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 The present battle for power and positions stems
from the fragmented nature of Brazil's political system,
where parties devoid of ideology proliferate, no clear majority
is won at the polls, and party loyalty is about
as easy to find as the extinct Dodo bird.
By Brazzil Magazine
First there were the caras-pintadas (painted faces), those students who in 1992
painted their faces, often in the yellow-green national flag colors, to protest against
corruption in the government of then President Fernando Collor de Mello. Nine years later
their heirs are more irreverent and more risqué: they are the bundas-peladas
(naked butts) who have gone to the streets in Brazil to demand morality from politicians.
To convey their messages they are lowering their pants and mooning government and its
mistakes.
First were the men in Brasília, who on May 23 let their pants down. In the federal
capital, the bundas-peladas directed their derrieres to the National Congress
building while congressmen were voting to open a process to expel from the senate Antônio
Carlos Magalhães, the once all powerful chief from Bahia state, and José Roberto Arruda.
Both ended up resigning before the process could move ahead.
The next day, Carla Santos, 21, the president of Ubes (União Brasileira de
Estudantes—Brazilian Union of Students) went a step further: she left all her clothes
on the lawn facing the Congress and, naked, entered a moat built around the congress with
the purpose to avoid that demonstrations got too close to the building. She sang the
national anthem, shouted slogans against the President, and ran on the lawn. Over Carla's
naked body, there were short protest messages like CPI (Parliamentary Committee Enquiry)
and Out FHC, which is an abbreviation for Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Bottomless, she
semicovered her breasts with a Ubes's flag. Her exposition lasted close to 30 minutes.
Carla has become an overnight celebrity after her naked act. She was having a hard time
to accommodate all the requests for interviews and had to deny several times that she had
received and accepted an invitation to pose in the nude for Brazilian Playboy. Born
in Rio Grande do Sul, the student leader is a member of the PC do B (Communist Party of
Brazil). It's been a year and a half now that she interrupted her last year of high school
to dedicate herself exclusively to the activities of her party and of the students union
she presides.
Santos explained her disrobing later: "The body is also a form of
expression. Aren't women taking their clothes off for other things? Why not be naked for
the country?" She also guaranteed that she had her family's backing for the bawdy
protest: "My parents approved of my attitude. They certainly would feel sad if I got
naked to pose for a male magazine, but for a good cause, the fight for the country,
there's no problem."
"The idea is to look for something irreverent, be it taking off the clothes or
lighting up candles," says Juremar de Oliveira, director of the Ubes. "What we
want is to show our indignation caused by a situation of incertitude facing young
people." For Oliveira, Carla's protest was the right thing to do: "It was an
irreverent act that called attention to our criticism."
Street protests have been frequent in Brazil those days. There's no lack of causes.
High-school and college students have been staging marches to demonstrate against the
International Monetary Fund intrusion in Brazil, against corruption in government and
private sectors, against President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and more recently against
the threat of widespread electrical blackouts in the country. To call attention to their
gripe everything is game: to carry effigies of the object of their protest, light candles,
dress as clowns, bare it all.
In Salvador, state of Bahia, the protesters had to face a violent police who didn't
spare bombs and other kinds of intimidation to disperse the students. In other places,
however, like Rio, São Paulo and Brasília, the police had a more subdued participation.
They didn't react even when students provoked them in Brasília throwing water in their
direction. The taking-your-clothes off stint isn't getting too many converts, however. In
a protest in São Paulo students limited to light up 2,000 candles at Praça da Sé, in
the heart of the capital. No one showed his or her privates there.
Culture
Take Me to the Book Fair
It was on an upbeat mood that Cariocas (Rio residents) staged from 17 to 27 of
May its 10th Bienal Internacional do Livro (International Biennial of Books).
After the 1999 downturn when the book industry sold 30 percent less than the previous
year, people are starting to go back to bookstores. According to the Câmara Brasileira do
Livro (Brazilian Chamber of Books) 2000 was a much better year with an increase of 12
percent in the number of books published and of 15 percent in the amount of books sold in
Brazil. This meant a revenue growth of 13 percent for Brazilian book publishers.
The Rio Bienal was never so big. There were 808 exhibitors (compare this to the 454
from the 1999 edition), 1200 new books were released and 120 authors got in contact with
their public. During the 11 days the exposition lasted there were 560,000 visitors, 70% of
each bought at least a book. The event has become the biggest book fair, losing even to
São Paulo, which also has its own book biennial. The São Paulo event put on last year
had 800 exhibitors. The book fair came a long way. The first Rio Bienal happened in 1983.
The event held at the Copacabana Palace Hotel had 86 exhibitors.
In order to draw public and make the event the cultural event par excellence of the
season, the Bienal organizers prepared a full calendar of seminars, conferences, and
guaranteed the presence of 13 foreign writers and 107 national authors, among them some of
the best-known Brazilian writers, including Lygia Fagundes Telles, Carlos Heitor Cony,
Nélida Piñon, Zélia Gattai, Ziraldo, Celso Furtado, Luis Fernando Verissimo, Luiz
Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Patrícia Melo, Tony Bellotto, Antonio Torres, Ana Miranda, Milton
Hatoum, Moacyr Scliar, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, José Roberto Torero, Marina Colasanti,
Sérgio SantAnna, Eric Nepomuceno and poet Ferreira Gullar.
Despite the improvement in book sales, reading in Brazil continues to be an activity
reserved to a very narrow minority. The country has a 13 percent illiteracy rate among
those who are 15 or older and from those who can read only 7 percent have the habit of
reading. The high cost of books in Brazil is blamed in part for this situation. Publishers
are accused of gouging the public, but they respond that they cannot sell cheaper before
they are able to get larger printings.
While France and the US, for example, sell in average 10 books a year per capita, a
Brazilian buys a mere 1.9 book a year. If we exclude the didactical works, this number
falls to 0.9. There are only 2000 bookstores for a population of 168 million people, which
means one bookstore for every 84,000 inhabitants. In the United States there are
approximately 20,000 bookstores.
French historian Roger Chartier, an expert in the history of reading and book, who with
Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán was the best-known foreign star at the Book
Biennial, wasn't impressed with what he saw. "The multiplication of titles," he
declared, "it's not necessarily an indication of publishing health. All over the
world—and I don't believe Brazil is an exception—there's been a reduction of
purchase of books by readers. Not a reduction in the number of books sold, but in the
percentage of copies bought by a reader. Publishers have responded by multiplying titles
so that they can draw readers for some theme or author, this way compensating the losses
due to the fall of copies sold by title."
Politics
Goodbye to Mean Tony
Once the most powerful man in the country, Antonio Carlos Magalhães
steps down amid one of Brazil's most outrageous recent political scandals.
Ernest Barteldes
Brazil has finally gotten rid of one of the most powerful and corrupt men in the
country's recent history. After another political scandal threatened to destroy his
political career, Bahia state senator Antônio Carlos Magalhães agreed to step down and
renounce to his term before a Congressional probe kicked him out—a move that would
bar his political rights up to 2009.
It all started when an investigative report by Isto É magazine discovered that
Antônio Carlos—dubbed "Mean Tony" by his fellow Baianos—had
hacked onto the Senate's computers, and had gained access to confidential information
about the congressmen who booted another senator last year—in this case Luis
Estêvão, who was caught amidst a huge money laundering scheme that drained millions of
dollars in the state of São Paulo.
According to the Brazilian press, Mean Tony had gotten access to the computer files
that recorded who voted for or against Estêvão's booting, and used the voters' list to
blackmail other colleagues into his own political interests. After all, no representative
would like the public to know that he or she voted against voters' wishes—to have a
crook like Estevão out of Congress inside a prison cell—and Tony knew that.
The scandal broke out last February when Brazilian Isto É magazine
(http://www.terra.com.br/istoe) released a series of investigative reports on the ways of
the former President of Congress. The report led to a Congressional investigation, and
finally the truth started to come out.
Last April 19th, former Prodasen (the data processing service for Brazil's senate)
director Regina Célia Peres Borges deposed to the House Committee for Parliamentary
Ethics and finally admitted that she was sought after by former government leader, senator
José Roberto Arruda(who also resigned his term ), who demanded her—using then
Congress President Antônio Carlos Magalhães's name—to hack into the Senate's
electronic voting panel. She also declared that she sent senator Arruda a list with the
names of the voters and their votes on the Estevão affair , and that Mean Tony had phoned
her later to thank for her services.
The loud-mouthed senator, of course, denied everything, but did acknowledge the
existence of a list that he "promptly destroyed". The national outrage was very
vocal, and the public demanded Mean Tony either to leave Congress or to be voted out of
the House. That, of course, was no simple task. After all, they were talking about a man
who, with his ways, intimidated even Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and
that had always been a key figure in the country's politics for as long as anyone could
remember.
Although many thought the President would interfere, he didn't—after all, he
didn't want his already bad image to get worse than it already was. However, everyone knew
that Cardoso owed a lot to Tony, including the constitutional amendment that made his 1998
reelection possible.
At the end, both Magalhães and Arruda resigned, and avoided a trial that would not
only throw them out of Congress through the back door, but would also erase them from the
nation's politics for a long time. Mean Tony's resignation might not mean the end. With
his resignation, his political rights are intact, and that means that he just might
swiftly return during the upcoming 2002 Congressional elections.
Just a final note: I cooked up the term "Mean Tony" for my first column for
the Greenwich Village Gazette almost two years ago, as a free translation for the
Portuguese language "Toninho Malvadeza." I went on using the term, and months
later I spotted it in the Washington Post. More recently, this alias was again used
in an article published by The Week, which is evidence of this column's steady
readership.
Ernest Barteldes is an ESL, GED and Portuguese teacher. In addition to that, he
is a freelance writer who has been contributing to Brazzil since December 2000. His
work has also been published by The Greenwich Village Gazette, The Staten Island
Advance, The Staten Island Register, The SI Muse, The Villager, GLSSite
and other publications. He lives on Staten Island, NY. He can be reached at ebarteldes@nycny.net
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