1. The past of the present

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz

Many Brazilians reacted with shock in the face of growing manifestations of intolerance and the conservative lurch that Brazil has witnessed since 2014.1 However, there is nothing recent or circumstantial in this social phenomenon. In truth, while it is possible to say that this direction is internationally in vogue, the Brazilian case appears to respond to a longer-running history, relating to the authoritarian roots of the country, which are grounded in the ‘past of the present’: the wide-ranging experience with slavery, the long coexistence with violence and public insecurity, the persistent fiefdoms and paternalisms and consistent low investment in education have made Brazil the ninth most unequal country and the fifth in rural income concentration.2 These are, therefore, ghosts of the past that persist in haunting the present.

Time has moved quickly in these last years, but it has accelerated even more rapidly in Brazil, since the protests of 2013, when Brazilians took to the streets to ask for and demand their rights. What many did not see at that time is that there were two very different roads, separated and without bifurcations. Time also showed itself to be in a hurry due to the economic crisis: the recession and unemployment that accelerated in 2014 generated the figure of the ‘collectors’, those who judged and judge themselves to have ‘lost’ their achievements to ‘others’ who have now won them. The crisis also showed its claws on the occasion of President Dilma’s impeachment, on 31 August 2016, when Brazilian politicians offered a televised show of voting in the name of their children, parents, wives, friends, but never referring themselves to the issue at hand. Familial politics won, an old acquaintance of Brazilian politics.

It was in this same context that many governments lurched towards populist and conservative regimes, as was the case in the United States, Israel, Russia, Italy, Philippines, Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Venezuela, who believe that democracy is limited to winning elections. It is not so limited, however, as democracy is a regime that needs to be won every day: democracies are governed through coexistence with ‘difference’ and the different, and not just ‘preaching to the converted’.

Everything points towards Brazil passing through a similar experience, but it seems to have learnt nothing from what occurred previously with other nations. In truth, authoritarianism entered in full into the agendas of these new governments, which can be described as ‘democraship’ (see e.g. Vieira, 2018). These are regimes that, despite being elected, conduct all kinds of attacks against democracy: they enact censorship, are against new forms of gender, and attack institutions, journalists and academics.

The historian Timothy Snyder wrote a post that went viral on Facebook. In it, he affirms that we ‘are not better or wiser’ than the men who witnessed the rise ‘of Nazism, fascism or Stalinist communism’. We can only count on ‘our experience’. The problem is that we have not relied on it, and are living a kind of ‘global Weimar’, with the proliferation of a series of authoritarian governments that harm democratic rights.

My hypothesis regarding Brazil, however, is that it is neither a circumstantial nor a solely global question. Brazilians did not become authoritarian and intolerant from one day to the next. We have always been authoritarian but liked to represent ourselves as the opposite: as open, pacifist, harmonious.

I would like to explore, therefore, the ‘present of the past’. Brazil carries within it a heavy legacy stemming from slavery, the latifundium and patrimonialism that generated a very unequal society and a structure as hierarchal as it is naturalised. However, and as always, the country set about presenting historical narratives that stated the opposite: a ‘good slavery’ (as if a system that is based on the possession of a person by another could allow for such a definition); a ‘dictatorbland’ (Reis, 2014) and not a military dictatorship; an alleged democracy; even a belief that ‘God is Brazilian’.

I am certain these narratives are untrue, and intend to develop this essay by analysing long-running structures that, instead of changing, reiterated and reaffirmed themselves in our reality. History is change, but also repetition, and I would like to consider this here, with the objective of understanding aspects of the crisis we now witness.3

Reinventing the past

Brazil was the last country to abolish mercantile slavery. It received 4.8 million of the 10 million enslaved persons who left Africa and disseminated the system throughout the entirety of its territory. With this, hierarchal structures of power and command were established in a nation where few ordered and many obeyed.4 A profoundly violent society was produced, with enslaved persons rebelling in multiple ways, and reacting to such an unjust and unequal system.

And if an obvious and determined continuity between past and present does not exist, the fact is that, after the abolition of May 1888, a long period that historians conventionally call ‘post-abolition’5 began, which has a starting but not an ending date. To this day Brazil practises structural and institutional6 racism – as we can see from the data on the discrimination against these populations. Indeed, it is Black persons that in Brazil have restricted access to education, are the most harmed by public health services and die the youngest.

On this matter, in fact, it’s possible to say that we are killing a generation of young Black men in the Brazilian periphery without much fanfare on the part of authorities or even the sector of the population that lives in middle-class or elite neighbourhoods. The intersectionality7 between social markers of difference, such as race, gender and generation, particularly accentuates the vulnerability of these groups, which is reaching epidemic levels.8

For example, if we look only at the year of 2012, when a little over fifty-six thousand persons were murdered in Brazil, of this total thirty thousand were young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, and of these, 77 per cent were Black. These numbers reveal very unequal conditions of access to the maintenance of rights and elevated violence with a clear target. Moreover, they indicate patterns of mortality that evoke short-, medium- and long-term historical questions.

To put these figures into proportion, we can note that this data is compatible with the homicide rates in various contemporary civil wars. In the Syrian conflict, which has embroiled the country since 2011, there are sixty thousand deaths per year; in the war in Yemen, which began in 2015, there are approximately twenty-five thousand yearly homicides; in Afghanistan, where conflicts began in 1978, the average is fifty thousand per year. These rates correspond to the scale of the Brazilian ‘war’, which permits us to speak of a Black youth ‘genocide’.

Brazil will not have a republic, in the true sense of the term, if it does not deal with the question of endemic racism prevailing in the country. But if slavery and racism represent the knot of Brazil’s contradiction, another long-running structure can be located in the rooting of ‘local fiefdoms’. For anyone who proclaimed that in 2018 a ‘new political era’ would be inaugurated, the results of the elections for president, senators and state representatives were very disappointing.

In any case, if in Brazil the prevalence of these true paterfamilias has been known since the colonial period, based on the generous distribution of lands (and authority) on the part of the metropole, and if we remember the figure of the colonels9 during the First Republic, what we see occurring now is a type of revival of these figures, still very enmeshed within the workings of Brazilian politics (Leal, 2012).

In a preliminary survey by the Intersyndical Department for Parliamentary Assistance (DIAP), conducted after the last elections, among the 567 new congressmen, 138 representatives and senators were identified as belonging to political clans – an increase of 22 per cent in relation to 2014. The number of members belonging to the ‘caucus of the relatives’, on the other hand, is surely much higher, since research is still ongoing and only first-degree relations were considered.

In 2018, there were even cases of ‘dynasties’ who campaigned based on an anti-systemic discourse, harnessing the wave of anti-traditional politics now in vogue. This was the case of Eduardo and Flávio Bolsonaro (both members of the Social Liberal Party, PSL), elected to the House and Senate, respectively, and who already had careers in state and national politics. In Pernambuco, João Campos (Brazilian Socialist Party, PSB), the congressman who won the highest number of votes, is son of former governor Eduardo Campos, who died in a plane crash in 2014, while campaigning for the country’s presidency (Gayer, 2020). The cousin of this politician, Marília Arraes (Workers’ Party, PT), who, in turn, is the cousin of a former federal representative and granddaughter of the former governor Miguel Arraes, won the second highest number of votes. In Bahia, the second most voted deputy for the House of Representatives is the son of senator Otto Alencar (Social Democratic Party, PSD). In Piaui, Iracema Portella (Progressives, PP), daughter of the former governor and of a former federal representative, achieved another term in the House while her husband, Ciro Nogueira (PP), was re-elected to the Senate. In Rio Grande do Norte, half of the seats for federal representatives were occupied by relatives – one of those elected is the son of the former governor.

In Ceará, according to the same article, one of the federal representatives with the most votes is the son of the current president of the state’s Legislative Assembly. In Pará, the Barbalho clan secured another re-election for its chief, Senator Jader Barbalho (Brazilian Democratic Movement, MDB), as well as two other members of the House – his former wife and a cousin. Kátia Abreu (Democratic Labour Party, PDT), for her part, now has in the Senate the company of her son, Irajá Abreu (PSD), currently a federal representative for the state of Tocantins and who won one of the two contested seats in the state. In Paraíba, the federal representative Veneziano Vital do Rêgo (MDB) won a seat in the Senate, where his brother already served a term and his mother acts as a substitute. The state’s other seat belongs to Daniella Ribeiro (PP), sister of representative Aguinaldo Ribeiro (PP), who was re-elected. In other words, Paraíba’s delegation in Congress is a visible sign of the persistent strength of political clans. Of twelve seats, ten are occupied by congressmen with familial ties to other persons who are already serving some electoral mandate.

And there is no coincidence, once it is ascertained that states which most possess families such as these are also those that generally present most wealth concentration and social gaps: fundamental elements to deepening the crisis, when resources are scarce and demand abounds.

The practices of local authoritarianism do not often arise alone. Frequently they are associated with a form of administering the state that, not by accident, implies managing public institutions as if they were private – intimate, even. There is a vast bibliography on the topic of patrimonialism (Holanda, 2002 [1936]; DaMatta, 1998; Cândido, 2004), which allows us to affirm that it is one of the greatest enemies of democracy (Schwarcz and Starling, 2014).

There are varied forms of exercising the old ‘Brazilian way’, when the majority of politicians understand the public office they occupy as a form of ‘private property’, their own or their family’s, to the detriment of the interests of the collective that elected them. And if this is the standard meaning, the use of the term ‘patrimonialism’, so recurrent in Brazil, has already become, as André Botelho (2019) has shown, a type of ‘accusatory category: a crime/sin in which the “other” indulges, not the subject of the enunciation’. Terms such as ‘patrimonialism’ or ‘patrimonialist’ have served, further, equally to stigmatise a political opponent or disqualify an adversary.

Finally, in these 30 years of the New Republic, Brazil has not only sought to consolidate democracy, but also to modernise social relations. It did not manage, however, to deter the practices of patrimonialism that are well rooted and help to explain part of the crisis we are experiencing today. It is for this and other reasons that patrimonialism maintains itself as one of the great enemies of the republic, having the power to undermine and weaken the institutions of the state. The health of a democracy is measured by the robustness of its institutions and, in our case, since colonial times there have been many instances where these were dominated by the interests of groups in power, who appropriate part of the state mechanism for private ends. The theory that Brazilians are more informal and ‘averse to bureaucracy’ acquires here a new face, when expedients such as these result in benefit to some and ill for many.

The contamination of public and private spaces is, therefore, a heavy legacy of our history, but also a record of the present. The concentration of wealth, the maintenance of old regional chiefs, as well as the emergence of the ‘new colonels’ and the strengthening of corporative politicians, show how it is still quite common in Brazil to fight, first and foremost, for private benefit. This is an authoritarian and personalistic form of dealing with the state, as if it were a generous family guided by a great father who retains the control of the law and is kind to his allies, but severe with his opponents, who are understood as enemies.

The legacy of private powers survives within the very governmental machine. The DIAP presents very revealing data regarding the so-called ‘caucus of the relatives’, which continues growing in Congress. In the House, in 2014, 113 of those elected bore oligarchic last names, being relatives of established politicians. In 2018, the number of parliamentarians with family ties rose to 172.

And if patrimonialism is the first enemy of the republic, the second principal adversary goes by the name of corruption. It pertains to the practice which degrades the confidence that we have in one another and disaggregates public space, misappropriating resources and the rights of citizens. Not by coincidence, it is often associated with the mismanagement of public funds, occasioned by the lack of control of governmental policies.

Over the course of time, corruption has been called by different names, but they all represent, according to José Murilo de Carvalho, the act of ‘transgressing’, in the sense of ‘disrespecting, violating and infringing the most diverse areas of action’ (Carvalho, 2017). Etymologically, the word comes from the Latin corruptio, meaning ‘the act of breaking into pieces’; that is, of ‘degrading or decomposing something’. In the management of the state, corruption evokes the act of conceding and receiving undue advantages either by public agents or the private sector, with the goal of obtaining rewards. Corruption is widely diffused in Brazil, playing a fundamental part in the world of politics, but equally present in human and personal relations.

Many examples from Brazilian history show how the practice of corruption became a machine for the government of the country. Especially in times of crisis it tends to corrode the public edifice, extracting currency and resources from areas that really need them. I refer to healthcare, education and public transport, sectors immediately harmed by these practices.

Violence is also a very important element in explaining the current Brazilian crisis and the 2018 election result. Many people voted for whoever promised more security and an end to the robberies, thefts and murders.10 There is nothing wrong in taking these elements as determining arguments when selecting a candidate. After all, the number of daily homicides in Brazil equals the deaths from a crash of a fully loaded Boeing 737-800. This is one of the conclusions of the Atlas of Violence 2018 (Cerqueira, 2018), produced by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA) and by the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP).

This situation places Brazil in a group of countries considered violent, with mortality indexes thirty times higher than those observed, for example, on the European continent. About 171 deaths are registered every day in the country and, taking into account the data from 2016, 62,500 annually. In just the past decade, there have 553,000 registered violent deaths. The same report attests that in Brazil, for the first time, the number of violent deaths surpassed sixty thousand per year. In fact, according to the Atlas of Violence 2018, the country reached the rate of thirty murders per hundred thousand inhabitants for the first time. This says much about the inequality that rules the country, but also regarding the deepening of social gaps, which are even more pronounced in moments of crisis.

Slave labour, land divided into latifundium, corruption and patrimonialism, all in large doses, explain the motives that made of the country an unequal reality. These historical factors do not explain, however, why, despite the process of modernisation and industrialisation that the country experienced in the twentieth century, we were unable to break totally with this vicious cycle of the past. On one side, research has shown that some alterations have occurred, for the better, in the data that measure inequality in Brazil. According to information collected by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE, 2018) through the National Household Sampling Survey (PNAD) – which analysed the living conditions of Brazilians in 2018 – the slice of national income appropriated by the richest 10 per cent fell in the last years from 46 per cent to 41 per cent, while the part of the poorest 50 per cent grew: from 14 per cent to 18 per cent.

But there are disagreements regarding these results. Marc Morgan Milá, an Irish economist and disciple of Thomas Piketty, indicated in a 2018 study that Brazilian governments, in practice, never opted to confront social inequality (Milá, 2018). In the researcher’s opinion, inequality is worse than imagined, with an immense concentration of income at the top of the social pyramid: the group representing the richest 10 per cent of our population accumulates over half of the national income. Between 2001 and 2015, this sector of the population has seen their part of income grow from 54 per cent to 55 per cent. Meanwhile, according to Morgan Milá’s calculations, the income of the 50 per cent poorest rose from 11 per cent to 12 per cent of the total. However, 40 per cent of the Brazilian population, the middle portion, had their share of national income shrink from 34 per cent to 32 per cent.

The same investigation reveals that the richest stratum of the population, which corresponds to only 1 per cent of the population, wolfs down 28 per cent of national income. Morgan Milá pointed out that, in the United States, the elites, the 1 per cent, possess 20 per cent of the national income, and in France, 11 per cent. Moreover, in France the annual income of the richest groups is under R$925 thousand, whereas in Brazil the average annual income of this sector is approximately R$1 million.

In 2018, a report prepared by Oxfam Brazil presented an equally pessimistic panorama. According to the institution, for the first time in 23 years Brazil saw its income distribution coming to a halt and poverty breaking out again. The convergence of income between men and women, as well as the levelling of income between whites and Blacks, were also diminished (Oxfam, 2018). These results are alarming, in the words of the authors, particularly since the majority of Brazil’s population is composed, precisely, of women, Black and pardo (mixed-race) people.

The same document explains that in the last five years the proportion of the population living in poverty has grown, the level of income inequality in the workplace has increased, and infant mortality has expanded. The index that measures income inequality in the country, the Gini coefficient of per capita household income, which had been decreasing since 2002, stagnated between 2016 and 2017. According to Oxfam (2018), sustainable development ‘walks backwards in broad strides’. For example, between 2016 and 2017, the poorest 40 per cent had an income variation worse than the national average. In this same context, women and the Black population present a level of income below that of men and the white population.

These results cannot, however, be read in isolation. In some way, they are a consequence of Brazil’s ongoing economic, fiscal and political crisis that began in 2013 and ended up generating a clear retraction in the national income. They also express the recession experienced by the country, whose levels of unemployment practically doubled, going from 6.8 per cent in 2014 to 12.7 per cent in 2017.

In effect, despite the relative improvement that occurred from the end of the 1990s until 2012–13, a series of investigations has confirmed not only Brazil’s elevated concentration of wealth but also the fact that the country remains one of the most unequal in the world. A study by IPEA, published in 2017 for the UN’s International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth, confirmed that the country is among the five most unequal on the planet, taking into account the concentration and distribution of income (Ferreira and Medeiros, 2017). What’s more, research published on 5 December 2018 by IBGE indicated that poverty and extreme poverty increased in recent years. After Oxfam defined the scenario as ‘stagnation’, it was IBGE’s turn to demonstrate how the crisis in the economy, the public sector and the labour market had a direct impact on workers’ lives.

Other data reveals that the most affected are, in order of magnitude: Black and brown people, children up to the age of 14, single mothers, Black and brown single mothers, and people over the age of 60. Certainly, it is Black women, the backbone of their families, who have been most affected by the crisis. The number of white men considered poor increased by 7.8 per cent; the number of Black women also grew, but only by 2.68 per cent. However, in absolute terms, the number of Black and brown women in a situation of poverty is 35 per cent, while that of white men is less than half that, at 16.6 per cent. The same picture repeats itself for the social situation characterised as ‘extreme poverty’.

Disparity in income distribution between social classes defines inequality in Brazil. According to a 2017 Oxfam report, there is a real abyss in relation to fiscal data. The richest 10 per cent pay 21 per cent of their income in taxes, while the poorest 10 per cent pay 32 per cent. Indirect taxes eat up 28 per cent of the income of the poorest 10 per cent and only 10 per cent of the richest 10 per cent. Inheritance tax, for example, provides approximately 0.6 per cent of government revenue, a value based on low rates and, at times, not even charged (Oxfam, 2017).

In the area of healthcare, the data also reveals an unequivocal inequality between Brazilians of different regions. The majority of people who received no care possessed the following characteristics: women (3.5 per cent); individuals aged 25–49 (3.7 per cent); Black and brown people (4.3 per cent); persons with low- or mid-level educational attainment (3.3 per cent and 4.1 per cent, respectively); and those without a healthcare provider (4.2 per cent). There are also clear regional inequalities, with the largest numbers of untreated persons concentrated in the North and Northeast.

Regardless, the crisis that had been forming for a long time gained momentum in 2014. In such circumstances, the easiest route appears to be blaming the other as responsible for one’s ills. The attacks on minorities and new social agents, therefore, are not aleatory. It is true that every society elaborates its own markers of difference.11 In other words, it transforms physical differences into social stereotypes, generally of inferiority, and thus produces prejudice, discrimination and violence. If the concept of ‘difference’ implies recognising, as Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) explained, that ‘Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse and undulating object’, in the sense of human experience being rich and plural, the term, in practice, has mostly been used to disqualify. In the contemporary world, it is also used to justify a type of behaviour that privileges the formation of isolated groups with their own digital media, separated by their interests and polarised in their identities; each becomes its own prisoner, captive within its own bubble.

On the other hand, the increase in the social perception of inequality, with the inclusion of new political subjects, often ends up generating dissatisfaction in sectors of society that tend to consider the ‘other’ as less legitimate and seek to deny them the right to full citizenship, conditioned by the ‘difference’ that they carry.

Social markers of difference are, therefore, ‘classificatory categories comprehended as social, local, historical and cultural constructions, that belong to the order of social representations – as exemplified by fantasies, myths and the ideologies we create – as well as exercise a real influence on the world, through the production and reproduction of collective identities and social hierarchies’ (Schwarcz et al., 2018).

But these categories do not produce meaning only in isolation; they act, above all, by way of an intimate connection that they establish between each other – which is not to say that they can be reduced to each other. In the list of social markers, with the impact on the reality in which we live, are included categories such as race, generation, place of origin, gender and sex, and other elements that have the capacity to produce diverse forms of hierarchy and subordination.

In our society, the perverse use of these categories has generated different kinds of racism, resulted in femicide, produced much misogyny and homophobia, and justified and disseminated a culture of rape, whose numbers continue to be alarming, but are, at the same time, mostly silenced in the country. Women account for 89 per cent of the victims of sexual violence in Brazil. According to data from IPEA, between 2001 and 2011, fifty thousand women were murdered. Even so, the term ‘femicide’ was only formally recognised in Brazil in March 2015, typifying the existence of premeditated crimes committed against women.

The number of cases of femicide in Brazil – gender-motivated murder – is alarming according to data from Relógios da Violência12 (Clocks of Violence), an entity linked to the Maria da Penha Institute. Every 7.2 seconds a woman is the victim of physical violence. The 2015 ‘Map of Violence’ (Waiselfisz, 2015) emphasises that, in 2013 alone, 13 women died every day, victims of femicide. About 30 per cent of these murders were committed by current or former partners. This number represents an increase of 21 per cent in relation to the previous decade, which indicates that the problem has grown, contrary to expectations.

The picture becomes even more dire if we examine the elevated rates of femicide based on the marker of race. According to the data from Waiselfisz (2015), the murder of Black women increased by 54 per cent in the years 2003–13, while for whites it fell by 9.8 per cent. Black women between the ages of 15 and 29 are 2.19 times more likely to be murdered in Brazil than whites of the same age group, according to the 2017 Index of Juvenile Vulnerability to Violence (Governo do Brasil and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2017).

But there are other ‘feminine risks’ in Brazil. Every day, five women die during childbirth and four women die from complications caused by abortions. In one decade, the Unitary Healthcare System (SUS) spent R$486 million on hospitalisations due to these complications, 75 per cent of which are intentional abortions as opposed to miscarriages.

The more Brazilian women have managed to impose their independence and autonomy, the greater has been the masculine reaction and the demonstrations of misogyny and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the domination of men in public office is indisputable. One needs only look at the paucity of women in politics. With the end of the 2018 elections, we have only 55 women among 513 federal representatives.

Rape culture is also a reality bequeathed from the past with a contemporary presence. According to data from IPEA, 88 per cent of harassment victims are female, 70 per cent are children and adolescents, 46 per cent have not completed primary education and 51 per cent are Black or brown/pardo. What is more, 24 per cent of the victims point to the aggressors being either their father or stepfather, 32 per cent of cases are practised by friends or acquaintances of the victim, and many of these acts are committed by two or more persons: 10.5 per cent for child victims, 16.2 per cent for adolescents and 15.4 per cent for adults. The immediate consequence of our institutional fragility is that only 35 per cent of victims file a report with the relevant authorities, which leads us to remain imprisoned in scandalous under-reporting.

Despite this, according to the annual Brazilian report on public safety, in 2015 a rape was registered every eleven minutes in Brazil (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2015). According to the Ministry of Health, every four minutes a woman enters into SUS as a victim of sexual violence (Carvalho, 2016). Estimates vary, but in general it is calculated that these cases correspond to only 10 per cent of the total. If we accumulate and project such data, we can arrive at the rate of nearly half a million rapes every year in Brazil.

The number of femicides also remains high – 4.8 for every hundred thousand women, according to data pertaining to 2013 but published in 2015 (Waiselfisz, 2015). This rate is the fifth highest in the world, according to the World Health Organization (2005). The number of murders of Black women, from 2003 to 2013, grew 54 per cent, going from 1,864 to 2,875 cases. In the same period, the annual quantity of homicides of white women fell 9.8 per cent: from 1,747 in 2003 to 1,576 in 2013. The last report by the WHO states that 4,473 cases of manslaughter occurred in 2017, of which 946 were femicides.

Such indexes reveal that, in Brazil, a woman is murdered every two hours and that the country experiences the shameful rate of 4.3 deaths, in 2017, per hundred thousand females.

There exist other populations in vulnerable conditions whose situation reveals that Brazil has never been, in fact, a republic and that the crisis in the country is not simply financial but also one of values. In 2015, 318 LGBTQ people were murdered in Brazil, according to the NGO Grupo Gay da Bahia (GGB), which maps homicides against this population; of these, 52 per cent were gay, 37 per cent trans, 16 per cent lesbian and 10 per cent bisexual (Michels and Mott, 2016).

Brazil is, however, a paradoxical country when this question is considered. While the biggest LGBTQ parade in the world occurs each year in São Paulo, 445 persons of this group were murdered in 2017. As the anthropologist Renan Quinalha (2019) shows, in the same manner that we like to present ourselves as open to diversity in a variety of sexual, affective and identitarian experiences, we permit widespread criminality against those who do not share the model of heteronormativity. On the other hand, if we celebrate the existence of one of the oldest LGBTQ movements in the world, which was formed 40 years ago and remained active under dictatorship, we have watched the election of leaders in the government who openly make a direct and unfettered association between politics and moral and sexual conduct.

To prove the existence and maintenance of so many paradoxes, it is enough to remember the increase in physical violence suffered by these populations. The GGB indicated that, in 2017, every 19 hours an LGBTQ person was killed (Michels and Mott, 2018). According to a study by the NGO Transgender Europe, between January 2008 and April 2013, Brazil saw 486 murders of transvestites and transsexuals; a number four times higher than in Mexico, the country with the second highest number of registered cases (Exame, 2014).

One way of assessing prejudice and the current process of exclusion is to note the lack of a public policy for verifying this form of crime. Not publishing and not measuring is a form of not knowing or not caring. There is little public data, or reliable sources, at both national and regional levels, regarding homophobic violence. There are only mapping efforts developed by NGOs linked to the topic, who base their work, in turn, on news reports.

This crisis has generated not only an increase in violence, but also much intolerance in the country. In fact, not long ago Brazilians liked to define themselves as harmonious, pacifistic and inclusive. Today the public image is totally different. Now they are defined and define themselves as intolerant. Politically, intolerance presents itself as conduct that seeks to erase, or which simply does not accept, different points of view than those of a given individual. Such behaviour often utilises prejudice and the dissemination of stereotypes to affirm itself. Racism, sexism, misogyny, antisemitism, homophobia, religious or political pragmatism and fear of foreigners are known forms of social intolerance.

Since a moment when Brazilians judged that democracy had consolidated as the best political system and as a fundamental value – since it had the objective of guaranteeing freedom, equality and a regular statute of rights, although it never fully achieved this – we have watched the growth of social intolerance, in the world and notably in Brazil. And intolerance, whichever form it may be – racial, religious, social, gender – attacks article 7 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms that ‘All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.’ It also attacks article 5 of Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, which guarantees: ‘All are equal before the law, without distinction of any kind, and Brazilians and foreigners residing in the country are ensured the inviolability of the right to life, liberty, equality, security and property.’

If it is possible to say that intolerance is not a sentiment or an existential posture that is born from one day to the next, and that is instead found in the roots of our past – in the short, medium and long term – despite our continued denial of the conflict, it is also necessary to recognise that we have stopped hiding such a sentiment, and now often exalt it publicly. And maybe this is the greatest novelty: what once were hidden manifestations have become occasions of pride and self-celebration.

This change in behaviour tends, firstly, to accelerate and become more visible in moments of open political polarisation. Secondly, despite the formally well-functioning institutions of Brazil’s republic, we still lack a truly democratic political culture that can sustain these kinds of tensions and transform them into public policies. Lastly, a prolonged crisis such as the one we are living through – featuring a recession, a decline in the levels of income and a rise in unemployment – underlines a little-explored political potential, that of aversion: aversion to corruption, which is treated as banal in newscasts; aversion to the insecurity present in the streets; aversion to the growth of organised crime; aversion to the disorganisation of the state, which has been taken over by private interests; aversion to political horse-trading; aversion to intellectuals and the press; aversion to new political actors; in sum, aversion to everything that is not ‘us’ or does not represent ‘us’.

The aversion by itself is not necessarily a bad sentiment; it would be good if we developed an aversion to racism, femicides and gender crimes, or to a military dictatorship that suppressed the rights of Brazilians. The issue will continue, however, knotted, if dissatisfaction can only provoke more dissatisfaction, channelled towards a supposed common enemy.

This was, moreover, the format of the 2013 protests; few people noticed, but already there existed, in that context, two sides of the street that never converged. If the streets represented a space dominated by the political left until then, suddenly the purview was broadened, while simultaneously reduced: broadened, since it hosted other types of demands; reduced, since it divided the public space in such a manner that two groups never shared the same place.

Democracy, since the ancient Greeks, has been defined as an inconclusive process, one that must always be remade and broadened. In our case, the prevalence of representative democracy in Brazil, during 30 uninterrupted years, did not equip us to deal with a divided society that is tired of living in recession and of watching on television how so many cases of corruption occur at the heart of the state. Brazilian society at large grew tired of the growth in scale and level of criminality in the peripheries and the deterioration of public safety. This fatigue, for its part, gave way to the resentment and the direct manifestation of conservative values, in the sense of those who actually want to ‘conserve’, and who changed what seemed to be a shared utopia in the form of understanding, preserving and sharing rights. It also attacked the world of politics and the homogeneity of our politicians, who are generally male, middle-class, heterosexual and middle-aged.

A new dystopia gained form in the world and travelled to Brazil. That is to say, with the fabrication of this kind of generalised disbelief, one gains the impression that everything that existed was devoid of value, and that therefore it was now necessary to ‘charge’ for that which was ‘taken’ or ‘subtracted’ from Brazilian citizens. The demonstrators who took to the streets in 2013 had many sides and included diverse sectors representing a range of social complaints. Difference is not a problem (to the contrary, it is part of the game), but intolerance is. What is certain is that, since the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the lid has been removed from the cauldron of resentment, which has resulted in a deliberate politics of hate and polarisations.

Since then, a movement has surfaced that lived on the margins, and started distributing intransigence, shamelessly declaring a lack of respect for any differences exposed in terms of belief, sexual orientation and public opinion. The other side also hardened: the left revealed equally their level of intolerance, adopting an ever more polarised discourse. And if there has ever been a time when we believed in the idea that Brazilians were a ‘pacifistic and tolerant people’, today few defend such a line. As we have seen, there is much evidence for the rise in violence against the LGBTQ community, the reactions to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in society, xenophobic demonstrations against immigrants and foreigners, cases of bullying in schools and workplaces generated by racial and gender differences or even political divergence, just as attacks against Candomblé places of worship have multiplied.13

According to an article in Folha de São Paulo, the registration of crimes related to intolerance reached a peak during the election of 2018. During the campaign – in August, September and October – there were dozens of cases every day, over treble the 4.7 registered per day during the previous three months (Estarque and Faria, 2019). The peak was in October, when voting for the first and second rounds occurred, with 568 filed reports, an average of a little over 18 cases a day. The total of this month represents 67 per cent of the first six months of that year, and is over treble what was registered in October 2017. Occurrences of religious intolerance grew by 171 per cent in relation to the three previous months, homophobia by 75 per cent and intolerance due to origin by 83 per cent. Those due to colour or race grew by 15 per cent.

The data from Disque 100 – the federal government’s service for reporting human rights violations – indicate that the religions that were most attacked were those of African origins, which were the target of almost 35 per cent of cases in the first half of 2018 (Ministério da Mulher, da Família e dos Direitos Humanos, 2019). The rise in violence revealed the scope of the intolerance. The Bureau for Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic has shown how every three days a case of religious intolerance is registered. The report by the GGB informs us that in 2017 alone, the death of a victim was registered every 19 hours. And the number of cases of persons forced to hide LGBTQ flags also increased due to attacks, from insults to physical assault. Foreigners from Latin America, from Haiti or even Africa have also suffered a newly belligerent attitude from the Brazilian populace; in 2015, there was an increase by 63 per cent of cases of xenophobia, of which only 1 per cent resulted in litigation.

Intolerance has spread, in the same way, by way of social networks. According to the Internet Managing Committee of Brazil, in 2018 alone, between August and October, of every three minors with digital access, at least one had knowledge of someone who had suffered discrimination. Those interviewed referred to cases of prejudice due to skin colour or race (24 per cent), appearance (16 per cent) and homosexuality (13 per cent). Other research conducted in the same period, by SaferNet, an NGO that defends human rights on the Brazilian internet, showed thirty-nine thousand sites with racist content and exhortations to violence were reported for violating human rights.

Taken together, this data confirms how people who had felt restrained in demonstrating their intolerance now seem to feel emboldened, authorised. But it is difficult to explain such a lurch. When did we abandon the image of a country of cordiality to create a public representation of intransigence and an aversion to difference? Answers do not exist, because we have seen how this type of attitude was a political and cultural performance, and not an accurate portrayal of Brazilians’ real, ambiguous views.

But a crucial element leads us to understand the growth of intolerance in our country: the deficiency in quality basic public education. Indexes of the Brazilian Forum on Public Safety (FBSP) and Datafolha for 2018 show that Brazilian society, on a scale of zero to ten, currently attains a rating of 8.1 in its tendency to endorse more authoritarian positions. According to Renato Sérgio de Lima, president of FBSP, a majority advocates for the use of violence as a form of governing and, paradoxically, judges that this would be the best manner to ‘pacify society, in a sort of moral and political vendetta’ (Gonçalves, 2017).

According to the same study, furthermore, the lower the level of educational attainment, the greater the tendency to risk authoritarian solutions which are not receptive to dialogue. After all, it is in school that students learn to live with difference and respect those who do not share the same familial experiences and forms of sociability.

The answer to the political, economic, social and cultural crisis in which Brazil finds itself will only come with a more inclusive and egalitarian project for the nation. Intolerance has increased the fragility of the rule of law of our democratic state, which requires respect between ideas, experiences, practices, options and different customs. Democracies function better, write Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), and survive for much longer, when constitutions are reinforced by democratic norms and not writs.

Authoritarianism, now, represents the antonym of democracy. In any case, learning from differences continues to be the golden rule of citizenship and a key part of the strengthening of the democratic bases of Brazilian society. Betting on polarisation, incentivising intolerance based on the proliferation of hate discourse and reinforcing social binaries, on the other hand, signifies going against the common good and working for division, which will make us less, not more.

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