In the second chapter, Reid dives into the multi-ethnic background that divines Brazilian culture and how that has shaped Brazilian society throughout the ages. Reid starts the chapter by exploring the diverse Brazilian political geography. Brazil is divided into five regions: a southern region with a semi-European culture containing much agriculture and industry, a southeast that is the economic heartland of the country, a poor northeast containing mainly agriculture (both cash crop and subsistence farming), a northern “frontier” of the Amazon containing isolated cities of commerce, and a central western region that serves as the country’s agricultural frontier, providing the country with soybeans. Of Brazil’s regions, the southeastern exerts by far the most influence on the rest of the country. Of all the cities in this region, Rio de Janeiro is the most popular for many reasons. Rio has, for a long time, held critical economic importance for Brazil both when it was a Portuguese colony and when it was sovereign. Nestled at the foothills of the Serra do Mar mountain range, Rio’s beauty has long attracted businesses and financiers to flock to the city. As Brazil’s former long-time capital, Rio was the central hub of the industrial and economic activity for most of the nation’s history, and has created a coexisting aura of glamour and squalor. This capitalist atmosphere has familiarized many with the luxury of Rio’s upper-class residents and the destitution of the infamous favelas (slums). In more ways than one, Rio de Janeiro represents the extremes of Brazil, and this socio-economic inequality isn’t just found in Rio, but in the other Brazilian cities. While this inequality is felt all across Brazil, for this entry, I will focus just on the southeastern region. As far as size and population, Brazil’s largest city is São Paulo. Unlike Rio, São Paulo wasn’t always a magnet for economic activity, but in less than fifty years, it grew from a marginal outpost to a massive hub for the coffee trade and eventually an industrial powerhouse. This growth attracted immigrants from far and wide. While many immigrants in southern Brazil were from Europe, São Paulo also attracted workers from the western Middle East and East Asia. São Paulo’s boom created an upper-class euphoria present throughout the city. As always though, when an extremely wealthy class is created, an extremely poor class follows. This growth of the impoverished population led to a segregation of poor and rich neighborhoods, just as had happened in Rio. Brazil’s southeastern heartland created an ever-increasing income gap that came as a result of government ineptitude and corruption, but the poverty experienced in the heartland is a far cry compared to the struggles of Brazil’s destitute northeast region. The Brazilian northeast consists of agriculture. Home to 53 million people, the region’s per capita income is only 2/3 that of the national average. The region’s coastlines are centralized around sugar and cotton cash cropping, while the inland sertão serves mainly cattle raising and subsistence farming. Most industry in the region revolves around the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, and Ceará. The few industrial loci that the area has were constructed in the mid-to-late-twentieth century while Brazil was a stratocracy. Salvador, the capital of Bahia, is the most Africanized city of the northeast and one which plays an important regional role in the trading of many crops. Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, is a hub for both maritime and airborne trade in Brazil, and is home to many industries, including but not limited to, beer brewing, and ethanol (alcohol) fuel. Also important is the electronics industry, to which an entire city district is devoted. Another industrial nucleus in the northeast is Fortaleza, capital of Ceará. As Ceará’s heart, much economic activity revolves around Fortaleza. Regionally, the city is very important in the shoe-manufacturing industry. This isolated industrial success in the Brazilian northeast is thanks in part to the low wages maintained by companies in the cities they occupy. This is especially true in Fortaleza, which went through reform in the 1980s, leading to a drop in labor costs. Corruption in the local government has also contributed to the suppression of income increase. For example, Maranhão, one of the northeast’s poorest states, has been dominated by the family of former president José Sarney. Naturally, Maranhão was swimming in nepotism because of this; this widespread corruption contributed to Maranhão becoming the frontrunner for Brazil’s poorest state. In this entry, the two socio-economic extremes of Brazil were analyzed; the southeastern economic heartland and the poverty-ridden northeast. While the regions do indeed differ, they share common elements. In both areas, there is rampant corruption by a government with close ties to either the super-elite rich, such as those living in the Flamengo and Ipanema districts of Rio, or to fellow powerful politicians, like the the Sarney dynasty in control of Maranhão. Despite the similarities, the situation in the northeastern region of the country is in some ways much worse, as the average person living in that region is much poorer than the average of a poor Carioca (resident of Rio) or Paulistano (resident of Sao Paulo) in the southeast.
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In the first chapter of Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power, Michael Reid discusses the current events affecting Brazil and how they came to be that way. He first discusses the term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was president from 2001 until 2011. Reid elaborates on the political and economic happenings under the Lula administration. Next, the author discusses Lula’s appointed successor, Dilma Rousseff, and how the economic boom experienced under President Lula stumbled during the Rousseff administration. Reid uses this discussion to launch into the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (from 1956 to 1961) and how much of what is transpiring today in Brazil can be traced back to the Kubitschek administration.
Although Reid discussed Lula’s and Rousseff’s presidencies first, in this entry I will be going in chronological order and be starting with Juscelino Kubitschek’s term in office. Kubitschek was elected in 1956, during a time in which Brazil had seen much economic growth, but not in industry. During the 1956, Kubitschek promised to turn Brazil into an all-consuming industrial powerhouse in just five years, which he did, but not without cost. The rapid bull market economy resulted in high inflation, which was exacerbated while the military dictatorship was in control. This paved the way for support of Brazilian economic reform. In 1989, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ran unsuccessfully for President, representing Brazil’s Worker’s Party and calling for Brazilian socialism. Although Lula did not win, the victor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, led many financial reforms which favored the free market, stalling inflation and leading to stable economic growth. As a result of these popular economic policies, Lula abandoned his socialist stand and gravitated toward the center of the political spectrum. This turned out to be quite beneficial for him; Lula won the 2002 election. Determined to continue the prosperity Brazil saw under Cardoso’s term, Lula encouraged and indeed pioneered many government actions that led to monetary circulation; Lula himself said, “Capitalists in our country didn’t realize that to have capitalism, you need to have capital circulating.” This approach led to the formation of “a new middle class,” leading to further economic activity, especially in Brazil’s financial industries. The combination of low inflation and strong economic growth helped Brazil to survive the 2008 financial crisis generally unscathed, in stark contrast to many other countries, particularly in Latin America. In 2011, with the end of his term looming, Lula appointed fellow socialist Dilma Rousseff to serve as his successor. Although Dilma, as she was known by her supporters, vowed to continue the same path of growth that Lula had started, stagnation began and stalled growth. Shortly after Rousseff became president, loss of competitive drive, low productivity and tax burdens stagnated the economy. Simultaneously, public investment was dropping. Both of these factors led to the shrinking of the middle class. Meanwhile, the rich, who were prominent landholders in many major cities, retained their lavish lifestyles, properties, and continued seemingly unaffected by the blight affecting the rest of the nation. The shrinking of the middle class led to increased favela crowding, to which the police had difficulty responding. The root of all these problems can be traced back to Lula’s administration, which turned a blind eye to economic inequality as the Brazilian economy grew and stable economic progress seemed like a reality. During Dilma’s presidency the situation became more difficult, as she was juggling the tasks of simultaneously sustaining Brazil’s economic growth, restricting inflation, and handling the whirlwind for the overvaluation of the real (R$). Also, a problem was government ineptitude and corruption to act on many social issues, such as the favela overcrowding. At long last rioting against the seemingly corrupt government started, and the people argued for reform. The accusations of corruption against Dilma and the effects of the economic stagnation during her term culminated in April 2016, when the Brazilian parliament called for a vote to impeach Dilma. The parliamentary votes overshot the 2/3 majority needed to approve the motion. The action then now moved to Brazil’s Senate, where on 16 May 2016, they voted 55-22 to impeach Dilma. While she officially remains Brazilian's President, many of her political powers have been transferred to her Vice President (now de facto "interim President") Michel Temer. Reid’s first chapter highlights the issues that surrounded/impeded the Brazilian government and socio-economy during the twentieth and early twenty-first century. There are three large mistakes made during this time period that hurt Brazil. The accelerated economic growth under Juscelino Kubitschek’s term is the first, which was the result of an “economic miracle” that took place in his presidency. The “miraculous” part of Kubitschek’s economic policies was that he just happened to hit the “right” one. Of course, history shows that his policies resulted in massive inflation, which took many decades to control, finally being stemmed by Cardoso’s administration in the 1990s. Lula eventually succeeded Cardoso starting in 2002 and continued his popular economic policies, further strengthening the economy. However, Lula made a fatal mistake in not dealing with the continuous shrinking of the middle class and the overcrowding of favelas, and all the while supporting the rich, thus exacerbating the problem. This led to the decline seen during Dilma’s administration. Lastly, Lula ignored another key issue that hurt his successor: government corruption/ineptitude. This inefficacy, particularly that of the Brazilian police, significantly contributed to the ever-increasing economic inequality. The government corruption eventually boiled over in riots during Dilma’s term. In his first chapter, Michael Reid did a thorough job on explaining the political and economic mistakes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The mistakes I discussed above are just the main mistakes, even though there were many individual mistakes that contributed to Brazil’s economic and political issues. |
Andy Jay CrossI am a sophomore Sustainability major at Stockton University.
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