Brazilian Legacies

Robert M. Levine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315503837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on Brazil, this text covers issues such as: the legacy of colour; social realities; and diversions and assertive behaviour.

Brazilian cities with a population of more than 1 million, 1997

BRAZILIAN
LEGACIES

4

The Brazilian Way

During most of the twentieth century, Brazil’s political culture diminished the status of citizens. Part of the problem stemmed from the swollen bureaucracy at all levels of government. Everyday life in Brazil necessitated constant interaction with bureaucratic regulations, government officials, public agencies, and other representatives of authority. The system treated individuals differently according to who they were. The poorest Brazilians often were excluded entirely from the system and the social benefits it provided because, as marginals living below the thin safety net provided for salaried workers, they lacked proper papers. This problem was severest during the military dictatorship, when police frequently stopped people randomly and arrested them or beat them if they were found to be without papers. “Without identity documents,” a large billboard in downtown Rio near the bus station proclaimed in 1969, “you do not exist.” In the interior of the country, patronage politics maintained almost complete control of social and economic exchange.¹

Ordinary Brazilians living documented lives spent untold time entangled in the bureaucratic labyrinth. Some cases of hopeless dealings stretched out for years. For those who could afford it or who possessed political influence, however, an antidote soon emerged in the person of the despachante, a professional facilitator able to cut through red tape. Sometimes bribery was involved, or small favors, but usually despachantes simply got things done (for a fee) faster and without hassle because they knew the right people on the inside. Some veteran despachantes seemed to have magical powers. Passports for which mere mortals had to wait on line for hours, then return to wait a second, third, or fourth time at the Federal Police headquarters, were issued in minutes. Documents not available at all by legal means materialized the same way.

Most people had no access to these agile geniuses, but they used other devices to beat the system. M., a maid working in an affluent condominium complex in São Paulo, at age twenty-four married a seventeen-year-old young man and had a child. When her mother-in-law told her that she couldn’t care for the baby all the time, M. sent for an eleven-year-old girl from the interior, telling people that she was “adopting” her. The girl, who presumably attended school a few hours each day, otherwise worked without papers (or wages) for M. as her servant.

What M. did is as much a part of the informal economy as a legal ruse since she did not have to obtain permission from any civil authorities to bring the girl to her home. In cases where regulations have to be confronted, Brazilians pride themselves on being especially creative in their array and variety of gambits suitable for bending rules. Most of these ploys work best, of course, for those with connections, even as low-level as a friend of a relative who works in a certain office or department. The system also bends for those who can throw their weight around. Thus, facing down a policeman trying to write a ticket on an illegally parked car is easy for someone who is wearing a Rolex and has been educated in an elite private school, because the weaker party to the action knows full well that society expects him to back away.

One element in the political culture that is available to almost everyone possessing a modicum of poise and self-respect is the jeito. The jeito (diminutive jeitinho), is the “way” to grease the wheels of government or the bureaucracy, so as to obtain a favor or to bypass rules or regulations. Jeitos fall halfway between legitimate favors and out-and-out corruption, but at least in popular understanding they lean in the direction of the extralegal. Favors, in addition, imply a measure of reciprocity, a courtesy to be returned. One never pays for a favor, however; but a jeito, which is often granted by someone who is not a personal acquaintance, must be accompanied by a tip or even a larger payoff.

Peter Kellemen’s 1963 tongue-in-cheek Brazil for Beginners offers an example of how the system worked even within the bureaucracy. A recent graduate of a European medical school was applying at the Brazilian Consulate in Paris for a visa to emigrate to Brazil. When he appeared, the Brazilian consul changed the applicant’s profession from physician to agronomist. When the candidate protested, saying that he did not want to sign a false statement, the consul told him: “In that way I can issue you a visa immediately. You know how these things are? Professional quotas, confidential instructions from the department of immigration. Utter non sense! … In any event, this way will make it perfectly legal.”² The consul explained that he was helping the applicant by employing the jeito. After the physician took up residence in Brazil, he understood: he had immigrated to a country, law professor Keith S. Rosenn notes, “where laws and regulations are enacted upon the assumption that a substantial percentage will be disobeyed,” and where, quoting Kelleman, “civil servants, be they small or powerful, create their own law. Although this law does not happen to correspond with the original law, it meets with general approbation, provided that it is dictated by common sense.”³

Several kinds of behavior are associated with the jeito. Officials fail to perform a legal duty (e.g., they issue contracts to the highest briber); persons employ subterfuges to circumvent a legal obligation that is proper (they may underinvoice import shipments, or receive part of a purchase price abroad in foreign currency to evade currency control and taxes on part of their profits); speedy completion of paperwork is available only in exchange for a bribe or because the official knows the applicant; officials skirt an unreasonable or economically prejudicial legal obligation (for example, laws requiring compensating bank balances or deposits at low interest); they fail to enforce rules or laws because they think the law is unjust or unrealistic (as in the above example of the visa applicant). The first three cases are corrupt, but the last two fall into a gray area where public purposes are arguably served by evading legal obligations.⁴ Some applications of the jeito, of course, involve mixed kinds of motives, combining payoffs or favoritism with a sense that the outcome will be reasonable and even legitimate.

Jeitos affect everyone. Once I was traveling to the interior of Rio Grande do Norte, a desolate backlands region with few signs of life. The van in which I was riding broke down outside a tiny, dusty town. The passengers and driver walked to the town to attempt to find parts to fix the motor; while we were sitting in a café, waiting, a man came in and identified himself as the police chief. He wore no uniform and showed no badge, but everyone in the café showed him deference and we assumed that he was some kind of official. He then asked to see our documents. The Brazilians had their federal identity cards; I had my passport. The official demanded that each of the Brazilians pay the equivalent of $6 for being given “refuge” in his town, and he “fined” the driver of the van a slightly lower amount for having obstructed the roadway. Then he turned to me. He asked me what a foreigner was doing in his town. I told him. He then asked to see my passport, taking it and thumbing through the papers one by one. “Why had I gone to Mexico?” he asked me, seeing a visa stamp issued in Mérida. “Venezuela?” “France?” Was I working for the “U.S. Intelligence Service”? I assured him that I was carrying out historical research. “Why are you carrying equipment?” he asked. I showed him my camera and lenses, and my notebook. He then grabbed my camera bag and my passport and stalked out the door.

More than two hours later, well after midnight, he returned. The van had been fixed and was sitting with its motor running because the driver was impatient to leave. By then I had visions of being stuck in this town or even being put in jail. Then the man returned. With a broad grin, he handed me my camera case and my passport. On one of the blank visa pages, he had painstakingly entered a “visa” for me to enter his town. It was handwritten, with various misspellings, and it had a cut-out printed paragraph from what probably was the state Diário Oficial pasted in—a regulation covering one rule or another that did not seem even closely pertinent to this case. He then demanded $140 for the “processing fee.” At this point, my Brazilian host interceded, pulling him aside in conversation. He then hustled me and the others out to the van, and we drove off. He told me later that he had given the man about $2 and told him that he “should be honored to have a university professor passing through his jurisdiction.”

Livia Barbosa, a Brazilian social anthropologist, has argued that obtaining jeitos does not depend, at least directly, on elements that make up a person’s social identity, such as wealth, status, family name, religion, and color. Someone who does not hold a privileged position in society is as capable of obtaining a jeito as someone who does, as long as he/she knows how to ask, is a good talker, and is pleasant and charming.⁵ This is so only to a certain extent. Such an assertion ignores the realities of Brazilian life and insults the poor, unless what is meant as a jeito in the case of a poor person is something as meaningless as a free cafezinho. Even if it is true that hapless peoples can benefit from jeitos, there must be an enormous difference in scale in comparison to the kind of arrangement or special favor a poised, educated, well-connected member of the affluent classes can manage.

Senator Roberto de Oliveira Campos, an economist, ambassador, and politician who seems to have obtained more than his share of jeitos during his public career, defined the jeito as a “paralegal” action, neither legal nor illegal, and understandable in the light of Brazil’s historical (Latin, not Anglo-Saxon) and religious history (in Roman Catholic countries, he writes, dogma is rigid and intolerant, so ways have to be found around things). By granting the jeito legally neutral status, of course, Campos seems to be justifying it as a forgivable transgression. Without it, he suggests, Brazilian society would find itself either paralyzed by compliance or exploded over incompatibilities among laws, customs, and facts of life.⁶ For João Camilo de Oliveira Tôrres, another old-school critic, jeitos are a way of being “particularly Brazilian.”⁷ Clóvis de Abreu, examining the results of an interview survey of twenty people at various bureaucratic levels carried out by a group of researchers in Rio de Janeiro during the early 1980s, came to some very specific conclusions about the jeito, calling it, in the end, a “recourse to power.” Some of that study’s conclusions included the following points: that the jeito system arises as a response to unbending bureaucracies; that jeitinhos occur anywhere people have to deal with hierarchies; that jeitinhos confirm the duality of a system that distinguishes between haves and have-nots.

Jeitos, in the end, say more about the system that rationalizes their value than about the theories spun about them. How far does the system stretch to accommodate sweet talkers, people who need personal favors or exceptions or exemptions? Anthropologist Barbosa asserts that according to Brazilian popular wisdom, women are more effective in obtaining jeitos because their personalities make them better able to twirl people around their fingers. They know how to charm. They are spontaneous. The need for jeitos, after all, arises unexpectedly; one cannot plan for them.⁸

Rationalizing the jeito as a flexible tool to expedite action from an obdurate system implies acceptance of the unfair advantages given to those who know how to bypass the system or to gain speedy treatment, especially when payoffs are involved. Jeitos that facilitate the evasion of taxes or regulations drive up prices (since the price of corruption is passed on to the consumer), and hurt workers for whose benefit the bypassed regulations have been enacted. The economist Gunnar Myrdal adds: “Corruption introduces an element of irrationality in plan fulfillment by influencing the actual course of development in a way that is contrary to the plan or, if such influence is foreseen, by limiting the horizon of the plan.”⁹

Rewards of Incumbency

In Brazil, an underlying thread running from colony to republic in various guises has been the historical aversion to developing autonomous political participation. Political decisions have always been made by the elite stratum of professional government administrators drawn from the classe conservadora—the “conservative class.” As early as 1885, the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco complained that complacency had preserved a rotten system by which the state “sucked up all resources and redistributed them to its clients.”¹⁰ For generations, politicians regardless of ideology saw themselves as members of a “political class,” entitled to obtain patronage and resources for themselves, their families, and their clients. It was never important whether individual members considered themselves “liberal” or “conservative.” Such distinctions in Latin America usually referred to views on religion, or on federalism versus centralism; but on most matters, opposing political views simply represented squabbling within the same family.

Members of this class were traditionally referred to as the gente decente, “the decent people.” They offered little sympathy for the principle of citizens’ rights because their privilege shielded them. The system presupposed the wisdom of hierarchy and rationalized its power as a paternalistic duty. Top-level administrators and civil servants rewarded supporters by bestowing favors—special investment incentives for a group of industrialists, for example, or the construction of a road or water storage facility for an important landowner. Business groups received exemptions from import duties. To the growing urban middle class and to the controlled labor unions, the system gave patronage benefits in exchange for acquiescence.

The political elite diversified after 1930, extending membership to industrialists, businessmen, and technocrats as well as large agrobusiness interests. It expanded again still later to take in representatives of multinational firms, retired career military officers...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Map: Brazilian cities with a population of more than 1 million
• Brazilian Legacies
• Introduction
• 1 The Legacy of Color
• 2 Social Realities
• 3 Outsiders
• 4 The Brazilian Way
• 5 Tools for Survival
• 6 Diversions and Assertive Behavior
• 7 Beyond Coping
• 8 Toward a New Civil Society
• Index