According to Rousseff sovereignty and transparency are highly important aspects in a democracy, more precisely also in her country, Brazil. But is the in her speech pronounced transparency really hold in Brazil? Some current important events in Brazil are indicators for a dubious compliance with political transparency and in general the usage of budgets, which creates serious doubts, especially for the citizens.
As a consequence, in july 2013 for approximatively two weeks, more than a million Brazilians took the streets to protest against the important political corruption, the economic injustice, the poor health care, inadequate schools, bad public transports and infrastructure and the billions of dollar blown on sports (for a video of students digging for corruption watch this video by the NY Times) . One of he founders of the Free Fare Movement, an organization which fights against the public transports and helped to start the protests, even said „it’s like the taking of the Bastille“. The crowds shouted „Brazil, wake up, any good teacher is worth more than Neymar!“ (Neymar da Silva Santos is a Brazilian football star earning $90 million for playing for Barcelona). Furthermore, Brazil is spending 13.3$ to host the FIFA world cup this year and 18$ billion for the summer olympics in 2016 even if there are other massive problems (see the most important problems in the box below) that seem more important than a sports event. A demonstrator says: “They don’t invest in education, they don’t invest in infrastructure, and they keep putting makeup on the city to show to the world that we can host the World Cup and Olympics,”. |
| Source: Marty Kaplan, Let’s Be Brazil, 06/24/2013, huffingtonpost.com |
Even if the demonstrations took place in a lot of cities in Brazil and the amount of demonstrators was considerable, the demands were diffuse, not clear, left the government confounded how to satisfy them. Besides, the fact that the police used pepper spray and tear gas to stop demonstrators and the demonstrators set fire in buildings and vehicles, the fact that there were hundreds of injured and some cases of death show the violent and peace-less attitudes of the parties and the from the government unwanted expression of the citizens that the money is spend for the wrong field.
An example for concrete political corruption and the weak sanctions for such a crime are Luiz Lula da Silva and other leaders of the ruling Worker’s Party who created a system to corrupt allies in return for congressional support. As a consequence they were arrested after the authorization of the supreme court-president on the 15th of November 2013 which was unexpected because impunity for politicians was the norm for a long time in Brazil. To be precise, 12 politicians were arrested because of bribery, money-laundering, misuse of public funds and conspiracy but all of them successfully appealed for retrials.
The most occurrent problem is that the sanctions for political corruption are activated very slowly. Donadon, a centrist congressman convicted in 2010 of stealing millions in public funds in the 1990s only went to jail in 2013.
Now the question is if this current situation will change with the economic growth and how investors and international companies handle this political in-transparency.
Camille J.
Sources:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/brazils-rousseff-trashes-us-over-nsa-spying/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/lets-be-brazil_b_3486614.html
http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21590560-landmark-justice-jailed-last
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/americas/brazil-protests.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
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