Brazil’s embattled President, Dilma Rousseff, was forced to step down from office earlier this month, pending impeachment proceedings, after a majority of lawmakers in her country’s Senate and lower house of Congress voted to suspend her. Rousseff is accused of doctoring official budget figures and using money from state banks in order to hide the real state of Brazil’s shrinking economy, so as to help her win reëlection, in 2014. Her removal took place as she suffered from plunging popularity ratings amid an economic recession and a string of corruption scandals involving her government; the state oil company, Petrobras; and other Brazilian corporations, including the construction giant Odebrecht. (Rousseff has not been accused of personal, self-enriching corruption.) She decried her removal as a “coup,” the result of a “conspiracy” against her, and she accused Michel Temer, the country’s gleamingly conservative Vice-President, who has now replaced her, of being part of it. Temer’s first actions—he promised a series of pro-business reforms, slashed the number of Brazil’s ministries by nearly a third, and named an all-male and mostly white Cabinet that included a soybean tycoon as agriculture minister and an evangelical creationist as trade minister—did little to dispel the whiff of suspicion that a political counterrevolution was taking place, following thirteen years of rule by the left-of-center Partido dos Trabalhadores, or Workers’ Party. (In the latest twist, a leaked tape recording, apparently from March, captures Romero Jucá, a senator under investigation in the Petrobras scandal, speaking with a former senator who was also under investigation about a “pact” to “change the government” and install Temer. Jucá was recently appointed Temer’s planning minister, but stepped down on Tuesday following the recording’s release.)
Although Rousseff’s removal from office was legal, the hypocrisy of many of the politicians who voted against her made it a distasteful spectacle. According to Transparency Brazil, more than half of Brazil’s lawmakers are themselves under criminal investigation, for offenses ranging from bribery and homicide to slavery; these include Eduardo Cunha, the former Speaker of the House and the leader of the impeachment campaign, who is accused by Brazil’s attorney general of taking as much as five million dollars in bribes; Cunha has denied the charges. Conspiracy being to politics what gluten, even now, is to most bread, the image of men in smoke-filled rooms remains real in much of the world.
There seems little doubt that Rousseff’s ouster bodes ill for a nation that, just a few years ago, was booming economically and fêted as a welcome newcomer to the international firmament of emerging economic powers, the jaunty “B” in the so-called BRICS, composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The government of Rousseff’s predecessor and mentor, the widely beloved Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who ruled from 2003 through 2010, rode the crest of Brazil’s economic success. Lula, as he was known, established his popularity by instituting the Bolsa Família, a poverty-alleviation program whereby poor families who vaccinated their children and kept them enrolled in primary school were guaranteed a basic stipend. In the end, the Bolsa Família was credited with lifting millions of Brazilians out of extreme poverty. Before leaving office after his second term, Lula crowned his glory by securing for Brazil the 2014 World Cup, and this year’s Summer Olympics. By the time Rousseff took over, on New Year’s Day, 2011, Brazil’s future seemed assured, big, and ebullient, like the country itself.
No longer. This year was supposed to be Brazil’s big début party, with the rest of the world as guests; instead, it’s been an annus horribilis. On top of everything else, the mosquito-borne Zika virus has hit Brazil with unusual virulence; the virus has been linked to a surge in the number of babies born with microcephaly. Few modern Olympic host nations have ever had to deal with such a dismal national outlook; the Games start in just a couple months.
Brazil’s change of fortunes is taking place against a backdrop of related shifts to the political right in Latin America, changes that could well prove to be seismic in a region that has been increasingly dominated by left-of-center governments since the early aughts. This trend, which some analysts have called the “pink tide,” was characterized by the emergence of a new brand of left-wing Latin populism, incarnated by the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez. His influence in the region was fuelled and financed by a boom in global oil prices, as well as by China’s thirst for access to natural resources, markets, and allies in Latin America. (China eventually became Venezuela’s chief creditor, lending it an estimated forty-five billion dollars.) Another factor was an unusual degree of U.S. inattention to the region during the George W. Bush Administration—distracted as it was by the “War on Terror” and its conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. But, beginning with Chávez’s death, in March, 2013, the dynamic began to shift. A precipitous fall in oil prices, together with the gradual slowdown of China’s economy, has meant a drop in revenues for Latin America’s export-based extractive economies. Corruption and mismanagement, long camouflaged by the extra money, revealed themselves to be deep and chronic problems—most obviously in countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. The pink tide is receding fast.
The ebbing of the tide began in Argentina, last November, with the electoral victory of Mauricio Macri, a pro-American free-marketer, over Daniel Scioli, outgoing President Cristina Kirchner’s handpicked successor. This ended thirteen years of leftward-leaning big government by Kirchner and her late husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner. Next, in December’s Venezuelan parliamentary elections, the political opposition won control of the national assembly, challenging the political hegemony enjoyed by the Chavistas, as the disciples of Chávez call themselves, for the first time in sixteen years. Three years after Chávez’s death, after a long battle with cancer in office, Venezuela, which declared itself to be “socialist” in the mid-aughts, is virtually bankrupt and languishes at the cliff-edge of disaster, with dire food and energy shortages causing outbreaks of looting and mounting social tensions. The opposition is collecting signatures for a referendum to recall Chávez’s successor, the bumbling and bombastic Nicolás Maduro. One senior U.S. government official told me recently that the fall of the Venezuelan government was likely “not a matter of if but when.” Maduro has obstreperously refused to make any political concessions, insisting that he will see out his term, which ends in 2019. As for the country’s shortages, Maduro last week claimed, Trumpishly, that he had “a plan,” but it seems unlikely that the plan consists of anything more than bluster. In Bolivia, meanwhile, the outspoken leftist leader Evo Morales, in office since 2006, narrowly lost a referendum that would have extended Presidential term limits, allowing him to run for a fourth term. As things stand, Morales will be forced to step down after elections are held in 2019.
Changes are under way across the region. In December, 2014, Presidents Castro and Obama announced the restoration of diplomatic ties between Cuba and the U.S., triggering a flood of American tourists on visits to Cuba, along with businessmen hoping to invest. Earlier this month, a Carnival Cruise ship docked in Havana for the first time, while Vin Diesel and his Hollywood co-stars shot car-racing scenes on the city’s famous seafront, for the eighth "Fast and Furious" movie. And in Colombia the last Marxist insurgency in the hemisphere is winding down, as FARC guerrillas and the government come close to concluding more than three years of peace talks, which will end fifty years of civil war.
When I asked Cassio Luiselli, a former senior Mexican diplomat, what he thought it all meant, he replied instantly, “It’s the end of the Cuban project in the hemisphere.” At a recent conference in New York, the renowned leftist writer Ignacio Ramonet, the editor of the Spanish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique and a biographer of both Chávez and Fidel Castro, seemed to concur. “Perhaps the historical cycle of revolution is ending, and what is important now is good governance,” Ramonet ventured.
If the pink tide is over, what will come in its place? Luiselli told me he hopes that the trend is toward greater social democracy. In spite of the chaos in Venezuela and Brazil, and the narco violence afflicting Mexico and Central America, Luiselli expressed optimism about the region’s future. “There’s a greater middle class now in Latin America than there used to be, and civil society is stronger, although work has to be done to build rule of law,” he said. “There are no real coup d’états anymore, for all the yelling about them—not like there used to be. The days of Pinochet are over. But the culture of Latin-American victimization has to stop. The left has to grow up and take responsibility for its own actions. There are people blaming the U.S. for being behind the ‘coup’ against Dilma. But it’s just not true, and to say so is insulting to Brazil. It’s a big nation, and it must still find its way, but it’s making its own choices, and making its own mistakes.”
On the day of Rousseff’s ouster, I happened to be in Miami, where I overheard a group of Latin-American businessmen talking about the events in Brazil. One warned of the potential dangers if Rousseff’s followers, many of whom had taken to the streets to protest, decided to take up arms against the new government. He reminded his friends that Rousseff had once been an armed Marxist guerrilla herself. (It is true that she belonged to a Marxist guerrilla group in the days of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when she was a young woman; she also spent three years in prison, was brutally tortured, and yet, as President, had ruled out punishing those responsible, in the name of national reconciliation. One of the legislators who voted to impeach her, on the other hand, announced that he was dedicating his vote to one of Brazil’s most notorious military-era torturers.)
There was a lull as the businessmen pondered their friend’s alarming scenario. Finally, one spoke up to say, “On the other hand, there’s money to be made right now in Brazil. The prices of rental properties are low.” It could, he suggested, be exactly the right time to invest.
