Brasil: The Wages Of Disillusionment

BRAZIL

The Wages of Disillusionment

The Brazilian Supreme Court’s hearing on the South American country’s abortion laws kicked off intense controversy.

Few expected the court to overturn Brazil’s tight restrictions against the procedure. But abortion-rights activists hoped the hearings would ignite further discussions and set the stage for reforms later. One in five women in Brazil has terminated a pregnancy, accordingto the New York Times.

But the backlash against the activists’ goals was intense.

University of Brasília anthropologist Debora Diniz, who helped spur the legal case at issue in the recent hearings, went into hiding after she received death threats. “We are in a new moment,” Diniz toldthe Guardian. “It could change the criminalization of abortion in the country, and that is why it is so important.”

Abortion has become a symbol of the divisions riddling Brazil today.

In recent years – including in 2016 when lawmakers removed ex-President Dilma Rousseff from office – the country has faced a sharp divide between those who want to reform the government and those who want to reform the economy.

“Citizens on the political right had coalesced around the issue of corruption,” wrote Pablo Ortellado and Márcio Moretto Ribeiro, both professors at Universidade de São Paulo, in the Conversation. “Those on the political left had honed in on social programs and public services. As political parties began putting these issues front and center of their platforms, left and right pulled apart, both politically and socially.”

Bloomberg argues the presidential election on Oct. 7 will be a clash between the two sides amid widespread disillusionment with the political class.

Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is in jail on corruption charges and probably won’t be allowed to stand for office again. But he has vowed that his left-leaning Workers’ Party will undo the privatizations pushed through by incumbent conservative President Michel Temer, who is not running for re-election, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, a mix of government failure and economic hardship has caused crime rates and street violence to soar. Many prominent people, like Brazilian soap opera star, Thiago Lacerda, want to leave: He is thinking about emigrating to Europe.

“I’m totally freaked out by what’s been happening, especially here in Rio,” Lacerda, 40, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “In several years, (my children) are going to want to go out, to start dating, without worrying about getting shot.”

In 2017, Brazil saw a record high 63,880 people murdered, a 3 percent increase over the previous year, while the number of rapes reported rose 8 percent to 60,018, the UK’s Independent newspaper cited a new report by the Brazilian Forum of Public Security (BFPS) as saying.

Right-wing populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro claims he’ll be able to find solutions in Brazil’s authoritarian past and attracts voters by disparaging women and minorities, Reuters said. Angry once at a fellow female member of Congress, he told her, “I won’t rape you because you do not deserve it.”

Such are the wages of disillusionment.