South America culture and politics thread

9 years according to my telephone newsfeed... Seemed to come rather out of nowhere.

I was already expecting a Bolsonaro presidency given all the corruption of left-wing politicians that has been revealed recently, but this is the nail in the coffin I would guess.

edited 12th Jul '17 2:56:41 PM by Grafite

The reason it came out of the nowhere is because most analysts agreed there wasn't enough evidence to condemn him. It was all very circumstantial. Unlike, say, Aécio Neves who still hasn't been condemned despite solid evidence.

The difference between Aecio and Lula is the levels of the courts involved, only the Supreme Court can judge Aecio Neves, which is well know for never doing anything against politicians no matter how many evidences of wrongdoing there are. On the other hand Lula status as a civilian meant that any judge could prosecute any case made against him. So by no longer being actively in the government meant that he lost all the protections Aecio and Temer are clinging to.

Maybe the Workers Party will pull their head out of their collective ass in order to actually do something instead of rallying behind the lost cause of keeping Lula out of jail. Because right now, going in defense of Lula is being a political drain and a dead end.

Also his conviction goes way beyond his triplex and tax evasion.

Bolsonaro's chances increased by he still holds an abysmal approval rate with most of the population, the Workers Party and the Green Party can still possibly give one or another candidate who is viable, the PMDB and PSDB are screwed in the next elections with all the corruption cases built against them.

edited 12th Jul '17 9:42:18 PM by AngelusNox

So, what do you guys think about former Brazilian president Henrique Cardoso? I saw an interview with him in an Argentine newspaper last month and he seemed like a very smart guy, but I've since realized the interviewer tends to present foreign politicians as if they were more respectable than they actually are, so I wanted to double check.

Depends of who you ask really. He pretty much got the country when it was in the shit and continued working with the Real program with a platform and not doing anything crazy or stupid with the economy, which in the long run helped Brazil grow and achieve a decent economy. He was also the forefather of most social programs post dictatorship in Brazil, though they were fairly small in their beginning.

However his lack of interest in investing in public education and the scandals involving the privatization of state run companies like telecom Telebras and what is now the Vale mining company at very cheap prices (though the price can be explained because both companies had huge debts). With the privatization came the layoffs since they could no longer hold the monopoly on their services and no longer be used to create jobs. So the unions usually tend to hate him for that.

Also, he is pretty smart at least the book smart kind, but his smartest move was retiring after ending his last term. Also compared to his successors, the bar has been lowered quite a bit.

edited 14th Jul '17 6:46:25 PM by AngelusNox

Interesting. Thanks.

Is there really no one that can challenge Bolsonaro? There is no one else who hasn't been hit with a corruption scandal who is decently popular? What about Sao Paulo's mayor, Joao Doria? I'm not really politically savvy but I heard he's doing alright and is open to running...?

edited 15th Jul '17 8:35:55 AM by RazgrizX

Doria running is a possibility, Marina Silva is also one. PSDB will either try Doria, Alckmin or Serra.

PT on the other hand is on a hard spot, even if Lula wasn't going through a conviction process, his vote intentions were still fairly low and the pools had him against other unlikable candidates like Bolsonaro and Aecio Neves.

"Are Brazilians Latino?" I think this is the sort of thing one doesn't think about until someone else points out to them (or they go to the US, I guess). I've thought about this before when I realized I probably wouldn't be considered white in the US. I don't think this is all that polemic, but what do you have to say about it?

link 2 in my signature (or my second comment a few posts below it if you don't know Spanish) should give my thoughts on the idea of being "latino".

EDIT: Watched the video. She pretty much says a lot of what I'm trying to say but more eloquently.

edited 5th Sep '17 2:20:04 PM by IFwanderer

Very few people in the US realized I was South American by looks alone, even then it was mostly the accent that gave me away to like 5 people, so...

People have thought I was anything from French to Israeli. I honestly don't think it means much, especially when they try to shove you into the context of US race politics.

I've always been confused by people trying to guess other's nationalities based on appearance. In terms of looks too many parts of the world are heterogeneous enough and with so few traits being unique enough to one country that even in favourable circumstances it's a wild guess. Similarly few countries around the world are homogenous enough to do it the other way around. Maybe in less diverse places it's not obvious why it's unreasonable, but yeah.

The part about Brazilians not considering themselves Latin-American is new to me, too. You're missing out so much, like... I dunno, but you're missing it.

Anyhows, look what I found:

edited 9th Sep '17 5:46:32 AM by Stormtroper

The video does not work.

Fixed.

I've mentioned this before, but the thing is the concept of a Pan-Latino identity that became what we nowadays called "Latino" was always excluding Brazil. The concept, if memory does not fail me, hails primarily from the Spanish colonies of South America (Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, e.t.c), who forged a sort of "kinship" identity over all being Spanish-speaking colonies who were, once upon a time, more or less unified in being colonized/oppressed by the Spanish Empire and its culture, and all ended up breaking away from it. So you can get the rough gist of how the identity came about.

Brazil however, was (largely) never subject to the Spanish Empire or its culture. It was subject to Portugal and its culture, and despite both being Iberian cultures, they're still evidently distinct. This caused Brazil to always see itself as apart from the rest of the colonies, something enhanced by the language barrier of the others speaking primarily Spanish and Brazil sticking with Portuguese.

This only gulf only widened with Brazil's independence, in which Brazil became a pseudo-British-ish monarchical Empire; unlike basically every other nation in South America which was at least nominally a Republic more based on the American model, whilst Brazil was clearly trying to be the British Empire 2.0. The gulf proceeded to become ever wider with Imperial Brazil's imperialistic actions in the rest of South America (Uruguay's Independence is basically the American Revolution redux, but with Brazil as the British Empire and Argentina as France) and the wars for control of River Plata which lasted most of the 19th century.

After the Paraguyan War/War of the Triple Alliance and its humongous loss of life, things settled down, Brazil and Argentina largely put their differences aside and there hasn't been a South American War since then. As part of the cultural effort to mend wounds, Brazil tried to implement itself in this "Latino" cultural identity, but to this day, it never really completely stuck. I think by that time the damage had been done.

Yeah. I remember last year when studying hispanoamerican literature we read José Martí, and his ideas of panamericanism contrasted spanish-speaking america against both the US and Brazil.

Indeed.

Argentina (the historically most powerful spanish-speaking nation of South America) being the France to Brazil's Britain didn't really help matters.The historiography of most nations during the military dictatorships of the Cold War only made things worse (as military dictatorships tend to do), as military dictatorships tend to invent convenient boogeymen, and both Portuguese-speaking Brazil and the Spanish-speaking dictatorships made boogeymen out of each other (particularly Paraguay, which straight up built a supervillain in Brazil).

An historical note: regardless of how it evolved through time, the concept of pan-latinism did not start with us, it began in France (of all places) and meant to include the rest of romance-language-speaking America and Europe, especially hyped up by Napoleon III for political reasons. Eventually stuff happened and the concept is what it is now.

Speaking of that, I once read a book that made various comparisons between Latin America and the countries of Southern Europe (Spain, Italy and Portugal) which pretty much summed up that we were not so different in terms of culture or idiosincracy from our European counterparts -not to mention Philippines-.

I'm hearing that Brazil's Supreme Federal Court has decided to allow religion to be taught in schools in Brazil. WTF is wrong with your government?

Is it an obligatory class? Because, if not, I don't see the fuss about it ^note in some public schools here, between the 5th and 12th years of general education - so, middle school and high school, roughly speaking - the class of Educação Moral e Religiosa Católica is an optional class, where parents have the option of signing their kids/teenagers in some or all of said years; it's a thing that became possible thanks to the Concordata that was signed with the Holy See a couple of decades back. In my high school, there was also a class of Bahá'í, for Christian and non-Christian students who wanted to know about the value of different religions/what the Bahá'í faith is about. An optional class would be a decent compromise between the more religious-minded parents (who care) and the non-religious parents (who do not care).

edited 28th Sep '17 6:52:32 PM by Quag15

"Religious studies" was already a subject in public schools. The ruling being mentioned allows those religious studies to be centered around one specific religion...which yes I would say that is bad in our current climate because of the reactionary christian groups trying to seize power, as I mentioned before.

edited 28th Sep '17 6:53:16 PM by Draghinazzo

It's in theory a plausible idea. In my youth I had religion classes (Catholic schools and whatnot) and some of them were actually interesting as they involved learning about other religions (I recall doing tests about basic aspects of voodoo, buddhism, islam, judaism).

In practice, yeah, it's likely to end in proselytizing.

Specifically, the Supreme Court decided to allow religion classes to be taught by clergy without the requirement to cover multiple religions, if my understanding of the situation is correct. Therefore, for example, any catholic priest could be hired as a religion teacher, and he could also focus on catholocism exclusively.