Postcolonial Dictatorship Blues.

Os Gemeos response to the 'order and progress' motto that appears on the Brazilian flag.After forty minutes spent arguing with various bureaucratic apparatchiks at my local post office on Rua dos Pinheiros, I’ve had a revelation, and it is this:

The chief obstacle Brazil has in making the most of the opportunities currently facing it is not, as you might assume from a brief acquaintance with the country, a lack of transparency.

In fact, it’s the opposite: everyone knows what’s wrong with Brazil, because no one – from the politicians to the magnates to the bloke working the till at Lojas Americanas – is particularly concerned to hide what they’ve done, whether it’s corruption, fraud, incompetence or even murder.

The problem, then, is an underlying absence of accountability. This creates the conditions for people to act without fear of repercussions. As we’ve seen in the UK with the financial crisis or the Labour government’s decision to go to war in Iraq despite a million-strong protest, this problem is by no means confined to Brazil. But it is, for outsiders accustomed to their politicians or business moguls making at least a token gesture towards maintaining the illusion of probity, shockingly flagrant here in Brazil. 

The question is, why?

My feeling is that Brazil’s pronounced lack of accountability is a direct consequence of the military dictatorship (1964-85). Under a military dictatorship, the prevailing assumption is that the authorities don’t need to respond to people’s complaints because there’s either no redress or, if you make too much of a nuisance of yourself, the implicit risk of a beating or being made to disappear. For those of us raised in democratic societies, it’s hard to imagine how toxically this would affect one’s life.

Under this ethos, it’s safe to assume that the authorities were the ones through which power was distributed downwards through society. This in turn probably gave rise to a hierarchical culture in which people felt they had to petition upwards for preferment. And, once they possessed any degree of authority, it is only too easy to imagine them replicating the same high-handed behaviour against anyone further down the ladder, thereby creating a society that enshrined inequality and habitually disregarded the interests of the perceived lower orders. In short, if you put bullies in power, you create a culture that worships bullies.

Of course, the dictatorship’s over now and Brazil is a democracy. But I would hazard that, in a culture which still concentrates a massive percentage of its wealth in the same type of people, and often the same actual individuals, it is far from being the case that the psychological hangover of the dictatorship, as well as the underlying legacy of colonial exploitation that preceded it, have entirely vanished from society. Orwell’s comment that people living under a totalitarian regime eventually condemn themselves seems apposite here, if you can countenance the idea of people, instead of actively convicting themselves in show trials, unconsciously imprisoning themselves within the same repressive structures they knew under totalitarianism, simply because they don’t know any other way. If you accept that admittedly tendentious thesis, it’s only a small step to infer that the plutocratic framework of power distribution, with its attendant assumption of impunity, is still alive and well in Brazilian society.

The most dangerous manifestation of a lack of accountability lies in the behaviour of the people with the power to dispense justice and take life. And, sure enough, the legacy of impunity can be seen in the ongoing tendency of the Brazilian police to disregard the rights of the Brazilian people through excessive violence against protesters (I wrote this analysis of the recent protests against the World Cup), murderous vendettas and brutal treatment of the poor and disenfranchised. And it is cautionary to note that this treatment is not just limited to the poor: one thing you learn fairly quickly on arriving in Brazil is that you simply don’t fuck with the police. Individually I’m sure some of them are lovely people, but they’re protected by a more or less inviolable wall of legislation, which gives them the right to turn your world upside down at the slightest provocation, with little or no thought of the repercussions.    

It’s not just the police, of course, who act with impunity. The recent mensalão case dominated the news precisely because it the first attempt to convict serving politicians for corruption, despite everyone knowing that most of them are seriously bent. Moreover, since all the politicians on trial in the Mensalão case are from the PT (the Workers’ Party of ex-Preisdent Lula and current President Dilma Roussieff), who came to power on a pledge of no corruption, and since, furthermore, the ruling judge in the case is being widely touted as a potential runner for the opposition in the forthcoming presidential elections, it’s apparently the case in Brazil that even a case against corruption has a distinct whiff of corruption to it.

The lack of accountability affects every strata and aspect of life in Brazil. It is this that you come up against when someone hangs up on your call rather than hear your complaint, or when your service provider hikes the fees without providing any reason. They’re doing it because no one stops them, and because everyone else is doing it, too. On a day-to-day basis, you learn to put up with it. But I can’t help wondering how the uneven, potholed texture of Brazilian infrastructure is going to go across come the summer, when millions of foreign visitors arrive for the World Cup. At that point, the pronounced indifference of the Brazilian élite to the opinions of the outside world might come into conflict with the need to make profit from those same individuals.

Finally, it was this culture of zero-accountability that I suspect I was banging my head against last week, when the manager of my local post office spent half an hour denying any degree of even putative liability for six packages having gone missing en route to our home in the last six months. I had already explained the problem both to her and her minions. I had explained how parcels sent during the same timeframe to the neighbouring sorting office, where my wife works at a much more august address (I suspect this may be why parcels sent there are mysteriously more immune to tampering), had all arrived safely. I had suggested, as delicately as possible, that perhaps the problem lay not with the addressing of the parcels, nor with the airport nor with the main distribution centre, but with her sorting office.

At this point, although not for the last time, she looked me in the eye and told me that it was impossible for the problem to have originated in her sorting office. I reminded her of the facts, particularly those concerning parcels arriving safely at their destination via other sorting offices. She repeated that the problem was not with her sorting office. It was impossible. Amazingly, she didn’t even need to check our address or speak to her staff to know this. Nor did she have to call anyone or make any effort whatsoever. She simply knew infallibly that the problem did not rest with her. I don’t know how she gained such omniscience, unless perhaps she had herself been sorting and delivering every single parcel for the past six months. But then, I am not initiated in the labyrinthine mysteries of the Brazilian postal service.

In a last desperate bid to crack the bureaucratic façade, I asked her if she couldn’t see that the balance of probability suggested the problem might just possibly lie with her sorting office. She repeated her assertion that my family had mislabelled the packages or that the porters in our building had mislaid them. I asked her if she believed my family was stupid, since she seemed to be suggesting they couldn't label a parcel, or that the porters were thieves. I was, I must admit, getting a little frustrated by this point. She assured me no, of course she wasn’t saying either of those things. Well then, I said, how did they get lost? Is it not even remotely possible for your employees to have lost them? She reverted to omniscience, telling me once again that it was impossible.

I realised then that I was actually in Room 101 and decided to end the conversation.

My parting shot was to take her name and email address, in the hope that I could make a small dent in the officious machinery by rendering her accountable for what had happened. She seemed a bit surprised by that, but acquiesced. Then I left.

Maybe I’ll write to her when I have some time. But then again I probably won’t. After all, what’s the point? 

Update on Saturday, February 1, 2014 at 10:01AM by Matt Phipps

Update: In the past week, two of the three most recent vanished parcels have arrived. We now have vast quantities of Indian tea, after enduring a drought for the last two months of 2013. I don't want to say for sure that our complains caused this sudden reversal in our fortunes, but it is interesting. One of the packages was torn open at the bottom and re-sealed. The Iron Man costume inside (which, needless to say, is for me as opposed to my three year-old son) has had the circuitry that lights up the chest mangled. Nice of them.