Brazil: The Persistence Of Inequality
UnpublishedMay/June
1995
Volume:
28
Number:
6
Article
Carlos M. Vilas
The internal conflicts of the FMLN illustrate the difficulties of democratization and the consolidation of peace in a country still rife with suffering and inequality. "Joaquin was always like that.
Marjorie Agosín
To live in exile is to lose the familiarity of your own face, and walk the streets of foreign cities without being recognized by anyone. For a writer, exile is the solitude imposed in the house of memory, the mirrors we carry around inside.
An upbet--ifslightly wary--Brazil celebrated the New Year with the inauguration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, an old leftist who led a center-right coalition to power, promising to take the country into a long period of economic growth tied to social justice. "We have recovered our confidence in development.
Rebecca Reichmann
Racial discrimination is endemic in Brazilian society. Yet mystification and denial of racial differences are widespread, sustained by the social construction of a supraracial Brazilian national identity.
José Luiz Fiori
Though Brazil's new centrist president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, achieved early prominence as a Marxist sociologist, there have been no major breaks in his intellectual career. He has simply embraced the position of his former object of study, the Brazilian business class.
Marcelo Montenegro
The Southern Common Market (Mercosur in Spanish, Mercosul in Portuguese)-a regional trade bloc comprised of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay-has been hailed by gov- ernment and business leaders as a rousing success. Over a four-year transitional period that ended on December 31, 1994, negotiators dismantled 90% of tariffs and non-tariff barriers between countries in the bloc.
Ricardo Tavares
Instead of isolating the question of land redistribution as many had in the past, those working in support of the rural poor are seeking to situate the agrarian-reform issue within the broader struggle against poverty and hunger. Posseiros--squatters who work the land but have no legal title-in the state of Rio de Janeiro.
Colombia Solidarity I Want to congratulate NACLA for publishing Ana Carrigan's "A Chronicle of Death Foretold: State- Sponsored Violence in Colombia" [March/April, 1995], and to let your readers know that a Colombia solidarity movement has arisen in the United States. The Colombia Support Network was created to organize and promote public con- ferences and workshops, delega- tions of U.
ARMY MOVES AGAINST ZAPATISTAS MEXICO CITY, APRIL 10, 1995 On Sunday, April 9, represen- tatives from the Mexican government and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) met in San Miguel, Chiapas to discuss the possibility of resuming negotiations. At issue are both the place and the substance of future talks.
Rebecca Reichmann
The Geledes Black Women's Institute charged in court that a Sgo Paulo shop owner was publicly maligned by a neighboring resident on several occasions. The businesswoman was called a "black whore," "black maniac" (maloqueira), "black monkey" and "stinking black," and was told that "if blacks don't shit coming in, they shit going out.
Looking for God in Brazil: The Progressive Catholic Church in Urban Brazil's Religious Arena by John Burdick, University of Califor- nia Press, 1993, 280 pp., $45 (cloth).
FR
The Age of Discipline It has been a growing source of concern among many of the defenders of Latin America's neoliberal model that the decade's most touted economic recoveries have done so little for the region's working populations. Declining real wages and vanishing job security have accompanied modest-to- strong recoveries in Chile, Argentina, Peru and Mexico-as well as the United States.
Iram Jácome Rodrigues
Brazil's new trade unionism faces a basic paradox: at the very peak of the CUT's ifluence in the broader political process, n increasingly bureaucratic pragmatism threatens the labor federation's effective workplace presence. Brazil is no exception to the global restruc- turing of production and the fragmenta- tion of labor which that restructuring has brought about.
Rebecca Reichmann
The Geledes Black Women's Institute decided to take on one of the continent's mightiest media giants by suing TV Globo and the authors of a nov- ela called Patria Minha for racial discrimination. According to Geledes Coordinator Suely Carneiro, "the novela's white characters are diverse and com- plex while the black characters are frozen in a sin- gle stereotype-humble, defenseless and servile.
Rebecca Reichmann
Women now represent 35.5% of Brazil's docu- mented labor force-up from 20.