Brazil president Dilma Rousseff declared last week that the country would welcome refugees “with open arms” and talked of the important role immigration has played in Brazilian history. But can such optimism survive the tensions that surround the issue? 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Surrounded by a withering economic crisis, the billowing Petrobras corruption scandal, a kick-in-the-teeth credit rating downgrade, and even the looming spectre of potential impeachment, Brazil president Dilma Rousseff must have been delighted to be able to send a positive message this week.

“Even in moments of difficulty and crisis, like we’re going through now, we have to welcome refugees with open arms,” she said in a message delivered via social media on Monday, Brazilian Independence Day. “I want to use today to reiterate the willingness of the government to receive those who, expelled from their homelands, want to come here and live, work and contribute to the prosperity and peace of Brazil,” she continued.

Citing the image of the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who was found washed up on a Turkish beach, Rousseff also said that the world was facing a “humanitarian tragedy”.

Official figures say that Brazil is currently home to 2,077 Syrian refugees, representing 25% of the total number of refugees in the country and more, according to a BBC Brazil report, than the USA and a number of European countries have taken in. The number of refugees in Brazil has doubled in the last four years, rising from 4,218 in 2011 to 8,400 today.

The total has been boosted by a government policy to relax entry requirements for Syrian immigrants for “humanitarian reasons”, with those arriving in Brazil no longer needing to provide evidence of employment or means of financial support. In the coming weeks CONARE, the National Committee for Refugees, intends to extend such special conditions, which have been in place since 2013, for a further period.

One city that has taken in refugees is Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third biggest urban area behind Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where, according to local consulate figures, 78 Syrians have arrived this year.

“Today I’m working as a security guard…but I’m happy. The Brazilians have welcomed us with open arms,” Alaa Kassab, a lawyer in his home city of Homs, told the Globo network. Belo Horizonte has been receiving Syrian refugees since 2012, mostly as a result of the work of Father George Rateb Massis of the Sagrado Coração de Jesus church, a Syrian himself, who has lived in Brazil for 15 years.

“They come from the airport with a Brazilian visa. Thank God the government isn’t denying them that. The job market is very limited for them. Even though they are all university graduates, doctors and engineers, the opportunities are very basic,” Massis told Globo.

This latest wave of arrivals is the most recent chapter in Brazil’s long history of immigration, which began with colonisation by the Portuguese, and the forced transport of an estimated 4.9 million African slaves to the country between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the modern sense of the word arrived in the 1820s in the form of large numbers of German migrants, unsettled by political and social upheaval at home and drawn by the lure of a new world in the south Atlantic, filled with vast, untapped areas of verdant farmland. The south of Brazil, where most of them settled, with its mountains and chilly temperatures, would not even have seemed all that far from home. The growth of the coffee industry subsequently created further demand for manpower, propelling more Europeans towards Brazil.

According to the Museu da Imigração in São Paulo, around 5.5 million immigrants arrived in Brazil between 1870 and 1953, from countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Poland. The influences of these arrivals can be felt today, from the stories of the Ukrainian born, naturalised Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and the Germanic architecture found in parts of states such as Espirito Santo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, to the Italian restaurants of the Bixiga neighbourhood in São Paulo and their Japanese counterparts in nearby Liberdade.

Arab immigration to Brazil, mostly from Lebanon and Syria, began in the late 19^th century, with sources estimating that around 140,000 people moved from the Middle East to the country between 1880 and 1969. While there are conflicting opinions about the number of Brazilians of Arab descent today – a 1998 survey by the IBGE research unit found that Arab-Brazilians make up 0.48% of the population, or around one million people, while other sources put the number closer to ten million – there is no doubting the profound influence Arab immigration has had on Brazil.

Comida Arabe restaurants and snack bars selling kibbehs (quibes/kibes) and sfihas (esfihas) are a staple in every Brazilian town and city, with the vast Habib’s chain one of the country’s biggest fast food networks. And many high-profile Brazilians – such as vice-president Michel Temer, whose family originally came from northern Lebanon, renowned author Milton Hatoum, TV presenter Sabrina Sato and actress Juliana Paes – are of Arab descent.

The welcome extended by Brazil towards refugees has not been without its critics, however, with some less globally-minded locals keen to point out the difficulty the country often faces in providing jobs, education and social care for its own citizens, let alone foreigners. “Before opening its arms to refugees, we should look after our own “refugees”, who have to live with violence and poverty,” commented one reader of the Folha de São Paulo coverage of Rousseff’s speech.

Tensions have risen too over the numbers of Haitian migrants in Brazil, with an argument breaking out between the governments of the entry point state of Acre in the north of the country, which lacks the infrastructure to deal with the volume of arrivals, and São Paulo, where the immigrants frequently end up.

And the kind of hostility and resentment that often surrounds the subject of migrants and refugees in the countries of the EU reared its ugly head a few weeks ago with the shooting of six Haitians by a man with a pellet gun in the centre of São Paulo, with the shooter reported to have shouted “you stole our jobs” after pulling the trigger.

“We Brazilians are a nation formed by people from a wide variety of origins, who today live in peace,” said Rousseff, when describing the country’s current stance on the refugee issue. With such tensions likely to grow as more and more immigrants arrive in the country, however, it is to be hoped that Brazil’s arms will remain open to refugees for as long as possible.

Brazilians’ love for soccer has been exploited by crooks, dictators, and dirty politicians for decades. Above, dictator Emilio Médici celebrates after his country’s 1970 World Cup victory.

By Mauricio Savarese

When former Brazilian soccer boss José Maria Marin was arrested in Switzerland at the end of May, most fans here just knew him as the old guy that stole a medal from a teenage player in 2012. His predecessor, Ricardo Teixeira, was a much more famous figure, famously involved in various corruption scandals. But as the media dug deeper into the 83-year-old Marin’s career, it became clear that the frail man who chaired Brazil’s football confederation (the CBF) during last year’s World Cup was one more example of how politics and football work hand in hand in Brazil.

But it’s been that way for a long time. Let’s take a walk down memory lane.

Rocky start

Brazilian politicians didn’t fall in love with soccer at first sight. Soccer and politics became entwined here just weeks before the 1950 World Cup, as Brazilians took to the streets in protest.

They didn’t demonstrate against high costs in the construction of Maracanã stadium, but small protests before the first World Cup in Brazil did have something in common with protests here in 2013 and 2014. They started against a rise in transportation costs, and then the tournament served to put a spotlight on the demonstrations and the issues they raised, such as economic policy changes undertaken by President Eurico Gaspar Dutra (1946-1951), the man who brought the tournament to Brazil. One year later, former dictator Getulio Vargas would channel that frustration and win a democratic election.

With only 13 participants, the first World Cup in Brazil, seen by many as a test event for the country after World War II (1939-1945) was an organizational success. But the shocking loss to Uruguay in the final was felt as a failure of the country itself. Many politicians decided to stay away from football as a result, with the exception of some that were fans first and public figures second – such as São Paulo mayor Porfirio da Paz, a founder of São Paulo FC.

The rise of Brazilian football, and the rise of Brazil

When Brazil won the 1958 World Cup, however, politicians changed their minds. President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), a former player at América in Minas Gerais, used the iconic players as a symbol of the modernization of the country – as he also used bossa-nova music and the construction of the new capital, Brasília. Brazilian soccer was moving past the shame of the 1950 loss and the country now actually had high hopes for the future.

That sentiment only grew after a second title was won in Chile, in 1962. But then the military dictatorship came, and took soccer with it.

In the first years of the regime, which began in 1964, it wasn’t clear what would happen with soccer, or indeed with politics.

Brazil had its worst World Cup campaign ever in England 1966, where the country failed to even advance past the group stage. Pelé, the national hero, was injured by Portugal’s constant kicks.

In Brasília, the capital, military leaders couldn’t decide whether they would remain in office. Their excuse for the coup was always that they would free Brazil from alleged communist influence and President João Goulart (1961-1964) and hold new elections, but they were holding on to power. Football club executives were lost: they didn’t know whether to be friends with the generals or hold on to old ties.

The dictatorship takes control of the pitch

Generals sent mixed messages by keeping Congress and a functioning Supreme Court open while also interfering. But when they decided to remain in power definitively and issued the dictatorial decrees of 1968, they also took hold of Brazilian soccer as a propaganda tool.

CBF chairman João Havelange, a cheerleader of military administrations, was watching. Although he named communist journalist João Saldanha as coach Brazil in 1969 (a move to calm the press after a number of bad results), Havelange was dying to please dictator Emilio Médici (1969-1974).

Opportunity knocked. Médici wanted “Fearless João” to take clumsy centerforward Dadá Maravilha to the Mexico World Cup in 1970.

Coach Saldanha wouldn’t have it. “I don’t pick his ministers and he doesn’t pick my players.” As a replacement, Havelange chose Mario Zagallo, a two-time World Cup champion who was present in the 1950 tragedy as a young Army recruit. The dictator Médici, a violent man that the Flamengo crowd loved seeing in the Maracanã every now and then, got even more attention from the CBF – military personnel dominated Brazil’s preparation for the tournament: fitness coaches, junior executives, and travel organizers, were all linked to the Armed Forces.

The dictatorship supported that Seleção, or national team, so much that Brazil’s leftist and liberal militants promised to cheer against it. But those people, unlike Médici, were only human…they ended up cheering anyways. The 1970 team was so fantastic that dictatorship propaganda is now the last thing most Brazilians think of it. Upon their return, friends of the armed forces were all over the players – São Paulo’s appointed mayor Paulo Maluf even gave them Volkswagens.

And Medici remained popular for a while, but the dictators would soon find out that you can’t win a World Cup every day.

White elephants to prop up the military, and the fall

There were two political parties in Brazil’s fake democracy in those days: Arena (the National Renewal Alliance) to support the military and MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement), which brought together all kinds of opposition parties, from socialists to free-market liberals. They competed for seats in Congress and for a few mayoral positions – but never in large capitals, of course.

Wherever friends of the dictatorship couldn’t gather much popular support, soccer was the solution: a new stadium would pop up and a local team would be included in national tournaments. Many white elephants were inaugurated at the time, such as the Castelão in Fortaleza (1973) and the Mané Garrincha in Brasilia (1974). They would be later renovated to become brand new white elephants for the 2014 World Cup.

It was during the dictatorship that now-disgraced Marin first appears in Brazilian soccer as an executive. Formerly a mediocre player for São Paulo FC, he used a position in the club as a ladder to his political aspirations. In 1975, as a very conservative state congressman in São Paulo, he started a campaign against journalist Vladimir Herzog, a key editor at Cultura, the state-owned TV channel. Weeks later Herzog, was killed by those who tortured him in prison. Herzog’s family holds Marin responsible, among others, for the assassination to this day.

This was the beginning of the end for dictators Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979) and João Figueiredo (1979-1985). Geisel didn’t profit much from soccer, but he did try hard. Brazil was defeated in the 1974 World Cup by Holland and in 1978 by Argentina, then ruled by an even more violent dictatorship. Brazil’s economic miracle was proving to be a farce and the regime decided to inflate soccer’s first division to maintain some of its popularity.

That move would lead stars like Zico, Falcão and Socrates travel to small towns to please crowds. The number of clubs playing in the Brazilian championship from 1975 to 1979 rose year after year: 44, 54, 62, 74 and then an astonishing 94. And though generals stayed in control of the CBF, Brazil without Pelé wasn’t as big of a propaganda machine. When the Seleção became great again, in 1982 already under Figueiredo, it was filled with pro-democratic players and captained by activist Socrates.

The end of Marin

After his time as a São Paulo legislator that pushed against allegedly communist journalists, Marin took another job he didn’t get a single vote for: he became governor of São Paulo between 1982 and 1983, appointed by the dictatorship, at the same time he was the president of São Paulo’s soccer association. But when Brazil became a democracy again, in 1985, he had no trouble adapting: he spearheaded the Seleção organization for the Mexico World Cup. When Ricardo Teixeira took over the CBF in 1989, he was one of his vice-presidents. In 2012, after his tutor got in trouble with Swiss courts, he rose to the top, since he was the oldest on the job.

In the 13 years he spent as CBF vice-president, in a more and more democratic Brazil, Marin was very discreet; to Brazilian ears he sounded like a politician from the sixties. Yes, he is a man of soccer and politics, but he wasn’t nearly as popular as club officials that got to Congress to get better kickbacks from sponsors, or businessmen that bought clubs to launder money for political campaigns. He was surely no Teixeira, who managed to turn President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva from a critic into a whiskey buddy on lazy Brasília Saturday afternoons.

Marin is one of the survivors that used old political ties to remain connected to soccer — ties that stopped former guerrilla and now President Dilma Rousseff from taking pictures near him. In prison, he must be thinking of all the favors he made to connect his successor and right arm at CBF, new president Marco Polo del Nero, to the main leaders of the opposition, such as defeated presidential hopeful Aécio Neves. Too bad his long experience with Brazilian politics and soccer won’t be of much use with the FBI.

Mauricio Savarese is a freelance journalist based in São Paulo and co-author of A to Zico: an Alphabet of Brazilian Football

The military dictatorship ended in the 1980s, and Brazil’s military forces have struggled to establish a role for themselves ever since. Sidelined from politics and unlikely to be deployed abroad due to Brazil’s “rainbow diplomacy,” they have been pushed reluctantly into acting as back-up police forces. 

By Mauricio Savarese

Fifty years after the coup that overthrew progressive President João Goulart and installed a military dictatorship, Brazil’s Armed Forces are nowhere near the centers of political power. The few that want them back in charge can’t get more than 1,000 people to their marches. In recent weeks, Brazil has remembered the 50th anniversary of the golpe, and criticism for the generals who occupied the presidency during military rule was so overwhelming, that a key question has returned to the public debate:

What should the role of the military be in South America’s powerhouse?

First, a look back at history.

Since the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), Brazil’s Armed Forces have rarely been in demand. But the Air Force’s effective participating in Italy during World War II kept their popularity just high enough for Air Marshall Eduardo Gomes to run as a conservative presidential candidate against Eurico Gaspar Dutra, in 1945. He lost, and ran another time in 1950, against former (non-military) dictator Getulio Vargas. Gomes lost again, but the military remained a key player.

In 1955, another general lost the race for the presidency to a civilian: Juarez Tavora – who is known for opposing the creation of state-run oil company Petrobras and the legacy of the Vargas government. He was beaten out by Juscelino Kubitschek, the man that would go on to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília. Many historians claim Kubitschek spent freely in order to keep the military from overthrowing him. It worked.

In 1960, a more liberal general attempted to get into the Presidential Palácio do Planalto. Henrique Lott, a big fan of the political marketing machine pushed by Dwight Eisenhower, eventually lost to conservative Janio Quadros. In a separate election for the vice-presidency, left-of-center João Goulart won. What no one expected was for Quadros to resign a few months later – some say he did so because wanted to be returned to power by the people. That never happened.

After taking power, Goulart eventually had to flee the country after the 1964 coup, and the rest is history. The military regime was a mess. A brutal mess. After it ended, and after the failed presidencies of friends of the dictators, like José Sarney and Fernando Collor de Mello’s, opposition to the dictatorship has dominated mainstream politics. In a country with no clear outside enemies and a revived democracy, what could the Armed Forces do?

Brazil spends about US$ 8 billion of its GDP on defense every year – the least of its BRIC counterparts – despite worries about protecting its huge pre-salt layer oil reserves, its enormous border with ten nations as well as the largest Atlantic coastline in the world. Minister of Defense Celso Amorim, like his predecessors, says Brazil’s military strategy is based on diplomacy and dissuasion. That means, it seems, that ideally those 350,000 men should just be available for backup. Or, to go to Haiti for United Nations missions.

Others want more out of the government’s investment in the military. Having the Armed Forces on the streets has surely worked during huge political conferences, general elections and sporting events, such as the 2007 Rio Pan American Games. They will be used similarly in the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. But many Brazilians want the Armed Forces to act as backup police forces, especially against heavily armed drug dealers hidden in favelas all over the country.

We saw this demand manifest in one favela complex in Rio de Janeiro last week. The Complexo da Maré was occupied by 2,700 troops from the Army and Navy, who will stay until the World Cup is over.

But in general, Armed Forces higher-ups don’t want their troops mingling with the police forces, due to the concern that criminals would embed themselves in the Armed Forces. Their concern stems from the corruption of this nature that exists in the police force; and the Armed Forces have even better weaponry and more resources than the local police. In exceptional conditions, they can act. But that will happen only if a governor recognizes he can’t control violence in the state. Rio’s Sergio Cabral has signed that deal and many others want to follow. But not for now.

President Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured and unlawfully arrested by military forces during the dictatorship, has not been active in the use of the Armed Forces. She rejected putting the military on the streets during the June protests and left everything up to the police. This week, her administration demanded the military chiefs look into human rights abuses in their facilities during the dictatorship. It’s unclear if, or how, Rousseff wants to use her soldiers.

The stalemate is likely to last as long as the political establishment reduces the military to the dictatorship and the military rejects having a more active role in the country’s security issues with security.

This is unlikely to be resolved soon. But the 50th anniversary of the coup has re-started the debate.

Brazil’s relationship to its former imperial power has changed dramatically in recent years, reports Dom Phillips from Lisbon. Above, a bookshop there

By Dom Phillips

“I went to Brazil about seven years ago,” Sandra Meleiro told me, sipping a beer in the weak Lisbon Spring sunshine. “I have relatives there. I love it. And it used to be so cheap for us.” She smiled wanly. “Not any more.”

Hanging out one recent Sunday at the LX Factory, a former industrial area transformed into a second hand market and food fair near the river in Lisbon, Sandra and her diverse group of friends were in agreement on one thing: things are not going well in Portugal. As her comments illustrated, the relationship between little Portugal, once an imperial power, and big Brazil, its former colony, has completely reversed in recent years.

The Portuguese discovered Brazil in 1500 and dominated their far-flung colony until it broke free in 1822. Even a decade or so ago, Portugal was one of the countries Brazilian economic emigrants headed for – as illustrated in Brazilian director Walter Salles’s 1996 thriller Terra Estrangeira (Foreign Land). But the Portuguese economy is in recession and contracted another 3.2% last year, unemployment is a staggering 16.9%, and the broke government is battling the constitutional court to get the tax rises through it needs to hang on to its European Union bailout plan. In vivid contrast, while Brazil is not the darling BRIC economy it was – its economy grew just 0.9% in 2012 – it still enjoys almost full employment, has no major foreign debts, and is increasingly a target for foreign professional immigrants, not just from Portugal, but even from countries like the United States.

Now it is the Brazilians who command the relationship between the two countries. It is Brazilian tourists who wander Lisbon streets, because for them, Portugal is a cheap holiday option, not the other way round. And instead of Brazilian immigrants flooding into Portugal looking for work as they once did, today it’s Portuguese heading the other way. Sandra says she knows many Portuguese who are desperately trying to emigrate to Brazil.

This was my first time in Portugal, and it reminded me of Brazil in the food, the architecture, and the colourful porcelain tiles. Colonial Brazilian cities like São Luís echo the colourful, winding streets of Lisbon. Portugal’s old world formality survives in Brazil. As does the language, which the Brazilians simplified to get rid of one of the two forms of ‘you’ common in Latin grammar. But Brazil is made up of much more than Portugal or the Portuguese – witness its indigenous place names, the African religions and rhythms, or the huge immigrant groups like Japanese, Germans, Italians or Lebanese.

Both countries are as different as they are similar. Lisbon is a subdued, polite city, where people talk in hushed tones. In this, it is very different to garrulous, go-getter cities like São Paulo and Rio, where people sometimes joke that the Portuguese are dim-witted, blame the Portuguese for their cumbersome, overcomplicated bureaucracy and corruption, or even argue that if Brazil had been colonised by another country instead of Portugal, it would be an organized, first world country today.

In his book ‘1808’, journalist Laurentino Gomes described how, with Napoleon and his army bearing down on Lisbon, the entire Portuguese royal court boarded a fleet of ships and relocated to Rio de Janeiro. The impact on what was then a colonial backwater of 5,000 European aristocrats, along with artists, musicians, clerks and hairdressers, was dramatic. It dragged Rio de Janeiro into the modern world. The book was a huge bestseller in Brazil, as was Gomes’s follow-up ‘1822’, in which he described how the Portuguese prince Dom Pedro, left in charge after his father, the king, returned to Portugal, declared independence.

Brazil finally became a republic in 1889. Perhaps the Portuguese are yet to forgive them. Some observers argue that both countries need to rethink the way they feel about each other. One is British ex-pat and Lisbon resident Michael Dacosta Babb, a specialist in business development and former executive director of Portugal’s Creative Industries Development Agency. He says that both countries should look to redefine the relationship, much as the USA and the UK did with their ‘special relationship’ when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan formed such a close bond in the 1980s. “Portugal has to do the same in its relationship with Brazil. It is not just about a common past and language. It is about economy and good sense,” said Babb. “For that to happen the Portuguese must swallow their pride and stop using national stereotypes. The same needs to be done by the Brazilians.”

Babb argues that Portugal’s inherent conservatism is what holds it back – particularly in the creative industries. Brazil certainly has one quality Portugal seems to lack: a sense of optimism, of change, of possibilities. Of a future to be lived, not a past lived long ago. Portugal could do with a little of that Brazilian confidence, drive and hustle. Then, just maybe, the Portuguese could go back to taking holidays in Rio.

“Tear gas, pepper spray, and stun guns were used yesterday in Rio to disperse more than 500 protestors who had met in front of the Military Club to protest against an event in honor of the 1964 coup.”

Wait. Military brass still get together to celebrate the coup that led to two decades of dictatorship, one widely accused of human rights abuses?

Apparently they do, and this used to be a much calmer event. But protests of this type are growing, as the question of what form the controversial Truth Commission will take is becoming more urgent.

In January, I published this piece in the Los Angeles Times about the decision to create the commission, which will investigate crimes committed under military rule, long after most other countries in Latin America have undergone a similar process.

But since then, we’ve had an unexpected development. Protests led by youth groups have  insisted that the accused actually be prosecuted criminally, something that is not envisioned under the current plan.

To simplify issues, some argue that a 1979 amnesty law – for both the military and anti-government guerrilla groups – put that question behind us. Others, like those that gathered yesterday, argue this was not enough.

What we are essentially seeing is a battle over what will be the official version of Brazil’s 20th-century history, a battle into which yesterday’s scuffle provided a striking view.

Links:
An excellent set of photos from yesterday’s clash
Los Angeles Times – Brazil finally ready to confront abuses in past dictatorship
AFP – Rio students protest military coup anniversary – coverage from the ground yesterday, in English

Follow @Vinncent