Ricardo Regatieri on Brazilian Elections: Bolsonarism and Its Aftermath

Democracy in Question?

Guests featured in this episode:

Ricardo Regatieri, professor of sociology at the University of Bahia, Brazil. He also teaches in the Graduate Program in Social Sciences and is one of the leaders of PERIFERICAS – Research Group on Social Theories, Modernities and Colonialities at the same university. Ricardo was a visiting professor at the University of Cape Verde, as well as a research professor at Korea University and a lecturer at Hankuk University, both in Seoul, South Korea.

Ricardo has published widely on critical social theory, modernity and coloniality, and democracy and authoritarian politics, and his latest research project investigates the challenges of dependency and coloniality to democracy and political stability in Brazil within the capitalist world-system.

GLOSSARY

What is the Workers Party (PT)?
(02:14 or p.1 in the transcript)

During the late 1970s, while Brazil was still under military rule, workers in the metallurgical industries (especially in automobile factories) located in São Paulo's industrial suburb of São Bernardo do Campo organized through factory commissions to push for increased wages and improved working conditions. The strike waves that these workers launched in 1978 and 1979 ushered in a form of organizing known as the new unionism and eventually led to the founding of the Brazilian Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) in 1979 and 1980.These workers founded their own party—under new political guidelines set out in 1979 by the dictatorship—because they saw the main opposition party (the Brazilian Democratic Movement, later the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party), the reconstituted Brazilian Labor Party, and the Brazilian Communist Party as too alienated from the concerns of rank-and-file workers. Thus, on May Day 1979, a group of labor leaders from the metalworkers' unions (who referred to themselves as labor's "authentic" leaders) issued a set of goals. The "authentics," led by Luís Inácio da Silva (popularly known as Lula), formed the Central Workers' Union (CUT) in 1983 to coordinate national labor practices for the unions associated with the PT. source

What was the military dictatorship in Brazil?
(13:42 or p.4 in the transcript)

After overthrowing the reformist center-left government of João Goulart on March 31, 1964 in a coup d’état, the military installed a tutelary authoritarian regime to control civil society and the political system, serving as a political model for similar regimes in Latin America during the Cold War. The military passed arbitrary laws and severely repressed left-wing political groups and social movements while also seeking to accelerate capitalist development and the “national integration” of Brazil’s vast territory. They intended to modernize Brazilian industry and carry out bold infrastructure projects. On the other hand, they faced strong opposition from civil society, led by political groups, artists, intellectuals, and press outlets of diverse ideological backgrounds (Marxists, liberals, socialists, and progressive Catholics). These groups were divided between total refusal to negotiate with the military and critical adherence to the policies of the generals’ governments, composing a complex relationship between society and the state. source

What is the Latin American populism?
(15:05 or p.4 in the transcript)

In Latin America, populism emerged in the 1930s and 1940s with the crisis of the oligarchical social order that combined liberal-inspired constitutions (division of powers, and elections) with patrimonial practices and values in predominantly rural societies. These estate-based societies had relations of domination and subordination characterized by unequal reciprocity. Institutional and everyday practices of domination excluded the majority of the population from politics and from the public sphere, which were kept in the hands of elites. Processes of urbanization, industrialization, and a generalized crisis of paternal authority allowed populist leaders to emerge. Classical populist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s such as Juan Perón and José María Velasco Ibarra fought against electoral fraud, expanded the franchise, and were exalted as the embodiment of the nation’s true, uncorrupted traditions and values against those of foreign-oriented elites. In more economically developed nations such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, populist presidents pursued nationalist and redistributive social policies that coincided with the period of import substitution industrialization. Populism also emerged in agrarian contexts. In Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, populism was not linked to industrialization, even though, as in the industrializing republics, it led to the political inclusion of previously excluded electors. source

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