Mark Ashurst
26 February 2004
analysis
Picture this. Night clubs thronged with multi-racial yuppies, dead ringers for that elusive tribe who tout beer and life insurance on Johannesburg billboards. Military convoys dispensing anti-retroviral drugs to people who have never seen a telephone. In the squatter camps of a prosperous coastal city, slum dwellers gaining formal title to their shacks, their feet on the ladder of a new property-owning democracy.
Wishful propaganda from the Nepad Secretariat? The idle daydream of a jaded World Bank official? Far from it. In downtown Sao Paolo, the outer reaches of the Amazon and the shanty towns of Rio de Janeiro, all this is happening - now - in Brazil.
Almost a decade ago, Cape Town economist Jos Gerson published an economic forecast entitled 'SA, the Brazil of Africa'. A daunting prospect at the time, Gerson predicted the performance-enhancing, job-shedding shocks dolled out to local industry would transform 21st-century South Africa into a rainbow nation of strong corporations cheek-by-jowl with spiralling poverty. Infused with the confidence of the Mandela era, Gerson was cautiously optimistic. He saw the benefits of democracy surviving the effects of South Africa's self-imposed economic reforms.
Today, being the Brazil of Africa looks like a reasonable summary of President Thabo Mbeki's ambitions for South Africa. Meanwhile on the far side of the Atlantic, much about Brazil in 2004 recalls the giddy optimism of the post-apartheid era. After a two-week tour as a jobbing journalist, I was left with a strong sense that Brazil has turned the tide on what Mbeki has derided in South Africa as "a psychosis of failure". Like their African peers, Brazilians have confronted the rhetoric of a looming apocalypse. Unlike them, common problems which still weigh heavily on Africa have been diffused.
A year after Workers' Party leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva came to power, most Brazilians are still enthralled by the romance of a former shoe-shine boy becoming president. His governing Partido dos Trabalhadores is a restive alliance of capitalists, pragmatists, populists and the destitute. Uniting them looks impossible, but there is broad consensus even among the government's opponents that it needs to be tried.
The challenges of doing so are enormous. At 170 million, Brazil's population rivals Nigeria's, South Africa's and Zimbabwe's combined. Aside from the vexed question of the actual proportions of Africa's Aids epidemic, Brazil's problems look much worse than South Africa's - if only for their sheer scale. The distribution of resources resembles Nigerian proportions, with at least 55 million Brazilians living in poverty. The largest private estate is the size of Connecticut, while the landless peoples' movement, Movimento Sem Terra, is the world's largest political pressure group. Popular politics is infused by an often nostalgic yearning for land, which any Zimbabwean would recognise.
South African cabinet ministers make much of their mutual interests with Brazil. With China and India, South Africa has forged a robust alliance of developing countries to campaign for a fairer system of world trade. Brazil is the boldest of the pack. In the corridors of multilateral agencies and the boardrooms of big pharmaceutical companies, South America's biggest country is hailed as a vanguard for the developing world. Its stance in dealing with Aids, multinational companies and mass movements is a useful reference for Africa.
BIG, BUT PERFECTLY FORMED
Size alone does not account for Brazil's influence, nor the sometimes grudging respect it commands abroad. As Mbeki often tells his African peers, size is no substitute for coordination. A better explanation lies in Brazil's social cohesion, developed over half a millennium since the arrival of the first Portugese settlers. Immigrants from every corner of the globe - India, Italy, Japan, China, France, Spain, Russia and Arab states have cross-bred through generations. Watch a Paulistano (Sao Paolo resident) who looks Korean, dancing the Samba - and you grasp how much ethnic roots have dissolved.
Brazilians boast that miscegenation is the country's greatest asset. Better even than the distinct colours of a 'Rainbow Nation', Brazil's racial profile has the blurred hues of an impressionist painting. Brazilians aren't much bothered by variations in culture or colour or ethnicity. Portugese, the colonial language, is an authentic "mother tongue". Despite huge economic disparities, political loyalties are largely non-racial. When there are no natives, no settlers and no lineage claiming to be purer than the next, transparently racial alliances have little resonance.
Knowing who you are is good for a nation's confidence. Alas, it does little to resolve historic wrongs. After three centuries of slavery, racism remains alive in Brazil. You see it in the concentration of Afro-Brazilians in the outlying slums of industrial towns, and the maldistribution of resources which condemns the mainly black North to poverty. Yet racism in Brazil is substantially different from much of the racially-charged feuding in Europe or America.
Watching a rally of destitute Brazilians gather under the banner of the MST is a lesson in virtual history: a glimpse of what might have been in South Africa. Brazil's underclass reminded me of those sepia photographs of pan- racial crowds on the Witwatersrand gold reef, protesting against cuts in miners' wages almost a century ago. Nobody pretends these evils are in any way redressed by changing the colour of people's faces on television. On the tenth anniversary of South African democracy, becoming the "Brazil of Africa" might seem an attractive prospect to many.
YESTERDAY'S HOLOCAUST
Politics in Brazil is not burdened by the sense of dislocation which weighs so heavily on South Africa, muddling real problems with old phobias. This is most apparent at times of crisis, when nations face a stark choice between unity and recriminaton. No crisis has loomed larger on either side of the Atlantic than Aids.
In the early 1990s, estimates of the likely impact of Aids in Brazil were freighted with the same apocalyptic warnings which now torment Africa. A killer virus, barely understood, threatened a fledgling democracy. There were no special drugs, and not much useful advice from Europe or America. When AZT and other treatments emerged in the early 1990s, conventional wisdom among multilateral agencies held that such medicines were simply too complex, too expensive and too difficult to supply at scale in developing countries.
Ten years on, the government claims that 99 per cent of Brazilians who need anti-retroviral drugs get them -- free - a measure of official confidence that the Aids programme reaches all corners of the country. After long battles at the World Trade Organisation, state laboratories manufacture generic copies of 12 Aids medicines under licence from the patent holders. Arguments with the big pharmaceutical companies over intellectual property rights have been fierce, yet contrary to its reputation among some Aids activists, Brazil has never broken a patent.
Far from antagonising Big Pharma, the principle of pricing essential medicines according to a country's ability to pay has been accepted by drugs companies. "Being in the forefront of just about any developing country in terms of being able to provide care for all who need it," says Raymond Gilmartin, chief executive of US drugs giant Merck, "Brazil has been a very tough and hard bargainer." Differential pricing is now recognised as a sustainable business model - making possible last year's agreement on trade in generic drugs at the WTO. "Brazil is moving towards greater intellectual property protection," says Gilmartin. "They see that as important for investment in the future".
The most important consequence is that HIV is no longer perceived in Brazil as a death sentence. At the Sao Paolo State Hospital for Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Aids Training and Referral Centre, I met queues of apparently healthy patients collecting anti-retrovirals from the pharmacy. Grey-haired old men lined up beside young mothers with push chairs. All carried green magnetic swipe cards - which allow the national Department of Health in Brasilia to track their prescriptions - with no obvious embarressment.
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