of PUC handing out leaflets for this restaurant, that English school, or another transport service, and when smalltime politicians like vereadores project themselves as products to be bought, with unique names like Antônio Cowboy and Amigão and catchy TV jingles to win votes, you have to wonder if he indeed had a point.
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