Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) Wins Mexican Presidency

Andrés Manuel López Obrador speaks
at a press conference in Mexico City, July 3,
2018 (Photo: Manuel Velazquez/Getty Images)
from New York Magazine

Three times can sometimes produce a seismic charm, or so it appears for Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) (1953-), who was finally elected President of Mexico on July 1, this past Sunday. Though a longtime member the leftist Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD) and a failed candidate in the contested 2006 and 2012 national elections, AMLO, a former Governor of the Federal District, ran under the aegis of a new left-leaning coalition, Juntos Haremos Historia (Together We Will Make History), that comprised the progressive Movimiento de la Regeneración Nacional (National Regeneration Movement/MORENA) and Partido de Trabajadores (Labor Party/PT) parties with a socially conservative party, Partido Encuentro Social (Social Encounter Party/PES). AMLO will assume office on December 1, 2018, which, given Mexico's current parlous state, will not be a moment too soon.

AMLO's chief rivals in this year's presidential election were Ricardo Anaya of the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party/PAN), the center-right party of former president Vicente Fox (who served from 2000-2006) an antagonist of US Republican presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump; José Antonio Meade of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party/PRI), the neoliberal, longtime ruling party to which incumbent president Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018) belongs; and two independent candidates, Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, who had previously become the first independent candidate to win a state governorship when he helmed Nuevo Leon; and Margarita Zavala, a noted lawyer, and the wife of former president and PAN figurehead Felipe Calderón (in office from 2006-2012).

In essence, AMLO was not just leading a visibly left coalition but represented the only left-leaning option for Mexican voters in this presidential election. As the campaign progressed, Mexico's political and social elites grew increasingly alarmed, and perhaps rightly so. Yet the hiccuping economy, metastasizing violence, which even marked the lead-up to the election, and continuing allegations of extensive, high-level government corruption, blunted the right's blizzard of "Mexico will turn into Venezuela"-scare tactics, some with racist and classist tones, including advertisements, robocalls, videos, and social media attacks, not unlike ones that had doomed AMLO's chances in the prior two elections.

In one instance, a PRI operative named Enrique Ochoa Reza tweeted that PRI politicians who switched parties to MORENA were "Prietos que no aprietan" (Dark-skinned/black people who can't get a hold), playing on the double meanings of "moreno/a" (brown/black man/woman) and "prieto" (dark/black person), as well as the feminine form of the former word (morena=brown woman/black woman) and the verb aprietar (not being able to keep somebody). Ochoa Reza did apologize for the racist aspect of his slur, but not the misogynistic one. Additionally, there were allegations of US and Guatemalan meddling in the campaign, and Ochoa Reza accused Russia of interfering on behalf of AMLO, a charge the eventual victor laughed off.

The attacks, however numerous and outrageous, could not overcome Mexican voters disgust at the current state of affairs. AMLO won in a landslide, defeating Anaya by 21 percentage points while winning 53% of the total vote and popular vote. The final tally in an election that saw a 63.6% turnout (or 56.6 million voters out of 89.9 registered voters) was as follows, with AMLO winning 31 of Mexico's 32 states, and the first outright majority for a presidential candidate since 1989:

2018 Mexican Presidential Candidate & Party	Vote Total
AMLO (National Regeneration Movement/Juntos Haremos Historia)	30,112,109
Ricardo Anaya (PAN/Por México al Frente)	12,609,472
José Antonio Meade (PRI/Todos por México)	9,289,378
Jaime Rodríguez Calderón (Independent)	32,743
Margarita Zavala (Independent)	31,983

While his ideology has long been diametrically opposed to what we see with a figure like Donald Trump, they share a vocal populist nationalism, AMLO's rooted in the left and democratic socialism instead of Trump's ethnonationalist and racist authoritarian approach. What this might mean for the cozy relationship between Mexico's large corporations and land owners and the government and for an approach to a renegotiated North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that privileges international structures and rules over the country's laws remains to be seen, but given the Juntos Haremos Historia/MORENA's capture of 312 of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and the strong popular mandate for the coalition and new president, AMLO could throw wrenches in Mexico's steady march towards privatization and economic (classical) liberalization, in favor of policies that more effectively and immediately address the rising economic inequality and insecurity that millions of Mexicans are facing.

During the campaign AMLO announced that he would push to reform some of the perks of the presidency, including cutting his salary and that of top officials, selling presidential planes, creating a public park out of the presidential grounds, and ending the lifetime pension former presidents receive, with the savings being directed towards Mexican seniors, who have a far less secure and comparatively robust retirement savings system than US's fixed pensions, 401K savings plans, and Social Security (which itself is admittedly always under threat from US conservatives and neoliberals). He also attacked the International Monetary Fund as an enabler of and participant in Mexico's corruption, suggesting he might pull back not just from the IMF but from other international financial systems that have long kept Mexico under yoke. One key question would be how projected new NAFTA negotiations might change as a result of this approach.

As Nathaniel Parish Flannery argues in a recent Forbes article, "The AMLO Era: Why Mexico's 2018 Election Matters," nearly half of Mexicans live in poverty, and despite the country's prowess in manufacturing, wages remain abysmal. Stemming governmental corruption and addressing the country's sluggish growth rate, rising economic and social inequality, the persistent lack of jobs in the formal economy, and low, stagnant wages across all labor sectors could have beneficial, ramifying effects on all aspects of Mexican society. The question for AMLO and Mexico's congress is how to spur all of this such that all the wealth does not continue to flow upwards to the relatively tiny sector of rich elites. Strategies to create a viable and vibrant middle class, which would necessitate a retreat from the neoliberalization of the prior PRI and PAN administrations, transformed tax and business policies, support for public education and farmers, and a strengthened safety net, could be among AMLO's and the new left-leaning Congress's potential steps.

Some of this, beyond NAFTA talks, will hinge on the "new relationship" AMLO has vowed to forge with Mexico's often domineering neighbor the United States. While the US and Mexico are among each others' largest trading partners and cooperate extensively in a range of areas, the two current leaders, Trump and Peña Nieto, have been at loggerheads, in part because of Trump's persistent attacks on Mexico and Mexicans, beginning the day he announced his presidential campaign and slandered Mexican immigrants, and because Peña Nieto understandably has refused to pay for Trump's desired border wall. AMLO has already challenged the border wall idea in a pamphlet he published, entitled Oye Trump (Listen Up, Trump). One goal AMLO outlined was development of Mexico's "internal market," so that "Mexicans can work and be happy where they were born, where their family is, where their customs and cultures are." Creating an expanding middle class is crucial to ensuring this market can flourish, and to transforming the migrant flows.

Another challenge for AMLO will be to figure out a way to lower the violence that has plagued Mexico. Neither Calderón's nor Peña Nieto's approaches worked; corruption remains endemic at all levels, and organized crime is strong as well. In addition, since September 2017, 130 political figures, from the municipal to the national level, have been murdered, and journalists across Mexico have been targeted for investigative and critical work. AMLO supposedly has suggested amnesty for low-level drug offenders, which sparked criticism, but it also is the case that Peña Nieto's initial policy approach of militarized attacks on the cartels failed, as did prior attempts to negotiate with organized crime. Rising pay for all workers, and better wages for domestic security and military forces could help to thwart the power of organized crime to infiltrate them, but AMLO also has suggested a "peace plan," involving human rights organizations, religious organizations, among others, to negotiate a decline in the murder rate.

I see less of a parallel with Hugo Chavez, to who AMLO has been repeatedly compared, and more of one with the presidency of Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, Brazil's now imprisoned but still widely popular former president. Formerly a firebrand leftist from his country's Worker's Party, Lula lost three elections before finally becoming president in 2003, and governed for two terms. Lula moderated his platform in his successful campaign, presiding over a series of liberalized economic policies that on the one hand led to considerable growth, but which included a range of social policies that helped lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty, increased Brazil's safety net, and created a visible if fragile middle class. Unfortunately, Lula did not target systemic corruption with the same zeal, and now finds himself crucified not only because of his opponents' vengeance, but as a result of his and his successor's failure to truly wrestle with the beast of corruption during the height of their successes. With AMLO, domestic economic policies and global financial trends could prove his ally or enemy, but a failure to address systemic corruption, impossible a task as that may be, could destroy not only the tremendous support he now enjoys, but damn his and his coalition's future, let alone Mexico, for decades to come.

The Coup in Brazil II: Rousseff Is Ousted

Dilma Rousseff defends herself before
the Brazilian Senate
(Independente)

It is now official; after the two-week façade of the Rio Olympics allowed Brazil to project a positive international image of itself, its sidelined Dilma Rousseff, democratically elected in 2010 and 2014, has been ousted from her post. This past Wednesday, August 31, according to the dictates of Brazil's post-dictatorship federal constitution and by a vote of 61-20 in Brazil's Senate, she has been officially removed from office. A second vote failed to reach the majority required to bar her from running for office again. Rousseff's former vice president, now acting president Michel Temer, of the opposition PMDB Party, assumes the mantle of power. Temer was sworn in two hours after Dilma was out, and now will hold office, unless he too is impeached, on far more solid grounds than Rousseff, given his alleged involvement in multiple corruptions schemes, resigns or falls ill, until 2018.

(I should note that Chamber of Deputies also called for Temer's impeachment in 2015, but that lower house's former president, Eduardo Cunha, who was third in line to the presidency, blocked the push. In April of this year, a Supreme Court Judge, Mello, ruled that the lower house vote to impeach Temer could proceed. The likelihood of that is slim unless significantly more information about Temer's links to corruption receive a public airing. In any case, other parties would have to ally with opponents of his ruling PMDB party to push through a vote. Cunha, for his part, was suspended as Chamber President in May of this year because the Supreme Court ruled he intimidated fellow lawmakers and obstructed investigation into his receipt of bribes; he also has been linked to money laundering schemes involving Petrobras.)

Before the final vote, which required a total of 53 senators to strip her of her position, Rousseff delivered a passionate self-defense outlining how the entire impeachment process was not simply an attack on her, Brazil's first woman president and representative of the Workers' Party, but also a major blow against democracy itself in Brazil. She cited predecessors such as Juscelino Kubitschek, the visionary president behind the construction of Brazil's third and current capital, Brasília, who was nearly toppled several several times, and João Goulart, whose overthrow led to two decades of dictatorship. Her lawyer, José Eduardo Cardozo, underlined in his written defense of Rousseff that the main aim of the impeachment was not to punish Rousseff for her budget manipulations, which a Senate report found did not amount to an impeachable crime, but rather, as wiretaps released by the Folha de São Paulo made clear, to push her out in order to eventually quash the ongoing and metastasizing Lava Jato corruption investigation involving the state oil company Petrobras, construction firms, lobbyists, and a sizable number of Brazil's elected Congressional politicians, including, it must be said again, the new president Temer himself.

I will not reprise my prior post from this past May on the coup, which describes the process by which the impeachment unfolded, but what's clear is that the structures and systems of a functioning constitutional democracy were abused in Rousseff's case to expel her from office. The coup plotters harnessed the public's rage at the country's economic crises and disgust at the rampant corruption swirling around the Lava Jato scandal, the Workers' Party, and politicians in general to get rid of the main obstacle to implementing what they could not achieve electorally: a conservative, neoliberal regime. It is probably the case that had Rousseff decided to take the unethical route and protect Temer and other members of the PMDB Congressional delegation, such as Cunha, she might have continued to receive public condemnation and cratered in popularity, which fell to as low as 8% last year, but she also would still be president. When Temer officially broke with her, however, the die was cast.

What also appears clear is that this coup was poorly covered by the US media--and here I am pointing to The New York Times in particular. Though it did repeatedly point out that Rousseff had not benefited in any way from the Lava Jato corruption or and had not been accused of corruption herself, the Times did fail to note more than once that she had been exonerated in a report by the very legislative body that was voting to impeach her. In a complete flip off to critics of the flimsy basis for impeachment, Brazil's Congress has subsequently ratified into law the very budgetary "pedaling" that Rousseff, like many of her predecessors, had engaged in. Whether Temer and his allies will be able to halt the corruption probes without public unrest is unclear, but so long as he remains in power and retains the support of Brazil's powerful media conglomerates, he and the right can continue to shape the narrative and downplay, to the extent possible, the narrative.

The vote to oust Dilma Rousseff:
Blue was Yes, Gray Abstain,
Yellow Absent, and Red was No
(Image courtesy of Veja Abril)

As it stands, allegations of corruption involving the 81 members (3 per state) of the Brazilian Senate and Chamber of Deputies keep filling the news. In addition to Cunha and Temer, who is barred from running for office for eight years, four major Senate figures linked to Rousseff's ouster are under investigation. They include Senate President Renan Calheiros, formerly fourth and now third in line for the presidency, and Minas Gerais's Senator Antônio Anastasia, who prepared the impeachment vote in the Senate. In total, out of the 81 Senators, 49 are under investigation of some kind. 60% have charges of bribery, money laundering, and other crimes looming over them. Brazil's Supreme Court is investigating 24 of them. 5 face criminal charges outright. One of Temer's strongest supporters, Brazilian Senator from Minas Gerais state, Aécio Neves, the grandson of Brazil's first democratically elected post-dictatorship president, Tancredo Neves, who died shortly before he could assume office, has been named by four different people under investigation in the Lava Jato corruption case. Neves lost to Rousseff in the last presidential election, 52%-49%. Another figure who voted for her, disgraced former president of Brazil and current Senator from Alagoas state, Fernando Collor de Melo, is also under investigation because of his links to the Lava Jato corruption case.

Another deeply disturbing aspect of this episode has been the US government's tacit approval of what was clearly the overthrow of a standing government. As I had previously pointed out, the current US ambassador to Brazil had served in Paraguay when a strange, quasi-democratic coup drove out a leftist leader there. Also, as Wikileaks revealed last year, the US had been monitoring the Brazilian government's phone lines, including those of President Rousseff, as well as many of Brazil's economic officials, and, in a recent revelation that should surprise no one, new president Temer allegedly served as a US informant. Secretary of State John Kerry in particular was mostly silent as Rousseff was put on trial, and has spoken favorably of conservative the former ambassador and now Foreign Minister, José Serra, who lost to Rousseff in the 2010 presidential race and also allegedly has ties to the US government.

Although both Dilma Rousseff and her Workers' Party predecessor Lula oversaw macroeconomic policies falling within the rubric of global neoliberalism, they also expended far more than their predecessors on social programs that helped reduce poverty, increase school enrollment, and increase the size of Brazil's middle and working classes. Afro-Brazilians, who constitute a majority of Brazil's population (roughly 51%) and the majority of its poor, were especially empowered economically by the range of programs Lula and Dilma Rousseff implemented. (One need only look at the success of the medal winning Afro-Brazilian athletes like Rafaela Silva and Isaquias Queiroz, who took up sports and received support via Lula-Rousseff sponsored program.) On multiple levels, these changes were anathema to Brazil's mostly white elites. It was not merely happenstance that Temer's acting--now permanent--cabinet is and remains all male and all white (according to Brazilian standards).

As Brazil became more powerful, it also represented a beacon for other Left-leaning regimes across Latin America. Its support of Venezuela, in particular, as well as the governments in  Bolivia and Ecuador, was stalwart. By pushing Rousseff out, Temer's government will now not only be able to impose a range of neoliberal programs, ranging from privatization of state enterprises and contracting out government services to private companies, and impose government austerity overall, and slash ministries and programs as much as it pleases, popular protests be damned, but it provides a bulwark to the conservative regimes in Argentina, Peru, Paraguay, Chile, and Colombia, as well as the USA, which would like to bar Venezuela from chairing Mercosur, but also which may support a coup, particularly a non-parliamentary one, in Venezuela. Having witnessed a near coup there when George W. Bush was president, I don't doubt that plans for one are sitting on someone's desk in Washington.

Before her impeachment, millions of Brazilians took to the streets to protest Rousseff's government, which was deeply unpopular, even among people who had voted for the Workers' Party. As a number of commentators have pointed out, a large portion of those participating in the anti-Rousseff rallies, which were championed by media conglomerate Globo, were middle and upper middle class Brazilians, particularly in the central and southern parts of the country, and the images of white Brazilian couples marching with a black nanny or maid behind them pushing their children in strollers have. become iconic. Yet what was less covered in the US mainstream media were the millions who also marched against Rousseff's removal and who have consistently called for the ouster of Temer ("Fora Temer") as well. So unpopular was the acting president that he was booed at the Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony. Since Wednesday, Brazilians have not taken the coup lightly, with rallies and marches underway all over the country. Given Temer's military support and the leaked wiretap suggesting collusion between some of the people seeking to impeach Dilma, members of the judiciary, and military officials, violent repression of anti-coup protesters is probably coming, especially the further we get from the media spotlight on the coup.

I think Rousseff's ouster should send a warning sign to Hillary Clinton should she win the presidency in November, which appears likely. I doubt that Brazil's administration would or could provide any material support, but the template they've established is one the GOP could replay, without need for a special prosecutor, as they required when they impeached Bill Clinton. Between the endless Benghazi investigation, which showed that Hillary Clinton was no culpable, to the private email server imbroglio, which the FBI stated did not warrant criminal charges against Clinton, to the current uproar, aided and abetted by the mainstream press, swirling around the Clinton Foundation, a GOP House could easily gin up a pretext from any of these as a means to launching a trial against Clinton. Her opponent, Donald Trump, has already spurred outright calls for Clinton to be tried and jailed, and chants along these lines occurred repeatedly at the GOP Convention in Cleveland. Over the last few years both Clinton and her boss, President Barack Obama, have backed Latin American coups and ousters, including the one in Paraguay and the 2009 Honduras coup, which she has admitted she supported. Let us hope, at least for our US democracy's sake, that the impeaching chickens do not come home to roost with the Clintons again.

The Brazilian Coup

Suspended Brazilian President
Dilma Rousseff (Photo © Inserbia.info)

One topic I've meaning to write about for a while is the current political crisis in Brazil. As has been widely reported (with the best English language coverage I've seen appearing on Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept and TeleSur's English language site), on April 17, 2016, Brazil's Lower of House of Congress, led by now former-President of the Chamber of Deputies Eduardo Cunha, of the center-right Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (Partido do Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, or PMDB), voted to forward to the Brazilian Senate impeachment proceedings against the democratically elected president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, a member of the leftist Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT). A few weeks later, on May 12, Brazil's upper house, led by Senate President Renan Calheiros (PMDB, from the northeastern state of Alagoas), voted 55-22 to have Dilma stand trial on the charge of budget manipulation, or "pedaladas," in which she allegedly used public bank funds to cover a lack of funding for government programs, with the goal of hiding deficits in order to ensure her reelection. As of that date, she was formally suspended as President, and the lawyer Michel Temer, her vice president and a member of the PMDB, like Cunha, assumed office as Acting President.

Just two years ago in the 2014 general election, Dilma won a second presidential term, defeating her centrist opponent Aécio Neves of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira, or PDSB). With her reelection victory, Dilma extended the Workers' Party's control of the presidency to four consecutive terms, the first two coming under her once highly popular predecessor and former labor organizer Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva.  Under Lula and then Dilma, during her first term, the federal government created a series of programs, including the Bolsa Familia, that lifted millions of Brazilians out of poverty, and the overall economic successes of this era, based on rising commodity prices and a roaring manufacturing sector, helped to dramatically expand the country's middle and working classes.

Under Lula and Dilma, Brazil's per-person GDP ascended from around $3000 in 2001 to high of $13,000 in 2010, and the country weathered the global recession far better than nearly all its South American peers and most of Europe. It's also important to note that as Brazil rose economically, its demographics were shifting so that by 2014, a majority (51%) of its citizens were self-identifying as brown/mixed or black, a striking fact in a country that at one point had undertaken an official state policy of whitening, beginning under its former emperor Pedro II (1825-1891, his reign lasting rom 1831 to 1889 ), by actively inviting European immigrants to settle on its shores and where state-sanctioned slavery lasted until 1888 and violence against Afrobrazilian, mixed-raced and Indigenous populations has continued for decades since. Many of these brown and black Brazilians saw their fortunes rise under Lula's and Dilma's stewardship of the country's economy, and provided crucial support for both during their presidential runs.

Not long after Dilma's second victory, the bottom fell out of commodity prices, the economy slipped into a recession, inflation began rising, and jobs started to dry up. Dilma had also continued her predecessor Lula's progressive and successful social programs and increased public spending overall, leading to a growing deficit and national debt. Additionally, in preparation for the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Brazil spent hundreds of millions of dollars on new stadiums and facilities, provoking a series of pre-tournament protests from a cross-section of the populace who preferred that the funds go towards more pressing needs, like support for public transportation and education. To make matters worse, during the event Brazilians endured global humiliation when eventual victor Germany's powerhouse squad defeated the acclaimed home team by a 7-1 score. The public dissent leading up to the World Cup could not bode well for Dilma's public standing, and it did not help that in two years, the 2016 Summer Olympics would be held in Brazil's second city and former capital, the densely packed, favela-ringed Rio de Janeiro, which meant that the country would have to spend many hundreds of millions more on athletic facilities, housing and related infrastructure, while also undertaking major environmental and security upgrades.  

One of the main Olympic venues, Guanabara Bay and the ocean area outside it, around which the city of Rio unfolds and in which rowing and some swimming events were to occur, tested so dangerously polluted that athletes competing in it for pre-Olympic events have repeatedly fallen ill with a range of diseases, including serious staff infections. (I have suggested elsewhere that that the sailing and other water events be moved to the far south of the country, to Florianópolis, where the water quality is much better, and that other events be distributed to several other central and southern Brazilian capital cities, like São Paulo, Curitiba and Porto Alegre, that already have first-class athletic facilities). Both Brazil and the International Olympic Committee, however, are dead set on not changing their minds or the sites, and many of the promised infrastructure improvements, which the government claimed would benefit not just the Olympic visitors but denizens of Rio, have yet to materialize. In addition, part of at least one favela has been razed and its residents displaced, and the military's "pacification" of others has led to increased violence against some of the city's most vulnerable people, most of them black and mixed-race.

Brazil's Congress Building
(Photo by RNLatvian)

Alongside the toxic mix of an economic slowdown and the costly international athletic events, last year Brazil found itself grappling with a new public health crisis when pregnant women, primarily in the country's northeast but eventually in other regions of the country, began giving birth to babies suffering from microcephaly. Research determined that this and related illnesses, including cases of Guillain-Barré syndrome, were the result of infections with the Zika virus, caused by Aedes mosquitoes. While Zika appears native to parts of Africa, it had not previously struck in Brazil, though there had been outbreaks in the South Pacific, and one conjecture is that it might have arrived with a 2014 World Cup attendee. After initial government paralysis, Brazilian authorities have worked, in conjunction with officials and organizations across the globe, to address the mosquito threat, but a great deal remains unknown about the virus, which also appears to transmissible between humans through semen and bodily fluids, and which does not appear to result in birth defects in all pregnant women. Chaos at the upper reaches of Brazil's government, however, makes ongoing coordination of Zika prevention a challenge.

Lastly, the problem of endemic corruption among political, economic and social elites, which has plagued Brazil for centuries, finally sparked widespread public backlash after revelations about the Petrobrás scandal began to emerge two years. During Lula's consecutive terms, from 2002 to 2010, several high-level Workers' Party members were convicted of corruption, but Lula avoided indictment. Since taking office, Dilma has not been charged with corruption, but as Lula's Minister of Energy she led Petrobrás, the state-owned oil company at the center of a vast corruption scandal, from 2003 through 2010. The Petrobrás scandal, in a nutshell, involved construction companies creating cartels to offer inflated bids on Petrobrás contracts, with Petrobrás employees approving the bids, which then led the construction companies to pocket the difference. This surplus included kickbacks to the Petrobrás employees, and to government officials, some of whom helped to place pliable employees in the ranks of Petrobrás, creating a perfect corruption feedback loop. 

The scandal came to light when Brazil's federal police began an investigation in 2014, under chief prosecutor Sérgio Moro, called Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), initially investigating money laundering, until one of the chief suspects, Alberto Youssef, spilled the beans on how extensive the alleged scheme truly was. The subsequent scandal has stretched far beyond Brazil's borders, and may have involved the illegal transfer of more than $5.3 billion state funds. Over 90 people have been convicted, and many more are currently under investigation, including several dozen sitting lawmakers, as well as ex-president Lula himself. His personal charity allegedly pocketed $7.8 million in donations from construction company executives linked to Petrobrás, leading to a recent police raid and arrest at his home. Shortly thereafter, and before her ouster, he was abruptly appointed Dilma's chief of staff, temporarily shielding him from the law's arm. A wiretap of their conversation arranging for his post spurred considerable public anger.

Palácio do Planalto, the official work residence
of the Brazilian President, Brasília

It should astonish no one that this confluence of grave economic, social and political crises spurred public outrage, but nothing suggested that Dilma, who I should note again has not been accused of any direct personal criminality, would suffer impeachment. Continuing street protests, calls for her resignation, defection of coalition partners, and increased criticism from the opposition parties seemed the likely outcome, and with her popularity falling to a low of 9% and her base voters stating in opinion polls that they disliked her tenure, she might well have chosen to step down. Federal deputy Eduardo Cunha, however, took matters into his own hands, however, and launched impeachment proceedings based on Dilma's alleged role at Petrobrás during the corruption scandal, combining this charge with her acknowledged use of federal funds to cover the deficit, even though her predecessors had taken this very same budgeting step without penalty. Lacking enough allies in the lower house, Dilma suffered a massive defeat, with Deputies voting 367 to 137 to send impeachment proceedings to the Senate, one third of whose members are under investigation for an array of crimes, some quite serious and linked to Lava Jato; one of them is Brazil's disgraced, impeached former president Fernando Collor de Melo (of the right-wing Brazilian Labor Party). With its vote to initiate its official trial of Dilma, her post now goes to Michel Temer.

In noting all of this I want to underline that as we witnessed in the late 1990s, impeachment can occur on the flimsiest grounds even in the US, and that governmental stalemate can occur here as well, as Barack Obama's battles with the US Congress over the last six years in office have underlined. Yet Brazil's democratic system has greater instability baked into its DNA, because a broader array of parties can hold power by forming tenuous coalitions, much like a parliamentary system and unlike in the US, where two fairly stable parties jostle for power, but without the presence of a prime minister to marshal forces on the president's behalf (i.e. France) and without a parliamentary presidential system's ability (cf. France again) to dissolve a failing government. To a far greater extent than in the US, one major conglomerate, O Globo, controls most of the public media, giving the right-leaning company outsized influence, and the presence of state-owned companies like Petrobrás, which lack strong independent oversight, open up vast possibilities for financial pillage.

Supreme Federal Court of Brazil, Brasília

President Dilma Rousseff, Lula's hand-picked successor, was a trained economist and a survivor of Brazil's two decade-long military dictatorship, during which she suffered detention and torture. Though an anti-dictatorship activist in her youth, she has not been a lifetime politician or handler, and although she was able to continue Lula's coalition with the PMDB, she did not cultivate the kinds of necessary relationships, through gladhanding, favors and monetarily greasing the wheel, that might have retained PMDB support and forestalled her impeachment. In any case, by removing Dilma, Eduardo Cunha, Senate President Renan Calheiros, and former Vice President and now acting President Temer, all from Dilma's former coalition partner the center-right PMDB, have effectively canceled the outcome of the most recent Brazilian presidential election, i.e., the majority votes of 54 million Dilma supporters. Immediately before taking office Temer announced one of his first moves would be "pension reform," a neoliberal hobbyhorse and fixation of the global right, and since assuming office, he has appointed an all male, all self-identified white cabinet that includes figures linked to Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs, and begun pushing for right-wing goals like privatization of public assets, while also eliminating ministries through consolidation, and championing greater government austerity through a lower fiscal target and reduced public expenditures.

The response has been still more protests, with one particularly notable challenge to Temer's radical shift emerging from Brazil's artistic community in response to the elimination, through consolidation and merger, of the Ministry of Culture. As a result, Temer has announced that it will be restored. The growing sense within Brazil and across the globe that Dilma's impeachment was a coup gained strength after three sensation recent wiretaps were made public via the influential Folha de São Paulo newspaper. 

First, in April 2016, just before the lower house was set to vote on whether to refer impeachment proceedings to the Senate, a wiretap captured Temer discussing Dilma's impeachment as if it were already a fait accompli, and he was the new president. Wikileaks documents had previously shown him to be a US informant since 2006, particularly against former President Lula. Then, an even more explosive wiretap from May 23, 2016 captured Interim Planning Minister and Senator Romero Jucá (PMDB, from the distant Amazonian state of Roraima) conferring with ex-senator Sérgio Machado, also a former CEO of Petrobrás subsidiary Transpetro, about the former's talks with the Brazilian Supreme Court, which will be responsible for trying Dilma and which has launched investigations of many legislators, and with key figures in the Brazilian military, which ran the country from 1964 through 1984, to guarantee that Dilma would be removed from office. In addition, the tapped conversation appeared to suggest Jucá was working to quash the Supreme Court's investigations of legislators. O Globo, the main newspaper organ of the Globo conglomerate, editorialized against Jucá, leading him to resign from his cabinet post, though he still holds his Senate seat.

Today, yet another wiretap, released to the media, appears to show Senate president Renan Calheiros also telling Sérgio Machado that they needed to change the the laws dictating investigations into corruption, primarily the plea bargain rules, because a number of politicians were "afraid" of the ongoing corruption dragnet. As with Jucá, Calheiros also appears to have been in conversation with Brazil's Supreme Court about forcing Dilma from office. 

The least generous appraisal of these wiretaps would lead one to conclude that Dilma's impeachment is the result of a concerted effort not only to oust her in undemocratic fashion while ostensibly using constitutional tools, but also to shut down the metastasizing corruption investigations. In so doing, the center-right and centrist parties, which cannot win the presidency, would thwart the will of a majority of Brazil's voters, and maintain the elite networks of corruption--into which certain fortunate new political actors can enter--while imposing failed conservative and neoliberal policies that will only enrich the uppermost stratum of Brazilian society while once again impoverishing those at the middle and bottom.

By involving the Supreme Court, politicians like Jucá and Calheiros are tainting the investigation process and showing that there is no real separation of powers, and by bringing military officials into the discussion, they appear to be setting the stage for an even more horrifying eventuality, which is to say, the transition from what is essentially now a "soft coup" to a hard one, with the military in control. In any case, the goal appears to be less about rooting out corruption and more about returning unpopular elites to untrammeled power, including the power to rob the country blind, while reversing the economic and social gains of the Lula (and Dilma) years.

Among the impeachment leaders, Eduardo Cunha is now suspended from the House of Deputies for alleged intimidation and attempted obstruction of investigations of his receipt of bribes totaling $40 million, which he is said to have squirreled away in a Swiss bank account. Acting President Temer also faces potential impeachment proceedings because he approved the same sorts of budgetary sleights of hand as Dilma; he had already been ordered to pay a fine for campaign finance violations and barred from running for office for eight years, yet was allowed to assume the interim presidency just the same.  Also under investigation are Calheiros and Machado, as part of Lava Jato. Indeed, in Calheiros' case, there are other investigations still brewing; he had previously been  involved in a 2007 scandal in which he was investigated for having received funds from a lobbyist to pay for child support for a child from an extramarital affair. A secret Senate ethics panel vote decided not to impeach him on the charges, but he currently still faces three other charges related to the scandal nine years ago. 

With Dilma out, and Temer barred from running for office and potentially under impeachment, this would tip the presidency to Interim President of the Chamber of Deputies Waldir Maranhão (Progressive Party, from the northeastern state of Maranhão), who has said he will not assume the post, thus handing it to Calheiros, who is...under investigation. And on it would go. To call this situation a hot mess hardly does it justice. To say that it deeply harms Brazil's democratic present and future is an understatement. In fact some Brazilian politicians, among them federal deputy, evangelical Christian, and extreme racist and homophobe Jair Bolsonaro (Christian Social Party, from Rio de Janeiro), have praised Brazil's military dictatorship and expressed nostalgia for its return. Bolsonaro event went so far as to publicly praise the very general who had inflicted torture on Dilma during her prison detention! If not the military, then a rightist Trump-like candidate could step into the breach. Multiple scenarios bode ill for Brazil, the world's fifth largest economy, which nevertheless must get through the rapid conservative changes under Temer, the Olympics, and the impeachment trial before anything else.

Palácio da Alvorada, the official
resident of Brazil's President,
in Brasília

One other disturbing note: the current US ambassador (ambassadrix) to Brazil, Liliana Ayalde, was Ambassador to Paraguay in 2012 during the period when that country's parliament shockingly and abruptly impeached and ousted its leftist president, Fernando Lugo. His two-day removal from office placed his Vice President, from an opposing party, and a year later a subsequent general election presidential vote installed Horacio Cortes, a conservative multimillionaire businessman from the party that had governed Paraguay for 50 years before Lugo's election. A US cable allegedly discussed a desire by some opposition figures to remove Lugo from office via impeachment, and when he was drummed from office, the US issued a bland statement that gave tacit approval to the process and outcome. Ayalde's presence during both impeachments seems to underline which side the US, yet again and quite unfortunately, is on.

Haitians Heading to Brazil

Today's New York Times brought a bit of news I hadn't read anywhere before, which is that Haitians have begun to emigrate from their still post-earthquake ravaged nation to Brazil, which over the last decade, under center-left governments, has become an economic powerhouse. The self-described "Country of the Future" is now one of the countries of today, with 5.2% unemployment drawing not only educated professionals from Europe, Latin America and the United States, but laborers from across the developing world. 

According to Simon Romero's Times article, "Haitians Take Arduous Path to Brazil, and Jobs," around 4,000 Haitians arrived in Brazil since the 2010 earthquake, usually traveling via Ecuador, which has looser vias policies, and have thus arrived at border posts at the edge of Brazil's Amazonian states of Acre and Amazonas.  Romero states that some of the Haitians have been robbed during their journey to Brazil and the wait for legal entry to Brazil has placed some in conditions not unlike what they experienced at hom, but the immigrants are willing to take the risk because of the continuing dire conditions in Haiti, where rebuilding in the capital and other devastated regions has moved at a glacial pace, and because of the job opportunities at Brazil's hydroelectric plants and in its burgeoning industries. I would imagine that the new infrastructure for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics are also going to provide opportunities, though despite its economic advances, still has a large population of impoverished and barely working-class people, especially across its historically economically disadvantaged northeast.

From Douglas Engle's NY Times clip

Brazil has provided the new arrivals with vaccinations, clean water, and two meals a day at the border posts like Brasiléia, where they stay until granted humanitarian visas, but I imagine if the flow of Haitians and other potential immigrants increases, Brazil will begin to step up border security and patrols. The video clip by Romero and Douglas Engle that accompanies Romero's article says that the local reception of the Haitians has been fairly positive, though a Brazilian also notes local alarm at and some prejudice towards the large number of arrivals, because they're foreign, speak a different language and are "black," though he, like Romero, notes the Haitians have caused "no problems." Some Haitian immigrants have already settled in cities like Manaus, the largest city in the Amazon, and Porto Velho, while others are being courted by companies located in states such as Santa Catarina, in Brazil's rich southern region, and others, like one polyglot cited by Romero, hope to settle in São Paulo, the center for Brazilian industry.

From Douglas Engle's NY Times clip

Jay Forte writes in the Rio Times that Brazil's government has issued new limited work visas for the Haitians, on humanitarian grounds, thus allowing the immigrants work in Brazil instead of remaining stranded at the country's northwestern ports of entry. The immigrants will receive a Cédula de Identidade do Estrangeiro (CIE), or Foreign Identity Card.  Brazil has already spent about 1 billion reais, or about $US 557 million on relief and reconstruction since the Haitian earthquake occurred on January 12, 2011.  The visas will be granted through the Haitian embassy in Port-au-Prince, and allow up to 1,200 Haitians to enter per year. Once they have their status legalized, Haitians will be able to bring immediate family members such as spouses or partners, parents, and children under the age of 24.  According to Forte, in 2009 former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva signed a law granting amnesty to all foreign nationals living without documentation in Brazil, with the possibility of residency status in two years; among the largest groups of undocumented residents in Brazil are, in descending order, nationals from China, Peru, Bolivia, and Korea.

From Douglas Engle's NY Times clip

The Haitian immigrants Haitians are choosing Brazil, as both Romero and Forte note, at the very moment that Brazil is withdrawing the last of its peacekeeping forces, initially sent after the coup, allegedly orchestrated by the United States and France, that ousted democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. Brazil's forces, which anchored the United Nations Stabilization Mission In Haiti (UNSTAMIH), had number as many as 2,200, the largest of any of the countries contributing military personnel, but with the expiration of the UN mandate, extended to October 2011, Brazil's and the other countries' forces were set to leave. I am curious to see how Brazil responds to the Haitian immigrants over the longer term, and whether the new government of Dilma Rousseff, a member of the Worker's Party and ideologically to the left of former president Lula, will continue to show the same openness to immigrants, especially if the economy loses its punch or if the volume of those seeking jobs dramatically increases. I also wonder whether the United States, long the primary destination, alongside Haiti's neighbor the Dominican Republic, of Haitian immigrants, will lose its appeal to Brazil over the long haul. The ties between the US and Haiti date back to the American Revolution, but since the Haitian Revolution, the US has repeatedly and often disastrously meddled in Haiti's internal and external affairs.

Quote: Wilson Harris

"The flute sings of an ancient riverbead one hundred fathoms deep, far below the Potaro River that runs to the Waterfall. Two rivers then. The visible Potaro runs to the Waterfall. The invisible stream of the river of the dead runs far below, far under our knees. The flute tells of the passage of the drowned river of the dead and the river of the living are one quantum stream possessed of four bnks. We shall see!

"So deep, so far below, is the river of the dead that the sound of its stream may never be heard or visualized except when we clothe ourselves with the mask, with the ears of the dancer in the hill. Then the murmur of the buried stream comes up to us as if its source lies in the stars and it may only be heard when we are abnormally attentive to the mystery of creation and the voice of the flute within the lips of three drowned children.

"Listen to the voice of the flute. It sings and tells its tale in the English language yet solid (however whispering) music gives the Word that echoes in one's frame as one kneels uncanny twists, uncanny spirals, that relate to ancestral tongues, Macusi, Carib, Arawak, Wapishana pre-Columbian tongues that have been eclipsed.

"From such eclipse emerges the rich spoil and upheaval of the Word, upheaval into banks of the river of space. As though the flute is a paradox, it arrives at the solidity of music by processes of excavation within a living languag.

"Once cannot tame the voices of the flute, voices of such uncanny lightness yet miracle of being that they are able to tilt the two rivers, the visible and the invisible rivers, into diagrammatic discourse; and in so doing to create the four banks of the river of space into a ladder upon which the curved music of the flute ascends. Those banks are dislodged upwards into rungs in the ladder and into stepping stones into original space.

"The titled banks convert of the river of space into a sieve that spills its contents. That sieve is the antiphon of the Waterfal, it constitutes a discourse between the rocks in the Waterfall and the clouds in the sky. The spilt water evaporates into cloud, evaporates into the promise of new rain, into cloud-kinship to latencies of precipitation in and of the Waterfall through rock. And the voice of the spiralling flute mirrors within solid music the ascension of the spirits of the living and the dead through rock and cloud into space."

Copyright © from Wilson Harris, The Four Banks of the River of Space, London: Faber and Faber, 1990, pp. 43-45. All rights reserved.

Miami Herald on Afro-Latinos + More

The blog is rapidly approaching 100,000 page views. The first 50 or so page views resulted mostly from my posting, checking and revising my posts, but StatCounter confirms that visitors are now dropping in from across the US, as well as Europe, the Caribbean, South America, Australia and New Zealand, and less frequently, Asia and Africa. The top five source countries so far today are the US, the UK, Norway, France, and the Netherlands. To all who're visiting and reading, thanks!

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Yesterday I posted about Afro-Brazilians speaking out about the persistence of racism in their country. The article turns out to be one of the ones Anthony's Monaga Blog pointed to last Thursday, when he highlighted a current Miami Herald series, "A Rising Voice: Afro-Latin Americans," which focuses on the largest populace of African descent in our hemisphere. As of today, the Herald has posted three reports, focusing on Blacks living on the north coast of Nicaragua, the ever fraught question of race in the Dominican Republic (above, at right, Capellan Domínquez, center, and Anthony Rosario, right, join others as they warm up for Carnival in February in the Cristo Rey area of Santo Domingo, Candace Barbot/Miami Herald), and Afro-Brazilians' attempts at redress for the racism there. I've read all three articles, and while the latter two cover familiar ground, but are definitely worth exploring.

The article on the Dominican Republic in particular caught my eye; it contains a quote by Purdue professor Dawn Stinchcomb about her negative personal experiences in the DR, and it immediately reminded me of this article by Kinii Ibura Salaam, which I initially saw on the DR1 message boards and which Anthony resent. Thinking about Stinchcomb's and Salaam's comments, I considered once again how different my experiences in DR were to theirs, and how different my travels in France were compared to what a close Black female friend of mine and her Latina girlfriend at the time encountered. They caught hell. It made me consider once again power dynamics vary depending upon differing factors like gender, race and national background, but also how differently Black people writing about travel experiences treat issues of racism and sexism, which Stinchcomb alludes to, Salaam details, and the article on the DR circles around.

Anthony also highlights the website of Ruth Ocumarez (who, in the photo he posted, strongly favors Gabrielle Union), the first woman of predominantly African ancestry to win the Miss Dominican Republic title. I've previously posted my impressions after a previous the DR, including issues of race and ethnicity. (Short version: popular notions and performances of race and heritage differ from the official version, and are considerably more complex than what I'd previously read and seen.) Reading Anthony's note on Ocumarez made me think of that previous entry, as well as about how every Sunday when I'm back in New Jersey, C and I try not to miss one of my favorite TV shows, Santo Domingo Invita, which each week features tours of the high-end Dominican coastal resorts (think Casa de Campo, Punta Cana, Puerto Plata, etc.), interviews with noteworthy Dominicans and Dominican-Americans, highlights of a given region (recently they've visited La Romana, San Cristobál, Samaná, and San José de Ocoa, all of which, as evident from the show, have significant African-influenced cultural traditions), and a live Dominican musical group. The local highlight segments often offer a gentle counternarrative to the "official" version of Dominican history and culture, sometimes even directly spelling out directly the African historical trajectory in each region. In addition, the musical groups range from standard merengueros to people performing reggaetón and hiphop, much like what you see when you go to DR and turn on the TV.

Just the other day, Reggie H. recently sent a link to an informative website on Afro-Mexicans, a number of whom are now living in the US. I'd been very curious to learn the whereabouts of Afro-Mexicans in the US, especially since they were, according the 2000 US Census, the second-largest group, and several people, including NCCU professor Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Herbert Rogers, and Reggie himself have answered my questions. Among other gerat sites, they pointed me to the following series, in the Winston-Salem Journal, "Mexican Ways, African Roots." (The photo at right shows Shatia Melton and Gerardo Cisneros-Cortes, both in kindergarten at Kimberly Park Elementary, as they wait their turn to perform in the school's multicultural festival, Journal Photo by Ted Richardson.) The page includes photos of the Afro-Mexican community in North Carolina and Mexico, as well as a link to scholar Bobby Vaughan's Afro-Mexican page, which I've written about before.

Reggie had previously sent the History of Mexican-Black Solidarity link, which details a long history of cross-cultural connections that have for the most part been consigned, at least in the popular discourse, to oblivion.

On my bookshelf (or rather, in the boxes I shipped back from Chicago) right now are several books on race, ethnicity and contemporary societies in the Black Diaspora, with strong foci on Latin America, so as I make my way through them, I'll try post some thoughts.

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Can someone clarify what Edward Rothstein is muddling on about in this New York Times Connections piece on Richard Rorty and Claude Lévi-Strauss? I mean, I thought I'd grasped it, but then I realized that I hadn't. Clarification, please?

(Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler has a similar take, but expands the discussion to the general disconnect between some of the most illuminating scholarship and theorizing taking place in academe, and the generally dismal, often anti-intellectual public discourse. I know, from my readings of Richard Hofstadter, that this is much of the non-changing same, but I do think it's important to ask the question periodically. The return of open mockery of Al Gore for being a smarty-pants among the mainstream press corps is part of this enduring trend.

I also want to note that Mark Twain pretty much captured the general tenor of the extreme anti-intellectual style in Huck Finn's redneck father's incoherent rant against the "guvment," the courts, the intellect and the life of the mind, education, the middle class, and free Black people. Sadly enough, his mentality is that of the people running the country right now.)

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A final note: as of today, I'm one year older. To quote my mother, "I can't believe time has gone by so quickly." That's about right: I'm convinced that after 30, the years continuously accelerate. Happy Birthday also to fellow Geminis Shari and Jim F. (and Kim, whom I haven't seen in years), and to everyone born in June (someone else I know's birthday is right around the corner...).