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Braudel Papers - Nº 1, 1993
Impeachment
is as foreign to Brazilian political culture as the word is to the
Portuguese language. Yet the swift action of Congress and the Supreme court
followed the essence of impeachment procedures as they evolved in England
six centuries ago. Legality was pursued by the leaders of Congress even
where impeachment provisions of the law and the Constitution were vague or
in conflict. The most surprising thing about this extraordinary event is
that, as recently as a month ago, many political insiders and ordinary
people, in corridors of Congress and in supermarkets, buses and
luncheonettes in Brazilian cities, stuck to the proverbial wisdom: "Não
vai dar em nada." ["Nothing
will come of this."] At
best, Collor's impeachment is the first episode of a long struggle that must
be sustained by the drive of most Brazilians for something better. While
Collor never tried to refute the charges against him, his aides
insisted that they would defeat the impeachment comfortably. However, their
maneuvers stalled amid a wave of indignation that overwhelmed all temptations by
Congressmen to temporize or sell their votes. To the drumming of street
demonstrations by students that became Carnaval scenes, with the vote of
each Deputy displayed in a national televised ritual practiced in Brazil on
this scale only for World Cup soccer games, Collor was suspended from office
for 180 days, pending trial by the Senate, by a vote of 441 to 38, a margin of nearly twelve to one, with the
President's main support reduced to a cluster of Deputies from the backward
states of Amazonia and the Northeast, heavily-overrepresented in Congress. Something
must come of this. Tuesday's vote shows that
many Brazilian politicians know that they survive at the edge of an
abyss. For the past year, chronic inflation has been "stabilized"
at a monthly rate of 20-25%,
perilously close to another hyperinflation. In the annals of world inflation,
no country has ever sustained price rises at such high rates for so long.
Federal revenues are falling while domestic public debt service is rising
fast and big government pay increases, already written into law, are
scheduled for 1993. As in the hyperinflation that preceded Collor's March
1990 inauguration, the country's domestic financial resources are
concentrated again in highly liquid assets that can be turned quickly into
foreign currency and gold. The new government headed by Vice President
Itamar Franco must do something about this fast. However, on the day after
the big vote, the parties backing Franco fell at each others' throats over
the makeup of the new cabinet. Names circulated of old cronies of the Vice
President and of failed economic czars of the 1980s whose policies led to
the past hyperinflation. The curse of mediocrity plagues the new government
even before it takes office. Brazilians
are starting to realize that chronic inflation is political failure, that
nothing of importance can be done without major alterations in the country's
political organization to truncate the parasitism embedded in a system of
transfer payments, especially from Brasília to local governments, that have
swollen public payrolls, cut public investment to dangerous new lows and
bred both corruption and more inflation. From this comes the wasting of
infrastructure, ethical standards and institutions that the Brazilian
economic philosopher Eduardo Giannetti da Fonseca calls "the plague of
relapse," threatening reversion of some populations to more archaic
regimes of civilization and mortality. The
spectacular corruption of Collor and his friends was blamed on the demands
of electoral financing which, in richer countries like Japan, Italy and the
United States, also blur distinctions between politics and crime. The
parliamentary inquiry on the influence-peddling and kickback ring operated
by Collor's friends reported:
"Brokers of public appropriations shamelessly swarm over the simplest
of routine payments" as well as bigger business such as unblocking
frozen bank accounts, getting contracts without public bidding, appointing
and removing officials, becoming "a kind of 'merchandise' for which
businessmen and others were willing to pay incredible and unjustified
prices." Brasília, the inland capital built three decades ago, has
become an institutionalized hive of such activity and a main engine of
Brazil's chronic inflation. Paulo César Farias, the President's business
agent and treasurer, accused his accusers of hypocrisy. Everyone is guilty,
he said. All this is part of the normal business of politics. This is why so
many Brazilians, shamed and despressed, said: "Não
vai dar em nada." Collor
was undone by moral indignation. But the moral indignation had to be fed
with muck from Brasília's bureaucracy, among whom he grew up as a Senator's
son, and from of an ugly family feud in the Northeastern state of Alagoas,
his political base. Even more important than the initial disclosures by
Pedro Collor, the President's younger brother, of organized corruption were
the relentless leaks and leads given the press and Congressional
investigators by disgruntled agents of the Federal Police whose salaries had
been truncated by Collor's pay freeze for public employees, by Central Bank
union leaders linked to the political opposition, by former military
intelligence officers also infuriated by low salaries as well as by
abolition of the National Intelligence Service (SNI). Collor
also rose to power on a wave of moral indignation, railing against official
"maharajahs" with special privileges in his 1989 election campaign
while denouncing corruption in the administration of President José Sarney
(1985-90). Sarney returned to the Senate in 1990 after establishing false
residence in the remote Amazon state of Amapá. His son and daughter, also
elected to Congress in 1990 in the inbred way of Brasília's ruling class,
played key roles in the impeachment proceedings. Ironically, the paper trail
of evidence condemning Collor was fruit of one of his moralizing innovations,
prohibiting banks from honoring checks made out to cash, eliminating a
customary way of making under-the-table payments. Brazil
has enjoyed the world's highest economic growth rate since 1870 of any
major country, but over the past decade has been stagnating economically and
sinking in political failure. There is no sign yet that Collor's
impeachment, product of alarm and indignation as well as political vengeance,
amounts to a clear reversal of this course. |
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