It has been quite a year in Brazil. The country experienced huge demonstrations as more than one million people protested in the streets. These were the largest popular eruptions since 1992, when president Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached.
In addition, the biggest political corruption scandal (the so-called mensalão) since the end of the military regime in Brazil (1964-85) saw some powerful personalities of the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party / PT) – including long-term comrades of the former president, Lula da Silva – being sent to jail, after their condemnation in 2012 by Brazil’s supreme court.
Whatever mix of good and bad things emerges from 2014, none of what happened has been minor.
This is most clearly true of the demonstrations, especially the ones on 17 and 20 June, when (according to even modest estimates) around 100,000 people assembled in the streets of Rio de Janeiro and 70,000 of São Paulo on the first night. There were also protests in the major Brazilian cities of Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Porto Alegre, Fortaleza and Curitiba.
The signals of the drama to come were apparent at the beginning of June, when small protests against a rise in the price of public-transport tickets took place in the streets of the Paulista capital and grappled the attention of Brazilian media. The same issue had ignited popular manifestations before in at least two other big cities: Natal, in August 2012, and Porto Alegre, in March 2013.
In São Paulo, three small demos on 6, 7, and 11 June encountered harsh police repression and the prejudices of Brazil’s establishment media, which was quick to classify the participants as “vandals”.
In a wider context of relative economic prosperity and consumerism, which much of the country had experienced since the Real Plan of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003) and the social programs of Lula (2003-11), it seemed that there was no space for political protests.
The easy accusations of “vandalism” just as rapidly proved to be mistaken, however. In fact, they provoked further protests directly against the Brazilian media. A few days later, on 13 June, people took to the streets in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and at least five other capitals: Natal, Porto Alegre, Teresina, Fortaleza and Maceió.
In São Paulo, the police crackdown was violent and at least 300 were arrested. Several people, including journalists, were injured in the clashes, and the photographer Giuliana Vallone, working for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, was hit in the eye by a rubber-bullet. This was two days before the opening of the FIFA’s Confederation Cup in the country, thus in full view of the world’s media.
On 20 June, in the middle of this global football tournament – which was to be known in Brazil as the “Manifestations Cup” – around 1.5 million people flocked onto the streets in more than 100 Brazilian cities.
The protests’ origin in transport prices became swamped by an enlarged range of issues – including public benefits in general (health, education and security), political corruption, media concentration, and the spiraling costs of the FIFA’s World Cup in Brazil in 2014.
The Scandal
Four months later, on 15 November, a crisis of another order reached its peak, as the Brazilian supreme court issued arrest-orders for twelve of the twenty-five politicians, bankers and businessmen condemned in 2012. The trial, which began in August 2012, concerns the buying of representatives’ votes in the Brazilian congress in 2005-06.
It involves high-profile figures such as José Dirceu, the Lula presidency’s former chief-of-staff, who was given ten years in prison and a fine of more than 650,000 reais (US$ 325,000), and José Genuíno, the PT’s former president, who was given six years in prison and a fine of almost 500,000 reais (US$ 250,000).
The importance of the case lies not only in its size and the fact that it involves a ruling party and prominent former leaders, but in the historic role of Lula’s PT as both a beacon in the fight against Brazil’s military regime and a traditional bastion of decency in the country’s complex political arena.
Hence, it will be no surprise if the image of politics itself suffers major damage among Brazilians, fed greatly by the conservative media’s “spectacularization” of the corruption trial.
The Lessons
So what good and bad things come from all this? First, the popular manifestations of 2014 show that relative economic prosperity and consumerism are not enough. The protests were largely a networked movements of the urban middle-class, and as such brought attention to long-standing problems in the provision of public services in Brazil and in an over-centralized media environment; and to the need for more participative methods of decision-making in the country and the creation of multiple spheres of authority to rethink Brazil’s social priorities.
Second, however, the protests fueled non-democratic movements and encouraged the view that Brazilian politics had failed to address all the issues they had voiced.
Third, the results of the long and complex mensalão trial can be seen as a hoped-for turning-point against impunity within Brazilian politics and society – and the idea that in Brazil, only black and poor people go to jail.
At the same time, the authoritarian behavior of the president of the supreme court, Joaquim Barbosa, during the trial has fed a desire for non-democratic solutions and neo-populist political platforms (reflected in pleas for Barbosa himself to become the “savior of the country”.)
In the end, the one certainty is that 2013 has shown Brazil to be both a vibrant and heavily mediatized democracy that thinks constantly about itself in a very competitive discursive environment (which now, without any doubt, includes the Internet.)
This can be seen as a complex, diverse and unexpected background for 2014, when the country will experience its second FIFA World Cup in June, after its second place in 1950 and the defeat by Uruguay in the final match in Rio’s Maracanã, but also national elections for congress, governors and the president in October. 2014 promises to be as big a year as 2013 has been.
Arthur Ituassu is professor of international relations at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You can read more from him at his website: www.ituassu.com.br. This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – www.opendemocracy.net.
]]>
“Nobody will want you. You will be deformed”, the 22-year-old prisoner was told in January 1970 by a jailer – maybe “Dr. Medeiros”, maybe “Joaquim” – working for Brazil’s then military regime. The young woman’s name was Dilma Rousseff.
Thirty-one years later, in 2001, she told a human-rights commission (in a statement released in full only in June 2012) that she had been held in prison for three years in three different cities, and during that time faced all kinds of torture, including numerous physical beatings, electric-shocks and even a fake firing-squad.
She could never have believed then that one day she would be Brazil’s president.
Dilma Rousseff entered the Palácio do Planalto in Brasília in January 2011, following her election victory in October 2010. The president’s success in her first two years in office, reflected in the fact that more than 75% of Brazilians think she is doing a good job, has many aspects.
For example, she has never used her suffering for political gain; she is a woman head of state in a country marked by a very “macho” culture; she created Brazil’s first “truth commission”, to review crimes committed by the state during the dictatorship of 1964-85.
But the most important ingredient is that Dilma Rousseff has confronted three major, serious challenges with hard work and honesty.
The Three Tests
The first is the global economic crisis since 2008. Brazil’s response has been to boost domestic consumption, a remedy that seems to have reached a turning-point with a possible growth figure of under 3% in 2012.
Some in the Brazilian press argue that Dilma Rousseff’s government is unable to deal with the problem, and the president acknowledges the need for action. But she also rightly insists that economic growth is not everything, but just one issue (if a vital one) on the political agenda.
She has reiterated that a country should also be judged by its ability to protect and educate its children, take care of the elderly and eliminate poverty.
By making these her priorities and pursuing them through various social programs, Dilma has in effect demanded that Brazil’s official political culture end its practice of judging administrations by their economic performance alone.
This is a positive step, for it highlights the historic inability of the Brazilian state (reflecting the influence of Brazilian capitalism on the country’s politics) to provide public goods – such as basic education, healthcare, justice and public security – to its citizens.
But even in the economic field, Rousseff’s government has fulfilled her promise to reduce Brazil’s interest-rates, with the central-bank’s rate falling from more than 12% per year in 2011 to the current 8% (the lowest level since 1996).
More than that, the president has pressed the public financial institutions to use lower rates in the market, thus forcing private banks to do the same.
The result is a financial revolution. For the first time in decades Brazilians are able to use banks and other financial institutions with reasonable rates; now, TV news programs report on how to borrow responsibly.
The second challenge is one inherited from her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (and more distantly from former president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso): the need to avoid the trap of making spurious political alliances in order to govern.
Here too, Dilma’s firm leadership – for example, in quickly dismissing seven ministers involved in political and corruption scandals in the first year of her presidency – has consolidated her authority and popularity.
But her steadiness will be tested in coming months, when Brazil’s federal high court will judge the notorious mensalão – the prolonged corruption scandal that unfolded under Lula’s government, when prominent figures in the ruling Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party), including Lula’s chief-of-staff José Dirceu, were accused of distributing money to small parties in exchange for political support.
Until now, Dilma has behaved with dignity and restraint, leaving the issue entirely in the hands of Brazilian justice.
The third challenge is Brazilian foreign policy, where Rousseff’s government has been attacked from both the right and the left. The right claims that the “Rio+20” agreement on climate change was empty, and that Brazil’s policy over Paraguay’s “presidential coup” was subordinated to Buenos Aires and Caracas.
The left claims that the president doesn’t care about foreign policy, has no patience with the idiosyncrasies of Itamaraty (the political bureaucracy behind Brazil’s foreign policy), and has lost the guiding path built by Lula and ex-foreign minister Celso Amorim, who (so the argument goes) articulated a more authentic and autonomous political strategy for the country in the international arena.
In fact, the agreement reached at the Rio+20 was a near-miracle, while Brazil’s position on the overthrow of Fernando Lugo in Asuncion showed that Brazilian leadership in the region is being linked to a new democratic discourse.
In this terrain, Dilma Rousseff has continued to pose the longstanding Brazilian question about the current methods of global governance, as well as corrected some flawed stances on human rights.
Here too, her thinking is clear: it is better to fight poverty and abuse from the inside than to play power-politics outside.
Besides all that, the president has had to deal with the political moods of her predecessor and mentor. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who served two terms from 2002-09, has more than once impolitely suggested that he could run again in 2014, when Dilma herself would be in a good position to reach for a second term.
For handling this test and the others with honesty, sincerity, hard work, good social programs and an impressive political conscience, Dilma Rousseff has already achieved much as Brazil’s first woman president. Oxalá she can keep going that way.
Arthur Ituassu is professor of international relations at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. You can read more from him at his website: www.ituassu.com.br. This article appeared originally in Open Democracy – www.opendemocracy.net.
]]>
What happened? Or rather, why it didn’t happen? There were only 150 “protestants” in Cinelândia, downtown Rio de Janeiro, for the anti-corruption demonstration organized by five groups in social networks.
In São Paulo, at Avenida Paulista, another five movements – Nas Ruas (In the Streets), Mudança Já (Change Now), Pátria Minha (My Homeland), Marcha pela Ética (March for Ethics) and Lojas Maçônicas (Masonic Lodges) – gathered only 200 people. In Boca Maldita (Damn Mouth), in Curitiba, the Anonymous group assembled 80 people.
The largest concentration of protesters against corruption was recorded at Freedom Square in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, estimated at 1,500 people, according to the military police. And the smallest, took place in Brazilian capital Brasília, where a mere 30 people gathered in the Esplanade of the Ministries.
Is that corruption is worse in Minas than in Brasília? Putting them all together, it wouldn’t be enough to fill the main square of my dear Porangaba, small but decent town.
This time, there was no disagreement on the number of demonstrators. They were so few of them on the November 15 holiday that you could count heads without being a genius in mathematics.
Even the most rabid bloggers who, the day before, announced “protests in 37 cities across the country,” with time and location of events, seem to have left the boat. They didn’t mention the subject anymore.
Apparently the assorted fauna, who since the weekend of September 7 organizes protests “against all that is happening,” grew already tired.
Organizers blamed the rain, but they cannot explain how, on the same day, under the same rain, 400,000 people went shopping in the 25 de Março street, in downtown São Paulo and 40,000 faithful gathered in the open at the Pacaembu stadium for an evangelical celebration.
Nor can it be alleged there was not enough bad news reported, as the old media never tires of presenting headlines daily about the “misdeeds” of the government, with emphasis right now on the Ministry of Labor from Carlos Lupi, a man beyond reproach.
In my humble opinion, the failure of these events inspired by the Arab Spring and protests against the unbridled capitalism in European capitals and the United States, resides in the lack of purpose and sincerity of the different movements that present themselves as “nonpartisan” and “apolitical” as if it were possible.
Apparently, the Brazilian people are happy with the country they live in and, therefore, it only take to the streets for a good reason, not at the invitation of the old “opinion makers.”
After all, we are all against corruption – even corrupt people, so that they can fight the competition, of course – but this crowd is really against the government. You just need to see who are their heralds in the press, which now harbor the remnants of the opposition after the last presidential election.
Dilma can fire all her ministers and do a spring cleaning in the government machinery and they will still claim for more, and will continue “calling on the people” in the social networks. The Internet brave folks are not used to face the real life’s sun and rain.
Unlike what happens in other countries, these events in Brazil are more a media phenomenon than a mass one – the same mainstream media that supported the 1964 coup and hid as long as it was able the Direct Vote Now campaign, in 1984 (with the notable exception of the Folha de S. Paulo, where I worked at the time).
They do not fool anyone anymore. People have stopped being stupid for a long while now.
Ricardo Kotscho, 63, is a reporter since 1964. He has worked in virtually all major media outlets in Brazil as a reporter, special reporter, editor, news editor, columnist, blogger and news director. He is currently a commentator for the Jornal da Record News and special reporter of Brasileiros magazine.
]]>
Services and information about federal actions and programs by the Brazilian government, which were previously spread out in several sites are now joined together in the new Portal Brasil. This is the new official website of Brazil.
Information about how to get an identity card, vaccination campaign calendars and guidance regarding retirement are examples of the content available.
At the address it was already possible to find information about the Federal government, but reformulation should bring together around 500 services.
Lula called the portal a “kind of national Google.” But on its first day of operation the site seemed overloaded: links were slow to open and many people were not able to reach the place.
According to a spokesperson of the Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency (Secom), the problem is due to the large volume of content that is being inserted.
The situation should normalize in the coming days, the government says, announcing that the ability to access the new portal was quintupled from 1000 to 5000 concurrent accesses per second.
Initially the portal will have 12 areas with specific content: citizenship, health, education, science and technology, Brazil, culture, economics, sports, geography, history, environment and tourism.
The content offered should be turned to workers, students, entrepreneurs and press and it is also forecasted to include senior citizens, children, civil servants and women.
There should also be a specific area for foreigners, in English and Spanish, focusing on students, investors and tourists.
The portal has resources to allow access by the visually and hearing impaired. It should also be possible, for example, to expand the font or change the contrast on the screen.
“The world has entered a new era of open, interactive, real-time communication and with the launch of brazil.gov.br, Brazil is ready to harness the opportunities presented by digital media to apply those qualities to official State communications,” said Secretariat for Social Communication Minister Franklin Martins.
“Portal Brasil underlines our institutional beliefs in social equality and transparency. This website is one of the largest open-source undertakings ever attempted. We will use its flexible platform to quickly, efficiently and dynamically inform and communicate with local and foreign citizens of the world,” he added.
The new e-government portal was launched in a ceremony held today in Brasília headed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and senior members of the Secretariat for Social Communication (SECOM) of the presidency of Brazil.
The launch of the remodeled site was overseen by SECOM with a total investment of US$ 4.1 million.
Portal Brasil aims to be a one-stop-shop for information on Brazil. The site’s content is designed to meet the needs of both Brazilian citizens and foreign audiences, including: analysts, investors, private sector companies, media, academics, NGOs, students, tourists, and other groups.
The site aims to not only inform, but also engage its users, says its creator, promising a collaborative platform that will be in constant evolution. To that end, Portal Brasil already includes 850 articles, a database of 6,000 photos, 40+ infographics, over 2,000 video and audio files, flash applications, user-generated content and customizable features.
New Multimedia Magazine
One unique area of Portal Brasil that distinguishes it from other e-government sites is its monthly multimedia magazine. This new outlet will provide informed insights into the heart of Brazil and its people, combining text, video, and infographic content to bring each story to life.
User functions like voting and surveys and integration with social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter should further expand the reach and impact of the magazine.
Portal Brasil is built on an open-source CMS platform – Plone with Zope application server – that offers maximum functionality and security to the site. In order to fully realize Brazil’s vision, the information architecture and programming of Portal Brasil had to be extensively customized, leading to unique programming technologies not yet seen anywhere else in the world.
This functional framework means that users can interact and impact the site in a number of ways, including: sending messages, questions, suggestions, complaints and/or compliments to Portal Brazil, commenting on the news and other content, uploading pictures to the collaborative photo gallery, reporting technical and content errors, sharing content with friends, integrating with other social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter, syndicating via RSS and bookmarking pages using the ‘My Brazil’ application.
“Portal Brasil is a central part of the State’s efforts to provide information quickly and efficiently in the digital age, and the timing could not be more right for us. Domestically, we are responding to the tremendous growth of Internet usage and broadband penetration in Brazil over the past decade. Brazil currently has the largest online audience in Latin America, and the ninth largest in the world,” commented the Social Communication Minister Franklin Martins.
“Externally, we are aware of the increased global interest in Brazil – not only in terms of investment, but as also as a result of the upcoming 2014 World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, which we will host – and so I hope our international friends and colleagues will take a moment to visit us at brazil.gov.br. We look forward to increased connections with the world,” he added.
]]>
Becoming a civil servant has become once again the Brazilian middle class dream, according to the cover story in the latest issue of Brazil's main weekly magazine Veja. Millions of Brazilians, says the opinionated publication, will be trying their luck this year to get one of the 100,000 new positions.that will be offered by the government.
A public job in Brazil means a good salary, possibilities of promotion, medical benefits, professional prestige and most of all the certainty that the lucky servant will never be fired.
Being a civil servant had lost prestige in the 80s when chances to get good salaries and opportunities to grow were more abundant in the private sector. This has changed however. The number of civil servants among Brazilian workers has grown from 17% in the 80s to 22% today.
The United States (14%), England (20%), Argentina (21%) and Chile (10%) all have a smaller contingent of civil servants among its active working population. The advantages of working for the state in Brazil are many. While in the US and England a civil servant can be fired this won't happen in Brazil.
Brazil's 1988 Constitution establishes that all civil servants have a job for life. They can be fired only in serious cases, like insubordination or when they abandon their job. It's believed that less than 1% of civil servants lose their jobs each year.
Brazilians working for the government also are guaranteed a full salary when they retire. While in the United States the average salary for a civil servant is US$ 4.200 in Brazil is US$ 2,500. The Brazilian government spends 48% of all the money it has available paying its employees.
In 2006, according to Veja, 5 million Brazilians applied to about 300 competitive examinations throughout the country trying to land a post posts in the federal, state and municipal bureaucracies, a number 43% higher than six years ago.
With 100,000 new public jobs being offered this year it's expected that new records in the number of applicants will be broken. The magazine quotes economist Nelson Marconi, from the Getúlio Vargas Foundation commenting on the trend: "The public sector, for the first time in decades, has become more attractive than the private one. This preference is a landmark in the history of jobs in Brazil and in the labor force profile".
Data from the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) show that the Brazilian state employs now more than 9 million citizens. As UnB's (Universidade de Brasília) political scientist José Matias Pereira, puts it, "Once again the government has become the country's largest and best employer. In no other place an employee will find such good salaries together with so many benefits."Â
Brazilian civil servants seem to be enjoying a new golden age as in the 60's and 70's during the military dictatorship, the so-called Brazilian miracle era, when the military-led state wanted to draw the best talent from the private sector.
While 10 years ago the typical candidate to a public post was 40 or older, nowadays most of those taking the examinations are below 30, and more than half of them are just leaving college and starting a career.
The average salary for federal civil servants has grown from 1,400 reais (US$ 730) to 4,700 reais (US$ 2,450) in the last ten years, a real increase since the inflation for the period was about 100%. With this jump, a civil servant nowadays gets 97.3% more than the private sector's average salary.
A recent study shows that public salaries between 1992 and 2005 grew 254% more than for similar jobs in the private sector. And 8% of government employees are making 8,500 reais (US$ 4,400) a month or more.
Most of the civil servants in Brazil today are chosen through competitive examination, but there are still thousands of them who benefit from a nepotism that hasn't been erased from the government. The United States has about 5,000 of such posts, France 1000 and England about 100. In Brazil, however, 25,000 positions in government are filled up by the godchildren of those in power.
]]>
You can’t deny it: in Brazil public authority is melting like ice cream under the sun. There are no command, no leadership, no political will and planning to deal with not only crises and the unexpected, which are a constant, but also to overcome the routine hindrances society is always throwing around.
In the administration’s federal, state and municipal tiers, all we can find is perplexity. Brazil’s structure has been dismantled, in other words, there isn’t a single structure capable of presenting itself as being ready for an effective exercise of power. This is the worst drama, the antechamber of total disaggregation
Executive Doesn’t Know a Thing
The population is abandoned to their own luck at the airports, when air traffic breaks down. Paulistas and Fluminenses (those from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), among others, have no one to turn to when their cities become lakes for lack of proper rain water drainage.
In the opposite end, if the drought devastates several regions, the remedy is to pray to Saint Joseph or Saint Peter because the plans to divert the river streams never left the drawing board. Faced with the unfortunate condition of public hospitals, where patients have to be laid down on the corridors floor, who will come forward with a solution?
Do we have perchance a single national structure capable of, upon taking up power, responding to the permanent and even routine hardships that come in constant and regular waves? Don’t even dream about it. But let us see. Is there a single political party that can call itself prepared to, in the government, be able to heed the basic needs of citizens always having to deal with nightmares?
In recent times the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement) seemed to have what it takes, but it happened what we saw. More recently, our hopes turned to the PT (the ruling Workers Party), which ended up becoming better known through the likes of Delúbios, Dirceus, Valérios, sanguessugas (bloodsuckers) and mensaleiros (congressmen involved in the cash for vote scandal).
Would it be possible that Congress would stand in for the parties? It is enough to recall that the now lame-duck legislature has been powerless in its attempt to create laws, which are able to solve some of our big and even small shortfalls.
About the Executive Power there is nothing we can say. It has always ignored every thing and it is never able to look ahead in order to prevent the unexpected and crises. And it continues mistaken if it believes that the magic formula of success lies in mere assistencialism.
Unions Turned into Clubs
The Judiciary Power? In the past, when the Estado Novo’s (New State) dictatorship fell, it prospered for a short time the motto "all power to the Judiciary," but it didn’t last long. With all due respect, judges today seem more concerned about readjusting their emolument.
You can’t count on the business community either because while some of them are merely interested in increasing their profits through speculation others are just trying to escape bankruptcy and the fiscal hell that torments them.
Would the unions be the saving structure that would bring the nation to its tracks? Not at all! The big union confederations have also been transformed into recreational clubs, without the might to marshal the working class, except for one or another privileged category.
The church? Surrounded by anachronisms and undecipherable documents, the distance between the clergy and the faithful keeps increasing, while there is a lack of new candidates to the priesthood and the Vatican keeps on spreading its backward ideas. From the evangelicals there is nothing to expect. They are simply committed to collect money and to promise that all will be solved in the other life.
The military have already had their opportunity and today they wouldn’t leave their barracks under any circumstances. They lack the will and also there is none of the needed popular appeal. Fortunately.
Would it be the press the national institution able to offer some way out for the impasse? Once again, no way! The TV garbage that deluges us blends with the unfortunate ways used to look for readers through the publication of the superfluous and the lowbrow, also with the honorable exceptions.
Without mentioning the excessive competition that throws the media apart and makes that the difficulties of some become the joy of others.
What is left then, as a national structure capable of taking over the responsibility to mend Brazil? Nothing. There is nothing left.
Carlos Chagas writes for the Rio’s daily Tribuna da Imprensa and is a representative of the Brazilian Press Association, in Brasília. He welcomes your comments at carloschagas@hotmail.com.
Translated from the Portuguese by Arlindo Silva.
]]>The 75th survey of Brazil’s National Confederation of Transport (CNT) and the Sensus Institute (CNT/Sensus) released yesterday indicates that the positive evaluation of the Lula administration remained stable. The research also indicates, however, that approval of President’s personal performance fell.
Compared to the previous survey of February 2005, the government obtained approval of 41.9% of interviewees against 42.9% in the beginning of the year. Negative ratings rose from 13.9% to 16.0%.
President Lula’s personal performance evaluation, in turn, fell from 66.1% measured in February to 60.1%. The disapproval index reached 29.0%.
The survey also indicates that 31.7% of those interviewed have followed or know about Brazilian government’s decision of not renewing the arrangement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), announced March 28th.
Of this total, 56.3% said that the decision was positive for the country, against 24.8% who believe it was negative.
When the subject is abortion, the research says that in spite of their support to family planning and to the use of contraceptive methods, the majority of the population is against abortion (85.0%), while 12.3% favor the practice. The majority is also against abortions in cases of sexual violence: 49.5%, while 43.5% favor the measure.
The survey heard two thousand people in 24 states in the five regions of Brazil, from April 12-14. The margin of error is three percentage points.
Agência Brasil
]]>The 1990s in Brazil was a decade characterized by privatizations and a shrinking of the state. A total of 133 state-run enterprises were privatized between 1997 and 2002, reports the government statistical bureau (IBGE) in its new survey, Public Finances.
According to Carlos Sobral, who coordinated the survey for the IBGE, “The privatizations [undertaken by the Collor and Cardoso administrations] caused a sharp reduction in the presence of state-run enterprises in Brazil’s economy.”
Privatizations Are Over
Earlier in the Lula Administration, the president of the Furnas Electricity Central, José Pedro Rodrigues de Oliveira, informed that energy systems in South America would require investments on the order of US$ 8 billion, between 2004 and 2007.
Rodrigues de Oliveira also assured that there is a clear orientation on the part of President Lula’s Administration in the sense that now is the time for partnerships, not privatizations and State take-overs.
“There is a clear guideline from the Administration that the period of privatizations is over, just as the period of State take-overs has already ended. Now is the time for partnerships.”
Following this orientation, passed along by the Minister of Mines, and complying with a request made by the Ministry of Foreign Relations (Itamaraty), Furnas did a feasibility study that indicated 14 possibilities of partnerships with the private sector.
The first of these, according to Oliveira, is the resumption of construction on the Angical Fish Power Plant, which is the subject of discussions with the Portuguese firm, EDP.
Rodrigues said that the private sector has been proposing partnerships, and he cited the Pan American company, which presented a project to import energy from Bolivia.
The Pan American company would build a thermal plant in Bolivia, and Furnas would install the transmission lines to transport the energy produced there. The project would involve US$ 2 billion in resources.
Agência Brasil
]]>