Brazil Is Not for Amateurs: Patterns of Governance in the Land of "Jeitinho"

By Belmiro V. J. Castor

Who should read this book? I cant imagine anyone who would not enjoy and benefit from this insightful overview. Obviously, those with current or future business interests in Brazil should read it, as should anyone planning a visit. Students and scholars interested in the politics, governance or administration of any country, would benefit enormously from studying Belmiros objective and skeptical methodology. In our increasing global interdependence, this is a good time to enhance our knowledge of the political, economic, and social conditions in this giant of the southern hemisphere. Belmiros astute analyses are presented in an optimistic, good humored style, reflecting a kind of tough love. He appreciates and extols the virtues and potential of Brazil, but is not blind to its flaws, and leaves the reader with an intricate, balanced
A. W. McEachern, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration University of Southern California

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 16, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469104324

Book preview

BRAZIL IS NOI FOR AMATEURS

PATTERNS OF GOVERNANCE IN THE

LAND OF JEITINHO

Translation Edited by A.W. McEachern

Copyright © 2002 by Belmiro V. |. Castor.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Cover art by lamil Snege and Rodrigo Canales.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

A PRESENTATION FOR BELMIRO V.J. CASTOR’S

BRAZIL IS NOT FOR AMATEURS 

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION 

Foreword 

Five centuries in search of explanations 

I 

Brazil at a Glance 

II 

The Motherland of Imprecision 

III 

THE BUREAUCRATIC INHERITANCE 

IV 

FORMALISM AND IEmNHO ? 

V 

BRAZIL’S UNIQUE CAPITALISM 

VI 

BRAZIL’S INFORMAL ECONOMY 

VII 

THE RELUCTANT TRANSITION FROM ENTREPRENEURSHIP TO MODERN CAPITALISM 

VIII 

PRODUCTIVITY MEASURES AND THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK 

IX 

THE NOMENKLATURA OF THE BRAZILIAN BUREAUCRACY 

X 

SEEKING THE HOLY GRAIL: THE TURBULENT HISTORY OF ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM 

XI 

BUREAUCRATIC POWER

IN A DEMOCRACY 

XII 

THE DIMINISHED ROLE OF THE STATE 

XIII 

A NEW MODEL OF THE STATE 

XIV 

A CONCLUSION:

THE POSSIBILITIES OF BRAZIL 

Bibliography 

The author 

Jeitinho [zhaé-’te-n(y)o]: skillful, smart, astute way of

achieving something, especially something that seems

particularly difficult to most people.

Houaiss Dictionary of the Portuguese Language

To my beloved Elizabeth,

Adriana, Carolina,

and Leonardo.

Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust.

John Rawls

Nor do I h/)ld with those who regard it as presumption if a man of low and humble condition dare to discuss and settle the concerns of princes; because just as those who draw landscapes place themselves below in the plain to contemplate the nature of the mountains and lofty places, and in order to contemplate the plains place themselves high upon the mountains, even so to understand the nature of the people needs the viewpoint of a prince and to understand the nature of princes needs the viewpoint of the people.

Niccolo Machiavelli

A PRESENTATION FOR BELMIRO V.J. CASTOR’S

BRAZIL IS NOT FOR AMATEURS 

Most humans have limited perspectives from which they re act to and evaluate the accomplishments of others. When an academic colleague asked what I thought of Belmiro’s English translation of his book, I first said it was excellent, then added without thinking that the book was well balanced. It was no surprise to discover that the added accolade was the result of my fixation on decision analysis.

Simply stated, decision making, problem solving and policy analysis have as common elements the identification of valued objectives, and the assessment and selection of alternatives that are most likely to accomplish those objectives. A balanced decision analysis, as distinct from the generally unbalanced assessments of the ideologically confined, makes explicit the multiple values and multiple actors underlying complex social and public problems. Belmiro acknowledges that the developmental model that dominated Brazil since the 1930s has brought Brazil into the twenty-first century as a significant player in the international community. But it has left millions of Brazilians still in poverty, and almost 50% of its economy hidden or informal. Centuries of Portuguese rule was a large factor in the continued presence of a bureaucratic system of governance that is powerful, heavy-handed, and unresponsive to social needs and inequities. The reduction of inequities, inefficiencies and rigidities is the fundamental value guiding Belmiro’s description of Brazil’s options in resolving problems.

Twenty-four years ago Shan and I took part in a master’s program offered by our School of Public Administration in Curitiba, in the state of Paraná. While there, we met Belmiro, who was described by students as the important official who had initiated the program. During that first exposure to Brazil, we visited the area of the Iguaçu Falls, where the Itaipu hydroelectric plant was under construction; Sao Paulo, a huge metropolis; Porto Alegre and the adjacent enclaves in the mountains, created and populated by descendants of German and Italian immigrants; and Brasilia, designed for government and automobiles, where walking across a street seemed impossible.

A year or so later Belmiro entered our doctoral program. In one class I remember looking forward to weekly three-hour conversations and debates in which Belmiro and a doctoral student from Jordan tested my decision-theoretic perspective, while the rest of the class looked on, thus demonstrating empirically that teaching in a university is a lifelong learning experience, at least for teachers. I don’t remember seeing Belmiro during our second journey to Brazil a few years later, when we spent most of our time with former students in Florianopolis, some time in Rio and Petropolis, and a visit to Salvador in the state of Bahia. After our two visits to Brazil and many interactions with Brazilian students, their families and friends, we took pride in knowing Brazil. Having read Brazil Is Not for Amateurs, I conclude that our earlier assessment of knowing was grossly exaggerated. We might now be characterized as better-informed amateurs.

Who should read this book? I can’t imagine anyone who would not enjoy and benefit from this insightful overview. Obviously, those with current or future business interests in Brazil should read it, as should anyone planning a visit. Students and scholars interested in the politics, governance or administration of any country would benefit enormously from studying Belmiro’s objective and skeptical methodology.

In our increasing global interdependence, this is a good time to enhance our knowledge of the political, economic, and social conditions in this giant of the southern hemisphere. Belmiro’s astute analyses are presented in an optimistic, good-humored style, reflecting a kind of tough love. He appreciates and extols the virtues and potential of Brazil, but is not blind to its flaws, and leaves the reader with an intricate, balanced portrait of his lovely, rich and complex country.

W. McEachern

Professor Emeritus of Public Administration

University of Southern California

August 2002

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION 

The first edition of this book was published in Brazil in June 2000 and received an encouraging welcome. A second printing is currently in process and O Brasil Nao É Para Amadores: Estado, Govemo e Burocracia na Terra do Jeitinho is now part of the basic bibliography of several Brazilian courses of Administration and Management.

The interest expressed by many foreigners was a pleasant surprise. Between 1997 and 2002 more than US$140 billion of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) were made in Brazil, fostered by privatization of public-owned companies and the opening of the economy to foreign capital. This has resulted in both a growing number of expatriates living in Brazil and an increase in the interest of financial and corporate planners in participating in the Brazilian economy. When I received invitations to speak to expatriates and learned that some foreign companies had translated parts of the book to provide newly arrived executives with a different glimpse of Brazilian economy and society, I decided to publish an English language edition.

This book intends to provide readers with some useful keys to understanding what Brazil really is, as distinct from the easy stereotypes and superficial analyses common among foreigners and even within some Brazilian intellectual circles. After all, it can’t be easy for a conventionally oriented expatriate, or Brazilian for that matter, to understand a country that in sixty years has had seven different currencies, three written national Constitutions, inflation rates between 4% per year and 4,500% per year, and that has part of its ethos solidly anchored in the eighteenth century in social terms while the other part pulses with the latest advancements of technology, habits of consumption and styles of life.

Brazil is not for amateurs because amateurs believe in appearances, in visible manifestations. Nothing can be more deceiving and misleading than what is visible in our country. To understand Brazil, one has to go beyond formal titles and nomenclatures in practically all areas and disciplines. What Brazilians call and practice as market economy is far different from what Americans, Europeans or Asians mean and practice. The dominance of governmental units in the operations of representative democracy is much greater in Brazil than in many other parts of the world. Similarly, the unemployment rate and other economic and social indicators have different meanings in Brazil and in the United States, despite the fact that in both countries, statisticians claim to use the same technical procedures for their estimates. And so on. Official and published statistics must be viewed with caution because in many cases what they hide is as important as what they purport to show.

A second objective of this book is to provide readers with some useful clues to understand the anatomy and functioning of the Brazilian government and its public and quasi-public bureaucracies. No one can understand Brazil without understanding how public bureaucracies operate and their dominant role in society. To succeed in business in Brazil it is necessary, even a priority, to understand the bureaucratic ethos of the country and to learn how to cope with the legendary capacity of Brazilian bureaucrats to make the whole society depend on their goodwill and favorable decisions and to create difficulties for anyone who threatens their authority or interests.

During the last decade, the Brazilian public sector has been through a process of fiscal impoverishment and loss of institutional and operational capabilities whose causes may be found in the perverse effects of inflation on public revenues and in political cronyism. As the quality and the quantity of public services have declined further, the population seems to take revenge for the centuries of arrogance, dissipation and privileges of the state, by observing the dismantlement with indifference or elation.

With the prescience of his superior intellect and helped by a clear and concise writing style, the Brazilian sociologist Alberto Guerreiro Ramos (with whom I had the privilege of studying as a graduate student at the University of Southern California) once defined Brazil as someone who prepared himself with care and elegance to attend a banquet, but who-against his will and facing a series of obstacles-missed the last transportation that would take him to the place of the festivity. And then, concluded Ramos, this person, opulently dressed, had to change his attire for a simpler one, in order to be taken seriously by those who saw him (1980:4). Back in the ‘seventies, Ramos was one of the first scholars to understand that the developmentalist model guiding Brazil since 1930 was rapidly exhausting its utility and losing its social and economic feasibility and he was among the first to advocate that a new model be designed and implemented. This new model would be characterized by a more frugal state that loses in pompousness and prestige but retains its powers to implement changes in the balance of social and economic forces. The overarching purpose of the new model would be to build a more egalitarian and just society for all. It would be a state modeled according to what the French sociologist Michel Cro-zier called the Modest State or l’État Modeste (1989:10). The Modest State is defined as one which substitutes for an arrogant, omnipresent and omni-competent [State which] is impotent so far as its acts are based only on abstract principles and general visions (1989:15).

I hope that, after reading this book, many of the things that puzzle a foreign observer can be better understood. Understanding the subtleties and intricacies of the Brazilian economy and society is the first step to recognizing an inexhaustible cornucopia of opportunities that lies beneath the visible and sometimes deceiving parts of this beautiful country.

Belmiro VJ. Castor

August 2002

Foreword 

Five centuries in search of explanations 

It had all climates, all fruits, all minerals and useful animals,

the best soil, the boldest, most hospitable, intelligent people on earth-what else was needed?

Time and some originality.

Lima Barreto

Almost a century after Major Policarpo Quaresma – the main character of a book by Lima Barreto – was absorbed by these ruminations, and five hundred years after its discovery, Brazil seems still to need more time and originality to eliminate two depressing realities: millions of Brazilians live in absolute poverty in a country that Mother Nature endowed with abundant resources and spared from hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes and other disasters; and at the end of twentieth century, the country continues to display shameful disparities in levels of income and social equality, at a time when the now—developed countries enter the Era of Knowledge and the Third Industrial Revolution, in which universal satisfaction of human basic needs is becoming routine.

There are no easy and quick answers to the disgrace of either of these conditions, nor can they be blamed exclusively on a particular individual, social group or organization. In all countries where the challenges of poverty and social inequality have been met, success was due not solely to the enlightenment of the government, the altruism of the elites or the hardworking habits of the populations. Success was the result of a broad commitment, an invisible covenant among different and diverse social and economic forces to overcome the difficulties and shortcomings that inhibited the full development of the country and its population. It is beyond doubt, however, that in all cases the state played a pivotal role as a mediator between the interests of individuals and groups and as the provider of social order. The state has also historically been the main vehicle for establishing benchmarks of civilization such as access of all citizens to a minimally decent material life, access to social and economic opportunities and participation in the political life of the country.

For centuries in Brazil the state enjoyed enormous power which led to its playing a central role in the socio-economic and political processes. One could even say, as Guerreiro Ramos pointed out, that while normally a nation evolves to become a state as the culmination of the process of nation building, in Brazil the mechanisms of the state arrived before the nation was born and, hence preceded society (1966:399), a fact that was decisive in shaping the economic, social, political and cultural characteristics of the country. Perhaps as an undesirable outcome of this precedence, members of the Brazilian public bureaucracy never considered themselves to be members of an institution subordinate to the nation. To the contrary, they see themselves as mentors, tutors or preceptors of the nation and of the citizens.

Resigned, the population responded with submission and respectful reverence, peacefully accepting their dependence on the state and its agents for virtually everything and consequently faced enormous barriers of indifference, negligence and intolerance in seeking to have their most basic rights respected and to receive even the most trivial public services.

One will never know what would have happened to the Brazilian economy and society if the state had not taken such a dominant role, but it seems reasonable to assume that despite these negative consequences there have been positive outcomes associated with this dominance. For instance, during the twentieth century Brazil has been transformed from a backward agricultural economy to a country with the ninth-largest GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the world in less than 50 years. The monocultural rural economy of the thirties based on coffee production and exportation became a mass industrial economy long before the end of the century. This result was fostered by deliberate public policies and public investments that have had deep and lasting material impacts on the country. It is however beyond doubt that the so-called developmentalist model that was the basic economic philosophy for decades was also largely responsible for a flourishing economy based on protections from true market competition. But protectionism plus subsidies also helped the privileged castes perpetuate social inequalities.

In fairness, it should be said that life expectancy, education, health and nutrition showed great improvements in the last seven decades, while access to some comforts of modern technology is widespread in spite of the inequalities of income: 87.7% of the households have TV sets, 94.8% have electricity, 82.8% have refrigerators and 37.6% have telephones (IBGE/PNAD 1998). Nevertheless, one cannot say that the Brazilian State has accomplished what could reasonably be expected in social terms, especially taking account of the length of time and the enormity of the powers the state retains. A substantial part of the population still is far from enjoying minimal standards of human dignity as synthesized by the United Nations in the Human Development Index. Calculations are based on life expectancy at birth, the educational level of the population and access to a decent living, measured by the level of income. The UN report published in 2002 placed Brazil in the 73rd position in a list of 173 countries for which the HDI is calculated. Illiteracy rates are high, and the quality of public of elementary and high schools is low. The lower strata of the population still are exposed to a series of endemic diseases and public health problems which have long since been eliminated in many other countries, some even poorer than Brazil.

Opportunities are unequally and unjustly distributed: the 1% richest have the same proportion of the national income as the 50% poorest (IBGE/PNAD 1999). The Brazil of Afro descent, blacks and mulattos, is significantly worse than the Brazil of whites. Applying the same methodology of the HDI, researchers have concluded that the Brazil of the white population would rank 46th, placing it in the group of high development countries along with Croatia and the United Arab Emirates, while the Brazil of the black and mulatto population would rank 101st, putting them in the medium-low category along with countries such as Vietnam and Algeria (Paixao 2001). Infant mortality among blacks is 67% higher than among whites (IBGE 1998) and life expectancy at birth is 6 years lower. Blacks also have lower salaries; even when blacks and whites have the same education, blacks’ salaries are 50% lower on average (Torres & Rossetti 1998:3-3; Pastore 1999: A3).

Infant mortality in the country’s poorest area, the Northeast, is more than two times as great as that of the rich areas of the Southeast and South; students of public schools have a much lower chance of passing the admissions exams for the free public universities. At the University of Sao Paulo, USP, the biggest and most important public educational institution in the rich state of Sao Paulo, 72.4% of the freshmen of 1998 had studied in private high schools which constituted only 20% of the total high school enrollment. Public schools, which represented 80% of the high school students, contributed only 20.7% of the acceptances at USP that year (Martins 1998:3-1). Legal protection against violence, abuse of power and arbitrariness is still virtually nonexistent in several parts of the country; in the poor neighborhoods of large cities, groups of vigilantes are paid by shop owners, drug traffickers and bankers of numbers games to provide informal security services.

Public services are in general of mediocre quality. Every year, familiar scenes are re-enacted: parents camp in front of the best public schools to get a place for their children; senior citizens spend nights queuing to get a pass for a free medical consultation (which may be scheduled for a date one or two months later); patients of emergency services in public hospitals may wait hours-and in some extreme cases, days-to receive medical attention.

It is therefore urgent that a new model be substituted for the models that dominated Brazilian political and economical life from the 1930s since there is still much to be done in order to build a society free of the inequalities that have accumulated for centuries and that have inhibited or even actively retarded the creation of an equitable, prosperous and just society for all. This new model ought to take into account new world realities such as economic globalization and the finitude of natural resources. Even more urgent is the need for a new model for government and public action in Brazil that aims to dismantle the peculiar combination of a state detached from the nation, an arrogant and transcendent public bureaucracy, a tolerant population and an entrenched and selfish elite that has resulted in a highly formalistic society in which appearances and realities are in permanent and deep conflict.

This book analyzes, from different perspectives, the role of the state in building modern Brazil, as well as the role played by the other relevant social forces. My departure point was the sociological work undertaken by Guerreiro Ramos that utilized formalism as the central analytical category. The conflict between appearances and realities was defined by Fred Riggs as the discrepancy between the prescriptive and the normative, between formal power and real power, between the impression transmitted by constitutions, laws, rules, organigrams [organization charts] and statistics and the practical and actual facts of government and society (1964:22). Formalism is a major characteristic and trait that pervaded the entire process of nation and state building and has impregnated the character and the behavior of Brazilians.

It is fair to say that Guerreiro Ramos did not consider formalism only as a social pathology (1960:360-80) but also as a useful device in a strategy for institutional modernization and institution building. In other words, he has taken a less negative stand than other Brazilian political thinkers and writers like Oliveira Viana, Alberto Torres, Silvio Romero, all of whom were very critical of the importation of foreign models and ideas to address Brazilian problems, a manifestation of formalism (Ramos 1966:360-90). Ramos also thought that formalism was able to reduce the rigidity of social structures and to facilitate vertical mobility of the less-favored part of the population.

While formalism may have some merit, it is clear and Ramos acknowledged that a formalistic approach, quite common in many analyses of Brazil, hides the true substance of economic, sociopolitical and bureaucratic phenomena. For that reason I have made a determined effort to avoid the trap of Brazilian formalism. I hope that these efforts have allowed me to capture a set of realities that are neither portrayed in official statistics nor acknowledged in the majority of studies of Brazilian public administration. Moreover, this non-formalistic approach required an emphasis on the relationships between state bureaucracies and what Jacques Maritain defined as the corps politique, the political body of the country, and I have examined measures taken to protect the fragile democratic process when it is confronted by the power of bureaucratic elites. Last, but far from least, I have explored some important components of Brazilian culture, such as our national passion for improvisation, our immediatism and our adaptive skills, which are the foundations for what Brazilians call, the jeitinho, a hard-to-define expression that implies components of paternalism, cronyism, street-smartness, cunning and social flexibility.

Inspiration for the discussion of roles, powers, limits and modus operandi of the state came from two main sources. The first is John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. My basic assumptions are that the definitive goal of human-associated life is to build a just society and that all social values-freedom, opportunity, income and wealth and the bases of self-respect-are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any, or all, of these values is to everyone’s advantage. This citation is from Rawls (1971:62) who has had an important influence on my thinking. I found in Rawls’ work the conceptual justification for the state as a privileged agent to reduce or eliminate the differences that derive from what Rawls calls the original position of individuals and human groups (1971:118) and