38 The New York Review
their health checked.” But he refuses
to acknowledge the two principal au-
thors of what he describes as “vari-
ous pre-existent partial schemes” that
Lula consolidated. One was Cristovam
Buarque, who implemented such a pro-
gram as governor of Brasília and later
became Lula’s first education minister
before leaving the PT in 2005 in protest
against corruption; the other was none
other than Cardoso, who, recognizing a
good idea, expanded Buarque’s plan to
a nationwide effort.
If anything, it is Lula who over the
yea r s ha s se eme d to su f fer f rom a n env y
complex. He and Cardoso were initially
allies during the military dictatorship,
but differences of both substance and
style drove them apart. The Brazilian
journalist Paulo Markun once wrote
a dual study called The Frog and the
Prince, and there was no mistaking who
was who. Cardoso was the polished, er-
udite, multilingual one, while Lula was
gruff and canny but unlettered and, as
Anderson puts it, “ungrammatical in
speech and untutored in government.”
This always seemed to gnaw at Lula,
and once elected he began to lob pot-
shots at Cardoso. “Never in the history
of Brazil,” he would often say after
some routine measure went into effect,
had any president achieved what he
had; another favorite phrase was that
“the lathe operator is doing what all the
professors could not.” So while Ander-
son may be correct in describing Car-
do so a s “pol it ic a l ly Lu la’s a rch- enemy,”
the reverse has never been true.Even more than Anderson’s book,
Petra Costa’s film The Edge of De-
mocracy adopts a “see no evil, hear no
evil, speak no evil” attitude toward the
PT’s depredations. Nominated for an
Academy Award in the feature-length
documentary category, The Edge of
Democracy is visually powerful and
also benefits from behind-the-scenes
access to Lula, Dilma, and their advis-
ers that would be the envy of any film-
maker or journalist. And it is very much
a personal story, attempting to link the
Car Wash investigation and Dilma’s fall
from power to the story of Costa’s par-
ents, former supporters of the armed
resistance who were jailed and tortured
during the military dictatorship. In one
memorable scene, Costa introduces her
mother to Dilma, and the two women
reminisce about the time they spent in
prison and in the underground.
But as a guide to what actually hap-
pened in Brazil in the middle of the last
decade, Costa’s film is unreliable. In-
stead, it plays as a friend-of-the-court
brief for Lula and the PT, and simply
ignores or seriously downplays evidence
against them. Costa completely skips,
for example, the bribery case in which
two major construction companies
spiffed up a weekend house for Lula
in return for Petrobras contracts. And
though she takes note of a notorious
phone call in which Dilma and Lula ar-
ranged for his appointment as her presi-
dential chief of staff to provide him with
immunity from prosecution, Costa’s in-
dignation is directed at the fact that the
call was intercepted two hours and sev-
enteen minutes after legal authorization
for a wiretap had expired, rather than
at the conversation itself, which clearly
constituted obstruction of justice and
was therefore an impeachable offense.
The Edge of Democracy is stream-
ing on Netflix and is worth watchingfor the atmosphere of growing na-
tional division it portrays, but it is an-
other Netflix offering, José Padilha
and Elena Soarez’s sixteen-episode
series The Mechanism, that provides
the most illuminating look at the Car
Wash scandal and the fall of the PT.
Though ostensibly a work of fiction,
all of the main characters in the series
have real- life counterparts who are eas-
ily identifiable—Lula is Gino and Dilma
is Janete—and significant chunks of di-
alogue among the corrupt protagonists
seem drawn from wiretaps or testimony
under oath. Overall, this appears a more
truthful version of events, with no purely
good guys, just a nation in the grip of a
corrupt cartel of construction companies
and bankers, regardless of which party is
nominally in power, and cops and pros-
ecutors willing to cut corners in their at-
tempt to take down that “mechanism.”
Naturally Anderson expresses dis-
dain for Padilha, accusing him of
“descending from the bitter docu-
mentary truths” of his early work to
low-grade action films. In general, An-
derson’s view of Brazilian culture, one
of the most dynamic and creative in the
world, is narrow and sour. “Compared
with the Brazil of fifty or thirty years
ago, the decline of political energy in
cultural life is palpable,” he complains,
and results in a “neutralization or deg-
radation into entertainment,” as if cul-
ture and entertainment were utterly
incompatible. In reality, the political
energy in Brazilian culture has merely
shifted from posh neighborhoods like
Ipanema to gritty suburbs known col-
lectively as “the periphery,” and into
new forms, such as rap: Anderson
might want to give a listen to artists
like Gabriel o Pensador, Chico Science,
Nação Zumbi, Seu Jorge, Marcelo D2,
Emicida, or Racionais MC’s.This tendency toward overgeneraliza-
tion permeates Anderson’s book, and
it weakens his arguments. He talks in
broad, sweeping terms, for example, of
“the press” and “the military” as if they
were monoliths. They are not, and each
institution, like the rest of Brazilian so-
ciety, has had to grapple with the shift-
ing political landscape that Lula and
Bolsonaro have created. Anderson ar-
gues that an elite cabal of newspapers,
magazines, and television networks was
motivated purely by class resentment to
bring Lula down: “For the first time, a
ruler did not depend on his proprietors,
and they hated him for this,” he writes.
But Lula initially enjoyed broad sup-
port among reporters and editors, and
coverage reflected that. When the first
giant corruption scandal erupted in
2005, though, they did what journalists
always do: they chased the story to its
origins, adhering to the Woodward and
Bernstein adage “follow the money.”
Were they supposed to turn a blind eye
to the systematic looting of the national
treasury simply because the PT was
now doing it?
This leads to a peculiar contradiction
that underlines the biases shackling
Anderson. He has plenty of praise for
articles published last year by Glenn
Greenwald’s The Intercept Brasil that
documented collusion and other im-
proper contacts between the chief
judge in the Car Wash case and prose-
cutors. This was journalism at its best,
and in the resulting uproar, Bolsonaro
and his allies were so irate that there
were calls for Greenwald’s expulsionfrom Brazil. (This was something I also
experienced firsthand: in 2004 Lula or-
dered me expelled because he did not
like articles I had written on subjects
ranging from the Celso Daniel case to
his well-known fondness for a drink or
ten, and he backed down only after the
Supreme Court intervened.) Yet when
Lula or Dilma is the target of similar
investigations into official misconduct,
he criticizes the press for its partiality
and condemns the leaks that inevitably
are part of such probes.
In the most recent phase of Brazil’s
crisis, the military has been even more
significant than the press, so Ander-
son’s oversimplification in that area is
particularly misleading. Many in the
armed forces view Bolsonaro not as
a representative of their class but as a
failed soldier; no one leaves the army as
a mere captain, as Bolsonaro did, un-
less he has no prospects of advancing,
which was his situation after showing
he was unable to submit to discipline.
It is true that he has turned to the mili-
tary to staff many important ministries
and advisory posts, but that should not
be taken as a blind show of military
support, and there has been a lot of
turnover. As Americans have learned
during the Trump years from the ex-
ample of generals like Jim Mattis, H. R.
McMaster, and John Kelly, military of-
ficers feel a strong pull of patriotic duty
even if—or perhaps especially if—their
commander in chief is incompetent.
The same is true in Brazil.
Anderson does not tell us whom, if
anyone, he has talked to in the high
command or officer corps. But conver-
sations with members of those groups
reveal a deep-seated reluctance to be
thrust back into a politically promi-
nent and sensitive position, especially
in the service of an administration that
has every possibility of ending up a di-
saster. When the military dictatorship
ended in 1985, the armed forces had
nearly zero prestige among Brazilians,
and it took thirty years for them to claw
back a degree of respect. Younger offi-
cers in particular have no appetite for
throwing that away on Bolsonaro’s mad
adventures, such as the gratuitous fights
he has picked with traditional allies like
France, Germany, and Norway and his
falling into lockstep with Trump on
foreign policy issues, nor do they want
to inherit the mess he seems certain to
leave behind. Hence the distinct lack of
enthusiasm for either an old-fashioned
military coup or for a Bolsonaro-led
“self-coup” in the style of Alberto Fuji-
mori in Peru, specters Anderson raises
in the last paragraph of his book.
The sad truth about Brazil in 2020
is that there seems no logical way out
of its crisis, at least not until the next
presidential election in 2022, and per-
haps not even then. Lula was released
from prison in November to appeal the
verdicts against him, and he now tours
the country, portraying himself as a
martyr, even as Bolsonaro blunders
from one self-created controversy to
the next—most recently his inept and
dismissive response to the coronavirus.
The two men need each other as foils,
but neither can offer Brazil anything
but dead ends and, in different ways,
both have shown themselves to be mor-
ally bankrupt. At this juncture, even
Anderson’s dreaded “guff of the Third
Way” might be welcome, but that path-
way also seems closed because of the
damage they have inflicted. Q
—March 25, 2020Tarka the Otter is a model for works
like J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine, books
that seek to transcend the boundaries
between the human and the animal
worlds. Henry Williamson’s tale of the
struggle for survival draws on his years
of observing otters in the wild. It is
also thought to reflect his traumatic
experiences in the First World War.
“[Tarka the Otter] was hailed as both
a popular success and a literary
masterpiece.... Set along the Rivers
Taw and Torridge in north Devon,
the novel follows the birth, life and
inevitable death of Tarka in vivid and
lyrical prose that reflects William-
son’s intimate study of the natural
world. Written from the perspective
of the otter, Williamson’s narrative is
empathetic but unsentimental. Tarka
roams and crosses the landscape,
encountering other animals,
finding mates and surviving in an
environment that is at times brutal.”
—The British Library
“I was about eleven years old when
I found [Tarka the Otter], and for the
next year I read little else....
It entered into me and gave shape
and words to my world.... In the
confrontations of creature and creature,
of creature and object, of creature
and fate—[Williamson] made me
feel the pathos of actuality in the
natural world.” —Ted HughesTARKA THE OTTER
Henry Williamson
Introduction by Verlyn Klinkenborg
With illustrations by Charles
Tunnicliffe
Paperback • $17.95 • On sale May 5thTarka the Otter may be purchased from
many independent bookstores, some of
which will mail books. Please call your lo-
cal store for their ordering information or
purchase books through bookshop.org,
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http://www.nyrb.comOne of the defining masterpieces
of modern nature writing