The past few decades were foot-on-the-brake times due
to decisions made abroad and middle-
and upper-class egotism at home.

Cristovam Buarque

The Brazilian population was shocked to perceive that our racecar driver Rubinho Barrichello had stepped on the brake, allowing his teammate Michael Schumacher to win the race. But we need to analyze the circumstances behind this fact: first, he had no alternative because he races for Ferrari, not for Brazil; second, he is not alone in this dependency, since the entire world is on the road to internationalization and the substitution of corporations for countries.

In the 2002 World Cup many players were under contract to international corporations. Only afterwards were they national players. Within a few decades the World Cup will be played by corporations. The players will be wearing jerseys with the trademarks and colors of their corporate sponsors. And we are complaining about Rubinho, who merely did something quite natural under globalization. For five centuries, moreover, we Brazilians have been stepping on the brake due to external decisions, systematically losing the championship of history.

We were born as a country stepping on the brake. Instead of dividing the Brazilian land, occupying it with families and constructing a new nation, the Portuguese preferred to create big plantations, bring slaves, kill Indians, and produce for exportation. They prohibited the production of anything that would compete with the Europeans; they prohibited schools and universities. They did not allow us internal growth, not even for our own people.

The methods have changed, but not the tendency to step on the brake. In 1822, we became independent, but, instead of accelerating, creating a republic, electing a Brazilian president, abolishing slavery, and carrying out agrarian reform, we preferred to crown a monarch who was the son of the king of Portugal, thus continuing the slave-ocracy system, maintaining the exporting plantations and postponing any sort of concern for the education of our people.

In 1888, we freed the slaves, but we kept our foot on the brake: we did not give the former slaves land, nor did we put their children in schools; and we continued to be mere exporters of agricultural products. A year later we proclaimed the Republic, but the egotistic, unpatriotic Brazilian elite continued to step on the brake, out of fear of the wealthy foreigners and disdain for the poor Brazilians.

After 1955, that behavior continued in other forms. We accelerated in matters of the economy but ignored the social and the political. In 1964, when Brazil was on the road towards the reforms that would bring social advances, we preferred to step on the brake of the democracy, installing a dictatorship whose effects continue today: political parties with no consistency; politics with no fidelity; governments corroded by corruption and compromised by special interests.

We underwent modernization without releasing the brake: without distributing income; without investing in social services; without radicalizing the democracy; without seeking to construct sovereignty. More than any others, the past few decades were foot-on-the-brake times due to decisions made abroad and middle- and upper-class egotism at home. The Brazilian elite, allied to the foreign interests, have made a country that is dependent, unjust, unequal, unstable, violent. Brazil is a country that watches as other countries pass us by in the race of history.

We are a country of Rubinhos in a world where, every so often, the president of a rich nation has the hypocritical elegance of Schumacher, taking our president out to dinner but keeping the championship. And leaving us with the memory of being the last to free the slaves or undertake agrarian reform and with the bad taste in our mouths of someone who continues stepping on the brake when it comes to social indicators, size of debts, international dependency, degree of violence. Meanwhile, other countries that are smaller and have fewer resources speed pass us towards the future.

Cristovam Buarque - cristovambuarque@uol.com - ex-governor of the Federal District of Brasília, is a professor at the University of Brasília Center for Sustainable Development and the author of the book Admirável Mundo Atual (Brave real world).

Translated by Linda Jerome - LinJerome@cs.com

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