This G20 ministerial meeting, held in Rio de Janeiro on February 28 this year, discussed the global energy transition, with biofuels as a central issue. Credit: Paulo Pinto / Agência Brasil

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Nov 5 2024 (IPS)

Holding this year’s presidency of the Group of 20 (G20) large industrial and emerging economies is allowing Brazil to push forward the dream of creating a global biofuels market without the current trade barriers.

Brazil is trying, at least since the beginning of this century, to free up global trade in ethanol, but so far without success. The scenario is more favourable now, with the worsening of the climate crisis and other countries joining the production and consumption of bioenergy.

Presiding the G20 this year, Brazil is in charge of the issues and projects to be discussed, creating working groups and promoting agreements, which will crystallise at the group’s annual summit to be held on 18-19 November in Rio de Janeiro.“There is a conflict of interests, of split personality. If Brazil wants to lead in biofuels, it must rule out new oil exploration”: Pedro de Camargo Neto.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s government has promoted social issues and included biofuels as a central aspect of the energy transition. Several of its proposals were approved in sectoral working groups or meetings of ministers, experts and civil society throughout 2024.

“The current context, driven by Brazil’s more active leadership in the G20 and regulatory progress on alternative fuels, offers a more optimistic outlook for the country’s success in expanding its biofuels market,” summarised Rafaela Guedes, senior fellow at the Brazilian Centre for International Relations (Cebri).

“The focus is no longer limited to ethanol,” she said in an interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro. New products, such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and bio-bunker for maritime transport, open up multiple markets and reduce the risk of dominant suppliers.

These are joined by biodiesel and green diesel, both derived from animal and vegetable inputs but different in their production process and properties, the latter being chemically identical to fossil diesel.

Then there is ethanol, already produced on a large scale, and biomethane, equivalent to natural gas and the product of refining biogas extracted from animal manure, and agricultural, urban and industrial waste.

All these products gained new regulations and incentives in Brazil through the so-called Future Fuels Law, passed by the legislative National Congress in September and effective from 8 October 2024.

The new legislation should attract investment and reduce trade barriers by defining rules and standards in a country that leads biofuel production and presents itself as “a supplier and also a strategic partner for innovation and energy security”, said Guedes, an economist specialising in energy transition.

The biogas and biomethane plant of Cocal, a company that produces ethanol and sugar from sugarcane and biogas, biomethane and other derivatives from waste, in Narandiba, in the southern Brazilian state of São Paulo. Credit: Mario Osava / IPS

Fear of dependence

Ethanol thrived as a free trade fuel partly out of fear of being held hostage by a few producers. Brazil and the US account for around 80% of its global production, with 35.4 billion litres and 58 billion litres respectively in 2023.

Brazil tried to encourage production in countries with high production or potential for increased sugar cane planting, such as India, Cuba and Mexico, in order to lower barriers to international ethanol trade.

In addition to the fear of dependency, environmental and food security concerns remain another stumbling block. It is argued, especially in Europe, that bioenergy takes land away from food production.

That was the claim of Cuba, which until the 1980s was the world’s largest exporter of sugar, but whose sugar cane production subsequently fell to the point where it is now practically limited to supplying the domestic market of 10 million inhabitants, who are suffering from a severe energy crisis.

But now India, previously reluctant, has joined ethanol production, as have other countries, since its consumption, blended with gasoline, has spread to more than 70 countries. Investment in biofuels has increased in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“This diversification of producers reduces the possibility of monopolies” and thus the fears of dependency, according to Guedes, who says growth in the production capacity of emerging countries and the consequent expansion of global supply are favourable factors for a freer global market for biofuels.

“India has invested heavily in biofuels in its energy security and emissions reduction strategy. Its policies of using agricultural waste to produce ethanol and biodiesel contribute to increasing its productive capacity, as a potential exporter in the medium term,” she cited as an example.

Other Asian and Latin American countries are using their abundant biomass and organic waste resources to produce bioenergy, biomethane and green diesel, in what represents another model.

Rafaela Guedes, an economist specialized in energy transition, believes conditions are favourable for the creation of an international biofuels market, as Brazil desires. Credit: Cebri

Inputs are waste, not food

Restrictions based on food security were also relaxed because biofuels are largely made from waste, whether agricultural, urban or industrial.

Second-generation (2G) ethanol, made from waste such as bagasse, is another solution. The United States and Brazil have plants producing it, which are set for rapid expansion.

In Brazil, Raizen, a large sugar and bioenergy producer with the participation of the British oil consortium Shell, has been operating its first 2G ethanol plants since 2015 and estimates that this technology can produce 50% more ethanol than a similar area planted with sugarcane.

Guedes also adds that the International Energy Agency has defined sustainable agricultural practices, such as crop-livestock-forest integration, which is expanding in Brazil, traceability in production chains and criteria for defining sustainable energy, which strengthen confidence in biofuels that benefit the climate.

These are policies that promote so-called low-carbon agriculture, preserve soil quality and ensure that Brazil’s agricultural frontiers can expand sustainably and without affecting food security, she said.

Ambiguity

But Brazil’s decision to promote biofuels, even internationally, causes bewilderment according to Pedro de Camargo Neto, a cattle rancher who leads a movement of agribusiness, that of large farmers, that seeks to reconcile his sector with environmentalism, after decades of stubborn antagonism.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (center) visited Raizen’s bioenergy park in Guariba, a sugarcane-producing municipality located 340 kilometers from São Paulo in southern Brazil, in May. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / PR

“There is a conflict of interests, of split personality. If Brazil wants to lead in biofuels, it must rule out new oil exploration,” he told IPS by telephone from Bandeirantes, a municipality in the central-western state of Mato Grosso do Sul, where he has a farm.

He criticizes the intention of Petrobras, the national oil company, to drill near the mouth of the Amazon River in search of oil deposits.

Large oil deposits are believed to exist in the Equatorial Margin in northern Brazil, an extension of the sea basin that already produces oil in Guyana and Suriname.

New and abundant stocks would make oil and gas cheaper, to the detriment of biofuels, argued Camargo, who has previously chaired the Brazilian Rural Society, a key farmers’ group, and held top positions in the agriculture ministry.

“Brazil does not know what it wants,” he said.

This is because it promotes a free and global market for biofuels, for economic and environmental reasons, and at the same time wants to become an oil producer, to the detriment of the climate and its own strategy.

The country currently ranks eighth in the world in oil production, with 4.3 million barrels (each holding 159 litres) per day on average in 2023.

The country should advocate international measures to make fossil fuels more expensive. This would enable a biofuels boom everywhere, with increased investment in a market in which Brazil is already a leader. Europe has already taken steps in this direction, Camargo said.

Oil exploration near the mouth of the Amazon is blocked by demands from the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, which considered Petrobras’ evaluations and guarantees insufficient.

An authorisation or denial of exploratory drilling will be ‘technical’, based on local environmental impacts, according to Environment Minister Marina Silva.

This is a mistake, according to Camargo, who calls for a broader assessment, not because of the local consequences, but due to the global climatic effects, i.e. greenhouse gas emissions, and because of the economic strategy of prioritising biofuels, which also favours the country’s foreign policy.

A bullet hole (right), in one of the buses hit on Mar. 27 by gunfire during a caravan for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s campaign tour to the south of Brazil, in the tense days before his imprisonment on corruption charges. The caravan suffered attacks and harassment along its journey. Credit: AGPT / Public Photos

By Mario Osava
RÍO DE JANEIRO, Apr 14 2018 (IPS)

Gunshots, eggs and stones thrown, blocked roads and other forms of aggression against politicians and journalists in recent weeks generated fears that the violence will increase the uncertainty over the October elections in Brazil.

Before going to prison, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the main target, during the caravan he led through the country’s three southern states, which suffered attacks from adversaries that culminated in gunshots against two buses on Mar. 27, without any injuries.

On the other hand, the demonstrations in support of Lula in the days before he began serving his 12-year sentence on Apr. 7 targeted journalists."The main source of aggressions against journalists since 2013 has been the State, its security forces, as well as the judiciary, with actions that restrict freedom of the press." -- Maria José Braga

In the space of a few days there were “17 cases of attacks, intimidation and curtailment of professional activity,” said the Brazilian Press Association (ABI), in an official note of protest.

The threat to freedom of expression affects journalists and politicians alike, victims of harassment in the months leading up to the official start in August of the electoral campaign for the presidential, parliamentary and regional elections.

“The tendency seen in recent years has been a reduction in violence against journalists,” acknowledged Maria José Braga, president of Brazil’s National Federation of Journalists (Fenaj).

In 2017, there were 99 cases of attacks against journalists, 38.5 percent less than in 2016, when there were 161 acts of violence, according to Fenaj’s annual report on violence against reporters.

In fact, the violence had returned to the levels seen before 2013, when the figure had climbed to 181 attacks, against 81 in the previous year. The outbreak that year coincided with massive protests, throughout the country, against poor urban public services, which turned violent towards the end.

“In 2018 we have a different political scenario, with the country in a de facto state of emergency, in which the judicial branch and part of the media have been taking part, and this may result in an increase in attacks against journalists,” Braga told IPS.

The president of Fenaj shares the view of much of the left, especially of the Workers Party (PT), founded by Lula, and which ruled the country between 2003 and 2016, that the removal of former president Dilma Rousseff two years ago amounted to a coup d’état, with the complicity of judges and the major media outlets.

“Since then, institutions and the rule of law have been subject to threats, including freedom of expression, social movements, society in general, and that is a factor leading to more violence,” said the journalist.

“The main source of aggressions against journalists since 2013 has been the State, its security forces, as well as the judiciary, with actions that restrict freedom of the press,” she said.

A “democratic vigil” held Apr. 11 by supporters of former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, near the headquarters of the federal police where he has been imprisoned since Apr. 7, in the southern Brazilian city of Curitiba. Some journalists who covered events in defense of the leftist leader, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on corruption charges, have been victims of assaults. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert / Public Photos

For years, the police have been the main perpetrator of such violence, accounting for 19.2 percent of the total, Fenaj’s 2017 report says.

Two journalists arrested by the Military Police, one when covering a traffic accident in Campo Grande, capital of the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, and another while recording the way agents treated people suspected of harassing a woman in Vitoria, capital of the state of Espírito Santo, are examples mentioned in the report.

The second group of perpetrators of aggression are politicians, sometimes through their aides, and the third are judicial authorities, who use their power to restrict freedom of the press.

“We are now, six months before the elections, at the height of political tension,” which increases the abuses, violence and fears, said Fatima Pacheco Jordão, a sociologist who specialises in public opinion.

“The strong polarisation between the left and the right, aggravated by the great unpopularity of the government of President Michel Temer and the uncertainty with respect to the elections, accentuate the pessimism, but once it is clear who the candidates will be, and the electoral process is on track, the tension and violence will decrease,” Jordão told IPS.

In general terms, “elections contribute to freedom of expression, and reduce censorship in newspapers and newscasts,” she said. But when this is not the case, what happens is that the violence is accentuated and this can prevent the elections themselves, “which is worse for everyone,” she said.

The absence of Lula, who has become legally ineligible after his conviction was upheld on appeal, “reduces the polarisation since he exited the electoral battle at a moment of decline (of his leading role on the political scene), as his PT has been losing electoral strength for years,” she argued.

Supporters of Lula as candidate to president – about 35 percent of respondents according to the polls – “will be divided between several possible candidates, not just from the left,” when it is confirmed that the former president is out of the race, said the sociologist.

For Jordão, this confirms that Lula’s popularity is due more to his personal leadership than to a leftist idea or programme, since he is the poll favorite.

In addition, society in this country of 208 million people has shifted toward more conservative positions, as evidenced by the fact that 60 percent did not approve progressive ideas in recent polls, she said.

A change that, in her opinion, “seems natural in rich countries, such as in Europe, but not in Brazil, where we have so much inequality, violence against women and violations of rights, where the voice of society is outside the parties, which do not address their most pressing demands.”

Violence against politicians and journalists sometimes becomes lethal. One victim who shook the country was Marielle Franco, a city councilor for the leftist Socialism and Freedom Party in Rio de Janeiro, who was shot dead on Mar. 14, near the center of the city.

The apparent motive was her denunciation of crimes committed by police against poor Rio communities, although the investigations have not made progress in clarifying the murder of the emerging political leader.

“Violence tends to happen more in municipal elections than in national or state elections,” said Felipe Borba, who teaches politics at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro and is the author of a study that identified 79 candidates killed in Brazil from 1998 to 2016.

Of them, a majority of 63 were running for the municipal councils in small cities.

This year’s elections should be less violent because the heads of the executive and legislative branches are chosen at a national and state level, but the situation “is unpredictable, given the polarisation between ideologically opposed currents, which fosters violence,” he told IPS.

“It will depend on the attitude of the more radical candidates, who can fuel animosities,” said Borba, mentioning the case of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate who ranks second in the polls, where Lula is still favorite even after being imprisoned.

Bolsonaro is a retired army captain who openly defends the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, including its torturers.

That freedom of expression is often a victim of electoral violence, as well as of police repression against political demonstrations, is reflected by the notable increase in attacks suffered by journalists in 2013 and 2016, years of massive street protests in Brazil.

Excerpt:

“I never thought I’d have to fight against a coup d’etat in Brazil again,” said Dilma Rousseff after she was suspended as president on Thursday May 12, before embracing former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva outside the government palace. Credit: Ricardo Stuckert/Lula Institute

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 12 2016 (IPS)

Ironically, the only two economists who have served as president of Brazil are also the only ones impeached for economic failures.

Dilma Rousseff, in office since January 2011, was suspended by a vote of 55 to 22 in the Senate on the morning of Thursday, May 12 after a marathon 21-hour session.

The impeachment trial may take up to180 days, during which time Vice President Michel Temer will assume the presidency.

If at least 54 of the 81 senators – a two-thirds majority – vote to remove Rousseff at the end of the trial, Temer will serve as president until Jan. 1, 2019.The impeachment trial is political; the president will be removed if two-thirds of the senators decide that there are grounds for such a move, independently of strictly legal arguments.

Analysts agree that it is highly unlikely that Rousseff, of the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT), will return to power, after the overwhelming defeats she has suffered – first in the Chamber of Deputies, where 71.5 percent of the lawmakers gave the green light to the impeachment proceedings, and now in the Senate.

The most likely scenario is a repeat of the case of Fernando Collor de Mello, elected president in 1989 and impeached in 1992, after a four-month trial.

But there are many differences between the two cases.

Rousseff is not accused of corruption, but of using creative accounting to hide large budget deficits. And she still has the firm support of a significant minority made up of left-wing parties and social movements capable of mobilising huge public protests.

By contrast, Collor de Mello was completely isolated, supported only by a tiny party created to formalise his candidacy. His impeachment was the result of a virtual consensus.

But there are also similarities. Both economists lost their political base due to reckless management of the economy.

When he took office, Collor de Mello immediately froze people’s bank accounts, to curb hyperinflation, releasing only small amounts for essential household expenses.

In 1990, GDP fell 4.3 percent, while unemployment soared and companies went under. The popularity of Brazil’s youngest president, who was 40 when he took office, took a nosedive. And when a corruption scandal broke out two years later, the conditions for impeachment were in place.

In the case of Rousseff, the decline of the economy took longer. Starting at the end of her first term (2011-2014), the recession turned into full-blown depression, with a 3.8 percent drop in GDP in 2015 and a continued downturn in 2016.

Consumption subsidies, tax cuts to give certain sectors a boost, and artificial caps on fuel and electricity prices are among the anti-inflationary or pro-growth measures that led to disaster, especially in the fiscal area.

Michel Temer signs the official Senate notification of Dilma Rousseff’s suspension, which made him interim president, on Thursday May 12. Credit: Marcos Corrêa/VPR

Another thing Collor de Mello and Rousseff have in common is that they misled voters in their campaigns.

Collor de Mello was elected in 1989 after accusing his opponent, trade union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the PT (who was finally elected president in 2003) of preparing to freeze bank accounts – the very measure that Collor de Mello himself adopted on his first day in office.

Rousseff accused her opponents, during her 2014 reelection campaign, of seeking a fiscal adjustment that she herself tried to push through in her second term. And she hid the scope of the government’s deficit problem and announced an expansion of social programmes that was not economically feasible, due to a lack of funds.

These errors helped spawn the movement for her impeachment, the mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad of the PT, acknowledged in a May 6 interview.

The economic crisis was then compounded by the corruption scandal involving the state-run oil company Petrobras. More than 200 members of the business community and politicians have been implicated, including former president Lula and other PT leaders, which has smeared the image of the government, even though Rousseff herself is in the clear.

This backdrop strengthened allegations that Rousseff violated fiscal responsibility laws by signing decrees increasing public spending without authorisation and by obtaining loans to the federal government from state-owned banks, which is illegal.

These two measures would amount to “crimes of responsibility”, which according to the constitution provide grounds for impeachment. And they allegedly aggravated the fiscal deficit, the key factor in the economic crisis.

Attorney General José Eduardo Cardozo, who represented Rousseff, and ruling coalition legislators rejected the accusations, arguing that the government decrees merely redistributed funds to other areas and that the government’s delayed payments to the state banks did not constitute illegal loans.

A group of weary senators applaud at the end of the marathon session that decided to immediately suspend President Dilma Rousseff during an impeachment trial for her removal. Credit: Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado

Dozens of mayors and state governors, as well as former presidents, have used the same accounting maneuvers without being punished in any way, said Senator Otto Alencar of the Social Democratic Party, a majority of whose members voted against Rousseff.

Whatever the case, the trial is political; the president will be removed if two-thirds of the senators decide that there are grounds for such a move, independently of strictly legal arguments.

In the all-night session, the 78 senators (only three were absent) heard 73 speakers who had up to 15 minutes each to speak before the vote.

The result, which was already a given, was a crucial indicator for the opposition: They managed to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to find the president guilty.

However, it is possible that some senators who gave the go-ahead to the impeachment trial will change their position.

At least three senators qualified their votes, clarifying that they were only approving the trial itself because they wanted more in-depth investigations and discussions on presidential responsibility, and that they had not yet decided to vote for Rousseff’s removal.

They included former footballer Romario Faria, a senator for Rio de Janeiro, and Cristovam Buarque, a former governor of Brasilia. They belong to two different socialist parties.

PT senators said there would be a fight, as well as mobilisations to block the “unfair” impeachment. And Rousseff reiterated that she would “fight to the last” against what she called “a coup.”

The vice-president’s rise to president means a heavy concentration of power in the hands of the centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), which has the largest number of mayors, many state governors, the post of president of the Senate, and now the presidency (interim, for now).

A group of six senators from different parties called for an alternative to the “traumatic” impeachment process: early elections to allow the people to choose their leaders.

Many senators, such as Tasso Jereissati of the opposition Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and Collor de Mello called for political reform, arguing that “coalition presidentialism” has proven to be the source of crisis and instability.

Rousseff’s impeachment also provides an opportunity to debate reforms in the political system.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Scale model of one of the offshore oil platforms exploiting Brazil’s “presalt” reserves, on exhibit in the research centre of Petrobras, Brazil’s state oil company, in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 18 2015 (IPS)

Megaprojects are high-risk bets. They can shore up the government that brought them to fruition, but they can also ruin its image and undermine its power – and in the case of Brazil the balance is leaning dangerously towards the latter.

As the scandal over kickbacks in the state oil company Petrobras, which broke out in 2014, grows, it is hurting the image of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, both of whom belong to the left-wing Workers’ Party (PT).

In its 2014 balance sheet, the company wrote off 6.2 billion reais (2.1 billion dollars) due to alleged graft and another 44.6 billion reais for overvalued assets, including refineries.

But the real magnitude of the losses will never be known. The company lost credibility on an international level, its image has been badly stained, and as a result many of its business plans will be stalled or cancelled.

The numbers involved in the corruption scandal are based on testimony from those accused in the operation codenamed “Lava-jato” (Car Wash) and in investigations by the public prosecutor’s office and the federal police, which indicated that the bribes represented an estimated three percent of Petrobras’ contracts with 27 companies between 2004 and 2012.

The biggest losses can be blamed on poor decision-making, bad planning and mismanagement. But the corruption had stronger repercussions among the population and the consequences are still incalculable.

It will also be difficult to gauge the influence that corruption had on administrative blunders, which are also political, and vice versa.

Two-thirds of the devaluation of the assets was concentrated in Petrobras’ two biggest projects, the Abreu e Lima Refinery in the Northeast, which is almost finished, and the Rio de Janeiro Petrochemical Complex (COMPERJ), both of which began to be built when Lula was president.

Petrobras informed investors that COMPERJ, a 21.6-billion-dollar megaproject, abandoned the petrochemical portion of its activities in 2014 as they were considered unprofitable, after three years of waffling, and was downsized to a refinery to process 165,000 barrels a day of oil.

It will be difficult for Petrobras, now under-capitalised, to invest millions of dollars more to finish the refinery, where the company estimates that the work is 82 percent complete. But failing to finish the project would bring much bigger losses.

Thousands of workers laid off, economic and social depression in Itaboraí, where the complex is located, 60 km from the city of Rio de Janeiro, purchased equipment that is no longer needed, which costs millions of dollars a year to store, and suppliers that have gone broke are some of the effects of the modification and delays in the project.

The Santo Antônio hydroelectric plant on the Madeira river, in the northwest Brazilian state of Rondônia, during its construction in 2010. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The Petrobras crisis is also a result of the crash in international oil prices and of years of government fuel subsidies that kept prices artificially low to help control inflation.

It also endangers the naval industry, which expanded to address demand from the oil company.

Shipyards may dismiss as many as 40,000 people if the crisis drags on, according to industry statistics.

The industry was revived in Brazil as a result of orders for drills, rigs and other equipment to enable Petrobras to extract the so-called presalt oil reserves that lie below a two-kilometre- thick salt layer under rock and sand, in deep water in the Atlantic ocean.

The Abreu e Lima Refinery, which can process 230,000 barrels a day, has had better luck because the first stage is already complete and it began to operate in late 2014. But the cost was eight times the original estimate.

One of the reasons for that was the projected partnership with Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, which Lula had agreed with that country’s late president, Hugo Chávez (1999-2013).

PDVSA never made good on its commitment to provide 40 percent of the capital needed to build the plant. But the agreement influenced the design and purchase of equipment suited to processing Venezuela’s heavy crude. The project had to be modified along the way.

Plans to build two other big refineries, in the Northeast states of Ceará and Maranhão, were ruled out by Petrobras as non-cost-effective. But that was after nearly 900,000 dollars had already been invested in purchasing and preparing the terrain.

The disaster in the oil industry has stayed in the headlines because of the scandal and the amounts and sectors involved, which include four refineries, dozens of shipyards and major construction companies that provided services to Petrobras and have been accused of paying bribes.

But many other large energy and logistical infrastructure projects have suffered major delays. These megaprojects mushroomed around the country, impelled by the high economic growth during Lula’s eight years in office and incentives from the government’s Growth Acceleration Programme.

Railways, ports, the expansion and paving of roads and highways, power plants of all kinds, and biofuels – all large-scale projects – put to the test the productive capacity of Brazilians, and especially of the country’s construction firms, which also expanded their activities abroad.

The majority of the projects are several years behind schedule. The diversion of the São Francisco river through the construction of over 700 km of canals, aqueducts, tunnels and pipes, and a number of dams, to increase the supply of water in the semi-arid Northeast, was initially to be completed in 2010, at the end of Lula’s second term.

But while the cost has nearly doubled, it is not even clear that the smaller of the two large canals will be operating by the end of this year, as President Rousseff promised.

Private projects, like the Transnordestina and Oeste-Leste railways, also in the Northeast, have dragged on as well.

Resistance from indigenous communities and some environmental authorities, along with labour strikes and protests – which sometimes involved the destruction of equipment, workers’ housing and installations – aggravated the delays caused by mismanagement and other problems.

The wave of megaprojects that began in the past decade was explained by the lack of investment in infrastructure suffered by Brazil, and Latin America in general, during the two “lost decades” – the 1980s and 1990s.

After 1980, oil refineries were not built in Brazil. The success of ethanol as a substitute for gasoline postponed the need. The country became an exporter of gasoline and importer of diesel fuel, until the skyrocketing number of cars and industrial consumption of fuel made an expansion of refinery capacity urgently necessary.

Nor were major hydropower dams built after 1984, when the country’s two largest plants were inaugurated: Itaipú on the border with Paraguay and Tucuruí in the northern Amazon rainforest.

The energy crisis broke out in 2001, when power rationing measures were put in place for eight months, which hurt the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003).

The return of economic growth during the Lula administration accentuated the deficiencies and the need to make up for lost time. The wishful thinking that sometimes drives developmentalists led to a mushrooming of megaprojects, with the now known consequences, including, probably, the new escalation of corruption.

Not to mention the political impact on the Rousseff administration and the PT and the risk of instability for Latin America’s giant.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Long before the attack in Paris that inspired the slogan “Je Suis Charlie”, a young French publisher had released a collection of stories titled je suis favela about life in Brazilian slums.

In an ironic twist of history, sales of the collection have taken off since Jan. 7, when gunmen targeted the offices of satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, leaving 12 people dead.

French publisher Paula Anacaona

Some readers apparently thought the je suis favela stories were an attempt to shed light on the situation of marginalised communities in France, but instead they learned about marginalised populations in South America, where similar forces of exclusion may push young people into crime.

“We can all learn from what is happening elsewhere in the world, because we’re all affected by similar social and economic issues,” says Paula Anacaona, the publisher of je suis favela and founder of Éditions Anacaona, whose mission is to publish Brazilian books in France.

Educated as a translator of technical texts, Paris-born Anacaona, 37, became a literary translator and publisher by chance. On holiday in Rio de Janeiro in 2003, she happened to start chatting with a woman who revealed she was a writer and who promised to send her a book.

Back in Paris, Anacaona received the book two months later and “loved it”, as she told IPS in an interview. She translated the work, written by Heloneida Studart and later called Le Cantique de Meméia, and managed to get a Canadian company to publish it.“To understand the favela, you have to understand the grandparents who came to the cities from rural areas, often with nothing and unable to read or write” – Paula Anacaona, founder of Éditions Anacaona

Studart, who died in 2007, was also an essayist, journalist and women’s rights activist, and the book caught the attention of French-speaking readers in several countries.

Other writers got in touch, and Anacaona found herself becoming a literary translator. But by sending out the works to publishing companies, she was also taking on the role of agent, a time-consuming task.

“With all that was involved, I thought why not publish the books myself?” she recalls. She set up Éditions Anacaona in 2009 and decided to focus initially on literature from and about the ghetto or favela in Brazil, because “no one else was doing it.”

The first published book under her imprint was le Manuel pratique de la haine (Practical Handbook of Hate), a very violent and dark work set in the favela and launched in 2009.

Two years later came je suis favela, published in 2011. Anacaona selected the writers for the collection, choosing authors from both the favela and the “middle class” and translating the works written in Portuguese into French.

Her motivation, she says, was to try to change perceptions of those considered to be living on the fringes of society. The cover of je suis favela features a young black woman sitting on a balcony and doing paperwork, possibly homework, with the city in the background.

“As you can see, she’s not dancing, so this isn’t about stereotypes,” Anacaona says.

Cover of ‘je suis favela’

The book has since been published in Brazil, with the title Eu sou favela, giving Anacaona a certain sense of accomplishment. “In Rio, twenty percent of the population lives in the favela, so the book is relevant to many readers,” she says.

In France, where there has been national soul-searching since the Charlie Hebdo attacks – with Prime Minister Manuel Valls calling the social exclusion of certain groups a form of “apartheid” – the book provides insights into the reasons and consequences of marginalisation, albeit from a distance of 8,620 kilometres.

“French readers have responded to the book because people really are trying to understand the space we all share and the reasons for radicalisation,” says Anacaona.

Now representing more than 15 authors, she has widened her company’s scope to include “regionalist” authors such as the late Rachel de Queiroz and José Lins do Rego, from the northeast of Brazil, who wrote about characters outside urban settings.

“To understand the favela, you have to understand the grandparents who came to the cities from rural areas, often with nothing and unable to read or write,” Anacaona says.

Her company’s contemporary writers include the award-winning Tatiana Salem Lévy, named one of Granta’s Best Young Brazilian Novelists, and the stand-out Ana Paula Maia, who began her career with “short pulp fiction” on the Internet and now has numerous fans.

Both writers were part of the contingent of 48 Brazilian authors invited to this year’s Paris Book Fair, which took place from Mar. 20 to 23.

Billed as “un pays plein de voix” (a country full of voice), Brazil was the guest of honour, and the writers discussed topics ranging from the depiction of urban violence to dealing with memory and displacement. Anacaona had a central role as a publisher of Brazilian books, with her stand attracting many readers.

Brazilian writer Ana Paula Maia. Credit: Marcelo Correa

She has translated and published two titles by Maia – Du bétail et des hommes (Of Cattle and Men) and Charbon animal (Animal Coal) – which focus on characters not normally present in literature. Maia writes about a slaughterhouse employee and a worker at a crematorium, for instance, in an unsentimental manner with minimal dialogue and almost no adjectives.

“She really can’t be categorised,” says Anacaona, who adds that despite Maia’s fashion-model appearance, the writer identifies with those living on the margins because she grew up among people who did not fit into the mainstream.

Both publisher and writer bear a resemblance and even have a name in common, and Anacaona acknowledges that she is attracted to Brazil and its literature because of her own mixed background – her French mother is white and her South American father is of African descent.

“In Brazil, it’s possible to be both black and white, and that’s something that is important to me,” she says.

As for the books, she has recently published a boxed set of 14 Brazilian plays, with the translation sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, in an attempt to make Brazilian theatre more known in France.

There is also a second favela collection, titled je suis toujours favela (I am still favela), that includes literature as well as journalistic and sociological articles about the slums.

Between the first and second collections, Anacaona says she has found that the “favela has changed so much”, which she credits to the impact of policies to diminish inequality, launched by former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva  – perhaps a lesson for France and other countries.

Edited by Phil Harris 

By Fernando J. Cardim de Carvalho
RIO DE JANEIRO, Apr 1 2015 (IPS)

Even moderately well-informed analysts knew that the Brazilian economy was in dire straits as President Dilma Rousseff initiated her second term in office in January.

Unlike her predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011), Rousseff had not the same luck with the situation of the international economy. But also, unlike Lula, Rousseff showed herself a poor saleswoman for Brazilian goods and an even poorer manager of domestic economic policy.

Fernando Cardim de Carvalho

There was a strong suspicion that economic policy, especially in the last two years of her first term, had been conducted in ad hoc ways and that serious adjustments would be needed to steer the economy back to working condition anyway. Still, the situation seemed to be even worse than most analysts feared.

More surprising, however, is to find out that Brazilian politics is also in dire straits. Caught off guard by the Petrobras corruption scandal, federal authorities, beginning with Rousseff herself, seemed to become paralysed by the rapid fall in public support, completely losing the power of initiative and creating a dangerous political vacuum in the country.

It is a vacuum rather than a political threat because the opposition seems to be as lost as the president. The political right, never very fond of democratic institutions any way, seemed to be more interested in making the president “bleed” – as stated by Senator (and former vice-presidential candidate) Aloysio Nunes Ferreira, of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party – than with fighting for political hegemony.

Economic problems were certainly fostered by the quality of economic policy-making in the second half of Rousseff’s first term. The realisation that tailwinds created by the Chinese demand for raw materials were no longer blowing led the government to implement a series of measures to stimulate the economy that turned out to be largely useless.

It was not “heterodoxy” that characterised the policy, it was uninformed wishful thinking. A plethora of measures were taken in isolation, without any apparent unifying strategy behind them, distributed mostly as “gifts” from the federal government (which later contributed to the public perception that corruption became a system of government). “Brazil is living through a very dangerous period right now. Neither the government, nor the parliamentary opposition are led by leaders the population trusts”

Plagued by semi-structural exchange rate problems, whereby Brazilian producers lose competitiveness in the face of imported goods in domestic markets and of other sellers in international markets, the federal administration tried to deal with them piecemeal, mostly through instruments like tax reductions or changes in tax rates.

Obsessed with car production, the government burned resources trying to stimulate production (only to meet increasing resistance of other countries to import them, most notably Argentina), again without any strategy thinking about how these newly-produced automobiles would be used in polluted and traffic-jammed Brazilian cities.

The federal government was not deficient only in terms of strategic thinking but also in terms of home caretaking: all available evidence points to the high probability that tax reductions and other similar measures were decided without any calculation of costs, lost fiscal revenues, and so on.

Anti-cyclical macroeconomic policy in late 2008 relied to a large extent on the expansion of consumption expenditures fuelled by increasing household indebtedness. The increase in non-performing loans and income stagnation made this option more and more unsustainable. Investment, in contrast, public and private, repeatedly frustrated expectations.

Unable to finance badly needed infrastructure investments, the government showed itself to be extraordinarily slow in devising appropriate strategies to attract private investors to implement them. Apparently lost in their own inability to define a way out of the mess, the government “muddled through” situations where more forceful definitions were required, as was the case of electric power.

The list of failures or of situations where the government showed inability to lead is long and well known. What was surprising to some extent was to find out that all evidence suggests that the government itself was unaware of what was going on.

Winning re-election by a narrow margin, President Rousseff, characteristically after a long period of hesitation, decided to take a 180-degree turn, asking a known orthodox and fiscal conservative economist to head an empowered Ministry of Finance, surprising even her supporters who seemed to be perplexed by the need to defend policies that they hotly denounced when presented by opposition politicians.

This picture would be difficult enough to manage without the Petrobras scandal. But Petrobras is not only the largest company in the country, it is practically a symbol of the nationality. Besides, energy was supposed to be Rousseff’s area of expertise and she was in fact responsible for the company’s policies for a while, as Minister of Mines and Power.

An increasingly loud murmur of a possible impeachment of the president led her to equivocal political decisions, beginning with the definition of her cabinet, widely considered to be particularly low quality, and alienating not only her major party in government, the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, but even the majority of her own Workers’ Party.

The result of such initiatives was illustrated by the twin public demonstrations of Mar. 13 and 15.

On Mar. 13, nominal supporters of Rousseff marched through the streets of most of the largest cities in the country. Speaking to the press, most of the leaders of the march (Lula did not participate) declared conditional support for Rousseff – that is, conditional on the firing of the Minister of Finance and change of newly announced austerity policies.

On Mar. 15, an even larger crowd marched in the same cities declaring unconditional opposition to the president.

Brazil is living through a very dangerous period right now. Neither the government, nor the parliamentary opposition are led by leaders the population trusts. The president is slow and generally equivocal when making fateful decisions. The right-wing opposition seemed to be more interested in enjoying the possibility of enacting a “third” ballot to obtain at least a moral condemnation of the president.

This would be bad enough for a country that has just celebrated thirty years of civilian government. When the economy adds its own heavy problems to the political vacuum, it is impossible not to fear the future. (END/IPS COLUMNIST  SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

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