Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  The brutality of Brazil’s slave trade fostered pressure for abolition both at home and abroad, but it was a lot to ask of the oligarchs and plantation owners to give up their “hands and feet.” The transatlantic slave trade to Brazil was technically illegal by 1826 but continued until 1850. By 1830, there were still more slaves than free people in Brazil, and it was still the largest slave economy on earth. The slave economy was so dominant in preindustrial Brazil, and Dom Pedro so indebted to the oligarchs, that every law was bent toward further concentrating land ownership and perpetuating the slave economy. This was very different than in the United States, where disputes about the benefits of free versus slave labor led to a civil war. It also led to the Homestead Act of 1862, which encouraged small farmers to take land and settle it. This challenged the westward expansion of the plantation class, at the expense of Native Americans. There was never a Homestead Act in Brazil, only more laws blocking the growth of any kind of small-scale land ownership.23

  Yet despite the oligarchs’ determination to maintain slavery, a number of factors finally accelerated its belated end. First, as mentioned above, a series of slave rebellions, not to mention hysteria after the victorious Haitian Revolution, left the royal court and the oligarchy completely unnerved about the possibility of rebellion. In addition, quilombolas, escaped slaves, were settling in camps on the very beaches of Rio.24 O Rebate, an 1889 periodical, wrote, “Had the slaves not fled en masse from the plantations, they would today be still slaves. Slavery ended because slaves rebelled against it and against the law that enslaved them.” The abolition “was nothing more than the legal recognition—so that public authority wasn’t discredited—of an act that had already been accomplished by the mass revolt.”25

  Slavery was also creating an immigration crisis. European indentured servants who came to Brazil complained about the horrible conditions and being treated like slaves. This, in addition to a growing movement in Europe against slavery, led to Brazilian job recruiters being banned from countries throughout the continent. These servants’ labor was so crucial that ending slavery became a life-and-death economic question of ending a labor shortage.26

  Lastly, there was a growing moral revulsion toward slavery among Brazilians. Brazil’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work of literature that inflamed people’s opposition to slavery and achieved mass popularity, was a poem called “O Navio Negreiro,” or “Slave Ship,” by Antônio de Castro Alves, detailing the horrors of the Middle Passage.27 The king himself even wrote an antislavery article (under the pen name “The Philanthropist”) in which he called slavery “the cancer that is gnawing away at Brazil” and insisted that it “must be eradicated.”28

  Abolitionist and antislavery societies were also beginning to form. Their method of moral suasion was to play on Brazil’s ongoing obsession with its perception in the eyes of the rest of the world. As one tract argued, “Brazil does not want to be a nation morally isolated, a leper, expelled from the world community. The esteem and respect of foreign nations are as valuable to us as they are to other people.”29

  Then came the final straw: army officers in independent Brazil’s standing army, many of them mixed-race, began to refuse orders to go after escaped slaves. Fear of Haiti-style revolts, labor shortages, and pressure from abolition societies inside and outside the country had all catapulted Brazil toward abolition. But the last factor that finally facilitated the end of slavery in Brazil was a fear of disease. The officers were terrified of the very thing that supposedly proved the weakness of the Indigenous people they were conquering: germs. Yellow fever and cholera were making their way over from Africa. This finally halted Brazil’s lucrative illegal slave trade.

  On May 13, 1888, Brazil became the last country to formally abolish slavery with what is known as the Golden Law. There was no civil war when abolition was finally decreed, just relief. The overriding agenda of the Brazilian state was abolition. Without abolition, there could be no industrialization, no acceptance by Europe into the emerging global economy, and no influx of European immigration and labor to push back against labor shortages as well as change the racial balance of forces. Given these needs, all concerned were feeling quite pragmatic about the need for change.30

  Yet even this change did not take place without controversy. In 1891, in a hotly contested action, “the Brazilian Minister of Finance decreed the abolition of history; he ordered the destruction of every document which dealt in any way with slavery or the slave trade; a nationwide burning of the books.”31 Some historians have argued that this was done explicitly to prevent the oligarchs from seeking compensation for abolition. This has had the more long-term historical consequence, however, of preventing any kind of movement for reparations or historical accountability from Brazil’s wealthiest families. Accountability for genocide has thus largely been erased.

  Once abolition became the new reality, there was no formally codified segregation, no equivalent to the US Jim Crow laws. Generations of intermarriage and carefully constructed racial hierarchies made rigid segregation impossible to enforce. Far more important and influential were ideas of white supremacy and social Darwinism, which became refracted through the lens of a culturally mixed nation. However, there also was no struggle over the political and economic status of the newly liberated people—it was just “slavery’s over, now fend for yourselves.” This created a mass influx of propertyless, impoverished ex-slaves into Rio and other cities. It also meant the creation of Brazil’s still-flourishing sex trade: the massive expansion of the prostitution and exploitation of women of African descent. This emancipation, in which people were given “nothing but freedom,” laid the basis for the extreme inequality of Brazilian society today.

  As this precarious new underclass formed over the nineteenth century, ideological tracts called for more European immigration to “whiten” and therefore improve the Brazilian population, Abolishing slavery did lead to a mammoth 500-percent explosion of immigration, largely made up of Italians, Germans, and, starting in 1908, Japanese. Between 1890 and 1930, Brazil’s population grew by 160 percent to more than thirty-four million people.32

  The end of slavery also opened the door for two dramatic developments. The first was end of royal rule: the armed forces removed and replaced the monarchy without bloodshed. This meant that Brazil’s very founding as a republic was under a military government. The army voted to increase its own size by 50 percent and double its own salaries. It then disestablished the Roman Catholic Church as the “official” church of Brazil, weakening its position significantly compared to other Latin American countries (no sin below the equator!).

  The beginning of the Brazilian republic coincided as well with the beginning of Carnival, a six-day party that today draws as many as five million people into the streets throughout the country. Carnival mixes elements of Catholicism (it is held the week before Lent, ending the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday) with the pagan festival of Saturnalia as well as elements of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian culture. Like the samba dancers who lead its processions, Carnival is a celebration of how Brazil chooses to see itself in its best light: as a beautiful mosaic of different cultures that have come together to produce something uniquely beautiful and life-affirming. It is also a day of masks, where sexuality and identity are fluid and under the protection of anonymity, so people can experiment without fear.

  Today, it is understandable why so many Brazilians are rankled by the modern commercialization of Carnival as a brand, just another export for global consumption, kind of like a super-sized Mardi Gras. But this would come later. In the late nineteenth century, the military government had no problem with the masses having their Carnival in the streets. They were concerned with setting up this new republic in ways that would establish continuity with the past. They could not have known that the echoes of their blueprint would reverberate into the twenty-first century. The army adopted a constitution that was a model of “radical decentralization.” This had the effect of preserv
ing the old oligarchic power in the new Brazilian military republic, while continuing to stymie any attempts to industrialize. In addition, the oligarchs proclaimed themselves part of the army: they were now officially colonels.33

  Though the military republic was content to remain an agricultural economy in an age of industrialization, Brazil’s rulers did have their eye on developing one part of the country: Rio. In 1902, 590 buildings were destroyed and thousands of families displaced on this prime piece of coastal real estate.34 Because the interior was largely left to the landed estates and the Indigenous people, what little industrialization there was took place on the coast. The presence of labor unions and other workers’ organizations was extremely modest, mostly on the docks or among the railway workers attempting to connect the coast to the interior one track at a time. The union movement that did exist was imported into the country with the European immigration wave, which included many people with experience in the revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist or socialist movements in their home countries. The anarcho-syndicalists congregated in São Paulo, while the socialists tried to find purchase in Rio de Janeiro. The reaction of the military was to repress them both in brutal fashion.35

  Unions’ and radicals’ initial inability to find a home in Brazil was mirrored in industry’s inability to expand: the country was still too decentralized, the oligarchs still too powerful, and the country as a whole still too addicted to its single-crop export economy. This absence of industrialization also meant that while its neighbors poured funds into public education, Brazil did not. The oligarchical mentality was to keep workers as poor and disempowered as possible. By 1920 only one-quarter of Brazilian workers were literate, a figure that had not moved in a generation.36

  Yet Brazil still believed that, due to its size and the wealth it produced, it should be afforded respect. After World War I, Brazil expected to be granted a leading place in the League of Nations. It withdrew in 1926, angry and insulted, when this was denied. Respect on the international stage would only come under the leadership of doomed dictator/president Getúlio Vargas.

  The Time of Vargas and the Military Dictatorship

  Each drop of my blood will be an immortal flame in your conscience and will uphold the sacred will to resist. To hatred I reply with pardon, and to those who think they have defeated me, I reply with my victory. I was a slave to the Brazilian people, and today I am freeing myself for eternal life. But this people, whose slave I was, will no longer be slave to anyone. My sacrifice will remain forever in their souls and my blood will be the price for their ransom. I fought against the exploitation of Brazil. I fought against the exploitation of her people. I have fought with my whole heart. Hatred, infamy and slander have not conquered my spirit. I have given you my life. Now I offer you my death. I fear nothing. Serenely I take my first step towards eternity and leave life to enter history.

  —From the suicide note of Getúlio Vargas37

  In 1930, in the wake of the Great Depression, Brazil experienced another military coup. Initially bloodless, it installed the leader who would leave a greater mark on Brazil than anyone until Lula: the charismatic, savvy, and ruthless Getúlio Vargas. Vargas was a fascist sympathizer who admired Hitler and Mussolini. He did not believe that democracy was a feasible option for Brazil. Seeing what he believed to be models of success in Germany and Italy, he held that only a strong national hand could finally conquer Brazil’s interior and industrialize the country. He also said—and this resonated with Brazil’s masses—that liberal democracy was inherently intertwined with corruption and fraud. Vargas was canny enough to introduce women’s suffrage in 1932, although it was a “suffrage” without democracy. Far more illustrative was that he did so while repressing the very new women’s movement: Vargas “smashed the first small wave of feminine activism” fighting for suffrage.38 As we will see in chapter 4, he also banned women from playing soccer, symbolically shutting them out of a cultural space that was generating both national pride and a sense of national identity.

  Despite his sympathies, Vargas sided with US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Allied powers in World War II. Roosevelt was deeply concerned, given Vargas’s fascist proclivities as well as Brazil’s growing German émigré population, that Brazil could well side with the Axis powers and serve as a beachhead for Hitler in the Western Hemisphere. Vargas leveraged this fear to cut a lucrative deal with FDR for Brazil to become the number-one rubber producer for the US war effort. Vargas was thrilled that FDR and the United States had been forced to come to him, hats in hand. Yet the people who paid the price for this deal were the Brazilian citizens conscripted to make the journey into the rubber plantations of the Amazon. Known as the “rubber soldiers,” they worked in slave conditions for the war effort and are still fighting for reparations to this day. As one of them explained in 2010, “An army official came to my town and told us we could join the fight on the front line in Italy or go to the Amazon. He said we would become heroes in the rubber battle and get rich tapping rubber.” Once numbering fifty-five thousand, today the rubber soldiers are down to their last several thousand survivors.39

  Vargas, it must be noted, was also the first leader of Brazil who understood the value both of nationalism and of actively fostering a sense of national identity. Perhaps this resulted from his careful study of Europe’s fascists, but either way, he plowed funds into creating a “unique” Brazilian culture. He funded national organizations to promote and teach soccer as well as supporting Brazil’s internationally renowned samba schools. Samba is a Brazilian dance and music that combines cultural elements from Africa and Rio; Vargas emphasized the African contribution and celebrated the idea of a country as a mosaic that brought together disparate cultural elements to create a greater whole.40 But even as he celebrated samba and soccer, Vargas also cracked down militarily on any efforts to create cultural space he did not define as “Brazilian”—such as Japanese and Jewish schools and newspapers. These he had eliminated, seeing them as a threat to “Brazilian identity.” Communist and other dissident political parties were also outlawed and strikes remained illegal from 1937 to 1946. When some still took place, particularly in São Paulo, he met them with intense repression, arresting, torturing, and even killing union organizers.

  Vargas was eventually forced out of office in 1945 thanks to spiraling inflation that saw the cost of living in Rio double and São Paulo triple. Dissatisfaction and resistance to Vargas were also rooted in anger over the conditions of the health care and education systems (sound familiar?). Literacy levels still hovered around 25 percent and life expectancy was just forty-six years. In one of the most stunning political reinventions imaginable, Vargas was reelected in 1950 as a born-again populist and a major supporter of labor unions. He started the national oil company, Petrobras, under the left-populist slogan “The oil is ours.” He instituted a minimum wage and formed the Brazilian Labor Party, which was seen as the political party for workers and the peasantry. The man who had outlawed strikes became known as the “Father of the Poor.”41 But his administration faced a variety of corruption scandals and the economy was in disarray due to the plummeting price of coffee, then the single cash crop. Vargas took his own life with a gunshot in 1954. In his suicide note, he wrote, “The crisis of coffee production came and the price of our chief product went up. We tried to defend the price, and the answer was such violent pressure on our economy that we had to give in.”42

  Vargas’s problem was not limited to local corruption scandals and an economy that was eroding his popularity. It was his inability to manage and control the fundamental trend warping his dreams of national mission and prominence on the global stage: massively expanding social inequality. Any effort to address this inequality, like the raising the minimum wage, met with implacable resistance from the oligarchs, the new industrialists, and the military. This exploding inequality grew up side by side with urbanization and the creation of the favelas. The interior remained more or less the Wild West, with Br
azilians still seen as “clinging to the coast like crabs.”43

  After Vargas’s suicide, Brazil elected a radical left-nationalist president named Juscelino Kubitschek. Known by his initials, JK, he ruled from 1956 to 1961 and is still remembered with great affection as one of the fathers of modern Brazil. Born in poverty, JK was a medical doctor before becoming immersed in politics. When elected, he saw the critical importance of breaking up the oligarchs’ power and diversifying the economy. His slogan was that the nation needed to make “fifty years of progress in five.” JK succeeded in building a new national capital in Brasília, which symbolically lies in the interior of the country—a national dream since the initial 1891 constitution. Placing the capital in the interior sent a message that the nation was no longer comprised of “crabs clinging to the coast” but that the entire land had in fact, after 450 years, finally been brought into an actualized nation-state.

  The Kubitschek presidency created a period of economic optimism in which Brazil’s economy experienced explosive growth and seemed to break out of its historic patterns of underdevelopment. Galeano described it in Open Veins of Latin America: