Brazzil
Perception
April 2003
The lowest common denominator opinion among Anglo-American foreigners in Brazil is that the country is irredeemably corrupt. Whether the person in question works for a NGO, an English school, a consulate, or a petroleum corporation in the Campos Basin, most gringos agree: Brazil has a bad problem with corruption. However, when pushed to give proof of their opinion's validity, most of these people are at a loss to say more than "Oh, come on! We all know that Brazil is corrupt!"
The presumption seems to be that the country is so far gone that data, examples and information regarding corruption are no longer necessary. Brazil may very well have a problem with corruption, but are the subjective opinions of under-informed foreigners really the most appropriate yardstick for measuring this?
Recently, while perusing the Folha de S. Paulo, I discovered a bit of the machinery that keeps this viewpoint alive and kicking. Entitled "Corruption is still high in the country, according to an international study", the article in question relates the "findings" of Transparency International, a NGO, which purports that Brazil is one of the world's most corrupt countries.
What is intriguing to me is the article's authoritative tone. Its headline and first paragraph salient the relative dishonesty of Brazil as if this finding were backed up by hard data. When one reads further on however, one discovers exactly how Transparency International fabricated their statistic. Basically, the survey does not purport to measure corruption, per se, but rather the perception of corruption among a very specific public: "investors, employees of multinational corporations and foreign analysts." Transparency International interviewed no Brazilian jurists, academics, or legal scholars. In fact few—if any—Brazilians of any kind were involved in the research at all.
That most gringos working for multi-national firms have a low opinion of Brazilian honesty is not, and has never been, news. To what degree this opinion is backed up by facts independent of prejudice is the question at hand, a question which Transparency International's study neatly dodges by carefully constructing the population sample from which they take their data.
Though one may presume that a market analyst for a large transnational firm may have an encyclopedic knowledge of the country in which he is working, my experience with these people has shown this to not be the case. Expatriates who work in Brazil rarely spend more than three years in country. While here, their connections to Brazilians and Brazil can best be described as "instrumentalist": they work in Brazilian offices with Brazilian colleagues and that's about it.
They mainly socialize in English. If they marry natives, they marry English-speaking natives. In short, their lives are by and large lived within a small colonial circle, with very few connections to the larger social universe surrounding them. In their areas of expertise, they are second to none. Unfortunately, however, these peoples' interests rarely stray outside their narrow realm of focus. Most gringos that I've met who are working in Brazil know little to nothing about Brazilian history, politics or society. In short, these people are not, as a whole, an "informed voice" from which one can extrapolate a reasonable picture of Brazilian "corruption", especially as it compares to that in other countries.
Take, for instance, the case of my neighbor, a British gentleman works teaching business English for the British government and has been in Brazil going on a year, following a two year stint in Colombia. The other night the topic of corruption came up while conversing over beers in a local bar and he, quite predictably, started talking about how bad things were here in Brazil.
"Now wait a minute," I said. "I happen to think that there's quite a lot of corruption in Brazil. What interests me, however, is how you came to hold that opinion. I mean, you don't read the papers here, barely watch TV, don't listen to the radio news... Can you even give me the names of three corrupt Brazilian politicians and what they've been charged with?"
'The above question has lately become my acid test for measuring gringo ignorance on this subject. After all, if one's opinion is informed and Brazil is corrupt, it should be no effort at all to name three corrupt politicians off the top of one's head. Like most foreigners, however, my neighbor could only cite one. He vaguely remembered following the case of Senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães, as one of his students had advised him to keep an eye on it. Other than Toninho Malvadeza, however, the man simply couldn't come up with anything.
Now this gentleman is a well-educated, informed cultural attaché for the British government with three years of "on-the-ground" experience in Latin America. That he should be so out of it with regards to Brazilian politics that he can't name three corrupt politicians is indicative, on the whole, of the level of expat "informed opinion" regarding corruption in Brazil. This man is probably among the upper 5 percent of gringos with regards to his knowledge of the country and certainly is among those people whom Transparency International would consider consulting for their survey. Nevertheless, he failed a simple test that most Brazilians would pass with flying colors.
Nor is my neighbor an aberration. Most gringos would fail the above test. This problem is not limited to those who work with the business community, either. It's an open secret within academia that the vast majority of Brazilianists who come here write their thesis and dissertations with less than two years' experience in-country. Furthermore, many of these academic specialists have grave difficulties in reading Portuguese or even following, say, a television broadcast in that language.
In other words, gringo "specialists" on Brazil frequently miss things that any 9-year-old Brazilian would be able to pick up. Simply put, it's rather hard to believe that a man who does not and probably cannot read a Brazilian news magazine, let alone a book like Notícias do Planalto, which documents the media's treatment of the Collor regime, can have an informed position on corruption in this country. While I respect common sense opinion as much as the next man, too often "common sense" is simply a synonym for ignorance and prejudice.
Perhaps one of the reasons why corruption is so massively and popularly perceived by foreigners in Brazil is that it exists on a much lower level of the state bureaucracy than it does in, say, the United States. It's much easier to get enraged over the fact that one needs to pay a fifty real "gratuity" in order to receive one's driver's license than it is to get be moved to fury over a tax or service fee hike because an energy provider like Enron ripped the state government off for hundreds of millions of dollars. In the first case, the corruption is immediate and hits one directly in the pocketbook. In the second, it's abstract, the costs spread out over millions of taxpayers and hundreds of months.
That being admitted, however, I must say that in 16 years of living and working in Brazil, I have rarely encountered the rampant corruption said to be so endemic in Brazilian society. On one occasion, I saw my boss pay a small bribe to a police officer in order to get out of a speed-trap, something which I've also witnessed (gasp!) in the United States and Canada.
A couple of times I needed to pay bribes to get shipments out of the black hole known as Brazilian Customs. However, every time I've had to use the services of the Brazilian State, I've been treated in a fair, if somewhat lackadaisical, fashion. Not once have I had to pay a bribe in order to have access to public services or justice.
Compare this to my tribulations in obtaining a permanent visa to the U.S. for my wife and stepson six years ago: a letter from my U.S. senator's office was finally necessary in order to move the Rio Consulate into doing its job. In other words, I had to use a personal connection with political power in order to get the American State to carry out its duties in my behalf. Can anyone out there say "jeitinho"?
That there is corruption in Brazil is obvious. But the gringo common sense opinion of it fails to take several factors into consideration. First of all, by what objective yardstick can one compare two countries' levels of corruption? Secondly, successful corruption, almost by definition, isn't detected. Its appearance may thus indicate a fight against corruption as much as its blasé acceptance.
Recently, there's been a lot of news regarding Brazilian corruption because for the first time in decades an all out offensive is being directed against it from the highest levels of government. Thirty years ago, during the closing days of the military dictatorship, robbery of public funds by politicians couldn't even be safely reported.
Finally, why is it that Anglo-American instances of corruption, such as the recent Enron scandal, are considered by most gringos to be "exceptions" to the rule of law in their countries while Brazilian instances of corruption are considered to be the rule itself? There is plenty of proof that funny money greases the wheels of government in Washington D.C. as much as it does in Brasilia, but somehow gringos choose to ignore this corruption as "not representative" of American government.
So when I read about "studies" like Transparency International's in the Folha de S. Paulo, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. As renowned writer and newspaper columnist Luis Fernando Verissimo says, this is a case of the blind dealing with those who do not want to see. I'm sure many gringos out there picked up this article, read it (presuming they could read it) and nodded grimly, their own views about corruption confirmed by a study that, in the final analysis, does nothing more than report in circular form upon the preconceived ideas many gringos hold about Brazil. Why these opinions pass as serious indicators of Brazilian reality is the real news story.
Thaddeus Blanchette is a 35 year old immigrant to Brazil who has been living in and studying the country most of his adult life. He can be reached at poboxthad@yahoo.com.br