Dr Anthony Pereira on Inequality and Governance during Brazil’s COVID-19 Pandemic
Poster design courtesy of Jeanet Alessandra Tapia Huertas for KCL Latin American Society
Dr Anthony Pereira, political scientist and founder and director of the King’s Brazil Institute, was interviewed on the 3rd of June by El Cortao’s Editor-in-Chief, Maximilian Frederik van Oordt, as part of our platform’s collaboration with the King’s MA 2021 Conflict, Security and Development (CSD) Conference.
This year’s CSD theme tackles “The Violence of Global Inequality: A Symptom of a Greater Disease” and is expected to generate considerable analyses of Latin America due to the region’s longstanding struggle with inequality. Dr Pereira’s interview for El Cortao’ examines the internal dynamics of Brazilian society and politics in the context of the global health crisis.
This is Part Two of a two-part collaborative series. Click here to read our Part One interview with Dr Ivette Hernández Santibáñez.
Thank you for providing this interview Dr Pereira. The extraordinary pandemic-era restrictions deployed in Brazil and abroad naturally constitute a major test for the depth and reach of government authority due to the need to enforce said restrictions. How has this challenge of government authority altered the influence of military institutions in state activities?
I think it has reinforced the prominence of the military in the Bolsonaro government. In the military context, his government is unprecedented since democratisation and, although it may be hard to believe, it is perhaps even more militarised than the military regime of 1964 to 1985 as there are more active-duty military personnel in the Bolsonaro government – even though it is headed by a civilian elected president – than you found during the dictatorship. This, I believe, is because the armed forces are an essential element of the government along with other groups such as the ‘Centrão’ which is a bloc in government that is not as much a centrist bloc as it is a pro-government bloc that negotiates with the executive for favours. Additionally, there are a lot of evangelical churches that are particularly active in supporting the government. So, there are lots of different elements that support the government, but the military is crucial because you have six of the twenty-two cabinet members coming from the armed forces – including the vice president – and there are thousands of active duty and retired military personnel throughout the Brazilian bureaucracy, including in the Ministry of Health. The military, therefore, is very strongly associated with the government; I would not say it owns the government, but it has lent its authority, its prestige, and its popularity to the government and that now gives it a dilemma similar to the one it had in the early 1970s, back when it had been ruling the country directly for about ten years after the military coup of ’64. This was when it started to talk about an extrication problem: it wanted to get out of direct responsibility for government, but it did not know how to do that without damaging the interests of the armed forces.
“There are more active duty military personnel in the Bolsonaro government than you found during the dictatorship.”
So, decades later, in today’s Brazil, the head of the Army has an extremely difficult decision to make because one of his subordinates, General Pazuello – who is an active-duty general and the former Minister of Health – went to a rally in support of Bolsonaro and expressed his support for the President. What he did was a political act and the armed forces’ administrative rules clearly prohibit this. In view of the hierarchy, therefore, he has to be punished for this infraction because, if he is not punished, everyone else in the armed forces wishing to express him or herself politically will say: “well Pazuello got away with it so I should too.” The President, who is also Commander-in-Chief, has already gone on record as saying: “I do not think he should be punished for this”, so the head of the Army has effectively already been told by his commanding officer not to punish Pazuello. This is a major dilemma, and we will see what the head of the Army will do about it because he has to make a decision in the next couple of days.
I consider it highly likely that there will be more such decisions for the leadership of the armed forces to make in the leadup to the 2022 elections because Bolsonaro has referred to the military as “his” military and he wants its leadership to support his government. In March, he fired the military officer who was the country’s Minister of Defence because he thought that this Minister of Defence was not being supportive enough of his government. This is because the Minister had said: “look, we are the armed forces; we have a constitutional role. We are not supposed to support governments, we are not supposed to support political parties, we are supposed to support the state.” When he was fired, the three heads of the armed forces – the heads of the army, air force, and navy – resigned in solidarity with the now ex-Minister of Defence and that kind of turbulence between a President and the heads of the armed forces has not been seen since the military dictatorship – you would have to go back to 1978 when there was a standoff between the military president, General Geisel, and the head of the Army; the latter of whom was fired for defying the President. So, this is a government that has become highly militarised but that is not something that the armed forces are necessarily comfortable with, and I think it is also a difficult issue for ordinary citizens because they wonder whether the armed forces are playing their constitutional role or whether they have simply become an arm of the government and, in reality, it is a bit of both. The official government line is: “well, look, all of these thousands of people who are in the state-owned enterprises and in the ministries, they have all accepted individual invitations to come to the government and they have all decided individually about whether they should come in.” That is a bit disingenuous though, because the leadership of the armed forces has clearly supported Bolsonaro. They did so in a tweet in 2018 when the then-head of the Army said: “if the Supreme Court were to rule that Lula could run for election, that would be terrible for Brazilian democracy.” Now this individual says that he posted this tweet in conjunction with the other heads of the armed forces and that it was a collective expression of their political view. You cannot undo that; you cannot put the genie back in the bottle once something like that has been said. So, I think we are going to come to 2022 with some trepidation because I think we are going to see whether Bolsonaro’s attempts to politicise the armed forces yet further will succeed or not. Will you get an armed forces that look like it is campaigning for the re-election of the President, or will it stand aside and be much more punctilious about its constitutional role and say: “that is for citizens to decide. We will serve the state, we will be a branch of the state, and the election is up to the people.”
Should exceptional circumstances like these be treated entirely as exceptions or does current military involvement in governance simply emphasise a historically blurred line between civilian and military influence in Brazilian government?
I would go with the latter; I think the military has always had a large political role in Brazil, even after democratisation. Of course, things have changed recently with the election of Bolsonaro, but if you go back to the important moments in the history of the Brazilian Republic – from 1889 onwards – you will see that the military has been involved in most decisive moments. The creation of the Republic, for example, telling the royal family that they had to leave the country, that was done through a military act, it was basically a military coup. The Revolution of 1930 that ended the old, corrupt oligarchical system that had existed between 1889 and 1930, that was done through an uprising of the the state provincial armies in Minas Gerais, Rio Grande do Sul, and Paraíba. If you look at the decision to tell Getúlio Vargas – who was effectively a dictator for 15 years – to resign in 1945, that was done by the military and so, of course, was the military coup in ‘64. Evidently, then, they have been acutely important as actors. With democratisation there was a feeling that the military had been discredited; there was considerable evidence of human rights’ abuses committed under the dictatorship and they certainly became more quiet, less visible. There was a civilian Ministry of Defence created in 1999 but, even after its creation, when you had conflicts between the civilian Minister of Defence and the heads of the armed forces, it was usual that the civilian Minister of Defence stood down and not the heads of the armed forces. Additionally, they are highly influential in terms of defence policy and public security, with them being heavily involved in the latter even though it does not fall into the military’s classic ‘defence of the territory’ role. If you look at civil aviation, if you look at borders – there is a 150-kilometre zone behind the country’s borders where the military effectively has police powers. So, we are looking at an armed forces that are very much integral to political power both during military and civilian regimes, and this has simply become more pronounced with Bolsonaro because – even though he had been out of the armed forces for 30 years and was a civilian – he campaigned by essentially wrapping himself in the flag and associating himself with the armed forces so as to appeal to people’s sense that the armed forces had more discipline, more integrity, more morality than other parts of the state. The military’s presence, therefore, has just become more pronounced and, as I say, I think they have a tricky issue to deal with now that they are associated with this government.
“We are looking at an armed forces that are very much integral to political power both during military and civilian regimes, and this has simply become more pronounced with Bolsonaro.”
Some have cited this supposed military discipline and morality to say that the armed forces’ presence in Brazil’s current government has served as a buffer against President Bolsonaro’s more cavalier excesses. Would you consider this to be the case or has this military presence exclusively caused harm to civilian institutions?
I think you can find evidence on both sides. If you look at a figure like Hamilton Mourão – the retired four-star general who is now Vice President – in many instances he has been a moderating influence on the President. When entering office, for example, Bolsonaro had said: “I am running against China. Just like Trump, I do not like China. China is trying to buy Brazil.” In the first year of Bolsonaro’s term, however, Mourão went to China, and he paved the way for Bolsonaro to follow suit later that year. The Vice President tried to smooth over relations and, in fact, Brazil even hosted the BRICS summit in November of 2019 when President Xi of China came to Brazil and talked about investing in infrastructure. This is a very important relationship for Brazilian business; I think about a third of Brazilian agricultural products go to China, they sell a lot of iron ore to China, it is the number one trade partner that they have – well above the US in terms of the value of the imports and exports – so Mourão was highly pragmatic in getting Bolsonaro to tone down his anti-Chinese rhetoric. On the other hand, you have a figure like Pazuello who was the Minister of Health and who was appointed despite his total lack of public health experience or medical experience, and this was mainly because he would do what Bolsonaro told him to. The two ministers of health that had preceded Pazuello had disagreed with a lot of the President’s decisions, including his decision to push hydroxychloroquine as a cure for the coronavirus and his refusal to contemplate any so-called ‘horizontal’ lockdowns. Bolsonaro only wanted the infirm and the elderly to be quarantined, so he lost those previous two ministers of health in quick succession in 2020. Recently, there has been a parliamentary commission in the Senate set up to investigate the government’s handling of the pandemic, and Pazuello, when he was testifying, made it clear that he was quite willing to do a lot of the things that Bolsonaro wanted him to do including investing in importing hydroxychloroquine, not prioritising the importation of vaccines, and other measures like that. I believe the military can often be quite rational and that their hierarchy allows them to be effective in implementing policy decisions. The fact that the Minister of Defence and the three heads of the armed forces all stood up to Bolsonaro in March and refused to use their authority to campaign for the government, that says something good I think about the internalisation by the Brazilian armed forces of their constitutional, impartial role, but you can find many exceptions to it on the individual level.
Building on your mention of the inquiry into President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic; his government’s response is domestically and internationally considered to have been an abject failure. Has such a grave inadequacy reinvigorated reforms towards increased government accountability or will this inquiry disguise a rising culture of political impunity?
I think there are rising demands for accountability as we saw with last weekend’s protests. Thousands of people protested in most of Brazil’s major cities – São Paulo had probably the biggest of these protests on its Avenida Paulista. There were a lot of very broad-based protests and, when Bolsonaro spoke to the nation last night, many people banged pots and pans – ‘panelaço’ [Spanish: ‘cacerolazo’] a common way to protest in Latin America. The congressional inquiry is another demand for accountability because Brazil’s pandemic performance was by no means inevitable. If you look at the WHO’s analysis of which countries were well prepared for a pandemic prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Brazil was fairly high up. Of course, in retrospect these were not particularly accurate evaluations because the US and UK were also highly ranked and they have both had fairly high COVID death rates per capita. Nevertheless, there was nothing inevitable about it; Brazil has a good public health system – modelled on the UK’s National Health System – it received an award in the 2000s for its work in getting anti-retroviral drugs to patients who had HIV/AIDS, it did relatively well with dengue fever, it has well-respected public health research institutions like Fiocruz in Rio de Janeiro and Instituto Butantan in São Paulo, both of which are producing vaccines now, and it has an infrastructure of well-informed medical and public health workers who understood the severity of the virus.
“The congressional inquiry is another demand for accountability because Brazil’s pandemic performance was by no means inevitable.”
Fortunately, Brazil’s federal system was highly beneficial for its COVID-19 response. In April of 2020, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that mayors and governors have the authority to impose lockdowns, mask-wearing, and other public health measures. Bolsonaro appealed the ruling but he lost, and this upheld the rights of subsidiary levels of government to make their own decisions on the extent of social distancing. In his speech to the nation last night, Bolsonaro repeated that he had never decreed a general lockdown, he had never wanted schools to shut, he had never wanted churches to stop having congregations, and he had never wanted public transport to shut. Despite the President’s refusal, however, many mayors and governors did take these measures. These were not respected as much as the restrictions imposed in wealthier countries as this is not a Western European economy where people are better able to work from home so there were a lot of people who felt that they could not afford to adhere to them. Nevertheless, there was a widespread adherence in many places, and I think that federalism has been one of the saving graces of the pandemic. Vaccination campaigns have also been a major asset because now, very belatedly, President Bolsonaro has set a target for everyone to get vaccinated by the end of this year. At this time, about 10% of the population has been fully vaccinated and they will keep rolling this out. I do not know if they will achieve their end-of-year target but there seems to be some consensus now on what the objective should be despite Bolsonaro’s delay in joining this consensus.
That factor, federalism, that you mentioned, is key to any analysis of Brazilian governance and inequality. Has Brazil’s federal system allowed for a greater decentralisation of financial support or have variations in state resources led to more serious discrepancies in the support each state can provide to its inhabitants?
That is a great question, and I am going to provide a partial answer because I do not know the situation well enough to provide a comprehensive answer. There is a brilliant researcher at the University of São Paulo called Marta Arretche who has done work on this. One of the things that has been important in Brazil in recent decades is that they have created an infrastructure at the federal level to deal with the very poorest people. This took years to develop but they now have a database of about 23 million households – low-income households – and this forms the basis for a family allowance programme called the ‘Bolsa Familia’ which started in 2003. There are many programmes like this, but it is effectively a conditional cash transfer programme which means that, if you fall below a certain income level, you will receive a card from the state bank and you will get credits put on it and you can use that to buy whatever you need. This was hugely scaled up, to the extent that it now covers about a quarter of the population, and it has been especially important in poorer regions like the north and northeast because in small towns in the interior of the northeast, for example, even though the average payment is fairly low, I think it is around 40 or 50 USD, that can go a long way and the multiplier effect of having lots of people receiving this and then going to local shops and markets and spending that money is a huge factor in reducing poverty. ‘Bolsa Familia’ was one of many other factors such as an increased minimum wage but, if you look at the 2000s, what you start to see is a reduction in poverty, considerable reductions in people below the poverty line, but also some small, modest gains against income inequality. By some measures, income inequality fell by about 10% in the 2000s. Naturally, that does not capture wealth inequality, which is harder to measure and is probably less likely to have changed, but income inequality did go down a little bit in the 2000s and regional inequality went down too. If you look at the 2010 census, it shows – for the first time in, I think, 60 years – that the north and the northeast, two of the poorest regions, were growing faster than the rest of the country so there were certainly some reductions in regional inequality. Most of these gains, though, were wiped out and started to go into reverse by the time you got to the abysmal recession of 2015 and 2016. One of the things that critics of the Bolsonaro government may be a little unwilling to admit is that, if you look at the emergency auxiliary payments that the government made last year to families below a certain income, this government assistance reduced inequality and some poverty. They gave around 600 Reals [~ GBP £80] per month to families that were unable to work because they had been laid off or because they worked in the informal sector. This was on top of the ‘Bolsa Familia’ benefits, and you can see a blip in poverty and inequality in the middle of 2020 when this extra support was being distributed. The programme started in April and lasted all the way until the end of the year, reclaiming some of those socio-economic gains that had been made in the 2000s. Admittedly, this was not something that Bolsonaro himself had wanted; Congress proposed it and Congress passed it, later his government adopted it and now he is championing it, so it was not really his initiative, but he is taking credit for it. Credit aside, however, I think the programme has been incredibly important; without that emergency auxiliary payment, a lot more people would have gone hungry last year than did. This year it has been reinstituted in a much more modest form – I think it is 200 Reals now – but it has been hugely important and I do not think we should neglect it.
“That is why the lockdowns were extremely hard for some people to respect because it was a question of economic survival. When Bolsonaro says he never decreed those lockdowns he is thinking of those voters.”
Additionally, civil society organisations have had a major role in this pandemic panorama. I know that there have been plenty of initiatives by NGOs who have gone into favelas with food bags and baskets and have tried to go to households where people are out of work because of economic activity plummeting last year. In Brazil’s poor neighbourhoods, many people have to find cash daily to buy food just for that day – that is how close they are to subsistence level – so if they cannot earn money or if nobody brings food into the neighbourhood, they will be left hungry and without any options. That is why the lockdowns, when they were decreed by mayors and governors, were extremely hard for some people to respect because it was a question of economic survival. When Bolsonaro says he never decreed those lockdowns he is thinking of those voters; after all, his two main priorities throughout this whole crisis have been to not get impeached and to try to ensure his re-election in 2022. So, inequality is a mixed picture; it actually went down briefly last year and now I would imagine that you have got levels of poverty rising again and probably of inequality as well.
Looking at the government’s ability to make itself present nationwide; how have inefficiencies and inadequacies in government aid programmes affected the influence of criminal organisations in Brazil’s poorest neighbourhoods?
Well, as you imply in your question, these organisations are highly savvy, and they are close to many communities as a matter of survival for themselves and so they made sure to take advantage of some of these gaps in state aid. The gaps were one of the things that people were most dissatisfied about; I have spoken to people in São Paulo who have said that it is often difficult to sign up for this emergency auxiliary payment and that a lot of people have fallen through the cracks, so I think it is likely the case that there were organised criminal groups that capitalised on the state absence and that provided their own services to those people who had fallen through the cracks. Certainly, in 2020, there were reports of organised criminal groups in Rio saying: “we are going to enforce the lockdown as well” and taking a public health stance. This is partly because, both territorially and functionally, there are places that the Brazilian state just does not reach and the gap is often filled by non-state armed actors, whether it is the ‘Primeiro Comando da Capital’ [PCC] or the ‘Comando Vermelho’ or the ‘milícias’ in Rio. If you go up to the far north you will essentially find private armies controlling land, you will find groups that engage in illegal logging, illegal mining, and creating fake legal titles to land. That is partly just a consequence of the territorial size and complexity of Brazil and the fact that the state is often significantly debilitated.
One of the fears I think people have now is that, when you look at Brazil’s fiscal space, it is quite limited. The deficit has gone way up with the borrowing that the state has to do – they tend to have to borrow at fairly high rates of interest – and it is not yet clear whether they are going to be able to reach all the people who need government assistance. The economy may be picking up, but unemployment has reached over 14% – with that only being the official number – and unemployment insurance in Brazil only lasts a short amount of time so I think we will be seeing a lot of social destitution.
Finally, in those areas where the state does not reach and where other groups fill the gaps, how accurate is it to state that the country’s stark inequality is causing the development of many parallel states in Brazil, with criminal organisations assuming the roles, responsibilities, and authority of the state?
Yes, that occurs and, unfortunately, while parallel is a good word, we may want to complement it with some other concepts because those organised criminal groups are often mixed in and overlapping with the state. So, if you look at the ‘milícias’, for example, they are mostly former police, some current police, some other recruits who were never in the police, but they have support within the state legislature and they often have a foot in legitimate legal businesses – they take money from illegal businesses and plough it into legal ones. The same is true of the PCC; when the PCC had an uprising in 2006, one of the remarkable things about what they did was that they attacked prison officials and policemen in their homes. They knew where they lived; they had information on those people and so it is likely, if not certain, that there are people inside the prison system, inside the state, and inside the police force that work alongside organised crime. So, there is an imbrication between the two entities that is very confusing for citizens and, in a way, one is parasitical on the other. You can see this in the judiciary, the prison system, and the criminal justice system.
“It is likely, if not certain, that there are people inside the prison system, inside the state, and inside the police force that work alongside organised crime.”
One of the things that I showed last year, when I was teaching about Brazil, I showed a video of an indigenous community that was trying to defend their reserve. Legally, under the Brazilian constitution, they have exclusive rights to this territory, this mostly forested territory, but there were groups coming in, armed groups, that were logging and taking the wood downstream. The sad thing about this film is that the indigenous community had given up on the state’s ability to protect them; they were not going to the military police, they were not going to IBAMA – the national forest protection agency connected to the Ministry of the Environment – they were patrolling themselves. They were going around themselves and trying to stop these people coming in and so they were essentially reduced to self-enforcement. That often happens as a consequence both of this debilitation of the state and of the connection between non-state armed actors, illegal groups, and state officials. The indigenous communities may simply believe that “our pleas will fall on deaf ears if we go to IBAMA or if we go to the military police” so they were doing it themselves and they were using this film to draw attention to the fact that they were trying to do this and that they wanted allies to help them protect their reserve. You can also look at aerial photos of indigenous reserves; I have an anthropologist friend who showed me an aerial photo of a pristine reserve in the state of Pará, totally forested. After about ten years, half of the forest had gone and this is one of the problems of this gap between the formal system, the legal system, the rights that people are supposed to have, and then the rights they actually have, on the ground.