"Brazilian society is becoming increasing unequal and unjust There is a great deal of need and millions of Brazilians are affected in their daily lives and their citizenship is damaged In addition to chronically low salaries, we now face unemployment in dangerous proportions and threats to labour rights won over the years t These are some of the reflections included in the message released by the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops at the end of their 36th General Assembly." The following text is an excerpt of the document prepared to guide the analysis and which was published in Crie No. 367 in July 1998.
"The challenges we face in Brazil today"
I what direction and in what sense is Brazil's social reality being transformed today? What effects have our actions had on the changes we would like to see in order to contribute to the con-struction of a society that is more just and fraternal? Of all the effort made by the Church along these lines, what is remembered today by so many men, women and institutions of good faith? Was it all in vain?
A reality is always made up of lights and shad-ows. At times we see only what is in the shadows, with doubts and dangers. At other times we identify with the lights, turning out attention to paths that lead to our overcoming problems.
Difficulties for an objective vision
But it is difficulty to have an objective vision of Brazilian reality. This difficult is due to two kinds of factors. On the one hand, reality itself leads to a kind of error in perception. On the other hand, those to whom we have given a mandate to find solutions to our problems, our political leaders, do everything possible to keep us optimistic.
An enormous market
What happens, and what tricks us, is that the mi-nority of the population that lives well or relatively well is huge and hides the other. We are talking about 50 million people, the population of an entire nation, such as France, one of the developed world's powers. These 50 million people allow for a strong economy to function.
Within this population there is a great deal of heterogeneity. The polling company Datafolha divides Brazilians into five major categories. The first three categories correspond to these 50 million people: The "é1ite", who make up eight per cent of the society and have university degrees; the "fighters", who do not have university degrees but aspire to be élites make up two per cent; the "neither poor, nor rich", who have some level of formal education and a regular income make up 14 per cent; the "decadents" who make up 13 per cent; and the "excluded" who today make up 62 per cent of the population.
But despite this heterogeneity, the 50 million who form the "included" are a massive market, which is big enough to afford large, luxury cars and pay US$ 10,000 for the pleasure of attending the World Cup soccer championship in France. And because Brazil is the world champion in the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, we have the second largest fleet worldwide of private yachts, which are only for the super rich. We are second only to the United States.
An unseen reality
Now, if this minority sector is big, then the majority sector, the "decadents", who live poorly, and the "excluded", who barely survive, is even bigger We are talking about 100 million people - double the minority - who are also part of the Brazilian population. We just do not see them. They are tuck away in the big cities or in the shantytowns, in the rural areas that go unattended and unnoticed.
The newspapers, magazines, television programs and advertising fill our days, our eyes, and our attention; they are aimed at the tastes and needs in more or less a refined way, of the 50 million who are well-off or middle-class. The tastes of the 100 million are manipulated through soap operas, soccer games and programs of poor taste, but their needs are unmet. It is an immense number of men, women, young people and children who correspond to the "ex-hausted and humble who are like sheep without a shep-herd" and who merited Jesus' compassion. They are 100 million people who are forgotten on a daily ba-sis. They are classified by the people with money as "useless to the world", or as "disposable", a term used in some Latin American countries today.
It is as if they did not exist, because it is assumed that it would be impossible to "integrate" them in the short term into the consumer society created for the 50 million. While this does not happen, they will sur-vive off the crumbs they are tossed. Many people think like this, but they do not have the courage to say it. There are also sectors that consider this population extremely useful and do not forget them at election time: They are millions of voters who will give politi-cal power to those who know how to exploit their needs at the time. From these classes also comes the demand for work, which helps keep salaries low.
There will not be a government in Brazil capable of resolving only the social debts that burden us. But confronting the truth and calling on people to mobi-lize in order to overcome the poverty and misery of 100 million people demands courage and strength. Churchill, when his country faced the peril of Hitler's advance, promised the English people only "blood, sweat and tears". Not all politicians are statesmen.
A second way the government always manages to remain optimistic and always tries to play down the "defeatists" - we are used to official complaints about each important Church document - comes from a political option that subjects us to the demands of the international economy and keeps the 'Real' (Brazil-ian currency) overvalued, among other reasons, for electoral possibilities. This option makes us depend-ent on foreign investors, but their dollars only come to Brazil if our government, in addition to being cooperative, is capable of maintaining a climate of sta-bility and keeping things under control. Any sign of lack of confidence makes these nervous capitalists leave the country as quickly as they arrived. The Cen-tral Bank's statistics cannot keep 100 million excluded people from existing.
The Brazil we need to see
When we analyze the Brazil of today we need to choose an option: What Brazil do we want to "see" and through which perspective do we want to see it?
If the Church wants to be a prophetic voice of those who do not have a voice, following her path without fear of contradicting the discourse of political power, we need to see reality from the perspective of the 100 million excluded, with whom our Bishops, priests, re-ligious brothers and sisters and laity are in permanent contact through social pastoral commissions. It is not about those who live in protected palaces, but those in rural villages and indigenous peoples, who live dif-ficult lives in the shantytowns, in ghettos, in the streets, in our abandoned public hospitals, in our deteriorat-ing schools. It is the tough reality of drugs, adult and child prostitution, slave labour, police violence, un-employment. One of the generals who used to rule the country inadvertently said during the days of the so-called "economic miracle": "the economy is going well, but the people are doing poorly". These are the people we need to see, these are the people we need to serve. This is the general feeling among people today, the negative side of Brazil today. The key problem is unemployment.
Unemployment is the central problem
The seriousness of the unemployment problem in Brazil was already highlighted by choosing it as the theme of next year's Lenten Fraternal Campaign. This is not the place to offer detailed statistics. The government and its critics often clash over statistics. They often compare indices that simply cannot be compared. Differences in the concept of employment or in the geographic limitations of the collection of facts ne-cessarily make the number different.
Statistics can be manipulated according to the in-terests of whoever is presenting them. The Campaign Manual will delve into our knowledge on the many aspects of this issue. What we are interested in here is simply to point out that this problem will get more and more serious. And this is recognized in official statistics: the unemployment rate, the joint statistics of all the metropolitan areas, jumped from 3.9 per cent in 1990 to 8 per cent today. And one institution, an official agency in Silo Paulo, stated that open and hidden unemployment in the city in February reached " 17.2 per cent, a record for this research that began in 1985 and it will continue to climb".
There is an effective loss in the population's buy-ing power as a result of this increasing unemploy-ment. There is an increase in noncompliance with con-tracts and incidents of people writing bad checks, as well as difficulties in paying rents. There is even a new social category for this, the "decadents" to which we have already referred.
Unemployment, which leads to the classic mecha-nism of labour supply outstripping demand, is leading to lower wages, which were already frozen. Sur-vival strategies have diversified. The informal sector is growing in every city, which is combined with contraband and corruption among those in charge of con-trolling it. The doors are open to violence as a way of meeting needs.
Drug trafficking is spreading in rural and urban areas because it is profitable and because the State presence is disappearing. The illusion created by the thousands of kinds of lotteries, combined with the hope of making easy money - with the élite as the exam-ple - opens the way for an influx of casinos. Pres-sure for casinos also comes from those who need ways to launder money.
A country of unemployed people is a country where "survival of the fittest" reigns. Not even soli-darity, to which the poor so often give witness, is enough to hold off the deterioration of the social fab-ric, beginning with the family unit, which gets worse as unemployment spreads. Confronting this problem is necessary if we want to reverse the negative trends in our society.
Agrarian reform
The main obstacle to finding a solution to unem-ployment is the lack of attention the government has paid to agrarian reform. The ministry in charge of this reform tried to show the work it was doing in a document that the minister delivered to the Vatican. He has received a letter encouraging him from the Vatican. But this encouragement calls on the Brazil-ian Government to reflect on the demands presented in the agrarian reform document prepared by the Pon-tifical Justice and Peace Commission.
It is a demand for social justice, to comply with the social function of land and meeting the needs of the millions of people who are unemployed and put-ting to good use millions of hectares of unproductive land.
Nevertheless, the government has dedicated itself to addressing problems as they arise, such as the land occupations or "tension points", and leading to the so-called "expropriation industry", in which the price of land purchased by the government is inflated at the moment of the sale.
The logic of the economic model not only ignores the possibility of small scale production, but forces this sector to disappear or reduces it to subsistence level. It would not be surprising if there were new restrictions on access to the Rural Social Provision, a conquest within the constitution that offers a wide spectrum of minimum rents for poor rural areas.
We are obviously not talking about an easy task.
We began talking about the need for agrarian reform in the 1940's, at the end of the Vargas dictatorship. Nothing consistent has been done since. Resistance to agrarian reform is strong and old, and while there are some changes in the profile of some opponents, the large land owners literally resist it with all their weap-ons.
The situation is not much different today. Research has found that the majority of Brazilians support land reform and are no longer seared by the arguments of an international communist conspiracy. A large number of people, who have become disillusioned with urban life, are willing to return to the countryside. 'The Lan-dless Movement (MST) and the rural union movement, which organize workers who want to work the land and are the only social movements with effective so-cial power, are gaining ground among workers and legitimacy in the struggle to return to the countryside. There is also a novel approach within the process as the grassroots movements are showing that they are capable of organizing production in their camps and are integrating their agricultural production in the in-dustrial production. Before they had to depend on the insufficient support of State agencies.
On the other hand, it is cheaper, healthier and more manageable creating jobs in the rural areas, and even allows for more exchange between small urban areas than with the big cities. The production in the camps could be an answer to the need to fill the basic food basket of Brazilians, among whom are the 100 mil-lion people who are excluded, instead of having to import food, which is what we currently do. Brazil has a massive amount of unproductive land. An in-crease in the number of small rural properties and the landless people's camps will allow for an increase in output, which will lead to an increase in internal con-sumption and will have a ripple effect on production and employment, and will integrate the camps into the formal economy.
But even with all this evidence our government does not see the link between agrarian reform and the problem of unemployment. A revealing fact is seen in the 10 points of the so-called war against unemploy-ment offered after the 101h March Cabinet meeting: There is not a single word about agrarian reform. In relation to the issue of rural unemployment, there is mention of theoretically reinforcing a program to strengthen family agriculture and support the fruit-producing industry, which is managed by the gi-ant companies....
Ref: LADOC, Vol. XXlX, n. 2, Nov. 1 Dec. 1998.