Brazil’s Political Upheaval: Too many greased palms makes for one sticky situation

Leo House

Black and white, good and evil. Corrupt president Dilma Rousseff and her crooked communist cronies at the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) cling to power in the face of mass protests calling for her impeachment. Mainstream coverage of the Brazilian political crisis has been overly simplistic, and some even argue that this is purposeful misinformation, not naïveté.

Brazil is undergoing its worst financial downturn in decades, but it’s important to understand that crises of all sorts are piling up.

In March the World Health Organisation revealed that in Brazil a suspected 6,480 babies had been affected by the Zika epidemic.

Meanwhile fraudulent state oil giant Petrobras is beginning to crumble under the weight of its own Wolf of Wall Street-esque scandal. The company’s officials have pegged the overall total bribes given at nearly $3 billion. The anti-corruption investigation, named ‘Operation Car-Wash’, has revealed that bricks of cash were delivered with extravagant gifts of ‘Rolex watches, $3,000 bottles of wine, yachts, helicopters and prostitutes’. Petrobras has lost more than half its value over the last year. It was one of Brazil’s largest financial products, sold worldwide in emerging-market bonds, and its downfall has caused a huge international loss of faith in Brazilian market stability. Operation Car-Wash has also revealed that $200 million of those bribes were pocketed by members of the ruling PT. Thus the economic crisis feeds the flames of political scandal, just months before the global spotlight is turned to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics in August.

If we take a second look, it becomes clear that the loudest cries for impeachment come not from the masses, but the élite and upper middle class. Brazil’s strongest business lobby, the São Paulo Federation of Industries (FIESP), currently has its headquarters flashing the national anti-Dilma colours yellow and green, and the message ‘Resign now!’ Polls showed that the people who have gathered beneath to protest are significantly older, whiter and richer than the wider population; 40% were over 51 years old, 77% had higher education and 37% earned over £2,200 per month.

It should also be noted that FIESP’s vast sphere of influence covers media conglomerate Globo Group, and the two biggest newspapers in São Paulo. Dilma and the PT are now feeling their full smearing power. People are even avoiding wearing red, afraid being attacked as pro-government socialists.

It could be argued that historical processes are at work here; South America has recently seen a string of political upheavals that ousted long-standing left-wing leaders and brought the centre-right into power. In Venezuela Hugo Chavez’ successor Nicolas Maduro and his United Socialist Party lost control of the National Assembly for the first time in 17 years, to a landslide centre-right opposition victory. Last year in Argentina, president-elect Mauricio Macri pledged that, after the first change in power in 12 years, he would erase Cristina Fernández’s centre-left legacy. In Bolivia, Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism party lost a referendum to amend the constitution and extend presidential terms. After 13 years of PT supremacy, this generational shift seems to be catching up with Brazil.

The key difference, however, is that in Venezuela and Argentina these transitions occurred via elections. In Brazil this change threatens to happen undemocratically, as Dilma’s opponents are agitating for the dramatic and extralegal means of impeachment. FIESP has a history of anti-left sentiment and political intervention. Adriano Diogo, chairman of the Sao Paulo Truth Commission, explains that: 

“The same way that back in 1964, FIESP financed coup-mongers to organise and throw down elected president Joao Goulart, with arms, buying union leaders and organising free trips for Armed Forces officers, now FIESP is allied with the speaker of the Lower House Cunha in his attempt to throw down Dilma Rousseff”

In 1964 FIESP’s media and business tycoons helped usher in a 21-year military dictatorship, under which Dilma Rousseff was captured and tortured for revolutionary guerrilla activity. 52 years later Brazil’s moneyed right-wing interests are once again wading into the political scene, to challenge a political opponent that has always come out on top in elections. This time they have armed themselves not with soldiers, but with newspapers and Twitter accounts - this change in political weaponry reveals much about how Brazilian democracy has matured.

The crux of the matter is that Dilma seems to be the lesser of innumerable evils; nearly all alternative leaders are embroiled in the same, or an even greater, level of corruption scandal. There is currently no solid evidence of her direct involvement in the Petrobras kickback scheme. If she were impeached, however, her Vice President Michel Temer could not serve as a replacement – he too is allegedly involved in the Petrobras bribery. The leader of the opposition and the impeachment movement, the evangelical and anti-abortion Eduardo Cunha, is even more unfit to govern by these standards. He is subject to multiple active criminal investigations, and has been found to have multiple secret Swiss bank accounts holding alleged bribe money. 

The hypocrisy is laughable: five members of Cunha’s impeachment commission are being criminally investigated themselves, most notably Paulo Maluf. He has been unable to leave Brazil due to an Interpol arrest warrant and a sentence to 3 years in French prison for money laundering.

So, predictably, things are not as black and white as they first seem. Corruption seems to have infected every organ of the Brazilian state, to the point that one is barely fit to judge another. One thing is for sure: Dilma’s impeachment would be a serious subversion of Brazilian democracy, orchestrated chiefly by the ruling classes.

Who Benefits from the International Arms Trade?

Oliver Ramsay Gray

The arms trade is big business, with global military spending last year totalling just over $1.5 trillion. Although the (legal) international arms market was only a fraction of this, at $83 billion, this still represents a significant market for potential profits. But who really benefits from the international arms trade, and what about the non-financial costs and benefits?

The clearest beneficiaries of the arms trade are, unsurprisingly, arms companies themselves; last year, the largest ten in the US and Europe had revenues of $203 billion (excluding non-military sales), the lion’s share of the international arms business. These international revenues, as David Cameron never fails to insist, contribute jobs and economic prosperity to the exporting country. For instance, the 1985 Al-Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia has brought the UK $45 billion already and could bring in another $40 billion. However, the picture is not as simple as that. A shift in resources and demand over the long-term towards non-military economic sectors would likely bring about greater increases in standards of living. Although a challenging aim, this holds the greatest potential benefits to any exporter and can be seen in the past, for example when military spending fell by over 1% of global GDP in the years following the end of the Cold War. We must recognise that although the arms industry will always benefit from the international arms trade, the idea that the exporting nation inevitably benefits as well, as David Cameron persistently argues, is flawed in the long-term view.

Arms exports can also be used as a political tool, another means by which a state can strengthen strategic relations, bring others under its sphere of influence and project its power into other parts of the world. This is visible in Russia’s relationship with Syria, which has been tied up with the sale of missile defence systems and fighter jets – in part, a means to increase Syria’s dependency on Russia. Recent years in Syria serve to show how these exports have also helped Russia secure its strategic aims in the country by buttressing the Assad regime and so have worked as a type of limited intervention (though this was of course escalated last year). Clearly the exporter benefits in numerous ways here, as does the does the direct recipient, though the picture muddies when wider considerations are taken into account. Was Assad’s strengthening a “beneficial” development?

Arms sales are well known to increase the frequency and intensity of conflict. Even the legal international arms trade is closely tied up in this damaging situation and the costs of conflict are huge in both human and economic terms. This hurts not only those directly involved in conflict but has damaging knock-on impacts around the world. Although war might benefit its few victors politically, its costs are huge to everyone else involved. However, with the current international arms trade system the actions of one state can do little to affect the legal supply or demand for arms. Thus, in terms of the benefits to the exporter laid out above it makes sense for arms exporters to not take a unilaterally moral position. Of course, in the longer term, the benefit shifts towards a situation in which the supply of arms is restricted. However, this can only be achieved at a multi-state level rather than by one state taking it upon themselves.

We can see that it is overwhelmingly arms companies and, to a lesser extent, exporting states who benefit from the international arms trade. The situation is more complex when looking at recipients and considering the wider world. What does seem apparent, however, is that it would be counter to an individual state’s interests to clamp down on its own arms exports unilaterally when, without multi-state agreement, the benefits would shift to other exporters while the damaging impacts of supplying arms remain.

A Child of Circumstance: the Life, Death and Rejuvenation of Nigeria’s Biafra

Hattie Goldstaub

Today’s title quotes Biafran president Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu’s assessment of the short-lived secessionist state situated in Nigeria’s south-east region from 1967 to 1970, whose existence was dominated by devastating civil war. With a resurgence in pro-Biafran demonstrations throughout Nigeria in recent months, examination of these circumstances and Biafra’s short history seems apt in order to explain the calls for a breakaway state. 

The colonisation and decolonisation of Nigeria by the British created and maintained a patchwork nation, pieced together by an alien will that ignored cultural, religious and ethnic distinctions. Nigeria as we know it is a state beset by divisions: a Muslim majority of Hausa and Fulani people in the north and a Christian majority of Yoruba, Ijaw and Igbo in the south. After its formal independence in 1960, the country was shaken by military coups in 1966. The first of these was viewed as an Igbo operation and killed the incumbent Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, while the second was a direct reaction to the first, led by Muslim officers and resulting in a backlash of pogroms against Igbos in the north where at least 30,000 were brutally murdered. After an attempt by the new head-of-state, Yakubu Gowon – a northerner, albeit not a Muslim and not of Hausa or Fulani descent – to create a Nigerian federation of twelve states, with the Igbo people concentrated in the central east away from control of southern oil, the then south-eastern governor Ojukwu announced the secession of his region from the rest of the country in May 1967. This was the inception of Biafra.

Although Biafra and its predominantly Igbo population of 13.5 million intended a peaceful split, Nigeria could not allow this due to the aggregation of oil in the Niger Delta, then under Biafran ownership. It declared war. Despite its greatly inferior military capability Biafra fought back bravely and held the British and Soviet-supported Nigeria off for the best part of three years. During this time, Biafra was only recognised as a state by Gabon, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Zambia. Much of the rest of the world remained silent over Biafra’s plight, although international aid efforts intensified after a Nigerian blockade created a chronic shortage of food and medicine to the region, aiming to starve it into submission. Nigeria’s Federal Commissioner for Finance, Obafemi Awolowo, stated: “All is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war.” This tactic broke Biafra, which surrendered to Nigeria in January 1970, after at least a million deaths of both civilians and combatants. When previously Biafran Igbo citizens tried to return to their pre-war lives in the north, they found their houses and jobs occupied by northerners. A Bank of Nigeria ruling that Biafran supplies of pre-war Nigerian currency were now defunct rendered the savings of many Biafrans worthless. Regardless of pre-war earnings, each Biafran was guaranteed only 20 Nigerian pounds. Despite Gowon’s promise of an equal peace and his use of the slogan "no victor, no vanquished", the post civil war situation did little to appease or even to help those who had fought for Biafra.

So what remains of the Biafran movement now? After decades of official silence, a pro-Biafran secession organisation – the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) – was established in 1999 and regularly calls for the United Nations (UN) to reinstate and recognise Biafra as an independent nation. Despite the non-violent nature of its demonstrations, it has been declared treasonous and aggressive by the Nigerian government, with former President Goodluck Jonathan terming it extremist in 2013, comparing it to Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. Its leader Ralph Uwazuruike was arrested for treason in 2005; despite bail, his trial is due to continue. Similarly, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement, headed by UK-based Igbo, Nnamdi Kanu, has set up a Radio Biafra station and campaigned for the state’s recreation. However, upon a visit to Nigeria in December 2015, Kanu was arrested for treason and is currently detained by the Nigerian government. Peaceful protests calling for his release have been dispersed and violently repressed by the Nigerian police and military: according to the South-East Based Coalition of Human Rights Organisations, 80 members of IPOB were killed by Nigerian forces between August 2015 and February 2016. Such demonstrations have once more led to an aggressive reaction against Igbo civilians, even those not involved in pro-Biafran demonstrations. Despite apparently flagrant human rights abuses by the Nigerian government, its denial of these has been more or less accepted by multilateral organisations such as the UN and the European Union. 

Although the possibility of a renewed Biafran secession in Nigeria remains remote, the tensions and divisions that caused a civil war in the 1960s are clearly still present, as are the motivations for a breakaway Igbo state. The international community, particularly those who are responsible for such a state of affairs, have a moral duty to disregard their economic motivations and pay greater attention to such a volatile and unjust situation.

Doubts over the upcoming Rio Olympics

Hubert Cruz

The International Olympic Committee met on Wednesday (2 March) to discuss a series of concerns over the Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that are scheduled to take place this August. The ongoing Zika virus outbreak featured on the agenda. It is estimated that up to 1.5 million people in Brazil have contracted the mosquito-borne virus, which is widely believed to cause brain abnormalities in babies, and health experts fear the surge of tourists during the Olympics would propel the spread.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention of the US has already taken an unprecedented step to advise pregnant women not to attend the Rio Olympics. This has led to worries that anxieties over the virus would worsen the Games’ dormant ticket sales. Only 47% of the 7.5 million tickets have been sold so far, but the organising committee is confident that there would be a late surge in ticket sales, especially in the domestic market across cities of Brazil.

However, as Brazil faces its worst recession since the 1930s, the organising committee has made substantial reductions to the Games budget in order to save $500 million. There have also been delays in construction projects, including a subway line that connects the Olympic Park with other parts of the city. Faced with a multitude of concerns, the President of the organising committee, Carlos Nuzman, dismissed the impact of budget cuts and delays, and promised that the Games would be “absolutely fantastic”.

Are you concerned by the problems surrounding the Rio Olympics? Do you think these problems would be resolved in time for the start of the Games? Whatever your view, send it in - via Twitter, Facebook or our website. Check out the articles below to find out more about the issue:

Boston Globe – Less than half the tickets for Rio Olympics have been sold

The New York Times – As Olympics Near and Zika Spreads, No Talk of a Plan B

The Guardian – Rio 2016 president plays down Olympic Games fears

Obama’s bid to close Guantanamo

Hubert Cruz

On Tuesday (23 February), President Obama announced a plan to close the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, and urged Congress to support his proposal. Guantanamo was opened by the Bush administration in 2002 to detain foreign terror suspects, and has held 780 suspected militants to date. The facility has been criticised for violating the rights of detainees since most of them have been held without charges, and there were also reports of torture and abuse in the compound.

President Obama assumed office in 2009 with a major pledge to close Guantanamo. However, he has only made incremental progress since then by relocating prisoners that were considered to be minimal security risks overseas. Currently there are still 91 prisoners in Guantanamo. Under the plan presented to Congress, 35 of them would be transferred to other countries, while the remaining would be held in facilities on US soil with some potentially facing trial.

The President appealed to the Republican-controlled Congress by citing up to $180m in military expenditure could be saved if Guantanamo is closed. He also argues keeping Guantanamo open to be inconsistent with US values, and hurts the country’s reputation and partnerships in the world. Nevertheless, prominent Republicans in Congress have already raised objections to hosting terror suspects on the US mainland. The President has not stated whether he would unilaterally pursue executive action if Congress blocks his plan.

Do you think the US government should close Guantanamo? Is President Obama’s plan feasible? Whatever your view, send it in - via Twitter, Facebook or our website. Below are a few pieces of articles for you to find out more about the issue:

The New York Times – Obama Sends Plan to Close Guantánamo to Congress

The Guardian – ‘No one but himself to blame’: how Obama's Guantánamo plans fell through

Vox – The fatal flaw in Obama’s plan to close Guantanamo Bay