Can Brazilian Spatial Patterns of Exploitation Explain Bolsonaro and Lula?
On October 2 over 150 million Brazilians will exercise their voting rights. All eyes will be on center-left leader Lula da Silva, the previous president who is leading in the polls with 48%, versus the extreme-right current president Jair Bolsonaro, who is trailing behind with less than 35% (Figure 1). The presidential contest is garnering inordinate media attention, eclipsing all others— governors, and members of state and federal legislatures—who will also be chosen next month. The previous Lula government (2003-2010) is remembered by most Brazilians as a time of full employment, economic growth, and wage redistribution. Nonetheless, corruption scandals (many already proven to have been fabricated), economic stagnation, and political instability gave buoyancy to the candidacy of Bolsonaro in 2018, a cartoonish defender of police repression, gun rights and misogyny. Unlike Donald Trump in the USA or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Bolsonaro had no support from Brazil’s main political parties. They only threw their support behind him after Lula was jailed (for charges that were later dismissed by Brazil’s Supreme Court) making his election inevitable. Notably, the ambitious judge who broke every judicial rule to send Lula da Silva to jail became Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice. If it sounds absurd, that’s because it is.
Figure 1. Street campaign for Lula, São Paulo, September 2022. Photo by persmisison of Elineudo Meira Chokito.
It is hard to account for the turn of events that led to the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s heir who lead the country from 2011 to 2016. It is even harder to understand Bolsonaro’s rise in 2018 and his erratic presidency. Even experienced commentators fail to explain how Rousseff and the PT (Workers Party) lost political capital so rapidly and how a majority of Brazilians voted for an ill-prepared—to say the least—Bolsonaro. These explanations rely on political interpretations developed in the Global North and theories that uncouple the relationship between political and spatial formations that drive the power dynamics in the Global South. There is a pressing need for theories about political processes conceived within the Global South that take into account the politics of and on the street. Trying to explain Brazilian street protests, police repression, and transportation bottlenecks using concepts and theories imported from the Global North demands a level of context simplification that eliminates the nuance of what is happening on the ground. This is especially important due to the intersectionality of land, labor, police, gender, transportation and access to infrastructure.
“There is a pressing need for theories about political processes conceived within the Global South that take into account the politics of and on the street.”
Brazilian streets exploded with protests in June 2013, just as we were starting a research collaboration comparing participatory processes and traditional top-down planning practices, and we felt the need to develop our own concepts and theories to explain Brazilian spatial history. On the one hand, the narrative set up by international observers such as Anderson and Vicino and Fahlberg do not consider the nuances of the Brazilian context, and, on the other hand, local scholars such as Rolnik and Ribeiro and Santos Junior are too caught up in the whirlwind of events to be reflexive. The more we read the more we felt like there is a mismatch between the conceptual lens of the Global North and the rich ethnography and engaged scholarship of the Global South. Right in the middle of this mismatch, as if operating as a kind of magnetic repulsion, are the Brazilian streets, the way they have been designed and the way they have been appropriated. There is a paucity of theorization capable of capturing the nuances of the Brazilian context, and it is in order to fill this crucial gap that we wrote Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil, published this year.
“Having space as the main variable of analysis allows us to discuss the production of the Brazilian city as both an instrument, and the consequence, of an unequal society.”
Written almost concurrently with the unfolding events between 2013 and 2018, our book seeks to interpret Brazilian inequality through the lens of the relationship between street protests and urban policy, making explicit the conflict between popular democracy and economic interests in the production of space on the periphery of Western capitalism. Having space as the key analytic allows us to discuss the Brazilian city as both an instrument and the consequence of an unequal society. The tension of street protests is the foundation on which conflicts of Brazilian democracy have been based. By analyzing the historical changes brought about at such moments, we can derive important lessons for urban policy in Brazil. The narrative seeks to uncover different historical moments and evaluate the political agenda of the Brazilian state versus popular movements, demonstrating that the struggles for the construction of a more just society are inscribed in the spatial arrangements of Brazil’s major cities.
We introduced a conceptual diagram to theorize and explicate the relationship between space, social movements, and the extreme inequality of Brazilian society (Figure 2). Following Manuel Castells’s suggestion that “we need a theoretical perspective flexible enough to account for the production and performance of urban functions and forms in a variety of contexts,” we proposed a theoretical tripod comprising the axes of work, land, and security, with transportation as a node at which these three intersect and traverse.[1] The axes form two pyramids—one at the base, symbolizing the working classes holding up the system, and one at the top, inverted, representing the elites.
Figure 2. Conceptual tripod diagram, by Fernando Lara and Ana Paula Koury.
Another inspiration for our theoretical tripod comes from Arturo Escobar work, Encountering Development: Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995). Escobar argues that there is no modernization without colonization. The very process of modernizing implies the colonial practice of imposing values and beliefs of ruling elites onto large swaths of the population. Our diagram encompasses the modernization/colonization mirror in its very structure. Every action taken by the ruling elites from the top down in the name of modernization has an effect on the working classes below. The opposite is also true: the political pressure of social movements and protests (their more radical form) pushes for changes in societal structure that impact the stability of those at the top of the social strata. As the reader can by now understand, our conceptual tripod operates with a broader definition of coloniality, in which structures created for the benefit of a minority are imposed on the ground and in the minds of the majority.
The tripod structure guarantees comfort for those who live at the top (good jobs, land tenure, and a protective police force) while subjecting the majority at the bottom to precariousness at work, informality in housing, and repression by police. Regressive policies enacted by the ruling elite have the effect of augmenting the distance between those above and those below. Progressive change pushed by social movements has the effect of shortening the distance between the classes, reducing the privilege of those at the top. Protests, both by the working class and by the affluent classes, take place when the rods expand (more inequality) or contract (less inequality). Our main argument is that while race, gender and class fill the void and are operating in the societal structure all the time, the three institutional variables of land, labor and police are acting in space, producing progressive or regressive change. If the rods stretch, it means that life becomes more unbearable for those below. If the rods shorten, this threatens the privileges of those above.
Over the years, Brazilian working classes have put pressure on their local governments to build infrastructure such as water and electricity, and pushed the federal government to improve working conditions and raise the minimal wage. Interestingly enough, none of these have changed or even threatened the inequality structure theorized in our tripod. Water and electricity, along with more educational opportunities and a public health system (Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS), improved people’s lives but kept the distance between the rich and the poor unchanged. The election of Lula da Silva in 2003 looked like more of the same at first, but it eventually did bring some change. In the theoretical tripod, raising the minimum wage above inflation and promoting economic expansion (via consumption) would shorten the labor rod. It bears remembering that police repression did not change during the Lula years, nor was there enough of an effort to give land rights to the inhabitants of the periphery. Rather, the poor improved their lives during the Lula years by consuming more, which, of course, made the rich richer.
When the growth-by-internal consumption model started to sputter during Rousseff’s first term (2011–2014), both the elites and the working class took to the streets to protest in June 2013. The commodities boom was over and economic measures implemented to mitigate the 2008 financial crisis of the North were now putting pressure on the Brazilian fiscal balance. The Rousseff government caved in to orthodox economic policies of fiscal austerity, indexing fuel prices to the fluctuations of international oil markets, while trying to keep the expenditures on social programs. Despite significant investments in education and health, the working poor saw their lives worsened by longer commutes (the transportation knot) and decaying infrastructure, and they demanded that schools and hospitals raised to the standards of the Padrão FIFA, the luxurious specifications imposed by the international football association for the stadiums and hotels that were being built at the same time for the 2014 World Cup (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Street campaign for Lula, São Paulo, September 2022. Photo by persmisison of Elineudo Meira Chokito.
While the large majority of the street protests are enacted by the poor because of regressive policies, the middle classes receive a lot of visibility when they protest against progressive change, with claims of “corruption” and “government inefficiency.” In contrast to the 2013 protests, in 2015 the middle classes and the elites began protesting that they could not get by as comfortably as they had before. After Rousseff was reelected in 2014, a more conservative Congress led by runner-up candidate Aécio Neves and House Speaker Eduardo Cunha placed all kinds of legislative roadblocks to derail Rousseff’s response to the economic crisis. At that point, in 2015, the streets filled with protesters again, but now no was one clamoring for better hospitals and better schools. On the streets, right-wing followers of Neves were decrying corruption and calling for the return of the military dictatorship in order to “get their country back.” The mainstream media cleverly amplified those calls eroding the popular approval of Lula da Silva, and Dilma Rousseff.
“While the large majority of the street protests are enacted by the poor because of regressive policies, the middle classes receive a lot of visibility when they protest against progressive change…”
Sergio Moro, a federal judge in the southern city of Curitiba became a popular hero for jailing politicians and construction companies CEOs in 2015/16. The middle class hailed him for “doing something” about corruption and the mainstream media (mostly Globo conglomerate which controls 60% of Brazilian TV market) conveniently overlooked his tactics of prolonging arrests to extract confessions and collaborating too closely with prosecutors. It was Moro who ultimately convicted Lula of corruption based on hearsay that a construction company would gift him an apartment (which never actually happened). Moro jailed Lula from April of 2018 until the Supreme Court overturned his conviction in November of 2019. When imprisioned, Lula was ahead in the polls for the 2018 presidential election, and his removal opened the doors for Jair Bolsonaro, who at that point was a distant second. Elected in November of 2018, Bolsonaro named Sergio Moro his Minister of Justice.
In June of 2019 The Intercept-Brazil published thousands of text messages exchanged between Judge Moro and the prosecutors, showing that they closely collaborated every step of the way. The Supreme Court was forced to annul Lula’s conviction. Moro left Bolsonaro’s government in 2020. In 2022 the UN Human Rights Committee confirmed that Moro violated due process guarantees in his conviction of Lula.
Implications for the Future
Looking at 2022 through the lens of our theoretical tripod, we clearly see the rods working to maintain the distance between the rich and the poor. The police are happy to take selfies with wealthy protestors shouting against “corruption” on one side of the street while brutalizing low-income youth protesting for labor protection, education and health on the opposite sidewalk. The labor gains of the Lula years were dismantled fast, and young people from the periphery who were the first in their families to go to college had difficulty finding jobs in the formal sector (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Street campaign: Women against Bolsonaro, São Paulo, August of 2022. Photo by persmisison of Elineudo Meira Chokito.
Worse yet, the long and slow political process required to rebuild Brazilian institutions damaged by the 2016 coup and broken beyond repair during the Bolsonaro years have not yet commenced. Isolated and lagging in the polls, Bolsonaro is radicalizing his discourse and normalizing the talk of another coup if the election doesn’t go his way. Lula, in contrast, is back as front runner in this election, trying to carve a centrist image by inviting right-of-center politician Geraldo Alckmin to run as vice president on his ticket. The need to create a broad alliance against Bolsonaro indicates that Lula will face significantly more difficulties in tackling inequality and pushing for labor gains than he had twenty years ago, his space for political maneuvers being much tighter now.
The Brazilian streets will once again hold the keys to the future, either full of protesters or emptied by the military/police apparatus. Our guess is that we will see both, and it will not be pretty.
Note
[1] Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press), 336.
Citation
Ana Paula Koury and Fernando Luiz Lara, “Can Brazilian Spatial Patterns of Exploitation Explain Bolsanaro and Lula?” PLATFORM, September 26, 2022.
