Freedom in the World 2001 - Brazil

2001 Scores

Status: Partly Free
Freedom Rating: 3.0
Civil Liberties: 3
Political Rights: 3

Ratings Change

Brazil's civil liberties rating changed from 4 to 3 due to improvements in tackling corruption and organized crime.

Overview

Corruption and violent lawlessness dominated the news in Brazil in 2000, as the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso came in for congressional scrutiny in a public works bribery scandal, and violent urban crime continued to spiral upward. In June, a live television broadcast of a hostage drama in Rio de Janeiro, in which a young woman was killed, caused Cardoso to announce a wide-ranging national crackdown on crime, including a $1.7 billion national public safety program. In August, Cardoso unveiled a wide-ranging anticorruption package designed to stem the accusations of illegality dogging a government that has shown greater resolve in solving the problem than any other Brazilian government.

After gaining independence from Portugal in 1822, Brazil retained a monarchial system until a republic was established in 1889. Democratic rule has been interrupted by long periods of authoritarian rule, most recently under military regimes from 1964 to 1985, when elected civilian rule was reestablished. A new constitution, which went into effect in 1988, provides for a president to be elected for four years and a bicameral congress consisting of an 81-member senate elected for eight years and a 503-member chamber of deputies elected for four years.

Civilian rule has been marked by corruption scandals. The scandal having the greatest political impact led to the impeachment by congress of President Fernando Collor de Mello (1989-1992). Collor resigned and was replaced by a weak, ineffectual government led by his vice president, Itamar Franco.

In early 1994, Cardoso, Franco's finance minister and a market-oriented centrist, forged a three-party, center-right coalition around his own Social Democratic Party (PSDB). As his anti-inflation plan appeared to work dramatically, Cardoso, a former Marxist backed by big media and big business, jumped into the lead. In October 1994 Cardoso won the presidency with 54 percent of the vote, against 27 percent for Luis Ignacio "Lula" de Silva, the leader of the leftist PT and an early front-runner. The senate was divided among 11 parties, and the chamber of deputies among 18. Cardoso's coalition did not have a majority in either house.

Cardoso spent 1995 cajoling opponents and bargaining for the congressional votes needed to carry out his economic liberalization program. That fall, his government was rocked by a bribery and phone-tapping scandal. In April 1996, Cardoso indicated that he favored a constitutional amendment to drop the one-term limit, which would allow him to run for reelection in 1998, and in 1997 he was able to secure congressional approval for such a measure.

In 1996, land issues were high on the political agenda. In January, Cardoso announced presidential decree 1775, which allows states, municipalities, and non-Indians to challenge, at the federal level, proposed demarcation of Indian lands. Following the decree, miners and loggers increased their encroachments on Indian land. In another development, a radicalized movement representing landless peasants continued to occupy mostly fallow land in rural areas to pressure the government to settle rural families. The activism contributed to scores of violent conflicts between peasants on the one hand and, on the other hand, the military, the police, and private security forces, which act with virtual impunity.

In 1998, Cardoso's first-ballot victory (nearly 52 percent of the votes cast) over Lula, his nearest rival, was tempered somewhat by a less convincing win at the congressional and gubernatorial levels. His win was also overshadowed when published accounts of secretly recorded conversations seemed to indicate that two top officials were steering a bid to privatize part of the state-run telephone holding company to a consortium of personal friends, who ended up losing the auction.

The revelation in 1999 of a vast criminal conspiracy centered in the jungle state of Acre highlighted the lawlessness of Brazil's remote areas and moved Cardoso to take firm measures to combat organized crime. In June, Cardoso's choice for chief of the federal police was forced to resign after holding office just three days when he was alleged to have participated in the torture of political prisoners during the military regime. At the same time, a power struggle between the state intelligence service (Abin) and the federal police, in which the wiretapping of top political figures, including Cardoso himself, was revealed, contributed to the scandal over the privatization of the national telecommunications system.

In 2000, the Brazilian senate removed for the first time ever one of its members, accused of corruption. Public safety issues appeared to increasingly determine how people spent both their money and their time. Bullet-proof-vehicle sales are booming in Brazil; some 50 percent of big-city residents say that they avoid leaving their homes after dark for fear of attack; and the private security market is one of the country's fastest-growing industries – 30 percent a year.

In September, a congressional committee probing organized crime and drug trafficking released an explosive report implicating nearly 200 officials in 17 of Brazil's 27 states – including at least 10 state and federal congressmen and a host of police officers, judges, mayors, and other local officials. Cardoso used the opportunity to warn that what he called a barrage of unfounded accusations was eroding faith in Brazilian democracy. In October, mayoral candidates of the moderately left, anti-corruption, Workers' Party (PT) swept to victory in a number of the country's most important cities, including São Paolo – Brazil's financial and economic nerve center – giving a boost to the party's chances in 2002 presidential elections.

Political Rights and Civil Liberties

Citizens can change their government through elections. Recent efforts to modernize elections procedures were considered highly successful in the November 2000 municipal elections, with state-of-the-art electronic voting allowing results from even the most remote areas to be tabulated in 12 hours. The new system dramatically diminished the incidence of blank or annulled ballots, which in the past have often come from illiterate voters unable to discharge their civic duty. The speed with which the votes were tabulated also appeared to reduce the possibility for chaotic, fraud-ridden elections. However, a 1999 study showed that nepotism is rife in the congress, where one third of all deputies have placed their wives, children, and relatives on the official government payroll.

The constitution guarantees freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and the right to organize political and civic organizations. Cardoso is credited with initiating a marked change in attitudes concerning international criticism on rights issues, from aggressive, nationalistic rejection to dialogue and openness. He created a ministerial-rank secretariat charged with defending human rights. The crime of torture was upgraded from a misdemeanor to a serious crime punishable by up to 16 years in prison.

In the past decade, the murder rate in Brazil has doubled, with 45,000 deaths due to gunshot wounds in 1999 and 2,495 people murdered by vigilante death squads over the past three years. The state capital of São Paulo has a death rate – 50 deaths per 100,000 people – comparable in the western hemisphere only to that of Colombia's war-torn cities. The climate of lawlessness is reinforced by a weak judiciary, although recently some improvements have been made. Brazil's supreme court is granted substantial autonomy by the constitution. However, the judicial system is overwhelmed (with only 7,000 judges for a population of more than 150 million) and vulnerable to chronic corruption. With a few exceptions, it has been virtually powerless in the face of organized crime. A national breakdown in police discipline and escalating criminal violence, fueled by a burgeoning drug trade and increasing ties to Italian and other foreign criminal organizations, have added to a climate of lawlessness and insecurity. Human rights, particularly those of socially marginalized groups, are violated with impunity on a massive scale.

In a positive development, federal government prosecutors have begun to act as public interest advocates on issues ranging from the environment and consumer and Indian rights, to monitoring police behavior. Recent legal reforms have given itinerant "traveling judges" broad special powers to decide on legal matters in makeshift courtrooms, enabling the system to clear thousands of backlogged criminal and civil cases and allowing the rural poor a greater possibility to have their issues addressed by law.

The 124-point national public safety plan, initiated in 2000 by Cardoso, included recruiting 2,000 more federal police, an implicit recognition that cash-strapped state governments have not been able to forge from their undisciplined and demoralized local police effective crime-deterring units. The plan also included a provision to set up a national registry of police officers with criminal records, in order to ensure they do not receive later employment in Brazil's burgeoning private security firms. There are some 1.3 million private security guards in Brazil, more than twice the number of police serving in the country's 27 states.

Brazil's police are among the world's most violent and corrupt, with local media claiming that some 15,000 officers having been accused of torture but that none have been sentenced. (In August 2000, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture traveled to Brazil, where he noted that he visited those countries where the number of torture accusations suggested the practice was commonplace and needed to be investigated.) Police are mostly grossly underpaid in the lower ranks, and working conditions are poor. Extrajudicial killings are usually disguised as shootouts with dangerous criminals. Military policemen in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have secretly been caught on videotape attacking people on the street, extorting money, and opening fire on – and killing – motorists during routine operations. In many cities "death squads," often composed of off-duty state police, terrorize shantytown dwellers and intimidate human rights activists attempting to investigate abuses.

Since 1994, the federal government has deployed the army to quell police strikes and bring order to Rio de Janeiro's 400 slums, most of which are ruled by gangs in league, or in competition, with corrupt police and local politicians. Public distrust of the judiciary has resulted in poor citizens taking the law into their own hands, with hundreds of reported lynchings and mob executions. In response to U.S. pressure, the Brazilian military is playing an increasing role in antinarcotics efforts.

The prison system in Brazil is anarchic, overcrowded, and largely unfit for human habitation, and human rights groups charge that the torture and other inhumane treatment common to most of the country's detention centers turns petty thieves into hardened criminals. In 2000, a parliamentary report charged the prisons were a "reinvention of hell" and singled out a jail in São Paulo as a "medieval dungeon" where guards used a special machine to deliver electric shocks to prisoners' genitalia. The 2000 public safety plan calls for new prisons to be built in order to relieve chronic overcrowding.

The press is privately owned. There are dozens of daily newspapers and numerous other publications throughout the country. The print media have played a central role in exposing official corruption. In recent years TV Globo's near monopoly on the broadcast media has been challenged by its rival, Sistema Brasiliero de Televisão (STB). In a negative development, on December 27, 2000, Cardoso promulgated a controversial law that aimed to shield public officials from slander by means of firing and fining public prosecutors who make charges that they cannot prove in court.

Large landowners control nearly 60 percent of arable land, while the poorest 30 percent share less than two percent. In rural areas, violence linked to land disputes is declining, but courts have increasingly supported the eviction of landless farmers. Thousands of workers are forced by ranchers in rural areas to work against their will and have no recourse to police or courts. Although casualties of rural violence appeared to decrease in the period 1998-2000, a total of 1,186 people – four times the number of casualties during a 1964-1985 military dictatorship – were killed between the return of democratic rule in 1985 and June 2000.

Violence against women and children is a common problem. Protective laws are rarely enforced. In 1991 the supreme court ruled that a man could no longer kill his wife and win acquittal on the ground of "legitimate defense of honor," but juries tend to ignore the ruling. Forced prostitution of children is widespread. Child labor is prevalent, and laws against it are rarely enforced. A recent UNICEF study reported that 53 percent of the 17.5 million children and young people forced to work in Latin America are in Brazil, and of these one million are less than ten years old. A Roman Catholic Church pastoral land commission said in December 2000 that slavery persists on farms, with a total of 1,080 rural slaves having been freed the previous year.

Violence against Brazil's 250,000 Indians continues. In May 1998, the coordinator of the Organization of Indigenous Peoples was murdered by unidentified gunmen. The 1988 constitution guarantees indigenous peoples land rights covering some 11 percent of the country, and by law outsiders can enter Indian reserves only with permission. However, the government has completed the demarcation and registration of only 187 of the 559 eligible Indian reservations. Court and administrative rulings have eroded indigenous land claims, putting a third of the promised territory in legal limbo. Decree 1775 has opened Indian land to greater pressure from predatory miners and loggers. In some remote areas, Colombian drug traffickers have been using Indians to transport narcotics. In April 2000, police used excessive force in breaking up a peaceful demonstration by 2000 Indians protesting, with Cardoso's explicit support, the 500th anniversary of Portugal's arrival in Brazil. In August, 50 Caiapo tribe members kidnapped 16 Brazilian tourists in protest against the government's suspension, in 1990, of the demarcation of 1.85 million hectares of tribal lands.

Industrial labor unions are well organized and politically connected; many are corrupt. The right to strike is recognized, and there are special labor courts. Hundreds of strikes have taken place in recent years against attempts to privatize state industries.