Rook's Gambit: The greatest colonist of modern times is corruption

What do we think of when we think ‘Brazil’? In no particular order (except the first word) here is a list: football; carnival; samba; the Amazon rainforests (with or without Sting in them); stuff you can blame on Rio; beautiful game; Pele... football; Maracana; the sight of Christ the Redeemer; the smell of coffee... and now, the aroma of an unnamed revolution in the making.

‘Samba Revolution’ or ‘Tropical Spring’ haven’t quite cut it. The first because people are not dancing: a few are dying some are getting injured and many are looting and vandalising property. The second, because unlike the Arab Spring, Brazilians haven’t taken to the streets against some puppet dictator, or a single oppressor. In that sense the protests are hard to define, harder to manage, and impossible to control.

At times like these, everyone blames Facebook. They tend to forget another amorphous, unmanageable seemingly leaderless movement that’s been around for decades now and announced itself on September 11. The protests in Brazil are NOT the work of Al Qaeda, and this isn’t about equating terrorism with democratic protest.

But they are similar in their (dis)organisation. Groups in different parts seem have different enemies, they splinter, try and take over each other’s space (this is already happening in Brazil), there isn’t a unified command, and therefore no unified control. A former guerrilla herself (but of the more ‘conventional’ sort) President Dilma Rousseff is therefore having to grapple with the question ‘Who do we talk to?’, as she wakes up and smells the coffee and Brazil’s citizens inhale teargas.

As a Bengali, I have talked to many Brazilians — we have always claimed their football team to be ours. Didi, Kaka, (with reverence) Pele and my friends have had long, if imaginary, conversations. We may have berated the chain-smoking Socrates for that heartbreaking World Cup game against France in 1986, but listened to the philosopher footballer intently for his world views thereafter.
We always knew what made Brazil cry: it wasn’t tear gas, it was the loss of a football match.

Suddenly, they’ve turned against football. They have begun to think of it as an excess. They don’t want to waste their money on it: they would much rather have cheaper transport, better health and education. Exactly what the rest of us want.

Who or what is it that has done this to them? At one time, Brazil had colonists to deal with. Carrying a secret cargo of diseases — from small pox to gonorrhea — the Portuguese wiped out large swathes of the indigenous population without even having to try very hard. They had come for rosewood, but they stayed on, always competing with the Spaniards for pieces of the new world.

The Portuguese came to India partly as a result of the treaty by which they got Brazil. Shortly after Columbus returned to Europe a Spanish Pope drew a line along 38 degrees W longitude that gave the Spanish rights to all the lands beyond, and limited the Portuguese to territories within it. Africa fell within, but only a little corner to Brazil’s north-east could be claimed by the Portuguese.

They renegotiated, and got the line shifted several thousand miles west, to 46 degrees W, through the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). A large part of Brazil was now theirs to claim. And on the other side of the world (since the line was drawn around the globe) places like India and Macau.

The colonists got assimilated, a local empire emerged, dictators followed and eventually, democracy. But with it, as in India, came a most treacherous modern colonist — not a greedy nation wanting to exploit and expand at the cost of another, but a phenomenon or disease. The greatest colonist of modern times is corruption, and we see spreading everywhere.

The problem fighting corruption is this: like in cancer, there is metastasis. Removing a part of the body — or a few ministers in a cabinet — doesn’t solve the problem. The colony of corruption just spreads elsewhere.

Just like the government doesn’t know exactly who to speak to, the protesters don’t know exactly who to blame, or in fact what they want, ideologically. Cutting bus fares or complaints about excesses on football stadiums isn’t an ideology, they are demands.

What the more literate Brazilian probably does know, is that the country has been sold a lie about the salutary economic effects of the spending on the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. A recent article in the Americas Quarterly points out that no country actually breaks even after hosting a mega event.

The spectacular Bird’s nest and similar stadiums in Beijing merely cost millions of dollars to maintain, and are of little use. A ski slope in Lillehammer had to be sold for a dollar after the winter games in Norway to avoid bankruptcy.

Brazil will spend over $30 billion for the two events, on the outside, it can expect just about a quarter of this in returns in the short term. And then there is this the irony of the spending taking place when the economy is generally performing well.

The Americas Quarterly article points out that this kind of public spending in relatively good times overheats economies. Already, construction workers for the stadiums are hard to find in Brazil, everyone’s working. But somewhere, everyone also seems to know something is seriously wrong. That many of the billions being spent will go elsewhere. That is why they’ve taken to the streets.
The Rousseff government needn’t try and find people to talk to. It could start by talking to itself.