Last year, while organizing a global democracy forum in Mexico, a member of that country’s national electoral court requested I add a speaker to our program: an American judge who was an expert in how elections work.

First, I contacted election lawyers, who told me they knew of no judges with such expertise. Then I called judges, eight leading U.S. jurists in all. Among this diverse group of judges were Republicans and Democrats, those who work at the state level and the federal level, in district courts and appellate courts.

Seven of the eight judges said they didn’t know of any U.S. judge who was an expert in elections either. They suggested that I instead invite a leading scholar of American election law—Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law.

The eighth judge suggested I try a friend and judge on the East Coast who had handled some election cases. When I called up this jurist, he replied: “I’m no election expert. But hey, aren’t you in L.A.? Don’t you know Rick Hasen?”

My search turned out to be an endorsement of the brilliant Professor Hasen, whose new book A Real Right to Vote is well worth your time. But it was more than that, too. It was a lesson in just how clueless American judges are about politics and elections.

To redress that problem, California and the U.S. should follow the lead of other countries in the Western hemisphere and establish a separate, specialized court system for handling all election-related cases.

A dedicated election tribunal would produce judges with the deep knowledge that is increasingly essential as politically polarized Americans contest elections more frequently in the courts. Indeed, one prominent law scholar—yep, Hasen—has documented that election litigation nearly tripled since the 1990s.

But, as my search showed, election law expertise is hard to come by. That’s partly because most judges went to law school when the issue was not such a big concern, and partly because judges, seeking to avoid politics, rarely come to understand it on the job.

This means, unfortunately, that American elections are shaped by a judiciary with little knowledge of, or feel for, electoral politics. And it is precisely why the 2024 election season is a mess.

You can see judicial cluelessness about elections at work in all four ongoing criminal cases against Donald Trump. The former president and his savvy team have made mincemeat of judges, attacking them to score points with the Republican base and outmaneuvering them to create so many delays that it’s unlikely any case will go to trial before the November election.

A specialized court for elections also could save the U.S. Supreme Court from itself. The court’s justices are losing credibility because of perceived political bias in their decisions and public appearances. Most recently, the court’s conservative majority all but endorsed Trump’s delay strategy by agreeing to hear the former president’s plainly phony claim that former presidents are “absolutely” immune from this country’s laws.

But the Supreme Court’s bigger problem is that it is a citadel of election ignorance. Not one justice has ever been elected to political office, much less administered an election. No justice has a strong scholarly background in election law. Unsurprisingly, then, in their decisions, the Court consistently misunderstands the basics of our political and electoral systems.

Take its recent decision overturning Colorado’s move to ban Trump from the ballot because of his actions to overturn the 2020 election by corruption and violence. The decision was unanimous but also egregious. The justices both misread the plain text of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from office and failed to understand basic democratic principles.

They took the bizarre, up-is-down position that states should not get to determine who gets to be on the ballot and serve as president—even though our entire electoral system is state-based. There are no national elections in this country; our presidential contests are really just 50 separate state elections.

It should frighten us that these nine democracy dimwits may well decide the outcome of a presidential election that promises to be close.

Many countries around the world have moved to redress this problem of judges’ lack of expertise and sophistication in contentious elections. Latin America, which has a long history of bitterly contested elections like the one we in the U.S. are experiencing now, has led the charge in trying to develop more judicial expertise and independence on election cases.

More than half of Latin American countries have established specialized electoral courts to handle election disputes. By now only three countries in the Americas—Argentina, Venezuela, and the U.S.—still give the decision-making power to their regular Supreme Court.

The electoral courts are not a panacea. Mexico’s has been dogged recently by internal conflict between its justices. But as Victor Hernández-Huerta, a Wake Forest University scholar of comparative and Latin American politics, writes in Election Law Journal, specialized courts develop expertise over time. And they have numerous benefits. Separate election courts can protect the reputation and independence of the regular court system by shielding it from the stains and strains of tackling controversial electoral questions.

Dedicated election judges also are accustomed to ruling quickly and efficiently under election time pressure, unlike the American judges in Trump’s cases, who keep delaying things to deal with unfamiliar questions.

Specialized electoral courts have produced particularly important successes when candidates or parties sought to overturn election results.

In Guatemala, in the face of threats of retaliation and prosecution, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal intervened to keep Bernardo Arévalo, of the anti-corruption party Movimiento Semilla, on the 2023 presidential ballot when the ruling powers sought to disqualify him on dubious grounds. As a result, Arévalo won the election and managed to take office in January despite attempts at sabotage.

The Brazilian Electoral Court—a system that includes the national Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, along with regional electoral courts and boards—is widely considered the world’s best, because of its structural independence and its record. The court proved its mettle in 2022 when President Jair Bolsonaro made unfounded allegations of election fraud and sought to overturn the result. The electoral judges not only upheld the election but also held Bolsonaro accountable for “abuse of authority” by banning him from running for public office for eight years.

Last spring, I ended up taking all that judicial advice about Hasen and having him speak at the Mexico conference about how courts handle tricky questions of democracy. When I caught up with him recently, I asked whether he agreed with me that the U.S. needs its own separate electoral court. He said that I was “putting the cart before the horse.”

He pointed out that the countries with such courts also have national elections (unlike our state-based system) and national election administrative bodies. When I noted that the U.S. judicial branch does have special judges and courts on bankruptcy and immigration, Hasen pointed out that each of those areas has a federal body of law associated with it. That’s not yet true of elections.

“You’re asking me a graduate-level question,” he said of the idea of a specialized electoral court, “when we’re not even in kindergarten yet.”

The post America’s Judges Are Bungling the 2024 Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What are the obstacles and opportunities facing democracy today? Zócalo is publishing a series of letters to highlight how the world’s democratic ideals are faring in practice. From Brazil: Senator Humberto Costa writes about the efforts to re-mobilize one of his nation’s signature democratic ideas: participatory budgeting.

One of the world’s great democratic innovations is about to make a big comeback in the place where it was invented: my country, Brazil.

And the story of that innovation’s rise, fall, and revitalization offers lessons for the world.

Participatory budgeting was a creation of Brazil, first introduced in Porto Alegre in 1990. Under participatory budgeting, everyday Brazilians met and decided themselves how to spend portions of their local government budgets.  The meetings and debates were not easy work, but people liked having the power. So, the idea spread quickly to other cities, with the support of the Workers’ Party, of which I was a member.

At the time, the Workers’ Party was out of power nationally, but counted many mayors and state governors in our ranks. Participatory budgeting was part of our efforts to engage more Brazilians where they live.

In the 2000s, I saw participatory budgeting firsthand in Recife, my own city, the capital of the northeastern province of Pernambuco. We used it extensively at the neighborhood level, so people could set priorities for spending and choose specific projects they wanted to pursue.

I was in government at the time—working on health matters—and we were intrigued and often surprised by the choices people made. In many situations, we assumed people had one set of priorities, but that found criteria were totally different when we actually asked them to make a decision.

In one example, we thought that a group of neighborhoods might prioritize building a public health office, or clinic. But through a participatory budgeting process, the people of the neighborhoods indicated that they actually wanted something different: an extension of an existing program called “City Gym” that provided space for recreation and exercise.

Constructing a city gym gave them a place to go to pursue their health, to run and walk, and to meet friends. The citizens also wanted exercise equipment. Participatory budgeting gave them the power to get what they wanted. It also seemed to improve health—reducing stress and diabetes risk. An international evaluation recommended the “City Gym” program to other countries.

Watching participatory budgeting in process, those of us working in public health learned that we had to listen to people. We expanded other programs that citizens told us they wanted, like the Family Health Program, a national program team composed by doctors and taking in consideration and they offer primary care. We also learned that we had to talk to people more often, if we were going to convince them to prioritize spending on an area we wanted to promote.

Participatory budgeting was such a success in Brazil’s local communities that it spread around the world, to more than 11,000 communities, according to an atlas that documents the process. Participatory budgeting processes have won many awards for innovation and engagement.

But in Brazil, its birthplace, the process has declined in use. What happened? There was resistance from officials who didn’t want to cede power to people, or found setting up the process to be challenging.  My party’s priorities changed. As we won presidential elections and took power nationally, we lost interest in city hall and state government.

That was an enormous mistake. When participatory budgeting declined, the people became less engaged and less organized. And that meant that when the far right gained power, the people were not mobilized to resist. Democracy is something that requires practice.

The Workers’ Party has just won the presidency again. But this time, we are not repeating our mistake. I’m now a senator, and participatory budgeting and democratic programs like it are a big part of what we’re working on.

Indeed, our new president, Lula, is preparing a participatory budgeting program for the nation. It’s an important topic in discussions at the federal government level, where we hope to apply it to four-year planning budgets.

I’d like to see it used more broadly also to make decisions in each state, and in municipalities. Such participation could help set priorities for addressing many issues, including health, education, and public security.

It won’t be easy to create this process at the national level. It will take some time. But it’s an important step. It’s time to re-mobilize this signature Brazilian idea so that Brazilians can again set their own priorities, and make their own decisions about the future.

The post A Letter From Brazil<span class="colon">:</span> Where a Great Democracy Invention Is Making a Comeback appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The truth is that the recall is very much a piece of a large and desperate global search for tools to hold powerful elected leaders accountable.

You can see the hunger for methods—any methods—to remove faltering officials in every corner of the world.

Recently, for example, a leading Nigerian scholar, Maduabuchi Ogidi of the Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education in Owerri, wrote in infuriating detail how the democratization of his country has produced ceaseless corruption, misappropriation of public funds, abuse of public office, and books’ worth of unfulfilled electoral promises.

How, he asked, might everyday Nigerians end this cycle and bring accountability to their democratically elected leaders?

Unlike many academics, Ogidi was brave enough to answer his question with a detailed proposal—for the establishment of the National Electoral Campaign Promises Commission, an official body of regular citizens with the legal power to require politicians to fulfill their promises, or remove them from office.

That suggestion may sound fanciful, but it fits a worldwide 21st century revolution in democratic practice. People are inventing tools and processes that allow citizens to intervene and participate directly in governance, with the goal of both collaborating with elected officials and keeping them in check. As places around the globe adopt them, the tools evolve and change.

Direct democracy—in which everyday people, rather than elected officials, make laws and amend constitutions—has spread quickly from its strong roots in Switzerland and the American West, to localities and regions in more than 110 countries. Participatory budgeting, a process first created in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1990, is now used by citizens on six continents to decide local budgets. Citizens’ assemblies, which bring together representative groups of regular people to examine some question or solve a problem, have roots in 1970s Germany and Minnesota. They’ve become popular ways to let regular people grapple with big questions; French citizens assemblies, convened in response to protests against a fuel tax, recently recommended major changes to that nation’s climate laws, including tougher emissions standards.

Countries are undertaking more novel experiments as well, like the European Union’s “Home Parliaments,” in which people gather in small groups, online or in person, to come up with recommendations for top continental officials. And there’s growing interest in places like Indonesia—the world’s third-largest and most diverse democracy—in applying non-Western cultural decision-making to modern democratic processes.

This focus on citizen participation represents a significant advance from 20th century democratic reforms, which tended to focus narrowly on improving election processes. But this progress also perversely coincides with growing authoritarianism in many nation-states. Autocratic leaders from Turkey to Russia to the Philippines have been willing to tolerate local democratic tools—especially participatory budgeting and related processes—as long as they don’t challenge their power.

That raises essential questions. Can 21st century tools be scaled up in ways that protect and extend democracy at the national level? And can such tools, used in concert by localities around the world, inspire more international democratic decision-making on climate, economy and public health?

In this context, Professor Ogidi’s idea of a National Electoral Campaign Promises Commission is intriguing, especially if it turns out to be more than an academic whim. He argues that the commission should empower citizens in various ways, including holding hearings to see if politicians have kept their word. But he also suggests going further, to allow citizens to impose real legal punishments against political promise-breakers. That’s a risky suggestion in a country with a considerable history of political violence.

To truly change nations or states, to truly hold democratic officials accountable, the tools of participatory democracy will have to be improved and made more powerful. (The Newsom recall has sparked some ideas). But, more important, the people who use tools of democratic accountability will have to be skillful, and courageous.

The post California’s Recall Is Riding a Global Wave appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The following day, the so-called Vaccine Revolt began in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s capital. The popular uprising left at least 30 dead and shook the structures of Brazil’s then-young republic.

The circumstances that led to this unprecedented revolt—a swirl of anti-science arguments, denialism about the benefits of vaccination, and fake news about the effectiveness of the vaccine—are not too distant from what’s happening in Brazil today. As with smallpox in the early 20th century, COVID-19 is now being used politically by fringe groups seeking to destabilize power. The difference this time is that the national government itself is helping to incite the revolt against vaccines and science.

When the Vaccine Revolt began, just 15 years had passed since the proclamation of the republic in 1889. In 1904, democracy remained fragile and excluded much of the population.

Rio de Janeiro itself was also in the midst of an acute process of industrialization, and its public services had not kept pace with the demands of its growing population. That failure had facilitated the proliferation of diseases, including smallpox.

Facing this scenario, Rodrigues Alves, who had assumed the presidency in 1902, adopted radical policies to develop the city and remedy its main deficits. These policies included a broad urban reform that led to the expropriation of several properties inhabited by the lower classes, the prohibition of social and labor activities that he considered incompatible with life in the capital—and the imposition of vaccination, which was the trigger for the revolt of the population.

Vaccination against smallpox wasn’t new. Since at least 1837, there had been an obligation to vaccinate children against the disease (and from 1846 the rule was also valid for adults). But this mandate was not fulfilled in practice, partly because the State could not produce enough vaccine.

But after young sanitary doctor Oswaldo Cruz took over as General Directorate of Public Health, he quickly ensured that Brazil had the capacity to produce enough vaccines to reach the majority of the population. Cruz then convinced the government to reinstate the obligatory vaccination in a way that would be virtually impossible for anyone to escape: only the vaccinated could enroll in schools, buy houses, get travel permits or even sign employment contracts.

In this, Cruz was drawing on expertise and experience. As a younger man, Cruz had studied at the renowned Pasteur Institute in Paris. On his return to Brazil, he had organized the fight against the plague in the city of Santos, São Paulo, and founded, in 1900, the Federal Serum Therapy Institute (now Oswaldo Cruz Institute), a pioneering center for the study of tropical diseases.

Despite Cruz’s credentials, he struggled to counter the uncertainty, doubt, and fear that surrounded the vaccine. Anti-science arguments were waged around the effectiveness of the vaccine and what it could do to a person. There’s an embryo of the modern fake news to the disinformation that was spread—one rumor had it that anyone taking the vaccine would end up looking like a cow.

But it wasn’t just concern around the shot that led to the uprising. Many saw the edict to get vaccinated as an invasion of their individual rights. The moral conservatism of the times also led people to balk at the idea of women being touched without the supervision of fathers or husbands by those administering the vaccination. In addition, large sections of the population, mostly poor, who were not treated as fully empowered citizens, resented being forced to submit to a vaccine they did not understand. Critics of the republic—monarchists, disgruntled factions in the army, and radical opponents of oligarchs linked to powerful coffee plantations—maneuvered to exploit discontent and incite rebellion.

Once A Notícia published the government’s vaccination plan, thousands of people joined marches in the center of the city. The assembled coalition included everyone from workers to the pro-coup military, who were seeking to take the front and bring the dissatisfied to their side in the following days. By November 13, the conflict had become widespread and violent, with attacks against the police forces. The armed forces were called in to contain the disturbances, and the revolt began to be crushed by force.

A Rio streetcar overturned during the revolt. Courtesy of Public Domain

Ten days later, all the hotspots of resistance had been defeated. In less than two weeks of the Vaccine Revolt at least 30 people died (some sources say 31) and around 100 were wounded. Of the protestors, almost 1,000 were arrested and nearly 500 were deported to the state of Acre, then a federal territory without self-government. (It would be nicknamed the Brazilian Siberia because of the government custom of sending criminals and rebels there.)

Officially, vaccination continued to be mandatory in the aftermath, but the government preferred not to enforce the rule to avoid more public revolt. It would take a new epidemic, a smallpox plague in 1908 that produced social unrest and violence, to convince the population of the benefits of immunization.

More than a century later, another epidemic has reached Brazil, and the winds of revolt are beginning to blow. What is different this time is that the authorities are not thinking about making vaccination compulsory. On the contrary, the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro is itself inciting a dangerous vaccines denialism while his opponents stage protests demanding a vaccination plan.

Bolsonaro opposes the obligation of vaccination while calling on his supporters to doubt science, not to wear masks and not to maintain any social distance. Since the pandemic’s beginning, the Brazilian president has made disastrous statements, suggesting several times that COVID would only be ‘a little flu.”

If in 1904, the rumor was that the vaccinated would end up looking like cows, today Bolsonaro has declared, without irony, that whoever takes the vaccine against COVID-19 could end up turning into a crocodile.

These lies and misinformation come with their own political objectives—that of pleasing an important portion of the far-right that openly denies scientific advances and clings to conspiracies like QAnon. This approach also lays the ground for a self-coup if Bolsonaro’s government is threatened or fails to win the elections scheduled for 2022. Like in 1904, most of the army today is on the government’s side.

Still, despite the denialism, more than a century of vaccination in Brazil has convinced most people about the need for vaccines and preventions. After initial skepticism, the percentage of Brazilians willing to be vaccinated for COVID-19 has risen, hitting 75 percent in January polling (with only 16 percent saying they would not get the needed shot).

The lack of vaccine doses is the larger problem. Bolsonaro has made it so difficult for Brazilians to access the vaccines that have been produced all around the world that it’s not clear how to vaccinate a population of 213 million.

Brazil’s long history of vaccination shows how societies can evolve, but the current administration is trying to reverse these changes. In an apparent policy involution, 2020 repeats 1904 (and 2021 doesn’t seem to be different), only the actors have switched places.

The anti-science arguments, the denialism about the benefits of vaccination, and the fake news about the effectiveness of the vaccine are all extremely similar to what happened more than 100 years ago, and show the effects of ignorance: unrest due to fear and helplessness, and needless deaths, like those that followed in the 1908 outbreak of smallpox.

The post A Turn-of-the-Century ‘Vaccine Revolt’ in Brazil Carries Seeds of Today appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Conceição crossed the Concentration Camp very quickly. Sometimes a voice would stall:
“Mistress, a little handout…”
She would take a nickel out of her purse and pass by, in a light step, running away from the promiscuity and stench of the camp.
What a cost, to go through that filthy trap of filthy people, of old cans and dirty rags!

This is an excerpt from Brazilian social critic and novelist Rachel de Queiroz’s first book Os Quinze. Published in 1930 and later translated in English as The Fifteen, it refers to the year 1915 when thousands of people fleeing a drought in the interior of the state of Ceará, in northeastern Brazil, were placed in a concentration camp on the outskirts of the state capital, Fortaleza.

Though little discussed today, in 1915 and again in 1932, eight concentration camps were built in the countryside of Ceará. Today, the rescue of the meaning and memory of such camps is more than a necessity. The camps of Ceará remind us how easily human beings who were considered undesirable could be discarded and isolated to avoid “infecting” the rest of the population and causing discomfort to the elites.

The stated aim in erecting these camps, or as they were known at the time, “poverty corrals,” was to prevent workers from poor regions from moving to the city, a phenomenon of great proportions throughout the Brazilian Northeast in the 20th century. Rural exodus was the result of the misery and abandonment, as millions of Brazilians—facing a scenario of malnutrition, hunger, and even death by thirst and starvation—were forced to give up everything in order to try a better life in the big urban centers.

But the retirante, as these people were called, were not seen as dignified human beings, nor even as a social problem that needed a solution. Instead, they were seen as a problem to be eliminated or, at best, hidden from the urban elites.

The genesis of the concentration camps lay in the Great Drought of 1877–78, the largest and most devastating drought in Brazilian history. It caused the deaths of between 400,000 and 500,000 people in northeastern Brazil—a massive impact for a country whose first census, in 1872, counted a population of just under 10 million.

The Great Drought forced mass migrations from rural to urban areas. All over Ceará, there were shortages of food and essentials and a surge in diseases such as smallpox. At least 100,000 retirantes arrived in Fortaleza, more than triple the local population of the capital at the time, overwhelming it.

In 1915, when another devastating cycle of drought hit, state authorities in Ceará were not willing to see history repeat itself. Instead, they resolved to prevent the arrival of those who trying to flee rural areas, and to remove those who had already reached the city center. The governor of the state, Col. Benjamin Liberato Barroso, created the first concentration camp in the so-called Alagadiço, a region on the outskirts of the capital Fortaleza.

Desperate retirantes sought to reach the capital by train—or even by foot following the railway line. Once they arrived in the capital, they were rounded up and sent to the camp, with the promise of work and, without any other option, they followed the orders. Those who had made it to the city center before the camp was set up, about 3,000 people, also ended up being removed to the Alagadiço where at least 8,000 people were crowded in makeshift tents living in less-than-ideal sanitary conditions.

The Alagadiço camp was dismantled in 1916 with the end of the drought, having largely succeeded in preventing the influx of thousands of people into the capital’s streets. The number of deaths resulting from the terrible living conditions in the camp is unknown, but the camp served as a model for the others that were organized from 1932 onward.

In 1932, with yet another major drought, seven more camps in Ceará followed the “success” of the initial venture. Two opened on the outskirts of Fortaleza, and others—at Crato, Senator Pompeu, Ipu, Cariús and Quixeramobim—lined the routes of the two main railroads that crossed the state.

These sites were strategic points on the migration routes of the people now known as flagelados da seca (“those plagued by drought”).

The purpose of the camps and their locations was to prevent people from reaching the capital, but they also were used as justification of “modernization” and “beautification” of the city based on the idea of social Darwinism or the “survival of the fittest,” meaning that certain people were innately better than others, and the deep-rooted prejudice that rural populations would be lazy and less productive, and thus, responsible for their own situation.

This time it was not the state, but the central government, which took charge of creating the camps. In a speech in Fortaleza in 1933, the dictator Getúlio Vargas praised the creation of the camps, where, according to him, 1 million people were being “served” and receiving government assistance.

In reality, the camps were created not to provide help to those in need, but to make the problem disappear from the cities—or at least to hide it for a while. By controlling entire populations, the local government aimed to avoid not only social upheaval, as in the Great Drought, but also social revolts such as the one that happened in Bahia between 1896 and 1897, known as the War of Canudos.

As with the Great Drought, reports about what was happening in Ceará in the 1930s were largely ignored by the Brazilian and foreign press. Inside the concentration camps, though, the picture was grim. Women and men were separated and could not leave except to perform forced labor on road and dam construction, under strong police escort. In many cases, their hair was shaved. The rules were strict, and those who disobeyed them were imprisoned in jails on site. The unsanitary conditions of the camps and the lack of food led to the deaths of thousands of retirantes.

In 1932 alone, it was estimated that more than 73,000 people were confined to these camps in inhuman conditions. The number of dead is unknown. In one camp, Senator Pompeu, it is estimated that at least 2,000 people died and were buried in mass graves. The total death toll for all of the camps may be as high as 12,000.

The inhumane treatment given to those seeking only to survive was not an exception and was not restricted to the years of great droughts. For retirantes who did manage to migrate, they were used as cheap, disposable labor, whether they fled toward the rich cities of the southeast, the rubber plantations of the north, the gold mines of Serra Pelada, or the construction jobs of Brasilia, today’s Brazilian capital.

By the second half of the 20th century, concentration camps were no longer fashionable. Even the military regime of 1965-1985 that tortured and killed hundreds of people did not set up camps. The idea of placing thousands of people in forced isolation in spaces with dubious sanitary conditions and without any legal process had been tainted by Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags.

Thus, when the greatest drought of the 20th century in Ceará occurred, between 1978 and 1984, camps were no longer a viable option. The government delivered food donations, but did little more to mitigate the worst effects of hunger and rural exodus.

At first, legacies of the camps were recorded in great books of Brazilian literature dedicated to analyzing, reporting, and romanticizing the consequences and the background of the drought in the Brazilian Northeast. Among them include Graciliano Ramos in Vidas Secas (literally Dry Lives), José do Patrocínio in Os Retirantes (Drought Refugees), Euclides da Cunha in Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), and De Queiroz’s O Quinze, which deals specifically with the concentration camps. This vast literature on the subject, which became known as the “Cycle of Droughts,” had been of immense relevance during the nationalist discourse prompted by the Vargas regime. The drought was also eternalized in the 1944 painting “Os Retirantes” by Candido Portinari.

Still, there’s a Brazilian saying that goes, “What the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.” Today, Northeast’s countryside continues to have development rates below the Brazilian average, periodic droughts are still common and a considerable part of the population depends on government aid to survive—which shows that the lessons of the past have not been learned.

There is scant physical evidence left of the camps, themselves, which were designed as mostly temporary structures, to testify to what happened there. Only in the small town of Senator Pompeu do the masonry structures still stand. Originally constructed by Norton Griffiths & Company to build a dam in the region in the 1920s, the buildings were abandoned for years until they were used for the camps, then abandoned again.

A year ago, Senador Pompeu’s town government turned the ruins of the concentration camp and its cemetery into a historical heritage site. There are plans to preserve the camp’s grounds, a way to the horrors of drought and the crimes committed there by the state—but testimony alone is not enough to prevent past mistakes from being made again.

The post The Forgotten History of Brazil’s Concentration Camps appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But my teenage dreams have now come true in a time when I cannot enjoy them without guilt. It started in the last days of February, just after Carnival—our most famous festivity—when the National Department of Health confirmed the first case of coronavirus infection in the country. Twenty days later, all schools and stores were closed to prevent the spread of the disease. TV drama production and all cultural events were suspended because of this disease that spreads fast and could kill up to 200 thousand people by August here in Brazil.

Since then, I’ve been teaching my college classes online. I’ve managed to keep my job, which I find surprising, because the other industries I’ve worked in have all suffered recent disasters, leaving my friends out of work. For many years I had worked as a screenwriter, but I gave it up for an old dream of dedicating myself to the low-paid profession of novel writing. So I started to work part time as a college instructor, saving some free hours in the afternoon to write. Teaching proved to be a wise choice last year, when a far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, assumed office and suspended federal funding for films. Film festivals, new productions and even films in post-production were paralyzed in the president’s “culture war.”

Things were no better for the book industry. Publishers and bookstores were in deep financial crisis due to five years of poor national economic conditions. Even children’s books became targets in the trophy hunting of a president who declared school textbooks have “too much writing on them.” He chose an education minister“ready for battle” to “clean up” textbooks of the “filth” they see, for example, in the picture of a healthy and happy kid with LGBT parents. We were sure these problems were unbearable enough.

No one expected things to get even worse.

Just a week into quarantine it was clearer than ever that my steady job was a privilege. Newspapers reported that 13 million people lost their income overnight and didn’t have savings that would cover more than a week of food. In Brazil 40 million people work in the gray economy. I used to see some of them selling corn, pizza, beer, and brigadeiros (local chocolate sweets) on the sidewalk right in front of my college, at the end of the day. With the students at home and no one on the sidewalks, all these people lost their already meager earnings.

I also know my assured monthly salary won’t last long. College tuition is already too expensive for many families and students. With unemployment rising, many of them will quit studying. Almost every day, my department head sends emails asking teachers to be extra dedicated, sympathetic, and charming to avoid student dropout. We had to come up with homework they could do at home with their cellphone cameras. Acting teachers perform alone in front of the computer to show how well or badly a scene can be done. We cannot ask for too much work from students, otherwise they will get stressed. We cannot take attendance, because it would be unfair to students with internet connection problems. But as hard as we tried, two or three students dropped out every week—in a department with only 150 of them to begin with.

Worrying too much about tomorrow is of no help. For today I have a job, so the best I can do is to sit down and work. In the first week of the quarantine I was a bit nervous about handling a whole class of 30 students in an online platform. It turned out to be much easier than I expected. Screenwriting programs are about exchanging ideas, and that works online. I talk for 60 minutes, show my notes on slides, and ask them to watch short films and selected episodes of national web series. That’s how I try to prepare them to work in the entertainment industry that I quit.

My desk is in the TV room, the same room where my partner and I read, write and watch our favorite films and series. We both have indoor personalities. We both love to stay home and do exactly what I am doing in this quarantine. But I keep this contentment to myself, because I don’t want to sound like the fitness influencer who posted a video of her party, shouting “Screw life!” My comfort now comes with guilt.

Meanwhile, I am moved by the stories about poor neighborhoods that I read in online newspapers. A father buys hand sanitizer for his kids and is left with no money to eat. A mother works as a cleaner for a doctor and keeps going to work on a bus full of people; her employer won’t pay her if she doesn’t work.

Unemployment is a sensitive matter for me. The shadows of poverty still hover over my family, which reached the middle class not that long ago. My mother and father were the first generation in their families to finish high school. When I was a teenager, my mother made bread at home and sewed our sweaters herself to save money to pay for our English classes. The year I graduated from university, my father lost his job and could never find proper work again.

If not for my partner, Dani, maybe I wouldn’t even think about why all of this is happening. While the quarantine has secluded me, she works for a large university hospital that offers free, high-quality healthcare for everyone who needs it.

As a psychiatrist in the mental health institute, Dani is not on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Appointments with regular patients have been suspended, but emergency cases still show up. In the first weeks, psychiatry patients suspected of COVID-19 infection were transferred to the “covidario,” a unit prepared for the illness. Now this unit has reached full capacity, so the mental health institute have to admit its own suspected cases. But short supplies and bureaucracy make it hard for psychiatrists to get protective wear—even though we live in the most prepared state to handle the outbreak. Some of Dani’s colleagues have become infected. “Doctors feel the anguish of knowing the danger, even when they can do nothing to prevent it,” she told me.

Dani comes home every evening with news from the hospital. I feel myself changing, as the world changes dramatically outside my apartment. I read with great sadness that many artists I admire are dead now from COVID-19: Naomi Munakata (64), Daniel Azulay (72), Rico Medeiros, Aldir Blanc (73), Abraham Palatnik (92), Sérgio Sant’Anna (78). Journalists warn us that young people can also have severe symptoms, but the unexpected death of old people strikes me more. It is terrifying to realize that our elected president is insensitive to all this danger and pain. He makes things worse by inciting people to “go back to normal” and forcing doctors to use some medicine that does not help and could even be harmful. He stated before the election that he had no sympathy for gays, women, black, and poor people. Now it is clear that he does not even care for old and sick people. Arnaldo Lichtenstein, technical director of the hospital where Dani works, declared in a live news broadcast that this cruel reasoning has a name: eugenics.

For Bolsonaro, “the rain is there” and “some people will drown.” He says families should put their “grandpas and grandmas in a corner of the house.” How do we react to that?

My mother is 72 now. My father is 76. My stepfather is 81. They all live in the city of Curitiba, where I was born, 250 miles south of where I live now. They are all healthy, smart, and funny as always. We talk on the phone every week, and from their voices I hardly notice they are getting older. In my mind they are still 50, and I easily forget that I am nearly 50 now myself.

When the quarantine began, in the third week of March, my mother was part of a group touring Brazil’s southern wine routes. She sent a photograph of herself and my stepfather smiling behind a fountain of red wine in Bento Gonçalves, Brazil’s “wine capital.” They were having dinners in large hotel restaurants with 200 or so other retired travelers.

I was suddenly worried. She had to come back and protect herself.

Dani’s parents live nearby, so she meets them every Saturday, at safe distance, when she brings them groceries. She is attentive to any sign of bad health: a hoarse voice, a complaint of fatigue. Since we’ve been together, I have become aware that parents may hide minor symptoms of weakness because they don’t want their children to worry. They don’t want to waste our time together talking about suspicions of diseases. It is we, the adult children, who must stay aware and offer help before being asked.

In my late 20s, I watched the serious illnesses of my grandparents in their last years. I saw how my mother and father were worried and stressed. Still absorbed by my youthful fantasies, I thought my parents were overreacting. Losing health and lucidity in your 80s is nothing but normal, I told myself. We should just accept that life will end someday.

Today I’m old enough to know how wrong I was then. I want my mom and dad alive and happy for our weekly phone calls and our holiday reunions, for as long as possible. I don’t even want to think that it could end someday, and the possibility that a sudden disease could take them away terrifies me.

The fear invades my silent and peaceful landscape. Inside the apartment, one day after another, I see the quiet city from my window. The air is cleaner and the sunsets are beautiful. The irony is that I was just beginning to write a fantasy novel about a future when the human population was drastically reduced. I have spent most of my adult life creating strategies to stay at home alone, with my books and my ideas—ideas such as a wish-fulfillment story of a more empty world.

Now there’s no need to fantasize. I gave up the fantasy novel and started a short story about a woman during the quarantine. She finds the courage to confess an old secret love for her closest friend. Declaring our deepest feelings is what matters for me now.

In a good story, the hero often goes after his goal only to find out he was wrong from the very beginning. That’s how I feel. I hope for my partner to come home by the end of the day. I call my parents to hear their voices. And I wonder what Patricia Highsmith would say about these days, if she were still there, in her stone house in Switzerland.

The post A Letter From São Paulo, Where the Definition of ‘Unbearable’ Has Shifted appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The deeply unpopular Rousseff wasn’t the first Brazilian leader, and likely won’t be the last, to lose her legitimacy after millions of people took to the streets. Over the last 50 years, Brazilians have raised street demonstrations to an art form akin to the country’s effusive Carnival celebrations. Both protests and Carnival parades rev up participants with raucous samba music, dancing, and truck-bed “floats.”

Brazilians often are characterized as politically passive, tolerant to a fault, and overly indulgent of their leaders’ many failings. In this context, gargantuan street protests have been seen as occasions when the sleeping giant of the Brazilian public is stirred to action.

I’m a native Brazilian who has lived in the United States for long periods, and I now split my time between Rio de Janeiro and New York. In a society like the U.S., there are so many democratic instruments through which to participate, and so many ways to celebrate your political identity. But as a Brazilian you don’t have that many options. The major parties are all but obsolete, and the minor parties are disgusted with traditional politics; as a result, no party engages in policy. So to express yourself politically, the street demonstration is one of your few openings.

It’s no wonder, then, that Brazilian governments of wildly different types—from autocratic military regimes to democratically elected presidents—have taken their cues from the street in determining whether they had the legitimacy necessary to hold onto power, or could cling to it by their fingernails. At several crucial points in post-World War II Brazilian history, mass street protests have catalyzed public sentiment and propped up or brought down governments.

One such time was in March 1964, when a military coup d’etat toppled leftist President João Goulart, ushering in a right-wing military dictatorship. A show of support for the dictatorship in the streets legitimized the overthrow. It was organized by conservative Brazilian forces who feared, in the heated atmosphere of the Cold War, that South America’s largest country might go down the revolutionary socialist path of Fidel Castro’s Cuba.

But just four years later, as the military regime turned more repressive—through growing censorship of the media, outlawing of opposition parties, and even the compulsory expulsion of targeted professors from universities—the streets turned the other way, with protestors taking on the military rulers. The outpouring came in alliance with protests in France, where students turned out en masse in 1968 to decry established power, and in the United States, where campuses erupted in protest against the Indochina War.

Demonstrators gather in São Paulo to demand the impeachment of Brazil’s then-President Dilma Rousseff in March 2016. Rousseff was eventually toppled over alleged fiscal mismanagement. Photo by Andre Penner/Associated Press.

The dictatorship survived, however, by cracking down on protest backers (removing many people from the streets to the prisons). The regime also was boosted by the perception (fair or not) that the military regime deserved credit for the so-called “Brazilian miracle” of economic expansion between 1968 and 1973, when the nation’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 11 percent.

But then Brazil’s economic engine sputtered under the burden of its soaring sovereign debt payments. By the early ‘80s, Brazilians were blaming the military government for their shrinking purchasing power, and in 1984 hundreds of thousands of Brazilians in São Paulo and other major cities went on the march demanding the return of free elections. Realizing it no longer could hold back the popular tide, Brazil’s military regime relinquished power in 1985, and democracy was restored.

One galvanizing leader of the ‘80s protest movements was the Brazilian soccer idol Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira (AKA Sócrates), whose São Paulo club team, Corinthians, joined in the calls for new elections. The team’s advocacy efforts, along with its egalitarian organizational style, became known as “Corinthian Democracy,” a sporting microcosm of how Brazil itself could become a more open society. The team also served as an example of how socially active celebrities and pop culture figures can upstage political leaders and serve as a loudspeaker for popular movements.

Democracy didn’t end the mass demonstrations. Indeed, people in the streets would eventually bring a conclusion to the presidency of Fernando Collor de Mello, who took office to high expectations as a self-styled crusader against corruption and privilege. He lasted only two-and-a-half years before being driven from office in 1992 amid corruption allegations.

While mass street protests often were decisive in legitimizing or delegitimizing Brazil’s ruling powers, in some cases the protests had the exact opposite effect desired by the demonstrators. The anti-military outcry of 1968 provoked a harsh response by the generals; by many measures, 1969 was the darkest year of the two-decade dictatorship, as jail cells filled with dissidents and government opponents “disappeared,” and prominent artists, activists, and intellectuals fled into European or U.S. exile.

Perhaps the most ironic example of these unforeseen effects was when the besieged President Collor called for Brazilians to show their support for him by turning out on the streets wearing green and yellow, the national colors. Instead, tens of thousands showed up the next day decked in black—and Collor was soon gone.

The fact that street protests can knock governments out of power in a manner of weeks, or even days, speaks to Brazil’s shaky democratic traditions. In the past half-century, only two of the country’s democratically elected presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have managed to serve out their full terms in office. It’s noteworthy that no mass protests arose during President Lula’s eight-year rule, even though his administration was marred by a massive vote-buying scandal. Why did most Brazilians stay off the streets? Likely because the economy was booming, fed by China’s insatiable demand for soy, iron ore, and other commodities.

But the economy began to sour after da Silva was succeeded by his protégé, Rousseff, sparking a new round of mass demonstrations from April to July 2013. Their suddenness and intensity caught politicians by surprise and shocked the watching world. Though the nominal cause was a transit fare hike, the protesters’ true target was a state-capitalist system that over-taxed Brazilians felt had short-changed them by delivering second-rate services and inefficient government.

The police cracked down violently. Black blocs and anarchists smashed ATMs and auto dealerships’ windows, overturned cars, and set buses ablaze. The anger unleashed in 2013 continued to simmer as Brazil sank into what would become its worst recession since the 1930s, and an epic political scandal, dubbed “Operation Car Wash,” unfolded around the giant state-run Petrobras oil company. Rousseff’s government and her tainted Workers’ Party were showing signs of fatigue and had lost the moral high ground, and her congressional coalition was dangerously eroded.

The pressure cooker finally exploded in the first months of 2015. Grassroots groups like Vem Pra Rua (Come To the Streets) tapped a non-partisan mood of popular disenchantment. Some protesters took to wearing rubber masks depicting Sergio Moro, the hard-charging federal judge heading the Petrobras case. Social media brought demonstrators together without any need for formal political leadership, giving citizens a new sense of their own autonomous power. Although she defiantly resisted the verdict of the streets for many months, Rousseff accepted the impeachment vote, and power was peacefully transferred to her successor and former vice-presidential ally turned enemy, President Michel Temer.

And Temer? Less than a year after effectively taking power, he has faced scattered demonstrations challenging his legitimacy and calling for his removal. But Temer has summoned an experienced and competent group of bankers and policy makers who form the core of his teams at the Finance Ministry, the Central Bank, and some state-owned enterprises.

As a consequence, Brazil’s macroeconomic numbers are no longer deteriorating. Inflation levels are falling. Petrobras, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) and the electric company Eletrobras are well-managed. Some structural adjustments in limiting public expenditures to fiscally-responsible levels, reforming social security, and modernizing labor legislation are going forward. Brazil’s GDP will resume expansion in 2017.

Now, if Temer remains unharmed by corruption investigations, not only will he have helped jump-start the economy and moved forward on institutional reforms, but he will hand his successor a much more stable country on January 1, 2019. Given Brazil’s recent tumultuous trajectory of dysfunctional politics and economic mismanagement, this will be no small accomplishment.

But in order to support his ruling coalition, Temer must deal with a political class that is largely vulnerable to the ongoing investigations of the “Car Wash.” If senior members of his administration end up being engulfed in the scandal, Brazil will face a long, rocky road to October 2018 presidential elections—and, no doubt, more and bigger crowds taking to the streets.

The post If You Want to Rule Brazil, Draw Power from the Streets appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet there was the city’s mayor, the state’s governor, the national legislature’s leader, and the country’s interim president all at the metro’s inauguration—a half-year late, way over budget, and only a week before the opening ceremony for the 2016 Games.

Michel Temer, the interim president standing in while elected president Dilma Rousseff faces impeachment, had flown in just to make the landmark ride. He stood among smiling faces as the sleek subway glided over 10 miles of fresh track from the line’s previous terminus at Rio’s famed Ipanema beach to the western suburb of Barra da Tijuca, which houses the main Olympic Park and Athletes’ Village—though those facilities are a full eight miles away from the last stop.

As his train screeched into the station, a youth orchestra struck up “The Girl From Ipanema,” perhaps in reference to how that tall and tan and young and lovely girl no longer has to go on walking, but can hop on the metro instead. In the press scrum, I asked a reporter why we hadn’t been allowed to ride the metro, too. She suggested it was because of the risk of lefty journalists chanting “Fora Temer!” (“Out Temer!). Most Brazilians want new elections, and the political instability continues to be a preoccupation for Brazil and Olympic organizers.

Inside the airy Jardim Oceânico station, Temer, who Brazilians are quick to note bears a striking resemblance to Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, took to a podium and promised that Rio would show “what it’s capable of.” In turn, the mayor, in his trademark jeans and untucked work shirt, and the governor, still weak from a recent cancer treatment but seemingly determined to be part of the hoopla, also heaped praise on the project. Their common message: the $3 billion transit project will unify disparate parts of Rio, just as the Olympics would unify a divided Brazil.

You don’t have to have been a Brazil correspondent for three years to recognize that overstatement. Moreso than forging unity, the rail project seems like yet another marker of Rio’s controversial, overhyped, and ultimately underwhelming haul toward hosting the first ever Olympics in South America.

Sure, it’s easy to hate on the Olympics. Predicting the myriad of things that will go wrong is an established tradition of the Games, as much of a ritual as the torch-lighting ceremony. In much of the media, the competition is fierce for the most dire prediction, the most alarming headline, the most damning criticism of “the disaster that is Rio.” The Athlete’s Village is not up to spec (it wasn’t in Sochi or London either). The military has taken over airport screening (again, as happened in London). The environmental pollution is alarming (as it was in Beijing, which was called the most polluted games ever). The doomsayers came out in force before the 2014 World Cup too, but were proven wrong when the tournament went off largely without a hitch.

Amid all the finger-wagging, it’s no wonder 60 percent of Brazilians believe the Olympics will do more harm than good—a far cry from 2009, when the bid was supported by 89 percent of the population.

But it’s still hard not to be cynical over the self-congratulatory glad-handing on full display during the inauguration of the new metro line. And perhaps the troubles surrounding this heralded project help explain the downbeat mood in Brazil right now. It’s just another of the scores of big promises made that have failed to come to fruition.

Built over six years by as many as 10,000 workers at any given time, Rio’s new Linha 4 line claims to be the largest modern urban infrastructure project in Latin America—a dubious claim, given it’s just 10 miles of track with five stations. It was originally targeted to open in January 2016, but construction repeatedly threatened to halt amid funding shortages from the cash-strapped state government, whose economic woes reflect the recession that rattled Brazil in recent years. Costs ran over. The federal government was forced to step in with an emergency aid package. The length of the line was halved. An investigation into contracts-related bribery was opened. And after all that, the line will only be open to Olympic ticket holders until September—so much for connecting the people.

Then there are questions about who this new metro will really serve when it opens later this fall. In contrast to public transportation projects in U.S. cities that are attacked for skirting wealthier neighborhoods exercising their NIMBY vetoes, the expensive metro expansion in Rio is being criticized for routing into more affluent neighborhoods at the expense of poorer ones. And it’s not even clear that the wealthy residents will take the metro. One transportation expert involved in the planning of Linha 4, Marcus Quintella at the Getulio Vargas Foundation, explained to me that changes to the original design, including the scratching of planned parking near the line’s final stop, mean that these more affluent residents may opt to stay in their cars.

Officials tend to sweep aside such criticisms. At an earlier metro station unveiling, I spoke with Rio’s state secretary of transportation Rodrigo Vieira, who was in charge of finishing the $3 billion legacy project. He said costs were on par with transportation projects elsewhere in the world. He also countered that the line connects people of all classes, including a new stop just outside the city’s largest favela and service that better connects poorer residents to the wealthy neighborhoods where many take service jobs. The upgrades will cut a commuter’s ride by up to two hours, meaning people “will have more time to be with their families, to work, to have pleasure, to live.”

“Of course it’s not cheap,” he added, “But it’s a way to change the lives and change the city.”

As we spoke, trains rumbled through the station conducting test rides, seats still covered in plastic wrap. The station itself was still unfinished: equipment needed to be installed at the ticketing counter, an emergency closet lacked its fire hose, and the ceiling-mounted security camera boxes had yet to be equipped with actual cameras. Vieira brushed off these concerns too.

“We will operate with all the security and safety that the Rio de Janeiro subway is known for all over the world,” he said, though it isn’t clear that the small metro system has any reputation outside Brazil, and the city’s not exactly known for safety.

The statement stands in contrast to a feeling of insecurity that seems to be permeating Rio right now. After the inauguration ceremony, I rode the newly inaugurated metro back to Ipanema with Mateus Araujo, the conductor of the youth orchestra that had played “The Girl From Ipanema.” He said they would likely use the new line during the Olympics to perform at venues around the city, but he was concerned about safety. He’s been robbed at gunpoint twice over the past two years, and kids in his orchestra sometimes miss practice because it’s not safe to leave their homes in favelas riven by gang violence and police reprisals.

It’s not limited to poorer neighborhoods either. To maintain security during the Olympics, some 85,000 military and police personnel have descended upon the city. Helmet-wearing commandos patrol the beaches and streets with their fingers ready on the trigger. Despite this, a gang was filmed last week pulling a man from his car and emptying his pockets within blocks of the governor’s palace. Tellingly, the government of France has issued an advisory to tourists suggesting they have a banknote ready to appease potential attackers, suggesting that in Brazil security is not a matter of avoiding robbery, but coping with it. The arrest of 12 suspects in an ISIS-pledged terrorist cell also did nothing to quell a city already on edge.

For residents and tourists alike, the first concern isn’t even about where the metro goes, but about getting there safely in the first place.

In this way, the Linha 4 line seems to underscore Brazil’s tendency to put the cart before the horse. Looking back, it’s clear that the 2009 host bid was made amid the hype of the country’s future prospects, but with no real plans for how to accomplish everything the investment promised to bring.

The city’s crime is down, but serious safety concerns remain because thousands of extra security units aren’t enough to combat deep-rooted violence. The bay remains horribly polluted with raw sewage because pledged water treatment infrastructure never appeared. Foreign capital is coming in, but won’t necessarily turn the tide of an economic crisis.

The new metro tracks were laid, but the city will remain disjointed.

Perhaps the best one can say is that at least the train runs. Given the country’s unexpected downturn and political upheaval, it is arguably a feat that Rio accomplished what it did. Sure, it’s disappointing—but maybe it was doomed to be.

The train will run, the Games will go on, and the country will likely get a boost. But will Brazilians be more united after their Olympic moment?

The post Even “The Girl From Ipanema” Can’t Save Rio’s Olympic Train appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Around 11 a.m. on these days, I rolled away from the computer, took the elevator down, and stepped outside, across the street and into the square, among the bright green heaps of lettuce, the dark collards still smelling of wet soil, and the fragrant architecture of tropical fruit: pyramids of mangoes, three for 5 reais; ramparts of apples; pineapples whose prickly crowns fell to the clean sweep of the vendor’s machete; papaya so large I carried mine cradled in the crook of an arm, as if it were a baby.

I am a journalist. In 2010, I had moved to Brazil—the country where I had been born, but left as a child—as a correspondent for a news agency. The headlines drew me back. Brazil’s economy was booming, the middle class was expanding, the social inequality that had long marred the country was shrinking a bit. In quick succession, the country would host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, international events that would test this new Brazil and thrust it into the spotlight. If the old joke had been that Brazil was the country of the future, and always would be, the future seemed upon us. How would the country hold up? What did it all mean? As a reporter, it was the place to be.

But I had also come for this: to walk in a market where everyone spoke the language of my childhood, to be greeted with a kiss by the elderly merchant with a sweeping white mustache, to lose myself in this city, and find out what it meant to be of this place, a Brazilian in Brazil. That cozy square with its familiar faces, its black-and-white mosaic walkways and its view of the Sugarloaf peak was an anchor in this bewildering city.

On one particular Wednesday, a clear fall day in March of 2014, I made the full round of the market and was passing the flower stalls, with their jarring reds and pinks, when I saw the way out was blocked. Up ahead, just beyond the stands, was the street, and beyond it, residential buildings. My building. Now all I could see was a dense cluster of shirtless men, men in tank-tops, well-coiffed women with their grocery carts, maids in uniforms, all of them standing, shoulder shoving against shoulder.

I couldn’t see anything, but I heard the voices that overlapped above. Their words sent a flush of adrenaline tingling into my fingers: “Beat him up. Teach him a lesson. Give him what he deserves.”

The bags of produce slung on my shoulders and arms made me an awkward mass. Bumping and apologizing, I pushed to the front. Then I saw them: two men and a teenager. The guys held the boy, shoved him back and forth. They were yelling something. I strained to hear.

One man managed to wrap his arm around the boy’s neck and grab the loose fabric at the collar of the boy’s shirt in a tight grip. His other fist struck the child on the head. The kid flailed, flung his arms about his face, pedaled his legs in the air, kicking wherever he made contact.

What happened? I asked no one in particular. Someone said the boy had robbed a woman, taken her purse. Around us, voices egged the men on. “Show him! Tie him to a post,” one man said. This last taunt was a reference to a homeless kid suspected of robbing people in the neighborhood who was stripped, beaten, and chained by his neck to a light post by vigilantes that January, two months previous. It happened there in Flamengo, my neighborhood, just around the corner from this market with its neat geometry of tropical fruit and its buckets of flowers.

I looked around for the man who spoke. He was standing at the edge of the crowd; thick-necked, stripped to the waist, with a round, hard paunch protruding over his board shorts, he could have been any of the vendors, anyone in Rio. His face was split in a grin.

This was one of the most trying aspects of life in this city: the violence that crackled just under the surface. It could erupt in unpredictable ways, as when the bus driver intentionally jostled passengers or swiped a biker after being trapped behind the wheel for too long with too little pay; or in routine revolts, as when workers facing long commutes stoned or burned the suburban trains that broke down with them—again. It also had harsher manifestations: Brazil’s stubborn homicide rate, which refused to budge despite the optimism and prosperity of the last decade, and the lethal police force. In the state of Rio de Janeiro alone, officers had killed 1,500 people over five years.

There are explanations for this culture of violence. As a journalist, I’d interviewed experts, written them down: the inequality that remains among the highest in the world, in spite of improvements; the inefficient court system, which makes impunity the rule; the corruption of law enforcement agencies; the complete lack of trust in government institutions.

But it is this particular strain of violence—the mob lynching—that leaves me grasping. Every day, at least one person is lynched in Brazil. I read this in an interview with a sociologist, José de Souza Martins, who studies the subject. Since 2011, he’s tallied over 2,500 cases. There are no official statistics, but according to a news agency’s compilation, the majority have been cases of vigilantism fueled by anger and impotence, a twisted desire for justice and release. But numbers and definitions do not help me make sense of it—not of the horror of the public thrashings and not of the social acceptance of the phenomenon.

When the teenaged boy was beaten and chained by the neck to a post in January, a controversial television commentator, Rachel Sheherazade, had called it “collective self-defense.”

“Since the local government is weak, the police demoralized, and the legal system a failure, what is left to the good citizen but to defend himself?” she had asked.

Neighborhood watchdog sites and online forums had overflowed with comments, some calling for calm and many others praising the aggressors.

“Wake up you idiots … people in Flamengo know he’s a THIEF who robs elderly ladies and women every day. What they did wasn’t enough,” one man had written.

“A good criminal is a dead criminal,” posted another, offering up an old refrain.

Reading these messages, it struck me: The people saying these things are my neighbors. They jog by me in the park, nodding their good mornings, and queue up with me at the bank. They are the same people who belly up to the stands at this farmers’ market, pressing their fingers lightly into the flesh of avocados, testing for ripeness.

I thought of this as I stood at the edge of the market in March, the plastic straps of shopping bags cutting into my forearms, the trampled remains of spoiled fruit souring under the noonday sun.

I wanted to do something, say something, stop them. I walked toward the men and the boy, who were pushing the boy inside the gate of one of the buildings. I was terrified—for the boy; for all of us standing there, on the brink of something; and for what that something said about the country I’d come searching for, about Brazil.

Once we were face-to-face, though, the words didn’t come. I reverted to habit, as if I were just a journalist on the job and this were another incident I had to cover. I asked them their names.

They looked up. We’re police, one of the men said. Go back to your house.

Maybe they were off-duty police. Maybe they weren’t. In Rio, this provided not reassurance but its opposite: it was a reminder there was no help for that boy, from law enforcement or anyone else. The crowd knew this; the two men knew it, even the teenager. Standing there with my bags of produce, my giant papaya, and my presumption—what was I going to do, take their names? Denounce them? To whom? Who cared?—I felt deflated, but also exposed and ridiculous in my naïveté.

And I did turn away and head to the gated entrance of my building, aware that this shard of violence was embedded in me now, as it was in my city, my country, my home.

The post Rio de Janeiro’s Violence Makes No Sense appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Be a freethinker, make your own decision,” the 6-foot-1-inch guard from Chicago rapped in English. “In the midst of a mission just follow your intuition.”

The lyrics could be a personal anthem for the 34-year-old, who in 2008 made the unconventional decision to go play in Brazil’s nascent pro league, known as the Novo Basquete Brasil (NBB), rather than pursuing a career in Europe’s more competitive and higher-paying leagues. The counterintuitive move paid off. Taylor has been a league all-star five times, won consecutive championships in the Americas tournament of the International Basketball Federation, and in 2012 played in the London Olympics for the national team of Brazil, which awarded him citizenship for the occasion. He’s been selected to play again in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

Taylor is one of thousands of Americans who play basketball professionally abroad, spreading a love of the game into the very heart of the soccer world. Futebol’s incursion into America is such a compelling story it’s easy to forget that our own U.S. sports, basketball especially, are making gains around the world. In a sense, even if he went native, Taylor is a cultural ambassador for American culture.

An unspectacular point guard for a NCAA Division II university in the Midwest, Taylor was unselected in the 2003 draft. Now, he is the one passing on offers to play in the NBA’s development league, the stepping stone to the NBA, so he can stay in Brazil and have a shot at winning an Olympic medal next year.

“I’m living the dream,” Taylor told me, “just further away from home than I thought I would be.”

Taylor at the Brazilian basketball league’s all-star ceremony

Taylor wouldn’t be the first American basketball player to medal for a foreign team. New York native Crawford Palmer won silver playing for France in 2000, and Michael Sylvester of Ohio won silver playing for Italy in 1980. On the women’s side, Rebecca Hammon of South Dakota led Russia’s Olympic squad to bronze at the 2008 Olympics. While there’s criticism every Olympics over teams recruiting (and nationalizing) stars from other countries, the tradition of itinerant American basketball players taking their game overseas is well established. In the 1930s, a Californian named Frank Luben introduced the game to Lithuania and turned the Eastern European nation into a basketball powerhouse, according to sports history professor Christopher Elzey of George Mason University. Luben is still considered a national hero in Lithuania.

Elzey himself played basketball for the University of Pennsylvania and professionally in Europe and Australia in the 1980s and 1990s, just as the 1992 USA Dream Team was captivating audiences and raising the game’s profile overseas.

“What better life than that? To play ball, get paid for it, immerse in the culture,” Elzey told me in a telephone interview. “I saw myself as an ambassador in some ways. Sport has always been that. At this grassroots level, you get this exchange of attitudes and experiences.”

As for Taylor, his journey, following his graduation in 2003 from Missouri Western State and a stint in the semi-pro American Basketball Association (the non-banker, non-lawyer ABA), first took him to Mexico. From there it was off to Venezuela’s pro league, and onto Brazil in 2008.

“I thought it’d be a year-long vacation and I’d play basketball,” Taylor told me. “The only thing I’d seen from Brazil before was Carnival and the beach, all the stuff you see on TV and music videos.” Alas, he landed in Bauru, a small university town and railway hub in the interior of São Paulo state, hundreds of miles from any beach or glamour.

Taylor said he picked up Portuguese quickly and started enjoying Brazil as his success took off. He was having fun: A YouTube video from a 2008 slam dunk contest in Brazil shows him leaping over another player, who is seated in a chair, to catch a ball mid-flight that he dunks, as the crowd erupts. He seems to love being a big fish in a small (if Brazil could ever be called that) pond. During the awards ceremony on June 8, Bauru was called on stage to be awarded for placing second in the Brazilian league and teammates pushed the trophy into Taylor’s hands.

“Larry feels the Brazilian colors,” Rafael Luz, a 23-year-old guard for the national team, told me. “You can see that he really likes the country. He’s not just taking the money and going home. He’s like family to us.” Paulo Prestes, a 6-foot-11-inch forward for the national team, agreed.

Luz and Prestes, unlike Taylor, never thought much of playing in Brazil—until recently. They wanted to play overseas. Prestes, who first touched a basketball in high school, signed a contract at age 17 to play in Spain and in 2010 was drafted in the second round of the NBA draft by the Minnesota Timberwolves, although injuries sent him back to Spain. Luz was sent at age 15 to the development league in Spain, where he’s now pro.

Taylor at the Mogi das Cruzes press conference

But as Brazil’s league matures, it’s attracting more talent. Prestes came home to play in Brazil last year, and Luz is also considering returning, lured by the improved competition and rising salaries. Team payrolls now average $1.3 million, still short of what a single NBA starter would make in a season. Stars in Brazil can make in the neighborhood of $250,000.

Thirty-five foreigners, including 24 Americans, now play in the NBB. Sponsorship money is evident on Brazilian team jerseys, which are so plastered in advertisements that the team name is relegated to a small patch.

“When I got here in 2008 there were a couple good teams and everyone else was so-so,” Taylor said. “And now you have to be ready to play hard every night.”

The day after the awards ceremony in São Paulo, I went with Taylor to the suburb of Mogi das Cruzes. He had opted out of his contract with Bauru because he thought he could win a championship with Mogi das Cruzes, where he’ll be playing alongside his friend Shamell Stallworth, a forward from California who was named the league’s top foreigner this year.

If Mogi das Cruzes does win a championship, I asked, will critics say it was because the team spent heavily to stack itself with foreigners?

“That’s not going to be an issue—the best teams are all stacked,” Taylor said. Several players from Argentina’s national team play together in Rio de Janeiro for Flamengo, and Flamengo had just beat Taylor’s team to win the Brazilian league championship.

Taylor shot a few baskets, finished signing autographs, and sat with me briefly to talk about his career. Hovering beside us was one of his new managers, a heavyset Brazilian with slick hair, who stared at his watch and fidgeted. After 15 minutes, the manager reminded Taylor he still needed to look at new apartment rentals before returning that night to Bauru so he could pack and prepare to move. The interview was over. The demands of Brazilian basketball stardom beckoned.

“It’s another life for Larry,” said Marcio Cipriano, a 6-foot-7-inch Brazilian forward who played alongside Taylor for the national team. “Sometimes you have to change your world to be somebody.”

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