Message-ID: <19960322021644180.AAA155@[200.239.60.121]> Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 02:16:45 +0000 From: Joaquim Moura <mailto:joaquim.moura@PERSOCOM.COM.BR> Subject: Two Brazilian incredible facts To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L <mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU>
Some interesting facts have just happen in Brazil:Fact one. How many dollars do you think that the Micro Credit Summit needs to succeed with their project to lend $ 200 to the 100,000,000 poorest families (mainly to the women of these families)? Let me tell you: 20 billion dollars. They (and we) plan to raise and lend all this money during the next ten years, and everybody - even the president of the World Bank and of the InterAmerican Development Bank agree that this will be very important to overcome misery around the world. But they need ten years to mobilize all this money.
In Brazil, in less than one year, the "neoliberal" government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso - the former Sociologist PhD that as he became president he forgot all his sociologistic approach to Brazilian reality, and embraced a more monetarist vision then that of the most monetarist economist you know or could imagine - has "lent" this same amount to the banks that previously had made a similar amount from their clients accounts. The Central Bank has spent 4 billion dollars to the Economic Bank, 5 billion to the National Bank, 8 billion to the Banco do Brasil (this is government owned - the other two are private), and some few billions more that were not clearly declared.
The problem is why and how the Central Bank did not act before than these banks' fraud reach so impressive levels. Many people declare that the private bankers can do anything they want, and the governmental officers agree with because they plan to work with the private bankers when they retire or soon after quitting a high position in the Central Bank.
And there are other state Governmental banks (Rio and Sao Paulo state banks) that also have lost billions of dollars. The Sao Paulo state bank lost 13 billion dollars in the last eight years. The Banco do Brasil ( a huge federal owned commercial bank) has lost just in the last year $5,000,000,000 (five billion) in credits the Bank cannot recover. The neoliberal "medicine" made the money disappear, and many enterprises are closing every day, but most of these billions were - for sure - stolen by people very influent and close to these banks' chair people.
Some senators gathered and required a Congress Research Commission to investigate these billionaire frauds, but the federal Government made the hugest efforts you could imagine to avoid the Commission to be settled and working. Today, the Senate (by its majority) refused to settle the Commission required by 1/3 of them - legally the number that could require a CRC even against the majority. Let's see what comes next . . .
Fact 2. You know that the Indians in Brazil are not living in the best of the worlds. But anyway, there were their reservations - not for all, but for many tribes that today live already in areas defined as Indian areas.
But now, the Government decided to accept contestations about these reservations` limits, and so all the Indians are menaced again. All the many decades efforts to design the limits, to define these limits through the jungles, were lost. All the Indians will be submitted to have their reservations rediscussed. But the most chocking fact has happened just last week (not the most chocking, maybe, but very very emblematic):
In a poor state of the Brazilian northeast (poor and dry region), a tribe at least had won their legal process to have the white people of a small town irregularly settled inside their reservation, moved out from the area. This process was running in the Brazilian slow justice since many years, when the town was unduly settled there, inside an Indian reservation.
Ok, when last week the Justice finally decided that the white people should leave and move to a new town prepared for them by Government. The Government paid everybody for the buildings that they have built, or their parents. But when the white people left - or before they left - they destroyed every building to avoid their use by the Indians.
They demolished the houses, the schools, the churches etc. and left just ruins to the Indians. I saw the pictures in the newspaper.
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Joaquim Moura (all the controversial opinions are just personal) Youth & Citizenship Development Commission Partners of the Americas - Brasilia / Washington DC Committee SHCGN 713 - Bloco I - Apt. 202 - 70760-739 - Brazil Phone (55 61): 414-1904 (w); 273-5613 (h); 414-1898 (fax) e-mail: mailto:joaquim.moura@persocom.com.br