Year 501 Copyright © 1993 by Noam Chomsky. Published by South End Press.
Chapter 7: World Orders Old and New: Latin America Segment 7/17
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5. "A Real American Success Story"

Writing in 1989, Gerald Haines describes the results of more than four decades of US dominance and tutelage as "a real American success story." "America's Brazilian policies were enormously successful," bringing about "impressive economic growth based solidly on capitalism." As for political success, as early as September 1945, when the "testing area" had barely been opened for experiment, Ambassador Berle wrote that "every Brazilian now has available to himself all of the resources available to any American during a political campaign: he can make a speech, hire a hall, circulate a petition, run a newspaper, post handbills, organize a parade, solicit support, get radio time, form committees, organize a political party, and otherwise make any peaceable bid for the suffrage and support of his countrymen" -- just like "any American." We're all equal, one happy family in harmony, which is why government is so responsive to the needs of the people. And so "democratic" -- in the doctrinally approved sense of the term, referring to unquestioned business rule.

This triumph of capitalist democracy stands in dramatic contrast to the failures of Communism, though admittedly the comparison is unfair -- to the Communists, who had nothing remotely like the favorable conditions of this "testing area" for capitalism, with its huge resources, no foreign enemies, free access to international capital and aid, and benevolent US guidance for half a century. And the success is real. From the early years, US investments and profits boomed as "Washington intensified Brazil's financial dependence on the United States, influenced its government's decisions affecting the allocation of resources, and nudged Brazil into the U.S.-dominated trading system," Haines writes.

Within Brazil, the "modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism" also brought great benefits, though to understand them, a bit more precision is necessary. There are two very different Brazils, Peter Evans wrote as the miracle peaked in the 1970s: "the fundamental conflict in Brazil is between the 1, or perhaps 5, percent of the population that comprises the elite and the 80 percent that has been left out of the `Brazilian model' of development." The first Brazil, modern and westernized, has benefited greatly from the success story of capitalism. The second is sunk in the deepest misery. For three-quarters of the population of this "mighty realm of limitless potentialities," the conditions of Eastern Europe are dreams beyond reach, another triumph of the Free World.

The "real American success story" was spelled out in a 1986 study commissioned by the new civilian government. It presented "a by-now familiar picture of Brazil," Skidmore observes: "although boasting the eighth largest economy in the Western world, Brazil fell into the same category as the less developed African or Asian countries when it came to social welfare indices"; this was the result of "two decades of a free hand for the technocrats" and the approved neoliberal doctrines, which "increased the cake" while leaving "one of the most unequal income distributions in the world" and "appalling deficiencies" in health and welfare generally. A UN Report on Human Development (measuring education, health, etc.) ranked Brazil in 80th place, near Albania, Paraguay, and Thailand. Shortly after, in October 1990, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) announced that more than 40 percent of the population (almost 53 million people) are hungry. The Brazilian Health Ministry estimates that hundreds of thousands of children die of hunger every year. Brazil's educational system ranks above only Guinea-Bissau and Bangladesh, according to 1990 UNESCO data.12

The "success story" is summarized in a May 1992 Americas Watch report: "Rich in natural resources and with a large industrial base, the country has the largest debt in the developing world and an economy that is entering its second decade of acute crisis. Tragically, Brazil is not able to provide an adequate standard of living for its 148 million people, two-thirds of whom were malnourished in 1985, their misery caused and compounded by lack of access to the land" in a country with "one of the highest degrees of concentration of land ownership in the world," and one of the most lopsided distributions of income as well.

Starvation and disease are rampant, along with slave labor by contract workers who are brutally treated or simply murdered if they seek to escape before working off their debts. In one of the nine cases of rural slavery unearthed by the Catholic Church Land Ministry Commission in the first few months of 1992, 4000 slave workers were found extracting charcoal in an agribusiness project established and subsidized by the military government as a "reforestation project" (of which nothing operates but the charcoal pits). In haciendas, slave laborers work 16 hours a day without pay and are frequently beaten and tortured, sometimes murdered, with almost complete impunity. Almost half the farmland is owned by 1 percent of farmers; government emphasis on export crops, following the precepts of the foreign masters, favors farmers with capital to invest, marginalizing the huge majority even further. In the north and northeast, rich landowners call in gunmen or the military police to burn houses and crops, shoot livestock, murder unionists, priests, nuns or lawyers trying to defend peasant rights, and drive the villagers into shantytowns or to the Amazon, where they are then blamed for deforestation as they clear land in a desperate attempt to survive. Brazilian medical researchers describe the population of the region as a new subspecies: "Pygmies," with 40 percent the brain capacity of humans -- the result of severe malnutrition in a region with much fertile land, owned by large plantations that produce cash crops for export.13

Brazil is a world center of such triumphs as child slavery, with some 7 million children working as slaves and prostitutes, exploited, overworked, deprived of health and education, "or just deprived of their childhood," an International Labor Organization study estimates. The luckier children can look forward to work for drug traffickers in exchange for glue to sniff to "make the hunger go away." The figure worldwide is estimated at hundreds of millions, "one of the grimmer ironies of the age," George Moffett comments. Had the grim result been found in Eastern Europe it would have been a proof of the bestiality of the Communist enemy; since it is the normal situation in Western domains, it is only irony, the result of "endemic third-world poverty...exacerbated as financially strapped governments have cut expenditures for education," all with no cause.

Brazil also wins the prize for torture and murder of street children by the security forces -- "a process of extermination of young people" according to the head of the Justice Department in Rio de Janeiro (Hélio Saboya), targeting the 7-8 million street children who "beg, steal, or sniff glue" and "for a few glorious moments forget who or where they are" (London Guardian correspondent Jan Rocha). In Rio, a congressional commission identified 15 death squads, most of them made up of police officers and financed by merchants. Bodies of children murdered by death squads are found outside metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture, riddled with bullet holes. Street girls are forced to work as prostitutes. The Legal Medical Institute recorded 427 children murdered in Rio alone in the first ten months of 1991, most by death squads. A Brazilian parliamentary study released in December 1991 reported that 7000 children had been killed in the past four years.14

Truly a tribute to our magnificence and the "modern scientific methods of development based solidly on capitalism" in a territory as much "worth exploitation" as any in the world.

We should not underestimate the scale of the achievement. It took real talent to create a nightmare in a country as favored and richly-endowed as Brazil. In the light of such triumphs, it is understandable that the ruling class of the new imperial age should be dedicated with such passion to helping others share the wonders, and that the ideological managers should celebrate the accomplishment with such enthusiasm and self-praise.


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12 Skidmore; Evans, 4. Mario de Carvalho Garnero, chairman of Brasilinvest Informations and Telecommunications, O Estado de São Paulo, Aug. 8 (LANU, Sept. 1990); Latin America Commentary, October, 1990. CIIR, Brazil. On the broader context, see DD, ch. 7.

13 Americas Watch, Struggle for Land; Brazilian journalist José Pedro Martins, Latinamerica press, June 4, 1992; George Monbiot, Index on Censorship (London), May 1992; Isabel Vincent, G&M, Dec. 17, 1991. Generally, see Hecht and Cockburn, Fate.

14 Dimerstein, Brazil; Blixen, "`War' waged on Latin American street kids," Latinamerica press, November 7, 1991; Gabriel Canihuante, Ibid., May 14, 1992; Moffett, CSM, July 21, 1992; Maité Pinero, Le Monde diplomatique, August 1992.