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May
7, 2003
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May
8, 2003
God in the the Service
of the Security State
Whether
in the US, Palestine or Brazil, When National Security is the
Program, Fundamentalist Religion Leads the Way
by NORMAN MADARASZ
Security--public and national--is now the buzzword
in democratic social policies throughout most of the world. After
Israel, the United States through the Patriotic Acts has implemented
the severest restrictions on civil liberties in decades, all
in the name of national security. France, under the conservative
governance of Nicolas Sarkozy, has rhymed the fears of a social
slump with ethnic-related crimes. Muscovites crumble under the
fear of the Chechen terrorist specter in retaliation for having
had their homeland plundered to a pulp. And in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, public security beholds the hopes raised from years of
inept and corrupt policing. Organized crime has exploded statewide,
garnering comparisons to a Colombia in the making.
As a policy obsession, 'security' is
traditionally slotted on the right of the political spectrum.
Israel, the US, France and Russia have all been under the governance
of conservatives unprecedented in their belief that the use of
force is a legitimate means to pre-empting terrorist attacks.
Each country has used the same idea of force to curb dissent
at home. Despite the banners and sound bytes on protecting democracy,
each of these countries has ever so subtlety withdrawn the rights
of the democratic opposition. Under this restrained, conservative
conception of democracy, religion has slid into the equation.
Apart from Israel and the US, to not have to speak of absolutist
theocracies like Saudi Arabia, religion has also become the measure
of accountability in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
Little can express the indignation of the educated middle class
Cariocas, Rio's own citizens, as they face current events wreaking
havoc in the state. Neither wealthy enough to shield themselves
from armed assault in guarded houses and armored cars, nor poor
enough to be tempted by the free for-all crime wave bleeding
the city, the large educated middle class has had to bite the
bullet of its powerlessness. In that regard, it differs little
from middle classes worldwide who have boisterously watched political
leadership betray them over Iraq. Most peculiar is that while
Brazil as a whole is embarking on important reforms under the
leadership of President Lula da Silva, Rio's state government
is experimenting with its own version of the national security
state.
The current tale is one of a state government
that has all but lost its grip on power. Yet it is also one that
only months ago embraced power in a landslide victory. No mere
fiction, it is the inner lining of a governor's dream, Mrs. Roseangela
Matheus. Also known as 'Rosinha', she spent the first weeks of
her term shielded behind sunglasses for tears flowed day into
night over her subjects' refusal to recognize her as a born-again
Evita. They stubbornly rejected her profession of faith to spread
the word of God to those for whom only divinity is left as a
hope for redemption. Meanwhile political corruption has run rampant
at the highest level, stripping the state of the funds so urgently
needed for security purposes, to say nothing of operating the
civil service.
The story is a pathetic one, too. Denial
has reigned supreme regarding the "mysterious" disappearance
of public funds, made accountable to the management of the former
Vice-Governor--a black federal senator--Mrs Benedita da Silva.
From April to December 2002, she served out the remaining months
of the gubernatorial term after her boss, Rosinha's husband,
Anthony Garotinho, left the seat of government at the Palácio
Guanabara to pursue his presidential ambitions.
There is no Karl Rove in this story,
only a slew of Jerry Falwells. This doesn't mean that Mr. and
Mrs. Garotinho, both born-again Christians, differ in their self-serving
use of the religious infrastructure in their rise to power. Both
Presbyterians, their power treadmill nonetheless remains the
massive, cultish organizations of the Igreja Universal de Deus
and the Assembléia de Deus. Public administration has
been perverted in their trail. Separation of State from Church,
which has long shaped Brazil's democratic political history,
has been explicitly curtailed.
Meanwhile, organized crime has assumed
unprecedented power. For years, drug lords have operated out
of Rio's favelas, a shuttle point for the Colombian trade. Teenage
gangs bring them the heavily armed support and commando tactics
needed to spread fear in the population. But the wealthy North's
desire for cocaine has stayed unabated despite the millions sunk
into the US's War on Drugs--yet another ineffective and costly
conservative 'security' policy. What's different now is that
Carioca drug lords are attacking state institutions, orchestrating
fake road blocks, threatening and murdering innocent civilians,
destroying state and private assets, and target practicing on
Rio's Military Police. On Monday, May 5, gangs even attacked
a university in retaliation for a leader's death in a weekend
raid. One student was seriously wounded, while hundreds more
have sunk into fear. Every year, 7 percent of Rio's population
is violently assaulted.
MR. AND MRS. GOVERNOR
On April 23, in the midst of this rising
chaos, Governor Matheus dismissed Colonel Josias Quintal from
his position as Secretary of Public Security. For months he had
struggled with an underfunded policing sector, stunted additionally
by the intestine war he was led to wage against the head of police,
Alvaro Lins. Systematically rejecting pleas for reform issued
by Lula's federal government, Rosinha failed--some say refused--to
deal with the matter. It is nobody's secret that Rio's police
are among the country's most corrupt while also most underpaid.
During her husband's term as governor from 1998-2002, Anthony
had preferred to fire his security secretary instead of oust
the "rotten gang" spreading terror in the squad.
The new twist for law enforcers is to
watch with deflating egos as their men are decimated by gangsters.
Sixteen officers have been murdered only this year. Next to their
graves lie the burned remains of the journalist Tim Lopes, brutally
executed last year by a crime ring involved in making child porn.
Countless citizens, crooks and the innocent, have been cut down.
The charred framework of over 200 city buses, and the fear of
merchants in Rio's most prosperous commercial zones, sporadically
shut down on order from narco-commanders. In Josias Quintal's
stead, Governor Matheus named the man she "most trusts:
[her] own husband", former governor Anthony Garotinho.
The move has only confirmed suspicions
over the Executive's operating mode. Only four months after taking
office, the Governor of Rio de Janeiro State is tittering on
the edge of collapse. 'Rosinha' has proved unable to administer,
let alone govern, the state. Since taking power on January 1,
she has leapt from one crisis to another, facing major public
sector strikes along the way for failing to cover bonuses and
vacation pay. She was swept to power in a landslide victory in
the very first round of last October's election in a staged ploy
that only paranoiacs would fail to believe.
In the closing months of his term as
governor, Anthony Garotinho left office to run as presidential
candidate for his party, the PSB (Brazilian Socialist Party).
His Vice-Governor, Benedita da Silva of the coalition PT (Workers'
Party) took office. For the nine months of her term, she fought
daily against a barrage of violence from drug lords matched only
by the Garotinho's vociferous accusations of mismanagement. In
hindsight, their shots were nothing but pre-emptive strikes.
Behind the appearance of populist prim, the Garotinhos left a
financially stripped state machine. Where that money had fled
to would soon be revealed in that God-awful Latin American scourge:
corruption. Perhaps Rosinha was not the racist she appeared to
be when disinfecting the Palácio das Laranjeiras from
governor Benedita's residency. There must have other bugs to
exterminate.
Only weeks into her governance, the top
staff of her tax inspection team was arrested and charged with
embezzling public funds and laundering money deposited into Swiss
bank accounts. The tally is a handsome one, some 30 million American
dollars. This group of fifteen may still grow as the trial begins.
At this point, though, they have yet to lose their jobs as the
State Parliamentary Inquiry Commission organizes the evidence
and trial. Among Anthony Garotinho's executive civil servants,
they were re-hired by Rosinha until their fateful time came in
February. Funds were extorted from many of Rio's most prosperous
companies in exchange for lessened or forgotten tax-evasion penalties.
Tax evasion is a bounty for punishment
anywhere in the world. When a national security state is implemented,
auditing is one of the first 'social' programs to bite the dust.
Overdue taxes then get mixed up with personal services. With
leadership of this kind, is it any wonder organized crime feels
empowered to threaten the government's control over parts of
the state? Is it really astonishing that drug lords dare to choose
the language of revolution and guerrilla warfare to justify their
trade?
The national capital until 1960, Rio
de Janeiro was once the hotbed of revolt and seat to the sporadic
democratic governments that alone have brought Brazil its promised
prosperity. Today, its residents wonder what has led to the
spate of poor governance afflicting them term after term. This
is not to say that most Brazilians aren't asking themselves what
could have led the Cariocas to vote for born-again Rosinha in
the first place. After all, Rio de Janeiro is an intellectual
center, home to some of the country's best universities. Why
seek evangelical diversion then?
The current federal government's economic
team comes from the city's celebrated PUC University. The federal
university is home to the prestigious COPPE engineering research
institute. One of the country's leading economic think tanks,
the Fundação Getulio Vargas, has its headquarters
in Botafogo, across the creek from Sugar Loaf Mountain. Rio still
houses the National Library, and its historic center are populated
with museums and galleries. Brazil's largest media conglomerate,
Globo, still keeps its headquarters in Rio. Why the evangelical
illusions when having access to education and information of
international standards?
The condition of the rest of the state
before its fusion with Guanabara (basically the former federal
zone around the city of Rio de Janeiro) in 1975 is another story.
Some of the country's poorest areas are found in the state, whereas
the Baixada Fluminense, the greater Rio de Janeiro city outskirts,
is infamous for its vigilante justice and state-specific lawlessness.
The state population tally at 13.5 million contrasts significantly
with the municipality's estimated 6 million. State statistics
hasten to point out that Rio's consumer market is equal to that
of Chile and greater than those of Paraguay and Uruguay put together.
Per capita income would be 60% higher than the national average
- over US$ 8 thousand a year. Yet lacking accurate Purchasing
Power Parity figures, that average attests especially to great
concentration of wealth. In the outskirts, apart from the stunning
natural beauty, much of the economic relief comes from religion.
It is rare sight for office high-rises and luxury hotels to dot
the interior landscape. But rising above the hot breeze, the
Christian cross is a landmark to trade as well temples.
Throughout centuries of exploration and
exploitation, there has been no dearth of comparisons likening
Brazil's remarkable beauty to Paradise. Yet the positivist philosophy
that shaped the country's democratic republican movement in the
late nineteenth century set God on his temple pedestal and left
Him there--banished from affecting the world of human administration.
Nowadays though separation of religion and state is a thing of
the past in Rio de Janeiro. The confusion having arisen in its
wake should be a lesson for all North Americans who see anything
redeeming about uttering the name of God in the context of a
political speech.
AUTHORITARIAN DEMOCRACY
Garotinho's power breeds from this background.
His appointment as head of Public Security is telling of his
role. During the whole inquiry into the tax inspection fraud
he has led a low media profile. But his stealth sojourn was far
from inactive. As his wife slid ever closer to losing control
of the state, he is said to have played more than a homemaker
husband's role to the couple's half-dozen kids. Newspaper reports
had him sitting in on a state-federal meeting during which the
feds decided to dispatch the army to the streets of Rio for the
Carnival festivities. A few days earlier, drug lords had forced
shops to close down in Copacabana and Ipanema.
In her solitary weeks at the helm, organized
crime was only a secondary issue. Rosinha inherited a government
with empty coffers. Her predecessor, Benedita, also had. Once
'Bené' took office, she covered herself by informing the
media that Anthony had left nothing for his successor. Her audit
of state coffers was confirmed by numerous independent sources,
including Rio mayor César Maïa. In failing to pass
on the buck, Garotinho bore a poisoned pill to his wife. As news
of the extent of the financial damage began angering the population,
his wife's impetuous behavior turned from her subjects toward
colleagues at the state and federal level in their bid at passing
social security reform. In the meantime, Rosinha's hysterical
Rio was becoming the laughing stock of the nation. Most people
would have kept laughing were it not for the increasingly common
sound of gunfights puncturing the horizon.
This mixture of pathos and perversion
explains why the press received Garotinho's appointment with
relief. For weeks the pitch had been pounding in the direction
of a premature change in government. Garontinho's presence, far
from the saving grace he has touted it to be, primarily precipitated
a cease-fire with the press. That no editorial from any major
newspaper has thus far decried the fall in democratic standards
implicated in his appointment is indicative of the damage. Even
before tackling that issue, one can pause to raise a simple doubt.
If Garotinho is so central a figure to the government, how could
he have not known about the tax inspection corruption? If he
didn't know about it, how could someone so incompetent be the
political leader?
As for how democratic the move is, the
public security, family and religious catch phrases came buzzing
when it wasn't idiomatic populism. Interviewed by the Federal
District correspondent, Carlos de Lannoy of Globo Cable-TV's
very respected "News at Ten", Garotinho first silenced
any concerns about the Security Secretary Josias de Quintal having
been fired. De Lannoy then followed up with a hard-hitting question.
"Given that de Quintal's dismissal was conceivable, in case
of ineffective policies Garotinho's own sacking is unimaginable;
how would he react to the accusations of nepotism that would
surely ensue?", asked de Lannoy. True to form, the new Secretary
of Public Security completely skirted the issue.
Whether he continues to play the big-mouthed
populist, Garotinho will be watched scrupulously. Behind the
press's silence, it expects him to adopt President Lula's policy
on a single, concerted security action plan. Federal Justice
Minister, Marcio Thomaz Bastos's plan calls for complete state-federal
partnership in pooling information and forces in exchange of
hefty increases in federal financial assistance.
Still, Lannoy's point was suggestive.
Garotinho evidently needs the press little to build his political
support. Ministers, 'bishops' and religious peer pressure do
the job for him. About accountability, most commentators observe
that Garotinho has dived into an all or nothing risk for his
2004 presidential prospects. Either he solves the problem at
home and shows himself deserving of the top job, or his political
career is over.
Such views hastily omit two observable
issues. Lannoy alone poked at accountability. Good governance
without public accountability, which means transparent accounts,
is impossible to achieve. As Garintho's tax inspectors stand
trial, he has offered no apologies for his or his wife's accusations
of the interim government's complicity over disappeared funds.
Nor has he even alluded to any critical comments on his gubernatorial
term. After all, the 'Rio War' didn't start during the nine months
he was out office.
Instead, the populism chants away. On
May 3, during his weekly Saturday radio show, he resumed accusations
of Benedita da Silva's interim government. "The PT government
in Rio was not good. It has to admit this. It collapsed. The
governor was weak. I don't know why Benedita was not prepared
or why her people weren't good." He went on to accuse Benedita
for mismanaging the public funds that she claimed from the outset
no longer existed by the time of taking office.
The fact that the press has all but eluded
Garotinho's lack of accountability, ecstatically reveling in
their pastiche of "The New Sheriff's Come to Town",
makes then even blinder regarding the second point: predictions
over political futures. One need only look south to Argentina.
Carlos Menem, the former president accused
of setting up slush funds, is whom most economists consider to
be the cause of Argentina's collapse. This did not prevent him
from winding up in the runoff election, closer to returning to
the presidential office every week than to the jail cell he deserves.
Even the Financial Times--typically filing social welfare
under smart financial jibe, and never failing to hob-knob with
the Third World's corrupt elite--lamented his having to wait
another round before returning to the Pink Palace in Buenos Aires.
At 41 years of age, nothing can count
out Garotinho for the future--not failure as security secretary,
nor possible corruption charges. Thinking in such a way would
is too logical, too reasonable for the political world in which
the Garotinhos thrive.
What will he now do that hasn't already
been tried? Mr. Quintal's comments on April 22 after a police
van had been ambushed by twenty gunmen in a Rio suburb made it
clear that the government is using means contrary to its stated
intentions. Mrs. Matheus has for weeks repeated that her government
refuses to negotiate with criminals. Yet Mr. Quintal warned that
were the twenty assailants not found by the following Sunday,
he would "be forced to use other means at his disposal."
Surely he wasn't referring to Garotinho's appointment.
Who was Quintal addressing this ultimatum
to? The assailants or drug lords? If the latter, it's clear the
government has been negotiating with them. Only a fool would
believe that the imprisoned gangster 'Fernandinho Beira-Mar'
is orchestrating this war alone.
GOD AND THE STATE
IN THE SOUTH-NORTH
The case of Rio de Janeiro is a spectacular
mix of corruption and the scourge of the underground pot and
cocaine industry. Administrative transparency has been the case
now for the fourth consecutive government at the federal level.
But Rio's political leadership has only sunk further into secrecy
and ineptness. Matched with the wealth generated from the cocaine
industry, the state approaches ever so slowly the national security
model of the American war on drugs. It is also inheriting its
failures.
For one thing, the best way to fight
cocaine is to legalize it. The fact that marijuana is still illegal
in North America should be deemed a crime against reason. No
amount of money and legal action is going to curb the taste of
the bad rush that Northern upper middle classes get from snorting
the white stuff. But Colombia and Brazil would have far less
blood spilling in the streets were the North to come to terms
with their aphrodisiacs. No single substance more completely
portrays the symbolic and financial capital crushing of the poor
than cocaine. Where power is most deprived, in ghettoes and favelas,
the drug is the cheapest--leading to yet another generation of
youth to burn their lives away by smoking crack.
The only sensible voice on this matter
came from the Folha de Sao Paulo. In an editorial published
last January it called for legalization of cocaine as the most
effective remedy to cut organized crime down. Legalize cocaine
must be repeated not only through the streets of Rio de Janeiro
and Sao Paulo, but also in Miami, L.A. and D.C. Legalize it--by
which I mean subject it to the tough regulations by which alcohol
is let to trace its destiny in free market economics.
Alcohol is far more tested an addictive
aphrodisiac than is cocaine, let alone pot. Legalize cocaine--but
barring stimulations to its consumption through commercial ads.
Legalize it--and ban the bloody arm of narcotics: fire arms,
i.e. weapons of minority destruction. The blood and repression
of the poor can no longer be the currency exchanged for the pleasures
of the American and European rich. It is time to quit pointing
to poverty as cause for the coke industry. Wealth is no less
a cause of moral depravity than is disparity.
But behind the appearances of sophisticated
discourse and designer clothing, when the 'model' classes and
societies project only corruption and lawlessness as their real
trade, what should lead the rest of society and the world to
ethical behavior?
Given that the model society projected
to Brazil today is the USA, criticism made by its journalists
and pundits of Latin America often seem gratuitous when lacking
full exposure of their own country's flaws and crimes. After
all with the world's highest GDP, nearing 10 trillion dollars,
the social record of the USA is contemptible. Fifteen percent
of its population lives below the poverty line. Over any given
two-year period, roughly one-third of the population spends some
time without basic medical insurance. The American public education
system is in shambles, even were we to focus only on science
teaching. The production of American pop culture, steeped as
it is in violence, seeps the general population's meager wealth
into a suicidal thrill of increased idiocy.
This matched with the decrease of middle
class wealth from its prime in the 1960s makes an outside observer
wonder in amazement at where the trillions lie and how they get
recycled into the community--if they do at all. Median real wage
is only 7 percent higher now than it was in 1979. Whereas top
income increases since 1970 soared to 500 times that of the average
worker's wage. Even Wall Street's annus horribilis of
2002 still garnered median executive pay a 14 percent boost.
Citing the US as a model, contrary to what many Americans are
led by their corporate media to believe, is done not to offend
alone, but to insist on how that country could be so much more.
Yet the middle classes, following decades
of disparaging aristocratic-retrograde descriptions of intellectual
mediocrity and cultural ineptness, are now in a struggle to maintain
their economic and political power within democracies. This point
just doesn't seem to want to take hold. Economic class differences
are being wiped over by the political tastes of a fabricated
"investor class", with a supposed disgust of government
spending. What do these pundits call warfare, international intervention,
the IMF and World Bank, homeland security and the entire defense
industry? Are these sectors of the economy supposed to exemplify
free market behavior, whereas only education, health and culture
are to be damned from government spending?
Regarding southern mimicking of the northern
model, and its incumbent failures, in the eyes of the North the
South may just as well be blamed for the problem. Not that this
is either new or surprising. As Tarik Ali writes, all foreign
news in the US "is exaggeratedly simplified and reduced
to a state of preoccupying incomprehensibility." Most dramatic
is how the tone filing corruption and inequality at the place
mat of the South's door alone is present even in the liberal
press. Marc Cooper's recent piece on Brazil and the PT in The
Nation simply fails to address the question of the powerlessness
of the middle classes to curb violence and impose economic reform
while the elite's political will--sheltered behind high-tech
defenses--is more intent on crushing its advances in the legislative
realm.
With a population bred on simplifications
and reductions, whether in North, Central or South America, religion
is given a clear path to populate its celestial doctrines. The
disturbing fact is that few if any governments under religious
jurisdiction recognize accountability as a primary principle
of governance. Many North Americans of strong religious persuasions
don't seem to be concerned about mingling God with the polity.
Right-wing propagandists are all too ready to reassure them in
their philosophical carelessness.
Depending on one's faith, God's actions
on human life may be more or less direct. In political atheism,
it is existent only as a ploy. The Bush government, consisting
of the wealthiest and most tightly-knit corporate group ever
assembled in the capital, seems to think that God's effect is
more direct, that God is on America's side. Surely, when curtailing
ethical norms and legal prescriptions on the most spectacular
accumulation of wealth within America's richest and the most
spectacular plunge in Wall Street, the middle class--denying
the pathetic disgust of its own powerlessness--seems to prefer
explaining the successes of the rich by divine right alone.
When it comes to being accountable for
public service, God is not the one to blame for the failings
of human beings. This is the veil systematically eluding the
Religion/State cluster clan. Humans may be a fallible species,
as with every living being destined to die. But we also have
the power to establish laws by which our actions will be evaluated
and judged. This is the philosophy the Enlightenment broke into
the theocratic political culture of the Western world, and which
the Church so vehemently fought against. It has also become the
history lesson our democracies no longer see a point in teaching.
Certainly it makes for boring reading
when the history lessons most Americans get come from the diatribe
of Fox News, or Brazilians from the innumerable novelas on Globo.
Religions have made inroads to politics worldwide, consolidating
themselves for generations to come. Today America with its fundamentalist
minority holding the reigns of power is clearly akin to fundamentalist
regimes of other stripes. Only the blind would claim that, contrary
to their fundamentalism, ours is of a good kind.
No one is arguing that secular states
are foolproof. We're merely saying that trying a culprit in court,
especially when they're a big fish, is a lot easier when God
is not in the judge's seat. Ask your local mafia don what he
thinks of that as he kneels in prayer to the Almighty at the
church to which he so generously gives tax-deductible donations.
While wealthy northerners post the honesty of their credence
time and time again, Cariocas of all walks of life must ask themselves
seriously whether submission is part of God's will, or that of
the crooks speaking in His name.
Norman Madarasz
is a Canadian researcher in philosophy and the social sciences.
He contributes regularly to CounterPunch. He lives in Rio de
Janeiro, and welcomes comments at nmphdiol@yahoo.ca.
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