36 The New York Review
Brazil’s Dead End
Larry Rohter
Brazil Apart: 1964–2019
by Perry Anderson.
Verso, 224 pp., $26.95
The Edge of Democracy
a documentary film by Petra Costa
O Mecanismo
[The Mechanism]
a television series created by José
Padilha and Elena Soarez
For Brazilians, January 1, 2003, was
one of those rare moments in history
when everything seems possible. It was
Inauguration Day, and not only was
power being transferred from one dem-
ocratically elected civilian president to
another for the first time in more than
forty years, but the man donning the
green-and-yellow presidential sash,
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was a former
lathe operator and union leader, and
the son of illiterate peasants—what
Brazilians call povão, a man of the
people. Tens of thousands of ordinary
citizens had traveled from every cor-
ner of their vast country to celebrate
his swearing-in, and they flooded the
esplanade in front of the presidential
palace in Brasília, waving banners,
chanting “hope has vanquished fear,”
and cheering the incoming president’s
promise of a new era of honesty and
transparency in government.
Sixteen years later, Lula, as he is
universally known, was several months
into a long prison term, having been
found guilty of corruption and money
laundering during and after his eight
years in office. His hand-picked succes-
sor, Dilma Rousseff (whom Brazilians
usually call by her first name), had been
impeached, with the connivance of po-
litical parties nominally allied with her,
and the left-wing party Lula founded
and led, the Workers’ Party, had been
all but obliterated in the municipal
elections that followed soon after. En-
couraged by that outcome, an obscure
ultra-right-wing congressman from Rio
de Janeiro with no party support, Jair
Bolsonaro, had launched an insurgent
campaign for president that, shock-
ingly, was about to put him in control of
Latin America’s most populous nation.
How Brazil got from Lula to Bolso-
naro in so short a time seems unfath-
omable, even to many of the 210 million
Brazilians who lived through the pro-
cess. Two main theories have been of-
fered to explain the momentous shift.
One is that Lula, by presiding over the
most corrupt government in Brazilian
history, betrayed those who believed in
him and that Bolsonaro became the in-
strument of their disgust and revenge.
The other is that Lula and his party
were victims of a “parliamentary coup
d’état” and a campaign of judicial per-
secution, both aimed at restoring to
power the elites who scorned Lula and
regarded him and his party as a threat
to their interests.
In Brazil Apart: 1964 –2019, Perry An-
derson, an emeritus professor of history
and sociology at UCLA, positions him-
self squarely in the second camp. Lula
is not only innocent of the trumped-up
charges of which he has been convicted,
Anderson argues, but he and his party
are solely responsible for virtually all
the social and economic advances Bra-
zil has enjoyed this century. From 2003
to 2016, he writes, Brazil was “the the-
atre of a socio- political drama without
equivalent in any other major state,”
making it for the first time in its history
“a country that mattered politically
beyond its borders, as an example and
potential inspiration to others.” The
collapse of that noble experiment, he
would have us believe, was the work of
a jealous, vindictive, and treacherous
opposition, and he directs particularopprobrium at Lula’s predecessor in
office, Fernando Henrique Cardoso,
and the center-left party he then led,
the Brazilian Social Democratic Party.
About Bolsonaro, Anderson reiter-
ates the obvious: he is a moral monster.
He spouts racist invective at black and
indigenous Brazilians; is a misogynist;
uses the most vile language imaginable
to refer to gay people; extols the mili-
tary dictatorship that tortured, exiled,
and killed Brazilians for twenty- one
excruciating years; sees arming the
middle class as the solution to the coun-
try’s crime problem; wants to hand the
country over to the rapacious corporate
interests that are pillaging the Amazon
and fouling pristine beaches; and is wag-
ing war against a free press. If he has
redeeming qualities, they are carefully
hidden, though Anderson generously
describes him as “crude and violent
certainly, but also with a boyish, playful
side, capable of a coarse, on occasion
even self- deprecating, good humor.”
Lula, on the other hand, is far more
complicated and interesting. When I
first met him in 1978, he was leading a
metalworkers’ strike in the industrial
belt around São Paulo and, at the age of
thirty-three, just emerging as a national
figure. He seemed inspiring, a charis-
matic, plain- speaking orator born in
the parched and poverty- stricken inte-
rior, the seventh of eight children in a
family that, like millions of others, had
migrated to industrial cities in the south
in search of a more bearable life. He
left school after the sixth grade, sold or-
anges and shined shoes before getting a
factory job, lost part of a finger in an in-dustrial accident, then lost his first wife
during childbirth. As Anderson writes,
“Lula embodies a life- experience of
popular hardship and a record of social
struggle from below that no other ruler
in the world approaches.”
That was Lula the labor leader. Lula
the politician and president has proved
to be a rather different matter. From
the time the Workers’ Party, founded
in 1980 and often referred to as the PT,
its Portuguese-language initials, began
winning mayoralties, it engaged in the
standard schemes to siphon money
from public coffers that have alwayscontaminated Brazilian politics and in-
vented a few new ones of its own. Some
of that graft inevitably found its way
into the pockets of party leaders. But
PT stalwarts who brought the abuses
to Lula’s attention, thinking he would
intervene, were instead drummed out
of the party, and in 2002, Celso Dan-
iel, the mayor of a São Paulo suburb
and coordinator of Lula’s presidential
campaign, was murdered—a case that,
though still unsolved and consigned by
Anderson to a brief mention, revealed
an elaborate network of bribes, kick-
backs, slush funds, extortion, and other
payoffs to the PT.
Referring to Lula and the corruption
that was institutionalized during his
first term as president, Anderson urges
the reader to brush aside “lapses in the
PT of which he had, of course, been un-
aware.” But that assertion is challenged
by the sworn testimony of associates of
Lula who turned state’s evidence, such
as the former party treasurer Delúbio
Soares, barely noted by Anderson, and
the former minister of finance Antonio
Palocci, whom he dismisses as a “toad”
and a snitch. And all of that was just
a prelude to the wholesale pilferage of
public assets that provoked the Opera-
tion Car Wash investigations beginning
in 2014: billions of dollars stolen from
Petrobras, the state oil company, and
distributed to the PT, its allies in Con-
gress, and corrupt businessmen.
Inadvertently, Anderson is high-
lighting one of the central problems
in current Brazilian politics: the un-
willingness of Lula and the PT to ac-
cept the slightest responsibility forthe corruption that flourished during
their years in power or even to concede
wrongdoing. Lula, Anderson claims,
was jailed merely for “his inspection
of a beach-side condominium” and the
“improvement of a friend’s retreat.”
But Lula’s own depositions, along
with piles of documentary evidence,
are available online for all to see, and
they point not only to his guilt on the
charges filed against him but also to
several channels of malfeasance that
have yet to be judged, including the
unexplained wealth of his son “Little
Lula,” a former zookeeper who became
a millionaire during his father’s time
in office. And an “everybody does it”
argument doesn’t wash either: the PT
came to power promising to hold itself
to a higher standard than its rivals, so
the sense of deception and disillusion-
ment has been especially sharp.The “parliamentary coup” theory
also has enormous holes that Ander-
son blithely ignores. Contrary to what
he implies, the impeachment articles
against Dilma were largely drafted not
by her opponents but by Hélio Bicudo,
a founder of the Workers’ Party and a
distinguished jurist and human rights
defender who held senior posts in a
pair of PT governments in São Paulo;
appalled by the thievery metastasizing
around him, Bicudo broke with Lula
in 2005 but continued to espouse the
party’s core values of social justice.
The articles included election fraud
and negligence as chair of the Petro-
bras board from 2003 to 2010, but Edu-
ardo Cunha, the devious president of
the Chamber of Deputies, accepted
only the weakest one: that Dilma had
illegally borrowed money from state
banks to make up for budget shortfalls.
Both Cunha and Dilma’s vice-
president, Michel Temer, were mem-
bers of the Brazilian Democratic
Movement Party, which has no defined
ideology and seems to exist only to
enjoy the fruits of power and corrup-
tion. In a political system with more
than thirty parties, it has often pro-
vided the support in Congress that any
president needs in order to govern ef-
fectively, for which it has exacted a high
price in the form of ministerial appoint-
ments and other patronage. Its alliance
with the PT was especially uneasy, and
Cunha, whom Anderson describes as
“an exceptionally skilled and ruthless
politician, a master of the black arts of
parliamentary manipulation and man-
agement,” held back the stronger im-
peachment charges in hopes of saving
his own skin; he too was enormously
corrupt, and the Car Wash investiga-
tion had already unearthed a wealth of
incriminating evidence against him. As
Anderson acknowledges, “he offered to
freeze impeachment if the PT would pro-
tect him from annulment of his mandate
and expulsion from Congress.” Lula was
willing, even eager, to do this, but Dilma,
not accused of personal corruption her-
self, was not. So the impeachment went
ahead, and she was removed from office
days after the end of the Rio Olympics in- A month later, Cunha was stripped
of his seat, then arrested, charged with
hiding $40 million in payoffs in secret
Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with supporters on the day he agreed
to start a prison sentence for corruption, São Paulo, April 2018 ;
from Petra Costa’s The Edge of DemocracyFrancisco Van Steen Proner Ramos