Canadian Store (CAD)
You are currently shopping in our Canadian store. For orders outside of Canada, please switch to our international store. International and US orders are billed in US dollars.
The following is excerpted from Global Shift: Asia, Africa, and Latin America, 1945-2007 by Mike Mason.
Dictatorship
in Brazil lasted for two decades from 1964 and has been considered the most
dismal period in the history of the nation. Tens of thousands were arrested,
many of whom were tortured and murdered, while the programme of ISI was
abandoned in favour of opening up the country to foreign capital and especially
multinational firms. Growth was furious; one spoke at the time of the “Brazilian
miracle.” Business writers hinted that the sacrifice of democracy was an
acceptable price for growth. The major beneficiaries of the miracle were,
unsurprisingly, those in the top deciles of the population, that is, the rich.
The top 10 per cent of the population absorbed a full 75 per cent of the total gain
in Brazilian income in 1964–75. By 1983 a government study was able to show
that 70 per cent of the population had a daily caloric intake “lower than
necessary for human development.” One study in the 1970s showed that the number of abandoned
and needy children was as high as fifteen million. Another, focusing on the
north of the country, showed that nearly 45 per cent of children had been
abandoned by their families.
This was worse than India.The generals
were shopaholics. Between 1974 and 1977 Brazil’s debt went up from $12 billion
to $50 billion. The IMF had loaned more money to Brazil than to any other
single country in Latin America. By 1980 Brazil’s debt payments represented 259
per cent of its total earnings. Fearful of their declining popularity, the
junta began to release their grip on society. Protests increased; even the
bourgeoisie was unnerved. Regime collapse was inevitable.Military rule
ended in 1985. Old politicians, Jose Sarney and Fernando Collor de Mello, ruled
in the 1990s, the first hour of neoliberalism, when the idea of selling off
state assets was thought to be a brilliant solution to debt. Meanwhile, in 1982
a new political party had emerged; in fact, the party was one of the few new
political organizations globally in the late twentieth century. The Workers’
Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) increasingly commanded the votes of the big
cities and for a time even the middle class. Yet, the poor and destitute
remained afraid that radical change would decrease their security and gave
their votes to Collor, who won the elections of 1989, defeating Inacio da Silva,
called “Lula,” of the Workers’ Party. Then, gradually, came a shift with the
middle class abandoning the Workers’ Party and the poor rushing towards it.
Collors impeachment for corruption in 1992 meant that in the elections of 1994,
a surprising candidate won: Henrique Cardoso, celebrated for his Marxist
critique of developmentalism. He had paid $41 million to get into the
Presidential Palace, which he occupied for eight years. Yet, for all his
professions of Marxism, Collor proved, in a remarkably short time, to be little
different from the neoliberals who were emerging right across the planet. By
the mid-1990s, during Brazil’s worst stagnation of the century, he had come to
preside over one of the most socially polarized countries anywhere.On his third
try, Lula, surfing on a remarkable social movement, won the presidential
election of 2002. In spite of early corruption scandals, Lula won two more
elections with astonishing results. To his good fortune, the early years of the
twenty-first century were those of the insatiable commodity boom with Chinese
demand for Brazil’s primary exports – soya and iron ore – seeming limitless.
But more essential to his popularity was Lula’s commitment to helping the poor
through the Bolsa Familia, a monthly stipend sent to mothers of the lowest income, given
on the proviso that the children had their health checked and were sent to
school.When Lula
finally stepped down in 2010, he was one of the most popular democratic
politicians in the world (a Nelson Mandela on the other South Atlantic shore).
The status of Brazil had been transformed; it was now considered one of the
BRIC countries, the head of a pack that included Russia, India, and China. His
successor in the presidential elections of 2011 was Dilma Roussef, a former
guerrilla who had been captured and tortured by the military. By the time of
her election the Workers’ Party had come to enjoy thumping majorities in both
the Brazilian Congress and Senate.
To learn more about Global Shift, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
No comments yet.