When corruption is not a crime: ‘innocent’ white politicians and the racialisation of criminality in Brazil

ABSTRACT

In northeastern Brazil, a small number of political families have ruthlessly clung to power for centuries. Members of these seigniorial clans have grown accustomed to the benefits of public office and, therefore, do not recognise how the economically and politically corrupt acts they have practised during their careers might be construed as illegal. Instead, they blame corruption on desperately poor voters whom, they argue, subvert the democratic process by selling their votes to the highest bidder on Election Day. Rather than examine why the desperately poor sell their votes, as scholarly literature on corruption in Latin America often does, this essay seeks to understand the racialised and classed discourses elite white politicians develop and disseminate in order to justify – or to deny – their own participation in corruption. Comparing scandals involving Fernando Collor and Lula, respectively, the essay suggests that historical and contemporary intersections of race and class become visible whenever allegations of corruption are made in Brazil, and in the Americas more broadly. The essay further argues that when elite politicians accuse those from humbler backgrounds of corruption, their accusations work to shore up an elite consensus that associates innocence with wealth and whiteness, and criminality with poverty and blackness.

Acknowledgements

This article would not have been written without the prompting, and the support, of Donna Goldstein. She generously read and suggested necessary revisions on each draft; thank you. My appreciation also goes out to Christopher Barnes for his patience and his editorial prowess, and to the anonymous reviewers whose invaluable critiques pushed me to refine my expression as well as my thoughts on this topic. I must also thank Alastair McClure, Tarek Younis, Uzma Jamil, and Yasmin Jiwani for discussing the ideas behind this article in their earliest incarnation, at the British Academy sponsored ‘Institutional Erasure of Race: Violence Across Time and Space’ workshop at McGill University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

K. Drybread is a cultural anthropologist based at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has written on prison rapes and murders, political corruption, and the meanings of mundane mass graves. Her current project examines relationships between citizenship and violence in Brazil.

ORCID

K. Drybread http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6573-4898

Notes

1 Senator Arnon de Mello had a long-standing rivalry with Silvestre Péricles de Góis Monteiro, another senator representing Alagoas in the National Congress. In December 1963, as Arnon de Mello was delivering a speech on the Senate floor, his rival barged into the chamber shouting insults. Arnon de Mello fired multiple shots at Silvestre Péricles but failed to hit his target. Instead, he fatally wounded a senator representing the state of Acre (Conti 1999).

2 On the campaign trail in 2014, Collor not only boasted repeatedly of his newly acquired ficha limpa (clean slate), he also tried to convince voters that his prior impeachment was a parliamentary coup (Madeiro 2014).

3 The Lava Jato probe contributed to the impeachment of former President Dilma Rouseff in 2016, and has already resulted in a prison sentence for former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

4 Some suggest that it was Collor’s father, Arnon de Mello, who cemented the character of the violent, backward northeastern politician into the national imagination when he fired shots at his political rival on the floor of the national Senate. Prior to that moment, Arnon de Mello had been able to portray himself as the worldly and lettered equal of his colleagues from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Afterward, he was shunned from polite society outside of his home state (Conti 1999: 22).

5 In fact, the famed editor José Olympico and the celebrated lexicographer Aurélio Buarque de Holanda signed the civil registry as witnesses to his birth. http://www.fgv.br/cpdoc/acervo/dicionarios/verbete-biografico/collor-fernando

6 However, as Goldstein (2018) points out in this issue, the case of Admiral Othon and his conviction in Operation Radioactive suggests that a subtle shift towards greater accountability for the elite may be underway.

7 Indeed, two months after Lula was convicted, his presidential successor, Dilma Rouseff, and six other members of the PT were charged with operating a criminal organisation.

8 Scholars of racial formations in the United States (Omi and Winant 2015; Roediger 1991; Smedley and Smedley 2012) and elsewhere (Banton 1977; Stoler 1995) have noted that race is, and has always been, a way of classifying and interpreting human differences. While many contemporary ideas of race and racial formation took root in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as colonial Europeans built empires in different parts of the globe, it was arguably in the nineteenth century that current notions of race and racism were consolidated in tandem with the abolition of chattel slavery (e.g. Davis 1981), the rise of social Darwinism (e.g. Young 1995), and the emergence of the State as a biopolitical formation of power (e.g. Foucault 2003).

9 Given the limited space I have to develop my argument, I cannot provide a thorough account of Brazilian ideas of race, nor can I even begin to fully trace the history of these ideas. The texts cited in this section do much of that work, and do it well.

10 It is important to note that racial classification in Brazil is much more complex than the black and white dichotomy that this sentence implies (Roth-Gordon 2017; Sheriff 2001).

11 In fact, when the 1890 Criminal Code was replaced by a new Code in 1940, many of Nina Rodrigues’ ideas about the natural propensity of people from certain backgrounds to engage in crime were incorporated into law, even though his ideas regarding racial inferiority had been recast into a discourse of cultural pathology (Dávila 2003; Fischer 2004).

12 As in the United States, this is particularly true in the case of drug related crimes.

13 https://extra.globo.com/famosos/luma-de-oliveira-protesta-contra-condenacao-do-filho-thor-batista-foi-julgado-pela-condicao-economica-social-8719442.html

14 http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/brazil/slaying.htm

15 http://www.atlasbrasil.org.br/2013/en/perfil_uf/alagoas

16 Friends who helped with apartment hunting suggested avoiding Collor’s block, joking (in all seriousness) that if as neighbours we curried his disfavour, we would be living in the city’s most dangerous spot.

17 Arguably, both predestination and an air of divinity are evoked by Renan Filho’s nickname, which he shares with Jesus Christ.

18 Whether local politicians know it or not, this perception seems to be rooted in the original use of corruption as a transitive verb.

19 Conservative politicians have characterised Bolsa Familia as ‘institutionalised vote-buying’ in an effort to taint with the brush of corruption this and other policies that have materially improved the lives of the nation’s poor (Ansell 2018a).

20 Central to these accusations were the educational modules Rouseff proposed introducing to schools to promote greater understanding of sexual difference and to combat homophobic violence (Ansell 2018b).

21 DaMatta uses the phrase ‘crushing equality’ to discuss the effects of the abolition of slavery on citizenship in both the United States and Brazil (DaMatta 1991: 153).

22 While scholars from Brazil (Alves 2018; Costa Vargas 2014) and from abroad (Hanchard 1998; Sheriff 2001; Smith 2016) have challenged this reading of Brazilian race relations, they have nonetheless been forced to contend with the contradiction between Brazil’s celebrated ideology of racial democracy and the lived realities of structural racism.

23 In DaMatta’s phrasing: Brazilian law has set up an institutionalised opposition between ‘big shots’ and the ‘riff-raff’(DaMatta 1991: 158). An example is the separate penal facilities that have been created to accommodate wealthy defendants and college graduates, guaranteeing that even when the elite are found criminally culpable, they are above the punishments meted out on the poor.

Additional information

Funding

Support for this research was provided by the Open Society Foundation and the Social Science Research Council’s Drugs, Security, and Democracy Program.