Pax Brasilia.

A ‘Black Bloc’ style protester, whose clashes with police have increasingly dominated coverage of the demonstrations. Copyright Dom PhillipsWhat effect does peace have on a nation?

Because it seems to me that the history of Brazil is comparatively peaceful. Not without incident or trauma, of course, nor without problems, but when compared to other nations, yes, it does seem relatively peaceful. Consider, the last major armed conflict on Brazilian soil was the Constitutionalist Revolution of 1932, which varying accounts estimate as resulting in between 900 and 2,200 deaths. Prior to that there was the surreal, messianic mess that was the Contestado War (which the most unforgiving estimate places at approximately 9,000 deaths). This was preceded by numerous minor conflicts dating back to the Brazilian War of Independence (1821-24), which guesswork places as having led to around 6,200 deaths.

The most destructive conflict that Brazil was involved in was the Paraguayan War (1864-70), in which Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina systematically – but at great cost to all sides – annihilated the Paraguayan armed forces, infrastructure and vast tranches of its civilian population. It remains proportionally the most destructive conflict of modern times, destroying 60-70% of the Paraguayan population and resulting in the highest number of fatalities relative to the number of combatants of any modern conflict (about 1 in 3). The particular consequences for Brazil, which lost 60-70,000 soldiers, were ruinous public debt, an increased political role for the military and – here’s the bit to remember – a gradual move towards the end of slavery.

Civilians fleeing Paysandú during the Uruguayan war, 1864There have been no major genocides in Brazil, no civil wars, no invasions, no aftermaths of famine and disease. The Brazilian Military Dictatorship (1964-85) was by all accounts a terrifying regime entailing censorship, intimidation and unlicensed corruption (as was ever the way). And yet a government-sponsored truth and reconciliation commission in 2007 assessed that, by the end of 21 years of dictatorship, there had been no more than 339 documented cases of government-sponsored political assassinations or disappearances (as compared to Argentina’s Dirty War, which the Argentine military intelligence cell, the Batallón de Inteligencia 601, which was directly involved in the terror, estimated as having killed or ‘disappeared’ 22,000 people from 1975-78).

Now I don’t want to seem like I’m trivialising or dismissing the suffering of the Brazilian people with a game of numbers. One death through violence is too much for me fit inside my head, too horrible to contemplate except at this remove. The point I’m trying to make is that that the history of Brazil in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is – by comparison with its neighbours, with European nations, with the Soviet Union and China, with other inheritors of troubled colonial legacies such as Zimbabwe or Darfur, Haiti or Cambodia, Vietnam or the Congo, the list that goes on and on – relatively peaceful.

Paulista troops in a machine gun nest during the Constitutionalist Revolution or 'Paulista War' of 1932.All of which brings me back to the end of the Paraguayan War, and its role in creating the conditions for the end of slavery in Brazil (the war ended in 1870 and slavery was abolished by the Lei Aurea, or ‘Golden Law’, in 1888). This side-effect is strikingly reminiscent of the end of ‘Service’ culture after the Second World War. During WW2, women worked in factories and the great houses of the country were emptied of both the ruling classes and the servants as men went off to fight in Europe. When the war ended, the people who had remained behind didn’t want to revert to the old order (women didn’t want to give up their jobs and return to servile positions) and the veterans didn’t want to go back to Downton Abbey but to the cities, where they could forge a living for themselves in the brave new world they had fought to emancipate not merely from fascism but from the stultifying effects of the class system.

Perhaps the end of the Paraguayan War caused a similar upheaval. Perhaps that’s war does: a lot of people die, in particular a lot of the men who make and uphold the laws that define the pre-war society; the survivors then have to decide what to do with their survival; acting from a position informed by their recent experience of suffering, they try and enshrine within society values that will prevent similar atrocities from recurring in subsequent generations. Thus cataclysm changes the social order.

If one were looking for confirmation of this theory, you could do worse than look at Brazil. Because in the decades since the Paraguayan War, when there has been relatively little war, there has also been relatively little change to society. The social order has become static, even ossified. I was moved to think about this last week when I was in the park with the kids. There I was on a Bank Holiday, following my kids around from the swings to the jungle gym and back again. And who was there with me? One other parent and three babas (nannies) – which is to say, the parents were outnumbered by the staff that were paid to be there, looking after someone else’s kids. I wonder how often that happens on Clapham Common or in Les Tuileries. Probably not often.

'Cidade Desigual'. Graffiti artist Mudano uses the São Paulo skyline to help make his point.

The stratification of society into rigidly demarcated layers is visible everywhere you turn in contemporary Brazil and, for a European or North American accustomed to these classifications being sublimated into special, highly coded signifiers of status or entitlement (which is quite another species of bullshit), it’s shocking. It’s shocking to find guards controlling entry to every condo, mediating your interaction with the outside world. It’s shocking to have a ‘social’ elevator for the owners and a ‘service’ elevator for the domestics. And it’s shocking to see how people in a relatively low position (a porter or a driver) will quite happily, and sometimes quite brutally, enforce the status quo by leaning on the group below them (a dog walker, say, or a maid).

I’m not saying this doesn’t happen in other countries. Of course it does. It’s just that, where I come from, we’ve learned to conceal it better – that and also, perhaps, we’ve been forced by the upheavals of the twentieth century to create a society that really is, despite all its flaws, more fluid. It might even be true to say that the horrors our parents and grandparents endured forced them to carve out and then legitimise a concept of civil liberty in which individuals were, at least notionally, free to define themselves without recourse to arbitrary, a priori classifications. (The possibility that later generations have squandered this legacy through their indifference towards those values or their systematic erosion by our government I leave for another day.)

What am I saying? That Brazil would be a better place if there had been more bloodshed here? That Brazil should be more like my own country, or Germany or Spain? No, because saying either of those things would be obscene as well as quite meaningless. All I am saying is that there is a difference between these countries in the structuring and experience of their societies, and that at least some of these differences can probably be attributed to the comparative prevalence or absence of warfare and its fellow horsemen of the apocalypse (viz. disease, famine and death) during the past two hundred years.

The reprieve Brazil was given has made it great in some ways – the people really are relaxed and spontaneous (as well as really, really noisy), and they really do live their lives in a frame of mind that, by and large, disinclines them to worry. And yet, funnily enough, a lot of the self-same qualities (passivity, hedonism, disinclination to complain) lie behind the current mess the country finds itself in, because Brazilians blithely accept conditions that most visitors find distressingly extreme. They contend on a daily basis with prohibitive taxes, a shaky infrastructure, chronically underfunded infrastructure, an obsolete and clunking bureaucracy that allows robber-baron capitalists to steal with impunity from their customers, an unregulated police force* and deeply unequal public health and education systems.

Protesters on the Minhocão, downtown São Paulo. Photo: Mídia NINJABut perhaps all that’s changing. The recent protests that have been sweeping through Brazil’s cities seem to indicate that the proliferation of social media – of decentralised discourse and a clearer oversight of conditions in others parts of the world – is helping the previously quiescent public to articulate their discontentment and organise their resistance at unprecedented levels¥. Perhaps Brazilians are beginning to think that peace and sunshine aren’t enough, not when their leaders and their cronies are taking them for a ride. All we can hope is that a demand for change doesn’t end the Pax Brasilia for good.

Postscript.
Before publishing this, I ran the basic idea past a friend of mine who came and stayed with us last week. He listened quietly and then equally quietly pointed out that, while there may not be much actual warfare in Brazil, the ubiquity of violent crime accounts for as many deaths as most major warzones. I checked, and he’s absolutely right. In 2011, there were 42,785 homicides in Brazil, as compared to 540 in the whole of England and Wales or, to find a comparable geographical landmass/population, 13,826 in the Russian Federation†. That was so shocking, it made me think I must have got it all wrong: a lack of warfare couldn’t be having the effect I thought because the whole country was effectively at war with itself. But then, a little later, I had second thoughts. Because isn’t the type of violence my friend mentioned to me the sort of violence that doesn’t change anything in society, because the violence itself is ghettoised. Confined to the periferia and the favela, it never leaks out onto the orderly, productive streets where the middle classes live and work or, heaven forfend, the tree-lined avenues of the truly rich. If ever it does, as in the summer of 2006, when the organised crime syndicate Primeiro Comando do Capital (‘First Capital Command’) staged an organised campaign of violence and assassination that spread out beyond the Zona Leste (the sprawling and impoverished eastern zone of São Paulo, where most gang violence occurs) with attacks on buses, the metro, downtown banks and the airport, the whole city shut down, the army was sent in, the media denounced it as a terrible state of affairs and, once the violence resumed its normal profile, everything went on exactly as before.  

† Statistics from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ("Homicide Statistics 2013" … http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/crime/Homicide_statistics2013.xls)

* In a hangover from the Dictatorship, Brazil still has a Military Police, complete with shock troops and special units who are exempted from prosecution for killing in the line of duty by the Auto da Resistência or ‘Act of Resistance’.

¥ For two deeply informed and searching English-language analyses of the current protests and their implications, read this and this by Time Out São Paulo Editor Claire Rigby.