Benefiting from a good international public image sown by President Lula and his policies of social inclusion, this developmentalist Brazil confronts the world as a power of a new kind, one that is benevolent and inclusive. The international surprise, then, could not have been greater with regard to the demonstrations which during the past week brought hundreds of thousands of people onto the streets of the main cities in the country. If the reading of the recent demonstrations in Turkey as one of “two Turkeys” was immediate, in the case of Brazil it was more difficult to recognise the existence of “two Brazils”. But it can be seen by everyone. The difficulty in recognising it lies in the very nature of the “other Brazil”, a Brazil that eludes simplistic analyses. This Brazil is made of three narratives and temporalities. The first is the narrative of social exclusion (one of the most unequal countries in the world), of landowning oligarchies, of violent caciquism, of narrow and racist political elites—a narrative that dates back to colonialism and which has reproduced itself on always mutating forms to this day. The second narrative is that of the demand for participative democracy, which dates back this past 25 years and had its highest points in the constituent process that led to the Constitution of 1988, the participative budgets on urban policies in hundreds of municipalities, the impeachment of president Collor de Mello in 1992, in the creation of citizen councils in the main areas of public policy, especially in health and education, at different levels of state action (municipal, regional and federal). The third narrative is less than ten years old and relates to the vast policies of social inclusion adopted by president Lula da Silva from 2003, which led to a significant reduction in poverty, the creation of a middle class with a high consumerist drive, the recognition of racial discrimination against the Afro-descendant and indigenous population, and policies of affirmative action, and the widening of the recognition of Quilombola [slave descendant] and indigenous territories.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Aug 2013 19:03:08 +0000
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