Challenges to Democracy in Brazil, the Northeast and Paraíba: The Country Back to the Future - 07/01/22
Global conditions have once again brought to the fore the issue of defending democracy as a condition for the emancipation, development, security, and prosperity of peoples around the world. The prolonged crisis of post-Cold War hegemony has escalated tensions, particularly through the emergence and expansion of extreme right-wing currents. Recent advances achieved through multilateralism, the innovative and emancipatory force of progressive social movements, environmental agendas in defense of sustainability, life and the planet all face innumerable setbacks.
In Latin America, defined by a history of dispossession and resilience against colonial and imperial powers, while systematically devastated by political coups and economic submission, crises mount and are made worse by the perverse effects of hybrid warfare. At the same time, however, progressive resistance endures even amid the instability created by exhausted liberal democracies.
The impact of regressive forces on social disputes follows an old and seemingly renewed pattern of interventions on the continent: external planning and financing for an internal conspiracy, destabilization, and institutional disruption. Recent events have more or less followed this pattern, for example, in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Argentina, Colombia, countries still marked by tense uncertainties and threats of democratic ruptures.
Due to its geopolitical relevance and, in particular, the leading role the country achieved under progressive governments between 2003 and 2016, Brazil is not only key to understanding the factors, interests, and forces at play in Latin America’s current struggles, but also for the knowledge and appreciation of innovative experiences in public policies, democratic governance, social empowerment, and emancipation.
From an influential nation in the global order to an international pariah, Brazil has been suffering the disastrous effects of the parliamentary-legal-media-business coup that, in 2016, deposed the country’s first female president, creating the conditions for the rise of far-right forces.
Between 2003 and 2016, by any standard, Brazilians experienced the longest continuous period of social and economic prosperity in their young republic. It was also the first moment in its history in which the alternation of power broke the vicious circle dominated by similar fractions of the elites and saw a genuine representative of the popular classes ascend to power. Among other notable advances, the new strategic agenda favored and promoted developmental leaps in the peripheral regions of the country, with profound impacts on social and political conditions and local culture, hitherto dominated by ultra-conservative oligarchies descended from the country’s patrimonial colonization.
It was in this new democratic environment that the Northeast Region of Brazil experienced what economist and intellectual Celso Furtado called “the intense dream of development.” With 18.3% of the territory and 27.2% of the Brazilian population, the Northeast is the third largest and second most inhabited region in the country. Social advances achieved there were numerous and formidable. For example, the number of people from the Northeast who lived in poverty in the region fell from 21.4 million to 9.6 million. More than 35 million people benefited from the “Bolsa Família” income transfer program. Infant mortality and illiteracy dropped drastically, and there was a sharp increase in the number of university students (from 413,709 in 2000 to 1,434,825 in 2012), a leap that made the region with the second highest number of college students (20% of the total), just behind the Southeast.
Of the nine states that make up the northeast region, Paraíba gained importance and strategic value in the context of the period’s social transformations, both for the forcefulness and depth of the ruptures with the dominance of the oligarchic paradigms and for the successes obtained during eight consecutive years (2011 to 2018) of a popular, democratically-elected and reelected administration. New forms of governance based on structuring public policies and on local empowerment and social control of governance produced unprecedented results, ranging, for example, from a 40% reduction in the illiteracy rate to the definitive solution of the state's centuries-old water crisis.
Just as the persecutory instruments of the 2016 coup have wreaked havoc at the national level, Paraíba has also been suffering the effects of legal and administrative procedures used maliciously by public agents against political leaders whose policies and conduct challenged the hegemony of ultraconservative forces and sectors. The folly of the parliamentary-business-legal-media coup of 2016, through the perverse instruments of “hybrid warfare” and “lawfare,” not only shifted Brazil away from a progressive and democratic state, but it also imposed with interventionist brutality a regressive agenda on all levels: institutional, economic, political, ideological, cultural, and civilizational.
The systematic discrediting of progressive and democratic institutions, agendas, and leaders through conspiracies, clandestine actions at the shadowy margins of structures and social life constitutes, once again, the instrument of interventionism in the service of decadent exclusionary interests. However, it is unquestionable that democracy is a sine qua non condition for equitable progress and peaceful, sovereign, and sustainable social harmony.
Ricardo Vieira Coutinho
Governor of the State of Paraíba (PB), for two consecutive terms, between 2011 and 2018.
Mayor of João Pessoa, (state capital), for two consecutive terms, from 2005 to 2010.
Contact: ricovc@terra.com.br
Amanda Rodrigues
Post Graduate in Management, Finance, Auditing and Controlling. Former Secretary of Finance of the State of Paraíba (2016 to 2019). Contact: amandaraujo1984@gmail.com
Joao Eduardo Fonseca
Master in Brazilian Education. Contact: jenf2011@gmail.com
