From hope to despair: the Brazilian political context in the years before the

3. CHAPTER 3: LENGTHY, SLOW AND INEFFECTIVE: THE CASE

On January first, 2003, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took the presidential office in a peaceful transition from his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. For the first time in Brazilian history, a man who was born in the country’s Northeast and migrated to São Paulo to work as a blue collar worker at a heavy industry was elected to the highest office in Brazil. The leader of the powerful ABC’s Metallurgic Workers Union and late founder of the Partido dos Trabalhadores came into power after the years of the neoliberal rule put in place by the sociologist and professor Cardoso since 1994.

The eminent “prince of sociologists”⁸⁰ left the office after eight years of economic austerity, which balanced the country’s fiscal policy and provided low inflation rates, at expenses of investments in infrastructure and elevated levels of unemployment and poverty.

Lula da Silva took office amid an atmosphere of hope. As an individual coming from a poor migrating family himself, he would be sympathetic to the harsh conditions of life in the country’s poorest regions. One of the crucial points of his platform was the alleviation of the extreme poverty of significant parts of the population. In his own words, everyone should have the right to “have breakfast, lunch and dinner”

everyday⁸¹. After his election, Lula da Silva conducted the first years of his first term keeping the conservative economic pillars of his predecessor, disproving fears that he would take radical measures. Boosted by the rise of the prices of commodities and after the forced renewed approach with social movements after the rocky political scandal known as “mensalão”⁸², Lula da Silva was able to govern improving the general well-being of the low and middle classes without implementing any structural change to the Brazilian unequal society. Despite this “weak reformism”

(SINGER, 2012), Lula da Silva had 80% of approval by the end of his second term as president and was able to elect his successor, Dilma Vana Rousseff.

80 “Prince of the sociologists” or simply “the prince” is the ironic nickname by which Cardoso is often cited in Brazilian newspapers, referring to his professorship at the Universidade de São Paulo, a renowned public university in Brazil.

81 As stated in his presidential inauguration discourse, which can be read at https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/brasil/ult96u44275.shtml (accessed on 06/07/2018).

82“Mensalão” is the nickname of the corruption scandal involving the alleged buying of congressional support by PT politicians in 2005. Each congressional representative would have been paid with monthly installments to vote under the guidance of the government’s agenda at the time. For an interesting analysis of this scandal as the result of the tension between the institutional incentives to PT to maximize vote and the party’s history, see Hunter (2007).

Rousseff’s election was no less symbolic than the one of her predecessors.

The first woman to hold the presidential office in Brazilian history, the young Rousseff took arms against the military rule in Brazil and was one of the leaders of the left- wing group VAR-PALMARES. She was arrested and spent three years under torture in military prisons between 1970 and 1972. After that, she became a public official and held several distinct positions in state-level governments before joining Lula da Silva’s federal government in 2002. After 2005, she became the coordinator and supervisor of significant governmental policies such as Luz Para Todos, Programa Minha Casa, Minha Vida and the large pack of infrastructural investments called Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (Growth Acceleration Program, mostly known by its acronym in Portuguese, “PAC”)⁸³. Largely considered by political actors as a “political outsider” and somebody with a “technical profile” rather than a

“standard” politician, Rousseff was able to keep the general improvement of well- being of the population, despite the end of the commodities’ “boom” and a much more prominent intervention in the economy. After the corruption scandal at the state-owned giant oil company Petrobras and successive mass protests in the streets calling for her removal from office, Rousseff was impeached by the Brazilian Congress in 2016, putting an end to fourteen years of PT’s rule of the federal government in Brazil⁸⁴.

The contrasts between “creator” and “creature” became clear as soon as Rousseff’s government took off in 2011. Whereas Lula da Silva was considered

“lenient” with corruption in his government, Rousseff was “cleaning house”; while the

83 The Luz Para Todos program was implemented in 2003 with the goal of providing universal access to electric energy to Brazilian population, with special focus to the historically neglected countryside (BRINA, 2016); the Minha casa, Minha vida program, on the other hand, was a housing program implemented in 2009 with the goal of stimulating the job market after the 2008 global crisis through the incentives for buying houses by poor and middle class families (DUTRA; SOARES, 2016).

84 The legality of Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment is a contentious issue to date and the terms of this controversy is beyond the scope of this research. The highly polarized political atmosphere in Brazil at the time of this research casts suspicions of “political bias” to every researcher who tries to discuss the pros and cons of the leftist governments between 2003 and 2016. Frankly, the author of this research agrees with many prominent political analysts (see, among others, SINGER, 2018; SANTOS, 2017) who understands the impeachment trial against Dilma Rousseff as illegal and a “parliamentary coup”. This proposition, however, should not give the researcher a “laissez-passer” to the analysis of PT governments, overlooking their problems and overestimating their accomplishments. Being aware of the impossibility of political neutrality of the research does not mean turning it into a piece of political advertising. Therefore, in this research we tried to make an assessment as clear and fair as possible of the PT’s era of the federal government. We strongly encourage the reader to search for primary sources and books assessing the period. Beyond the works already referred, for an overtly positive assessment of Lula da Silva’s first term, see Mercadante (2006); for a nuanced discussion of the entire period of the PT in power, see Singer (2012; 2018); for a conservative analysis of the Rousseff period, see Bolle (2016);

for the analysis of the evangelical vote on the impeachment trial, see Prandi and Carneiro (2018).

former was the “universal mediator”⁸⁵ of the political disputes, the latter was the

“manager” of the daily life of the government. The continuities were also evident, especially in the economic agenda. However, even there Rousseff’s imprints were clear: whereas the state-led developmentalist formula was designed in Lula da Silva’s second term, it was during the Rousseff years that this agenda became hegemonic, overriding traditional populations.

Furthermore, in sharp contrast to Lula da Silva’s approach, the progressive distancing of Rousseff’s government from the Indigenous social movement was followed by an aggressive approximation to representatives of agribusiness and prominent members of the ruralist caucus. Katia Abreu, one of its most outspoken members, became Minister of Agriculture in 2015 and was a tireless critic of the Indigenous peoples and their right to traditional lands⁸⁶. When the impeachment trial against Rousseff started in 2015, the NPPCIP was seen as a decisive event to show political support and a timid but positive step towards reconciliation, unfortunately, a bit too late.

As bad as the record of the leftist governments towards Indigenous peoples, Indigenous policy, and land demarcation may be, as we have seen in the previous chapter, it does not mean that some critical policies were implemented in the period.

To mention just the most prominent, the Indigenous Environmental and Territorial Management Project started in 2003 (GATI- Projeto Gestão Ambiental e Territorial Indígena) became the Indigenous Environmental and Territorial Management Policy (PNGATI) in 2012 after a broad process of consultations with Indigenous peoples around the country; the Ministry of Culture established the Indigenous Cultures Award (Prêmio Culturas Indígenas) and the Indigenous Pontos de Cultura in 2006 and 2009, respectively; the Ministry of Health established the Special Secretary for Indigenous Healthcare (Secretaria Especial de Saúde Indígena) in 2010.

85 I borrow this expression from Vladimir Safatle’s piece “Os impasses do lulismo” (available at:

https://www.cartacapital.com.br/politica/os-impasses-do-lulismo. Accessed on: 06/07/2018)

86 In 2011, Abreu defended that “Indigenous peoples have lands, what they need is social policies” (available at:

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/mercado/me1106201127.htm. Accessed on: 06/07/2018); in her first interview after she became Minister of Agriculture, she infamously affirmed that “there are no large rural properties in Brazil anymore” and that the ruralist caucus only started to worry about Indigenous lands “because Indigenous peoples left the jungle and came to productive lands” (available at:

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2015/01/1570557-nao-existe-mais-latifundio-no-brasil-diz-nova-ministra- da-agricultura.shtml. Access in: 06/07/2018), a declaration that immediately sparked protest by Indigenous movement (available at: https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2015/01/1570935-katia-abreu-assume-ministerio- sob-criticas-de-indios-e-sem-terra.shtml. Access in: 06/07/2018).

In other words, Indigenous policy in Brazil is a political battlefield where advances and setbacks are part of the daily life of Indigenous peoples and policymakers, and no simplistic assessment is allowed. It is imperative to take a step back and highlight the importance of participatory politics to PT governments in democratic Brazil, with specific focus to Indigenous participation, to understand the emergence of this Conference in this complex context.