Backtrack: citizenship talk

I am going back through my notes and tran­scrib­ing. Here is where the blog is per­haps more inter­est­ing for me than it might be for other read­ers. Below are my notes from the first ses­sion we had at PUC, the pri­vate catholic uni­ver­sity in Rio. They have an impres­sive human rights depart­ment. Two pro­fes­sors from that depart­ment, Mar­cia Nina Bernardes and Flo­rian Hoff­man talked to the class about the con­cept of cit­i­zen­ship and clien­telism in Brazil. Most, if not all, the NGOs we vis­ited talked about and taught cit­i­zen­ship. This con­cept comes from a post-dictatorship sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple are nego­ti­at­ing their rela­tion­ship with the state with the recent mem­ory of being stripped of all rights that usu­ally come with cit­i­zen­ship. Cit­i­zen­ship is such a hot topic because it is not a give in, even under a democ­racy, because the sys­tem is so crip­pled by clien­telist poli­cies, where the law is mail­able for some and oth­ers need to cater to those peo­ple in order to secure rights and privileges.

Brazil class, ses­sion 1, Mon­day June 18th,
Mar­cia Bernardes / Flo­rian Hoff­man — PUC
His­tor­i­cal cit­i­zen­ship in Brazil

Mar­cia Bernardes

Cit­i­zen­ship – par­tic­i­pa­tion, rights to make indi­vid­ual free and equal
Cer­e­mo­nial mem­ber­ship of community

Pub­lic Sphere – social stage on which cit­i­zen­ship rights are exer­cised (tra­di­tional soci­o­log­i­cal the­ory on Brazil says that pub­lic sphere has never existed)

Three main inter­pre­ta­tions of Brazil­ian Social Formation

Ser­gio Buar­que de Holanda
– Raizes do Brazil
– Per­son­al­ism, instal­la­tion of per­son­al­i­ties (charis­matic indi­vid­ual as pro­tec­tor)
– “Homen Cor­dial” emo­tive, action through heart, feel­ing
o US -> some­thing is allowed or not allowed
o Brazil -> some­thing is both allowed and not allowed
– Rela­tional sys­tem gov­erns social and legal inter­ac­tions, like a nuclear fam­ily, there is a nat­ural hier­ar­chy that you don’t criticize

Ray­mond Faoro
– pat­ri­mo­nial sys­tem, prince monop­o­lizes power and bureau­cracy rules in prince’s name
– state belongs to some­one, not to peo­ple
– likened to cast sys­tem, no notion of com­mon good

Roberto DaMatta
– per­son­al­ism in terms of per­sons and indi­vid­u­als, and home vs street
– Per­son: rela­tional being, kin­ship, sym­pa­thy, inter­ests -> homes set­ting
– Indi­vid­ual: anony­mous no one, not part of rela­tional sys­tem -> street set­ting
– In Brazil, the one higher in the hier­ar­chy will pull rank, “Do you know who you are talk­ing to?”

Com­mon diag­no­sis among ana­lysts
– inva­sion of pub­lic realm with logic of pri­vate domain
– no clear dis­tinc­tion between pri­vate and pub­lic, state is prop­erty of rul­ing class
– agri­cul­tural sys­tem dis­placed by urban­ism -> no new sys­tem to deal with new cir­cum­stances
– clien­telism and nepo­tism are unavoid­able, sub­sti­tutes polit­i­cal processes and under­mines citizenship

But Mar­cia likes the the­o­ries of this guy best:
Nestor Gar­cia Can­clini
– hybridism -> mod­ernism in Latin Amer­ica and Brazil, very dif­fer­ent from ‘first world’
– both elites and pop­u­lar classes com­bine mod­ern and tra­di­tional cul­tures
– rela­tion­ship between tra­di­tional and mod­ern is not substitution

Three phases of Brazil­ian Polit­i­cal His­tory (accord­ing to Leonardo Auritzer)
– Mod­er­naiza­tion and Urban­iza­tion (1800-1960s)
– Lib­er­al­iza­tion (1974–1985) -> new demo­c­ra­tic actors and devel­op­ment of new reper­toire of action (mil­i­tary regime)
– Post-military rule -> new (mil­i­tary) actors still present, but don’t react to deci­sional sphere
o Cre­ation of pub­lic sphere for the first time in Brazil­ian his­tory -> human rights move­ment, neigh­bor­hood asso­ci­a­tions, cam­paigns for direct elec­tions
o What hap­pens in pub­lic sphere does not reach the state
o Pri­vate pres­sure still hier­ar­chi­cal, puts pres­sure on state to main­tain clien­telism, sub­verts effects of civil soci­ety on laws

next speaker:

Flo­rian Hoff­man (ger­man guy)

- struc­tural fault lines date back to colo­nial struc­tures, not just lack of inter­est or ego­ism
– incred­i­ble obsta­cles to shift­ing par­a­digm
– lack of inten­tion­al­ity for end result

Great­est human rights issues in Brazil: Police vio­lence and Prison conditions

Much vio­lence is con­nected to transna­tional drug traf­fick­ing, this vio­lence is deeply con­nected to polit­i­cal sys­tem (polit­i­cal office = immu­nity). This incor­po­rates 90–95% of crime. Rob­beries are a front piece of com­pli­cated net­works. Poor com­mu­ni­ties are cen­tral cites of these sys­tems because of the hybrid sys­tem, makes it harder to change and mod­ern­ize the com­mu­ni­ties. Opens space for new forms of crim­i­nal­ity due to eco­nomic activ­ity hap­pen­ing out­side state that resists incor­po­ra­tion into the state. (ex: mini buses, not city sys­tem, cre­ates space for turf war and thus gang violence)

Three Police forces
1. Fed­eral -> col­lege degrees, dis­mount­ing cor­rup­tion schemes, does a decent job, like FBI
2. Civil Police
3. Mil­i­tary Police -> in street, gray/blue uni­form. Main actors of police vio­lence, mil­i­tary like orga­ni­za­tion, live in bar­racks, lit­tle edu­ca­tion, cre­ated as instru­ment of repres­sion in mil­i­tary regime. -> older anti-communist tac­tics to resist those against mil­i­tary regime are trans­ferred to post-military period, just change ‘com­mu­nist’ for ‘ban­dit’ and you see the same military/war logic -> not effort to use polic­ing tech­nique for rein­cor­po­rat­ing crim­i­nals into soci­ety. the goal, like in war, is elimination.

- Comando Ver­melho (mafia like gang) calls the police Comando Azul
o Police mil­i­tary logic coop­er­ates with gang logic, drag­ging police toward crim­i­nal­ity
– police reform is extremely dif­fi­cult because they have a strong lobby in the gov­ern­ment
– poor pay enables a bribery sys­tem to develop and the pri­va­ti­za­tion of police duties through hired secu­rity forces
– res­i­dents of fave­las are in a dou­ble bind because of crim­i­nal­iza­tion of poverty on state side and expo­sure to drug car­tel violence

Mili­tias -> favela res­i­dence who used to hold police posi­tions orga­nize them­selves to expel gangs. –> prob­lem is it is out­side state and resists the method­ol­o­giza­tion of activ­i­ties and peo­ple involved. Uses war/military men­tal­ity, exter­mi­nates young peo­ple rumored to be involved in gangs. Some suc­cesses of these groups only fur­ther under­mines the legit­i­macy of police.

What is the rela­tion­ship between clien­telism and cor­rup­tion? There is a like, blurry, but it does exist.

Epi­demic impunity is a legacy of colo­nial hierarchy.

Inno­cent per­son = worker
– Okay to kill crim­i­nal because of military/war sys­tem -> impos­si­ble to con­vict police of mur­der because they argue mis­taken iden­tity of vic­tim as crim­i­nal. Many police homi­cides are reg­is­tered as resis­tance to arrest, so dif­fi­cult to get accu­rate num­bers.
– inno­cent peo­ple are work­ers because of a lack of a devel­oped sense of cit­i­zen­ship
– in police jar­gon, peo­ple are either work­ers or elements/individuals. Gen­eral war­rants don’t spec­ify who to arrest, but rather allow for arrest of ‘sus­pect ele­ments.’ Any ‘sus­pect ele­ment’ can be arrested.

Brazil­ian socia­bil­ity is a result of nego­ti­at­ing clien­telist sys­tem -> cor­dial­ity. You have to be nice to the park­ing ‘assis­tant’ because of the implicit threat of vio­lence. Being cor­dial allows one space to nego­ti­ate the clien­telist net­work and man­age the vio­lent poten­tial of sys­tems out­side the state.

Social ele­va­tor vs. Ser­vice Ele­va­tor issues -> since Brazil wants to be closer to the US and Europe than Africa, they go with the inte­grated ele­va­tor sys­tem. No real inte­gra­tion, just a gesture.

Three lev­els of cit­i­zens
– those above the law
– those with access to civil rights
– those who are clients of the law

“To my friends, every­thing. To my ene­mies, the law.”

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Look­ing back at this talk, I think it was a very solid start to the course. These theme come up over and over again, not just in class but in my daily nego­ti­a­tion of Rio de Janeiro. As much as cer­tain aspect of life in the US fol­lows a clien­telist pol­icy, it is totally for­eign for me to encounter basic cit­i­zen­ship rights to be func­tion­ing on this level. Here, as opposed to other places I have been, the implicit threat tied to the clien­telist pol­icy prac­ti­cally fla­vors the air you breath. I have been think­ing a lot about how the vio­lence and threat of crime here feels over­whelm­ing and exhaust­ing. I am try­ing to fig­ure out why that is. I have a feel­ing it cor­re­lates to the themes dis­cussed here, but I hes­i­tate to jump to con­clu­sions about how exactly. I often feel relieved when I am hang­ing out with Brazil­ian friends because the details for inter­pret­ing sit­u­a­tions remain illeg­i­ble to me but are sec­ond nature to them. Sud­denly the fric­tion of walk­ing down the side­walk or rid­ing a bus smooths over, even if the sit­u­a­tion still feels tense and unsafe. When I am on my own, or with other for­eign­ers, I get exhausted and stressed out try­ing to read a sys­tem that remains elu­sive and where here feels like so much is at stake. Maybe in the other places I have been, namely Guatemala and India, the illeg­i­bil­ity of the sys­tem didn’t com­pute to poten­tial vio­lence, so it wasn’t so exhaust­ing. At least in those places, my New York City street sense helped me out. Here, I feel like it is a lia­bil­ity. For the NGOs that we vis­ited, peo­ple could nego­ti­ate the micro activ­i­ties that I am hav­ing such a hard time with. The chal­lenge was address­ing needs on the lev­els just up from that. How do you secure your home, you place of work, your access to cul­tural prac­tices, given this pre­car­i­ous and vio­lent system?