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.
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