The bandits from Brazil
Richard West
Rio de Janeiro Returning from SOuth America on a plane in April 1966,1 heard the captain announce on the intercom that Harold Wilson had won his second general election with an increased majority. The response of the passengers to this news was neither a cheer nor a groan but a kind of inane laughter; perhaps, in retrospect, they were right. For me, returning to England after a long South American tour, the news was vaguely portentous since I had already spotted a resemblance between the ways that England and South America were heading. This trend was not entirely Wilson's fault; indeed his government in the Sixties was certainly better in most ways — and less South American — than that of the mad Edward Heath. Yet somehow he got stuck in my mind as a South American figure, whom I identified with the stirring and sometimes disastrous incidents that we later heard about from that continent: the return to power in Argentina of Juan Peron (WisIon) or the last stand in Chile of Allesandro Allende (Wisllende), machine-gun in hand, defying his enemies. The comparison may be unfair, yet Wilson certainly was in power during most of the years in which England careered through inflation, strikes, folly and terrorism to the very brink of a South American tragedy. A left-wing Brazilian priest told me in 1965: 'I'm a great admirer of Wilson. We'd like him here as Prime Minister.'
Brazil had already acquired a military dictator in 1964, the year that Wilson came to power. The former civilian President, Joao Goulart, had fallen from power for reasons best explained by a statistic. The Brazilian newspaper 0 Globo reported on 4 October this year that inflation per month now stood at 7.96 per cent, the highest figure since January 1964 when it had reached 11.29 per cent. The present government of Brazil attributes the present inflation rate, and with some justice, to the increased prices of fuel and to wage demands. But how did Goulart achieve still higher inflation when there was no world • fuel shortage and wage demands could not keep up with price rises? He was quite simply a giant spender: land reform programmes, new cities, motorways, slum clearance schemes, new ministries, Amazonian farming settlements sprung week by week from his bubbling imagination. He even looked the part of the maniac dreamer, with staring eyes behind a pair of glasses that seemed to be joined to his black moustache like one of those sets in a children's joke shop. He spent, not just unwisely, but in heroic fashion. When the foreign banks despaired of him, he printed his own money and challenged the rest of the world to stop him. I thought of Goulart during the British financial crisis of autumn 1976, when Tom Jackson, the Postal Workers' leader (and fellow whiskers), told the Labour Conference that if the rest of the world let Britain go bankrupt, then Britain would bring down the rest of the world with her.
Britain in 1976 agreed to cut some of her spending and did not collapse. When Goulart, in 1964, refused to stop spending, the bankers and some of the politicians called in a general to take charge, while Goulart went into exile in Uruguay (another big spender, as we shall see). For the first two or three years, the military rule in Brazil was not oppressive; the old politicians had their say, and even the revolutionaries agitated with little fear of trouble from the police. Here, as everywhere in Latin America, the universities were abuzz with the exploits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the Argentinian who had set out from Cuba to stir up revolt in Bolivia — an enterprise that ended with Guevara's tragi-farcical death. It is not in the least strange that Che and Fidel were themselves the children of rich, middle class families; SO were the overwhelming majority of their admirers. Throughout South America, the poor and exploited peasants, cane cutters or tin miners have stayed indifferent or hostile to the appeals of the revolutionaries, although they will strike for better pay and conditions.
Here in Brazil, the degradation was always worse in the north-east part of the country where most of the population are black or brown descendants of Africans who have been brought to slave on the sugar plantations; the region was chronically lawless during the 19th century when social protest expressed itself in banditry. A popular song of the Sixties 'Hole, I am a bandit, a bandit of Brazil,' was taken from a film by 3 left-wing Brazilian producer, who no doubt hoped that some recurrence of violence might liberate the north-east. There was no shortage of preachers of violence even among the Catholic priests; one of them told me in 1965 that he wanted to raid the local plantations and kill the bourgeoisie with a machine gun. But the peasants themselves were docile. This vast country, most of whose people really are poor and exploited, would seem to have been most suitable for a revolutioni yet when the violence came, at the end 0 the Sixties, it was largely confined to terror attacks by 'urban guerrillas' in Rio, Sa°, Paolo and other cities. The young men and women involved were almost without their inspiration pn m i from nw cameel lt o from mf a mAmericani li es. exceptionMucsht°13f dent protest against the Vietnam War, from the 'evenements' in Paris in 1968, and later terrorist movements in Ireland and GerMany. For about three years, this once genial country suffered a reign of political bombings, shootings and kidnappings. As an English resident recalls: 'One of the last incidents was in 1971 when they grabbed a British sailor during a naval visit. Chopped him into little bits. This was expressing solidarity with the IRA or the BaaderIVIeinhof Gang or something.'
The terrorists were destroyed by eounter-terror. Thousands of known or suspected left-wingers, few of whom had been involved in terrorist activities, were arrested, sentenced to prison or exile. Many of these were horribly tortured. Since the Courts were not always willing to convict those accused of political crimes (or, if they did, gave only a lenient sentence), some elements of the police usurped the job of the judges. Murder Squads kidnapped, tortured and murdered scores of urban guerrillas and also a great many common criminals. Only last month, a man whose daughter had just been attacked and raped, asked in a letter to Jornal do Brazil why the murder squads could not be revived.
Now that the urban guerrillas have been removed, the government is prepared to behave more liberally. The .politicians are active again and sniffing the rich aroma of Power. There has been a series of strikes in both the private and public sector. The newspapers debate such issues with gusto. The student organisation may be restored. The leaders of the Brazilian Communist Party have come back under an amnesty and resumed a dialogue with their friends in the Catholic Church. The Bishop of Sao Paolo, whose diocesan magazine recently Published a cartoon of Christ as an urban guerrilla on the run, entertained one of those communist bigwigs who in turn called for religious freedom. A group of 40 powerful businessmen issued a statement — its language redolent of the Sixties— asking for Party reform 'that will enable a better reflection of the different tendencies of Brazilian thought in the country's decision-making process'. Brazil has now passed out of the rightwing counterterror still endured by Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. At the same time She is moving away from the harsh, free market economic principles of the Chicago School so called after the liberal economist, Milton Friedman. Of Brazil's two economic ministers, one is a 'Chicago' man and the other an 'expansionist', which is the uphemistic expression for the state spend' ing money. 'Expansionism' is one cause of the high, inflation rate. The other is the cost of fuel.
Braze ha's little oil or other natural sources of energy. She cannot therefore PO cutting down on the consumption of petrol, as can the oil-producing, backward countries like Venezuela, Mexico and Great Britain. But, at the sa,me time, modern Brazil is constructed to run on a con stant and cheap supply of fuel. The railways stopped running properly almost as soon as the British, who built them, were bought out; the cities, above all Sao Paolo, sprawl for as much as 40 miles in any direction; the cement skyscrapers of central Rio depend on electric power for lifts and airconditioning. When I was here in the Sixties, the Americans used to point out that Brazil was just getting 'on wheels'.
By chance, 1 met one of the many Brazilian professors working to find alternative sources of fuel: 'We want another fuel for automobiles, so we will not be so dependent on the United States'. (Like most Brazilian intellectuals, he does not like the Yanquis). 'The answer,' he said, 'is solar energy'. 'How do you run a car on solar energy'?' I inquired, for he seemed to want me to ask that question. 'The answer is gasohol,' he explained. 'We will run automobiles on alcohol out of sugar cane and manioc. Do you know what manioc is?' 'Yes, that disgusting root. I've eaten it in Africa'. 'And they eat it here!' the professor exclaimed. 'That's the problem. How do we make gasolene out of the manioc that is filling the stomachs of poor Brazilians? Do you know how many people in this country are underfed? And when the children do not have enough to eat, their brains do not grow, they cannot study in the schools, they grow up to think of nothing but — football!' I interrupted to ask a question that had been nagging me: 'But if you're using gasohol, where does the solar energy come in?' He looked at me as Galileo must have looked at those who doubted the world was round. 'Solar energy? That we use to dry the manioc. You cannot get alcohol out of manioc until it is dry. In the United States they dried the vegetables with electric power and it ended up costing more than petrol. We can dry any amount of manioc with solar petrol. The only trouble is, what will our poor people eat? We shall have another generation growing up with impoverished brains — it will happen to them• whatever race they are, not just the Negroes. The professor had touched on what is a delicate topic in Brazil. The negro minority is already the preponderant race in north east Brazil and is growing proportionally to the whites in cities like Rio and Sao Paolo. Relations between the races, at a personal level, are very good; incomparably better than in England, for example or the United States, let alone South Africa. This is partly attributable to the Portuguese system of slavery in which the arriving Africians were allowed to keep their names and customs, to marry and stay with their wives, and to buy their freedom. Slavery in Brazil was never as odious as it was in the West Indies or the United States. The African ju-ju religion sometimes results in trouble with lice: disturbing the peace at night, sexual indecency, or death from a witch-doctor's medicine. Only last week, near Rio, a crowd lynched two men who had used a child as a human sacrifice. But such excesses by the negro part of the population are more than outweighed by their contribution to football, music and general good humour; Brazil's greatest author, Machado de Assis, and many artists and poets have been wholly or partly negro.
If the contribution of negroes to the culture of Brazil has been disproportionately high, their contribution to the economy is disproportionately low. They themselves acknowledge, indeed they bemoan, this fact, One of the leaders of the negro community complained this month that the forthcoming census will not insist the population state their racial origins because, so he insisted, this would reveal the very low status of negroes in society. Although negroes have made some headway — if disproportionately low —in the civil service, the professions, the police and the clergy, they are scarcely to be found in business or big farming. There is less of a black middle-class than in the United States or South Africa. The great majority of the negro population have menial jobs or none at all. They are citizens of the shanty-towns or favelas that perch on the mountains overlooking Rio. Their children as the Professor said, get little to eat, their brains are stunted, they probably do not get to school and they end as illiterates thinking of nothing but — football. (In England their equivalents get enough to eat but pass through comprehensive schools and, therefore, may also end up as illiterates.) It is what sociologists call 'the cycle of deprivation'.
The wealth of Brazil that feeds and clothes her vast population comes almost entirely from the three southernmost provinces; it is provided by agricultural goods like coffee, beef and wheat and is produced largely by two immigrant groups, the Japanese and the Germans. Here in Brazil, one gets the first hint of an economic phenomenon that is widespread in South America but unknown in Europe — at any rate it is unknown to me. This is the transfer of capital, enterprise and talent away from industry and back to the land. Significantly it is the two most enterprising modern industrial peoples — the Germans and Japanese — that have become the most successful farmers.
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