“Seven Theses”: Notes by a Brazilian Translator in the Twenty-first Century

Thinking about Translator’s Notes

During the translation process I noticed some aspects of the text that were bound to incite the imagination of Brazilian readers and led me to conceive of a series of notes that could help the reader uninitiated in the discussion of Latin American political thought. These observations were probably prompted by the collaboration with Costa, who had written a thesis on indigenous thought in Bolivia after Evo Morales. It may seem unconventional for a translator to say this, but, as Stavenhagen (2009: 62) stated in an homage to his friend Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, there is “a certain isolationism in Brazil in relation to the Spanish-speaking countries in the continent, as well as a social and cultural identity clearly different from those encountered in the frontiers beyond the Brazilian territory.” In this context, my questions prompted me to reflect on this isolationism and to produce a few notes that would help new readers participate in the debate and make sense of Latin American social thought.

Undoubtedly, this was one of the greatest challenges associated with this translation. As Stavenhagen points out in his 2009 text, among others, while his concerns touched upon Latin America it was in “Seven Theses” that reflection on the alleged distinctiveness of Brazilians came to the fore. I concluded that thinking about the notes involved translating some of the problems discussed in the text for Brazil, since a little earlier Stavenhagen (1968 [1963]: 55) had defined internal colonialism (for Mexico and Guatemala) as follows:

The expansion of the capitalist economy in the second half of the nineteenth century, in tandem with the ideology of economic liberalism, transformed once more the quality of the ethnic relations between natives and Ladinos. We consider this phase a second form of colonialism, which we may call internal colonialism. The natives of the traditional communities found themselves yet again in the role of a colonized people: they lost land, they were forced to work for the “foreigners,” they were integrated against their own will into a new monetary economy, and they were subjected to new forms of political domination. This time, colonial society was the national society, which progressively expanded control over its own territory.

This analysis anticipated the subsequent discussions by Quijano (2005), for whom modernity and coloniality are not only synonyms but fundamentally linked to the conceptualization of race, which is the primary category for classifying all of humanity.

In other words, translating and thinking about these explanatory notes entailed creating a strategy for introducing into the discussion the importance of black slavery and the perpetuation of racism against blacks in Brazil. These two points articulate the ethnic-racial prejudice directed at indigenous peoples who were massacred here as in no other continental nation in the Americas. At the time Stavenhagen wrote his text, the observation that Brazil was the country with the smallest percentage of indigenous peoples in its population motivated writers such as Darcy Ribeiro to produce dark prognoses for the nation. ¹

Thus, to illustrate the type of problem with which we had to cope, I would like to discuss two notes: one on the first thesis and one on the sixth.

On the first thesis we had to insert two notes. One of them explained caciquismo and its importance in Mexico:

“Caciquismo” is the name given to a form of clientelism in Mexico and in other countries of Hispanic America. It is a system that entails a network of chieftains at the local, municipal, regional, state, and national levels. Commonly, chieftains are politicians. When they do not hold political office, they are at least affiliated with political parties, especially the PRI [Partido Revolucionario Institucional]. Chieftains are also part of the civilian population, a characteristic that helps distinguish them from caudillos. Violence is one of the resources at their disposal, but it is used as a latent threat and mixed with a system of benefits (as Porfirio Diaz put it, bread and a stick). For a typology of the “Cacicazgo,” see Alan Knight’s article “Cultura, política y caciquismo” in http://www.letraslibres.com/revista/convivio/cultura-politica-y-caciquismo.

One can see here the difference from coronelismo, a significant feature of Brazilian republican history, in which the colonel was a member of the National Guard and therefore had a right to use force. Furthermore, in Brazil, although the colonels were commonly affiliated with political parties, many of these parties had different agendas depending on the region and the purpose of their leadership, a condition that precluded a unified national party agenda. Brazil never saw the rise of a party like the PRI. Thus, the colonels themselves were a source of power and a more significant resource than the parties—although sometimes the latter also constituted an important resource for local interests and were accessible through governmental institutions. In this context, the case of Manoel Novaes became an illustration of these power relations. As a member of the Republican Party he led the São Francisco Valley Commission for 20 years: ² the commission’s resources were available only to those who belonged to the party. Novaes’s career spanned many years as a congressman for various parties (PSD, UDN, PR, ARENA, PDS, and PFL).

Another note that became important for reflecting on the differences between our countries was attached to the sixth thesis, where racial mixing is discussed:

These four terms [Ladino, cholo, mestizo, and mulato] have a long history. Their meanings may converge at times and diverge at others. They may have a biological meaning (such as the “mixed blood” of the Anglo-Saxon context), a cultural meaning (as in the assimilated native), a geographical meaning (the children of Spaniards born in the Americas), or even a linguistic meaning (such as the Spanish-speaking native or African). At different moments several countries in the Americas have identified their populations with one of these terms. One interesting analysis of their history can be found in Ronald Soto Quirós and David Díaz Arias, “Mestizaje, indígenas e identidad nacional en Centroamérica: De la colonia a las repúblicas liberales.” Cuadernos de Ciencias Sociales 143. FLACSO, 2007). The original word mestizo has been retained to sustain the specific connotations of the Spanish word Stavenhagen uses below, which do not always agree with the meanings of its Portuguese cognate, mestiço. Finally, there is a certain affinity between this discussion and the debate on the term caboclo as related to the concept of “interethnic friction” in the work of Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira, a close friend of Stavenhagen’s.

During his stay in Brazil, Stavenhagen met Florestan Fernandes, who had published The Integration of Blacks into Class Society in 1964 (2008 [1964). Conscious of the differences between mestiço and mestizo in Brazil and of the structural roles that mulatos and caboclos play in the Brazilian national narrative, Fernandes (1972 [1964]) observed that the mulatto existed as a tool that the country’s elite used to dominate the population of color—that racial group was useful to propagate the myth of racial democracy and suppress the rise of a true racial democracy. In contrast, Cardoso de Oliveira (1962) used the image of the caboclo to create his most important concept, interethnic friction. Often, the argument went, the caboclo was a native who rejected himself, preferring to be the worst of whites than to be the best of natives.

Another term that did not appear in the notes but deserved to be mentioned was the concept of caste. It was particularly important as it related to these three friends. Caste in Mexico is/was a native category (as exemplified in books about castes and caste wars). Stavenhagen points this out in some texts, but in the 1950s and 1960s in Brazil caste was a particularly controversial analytical category used to discuss prejudice against blacks with a metaphorical reference to the Indian term. It was used in the sense of a closed group, in contrast to “class,” an open group. Fernandes had already questioned this use of the term in the 1960s.

Thinking about the Current Moment

While it is necessary to contextualize a translation in space, it is equally important to explain its location in time. The period that saw the gestation of this translation was the same that saw the Second Growth Acceleration Program, the 2014 elections, and the subsequent developments. Stavenhagen’s text was published in 1965, shortly after the 1964 coup that ousted the civilian president João Goulart and certainly motivated Stavenhagen’s return to Mexico. Translating the text in 2014, the fiftieth anniversary of the coup, meant imagining how he would have experienced that event: “In Brazil I witnessed the military coup that overthrew the government of Jango Goulart and the thousands of political refugees that flocked to the Mexican embassy in Rio de Janeiro, seeking exile in my country” (Stavenhagen, 2009: 63). The military coup is also mentioned in the rejection of the third mistaken thesis: “After the U.S.-supported military coup in that country in 1964, the previous economic policies which had furthered a progressive and national capitalism were thrown overboard in favor of the increasing control of the economy by U.S. corporations” (Stavenhagen, 1967 [1965]: 31). To this comment we can add that the event also led to the creation of a very powerful construction-business segment directly linked to the interests of dictators and their sympathizers and collaborators, interests that were also articulated frequently in each of the mistaken theses.

From an analytical perspective, I believe that Stavenhagen’s “Seven Theses” revealed the structure of the founding myth of the nation-state in Latin America. Here I follow an observation made by Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958]: 209–210):

When the historian refers to the French Revolution, it is always as a sequence of past happenings, a non-reversible series of events the remote consequences of which may still be felt at present. But to the French politician, as well as to his followers, the French Revolution is both a sequence belonging to the past—as to the historian—and a timeless pattern which can be detected in the contemporary French social structure and which provides a clue for its interpretation, a lead from which to infer future developments. Michelet, for instance, was a politically minded historian. He describes the French Revolution thus: “That day . . . everything was possible. . . . Future became present . . . that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity.”

Particularly for Brazil and Mexico, the first thesis, the one on dualism or internal colonialism, is the great contradiction constantly narrated in all the founding texts. I do not mean to argue that it is the most important thesis for the Latin American context in general, but I do consider it the most important when it comes to Brazil and Mexico, especially if we consider the creation of imagined regions and the use of their images in these two countries. I think of “Mesoamerica” and of the “Sertão,” which I have discussed in an article on the founding myths of nation-states (Lima, 2015). These names are always invoked in times when integration, sovereignty, the civilizing process, self-image, and other components of the mythical narrative are at risk.

As an example, this is how I see the election of the most conservative Congress since the dictatorship in the last voting contest. The leadership of both houses of Congress has been placed in the hands of two conservative politicians who emerged from the same (“underdeveloped”) Northeastern political group. Renan Calheiros, the president of the Senate, was the main assistant to former president Fernando Collor de Melo. Eduardo Cunha, president of the lower house, was a protégé of P. C. Farias, the treasurer of Collor de Melo’s presidential campaign in the late 1980s. The presidential election of 2014 was also interesting in this context. It resulted in a narrow victory of the Workers’ Party over the Social Democrats. (These two parties resemble the Partido Revolucionario Democrático and the Partido Acción Nacional, respectively, in Mexico.) However, it was not this result that was surprising. Instead, two other factors attracted my attention: the first round of the election and the postelection period. First, the political disputes did not revolve only around the two main opposing candidates, Rousseff and Neves. In fact, Marina Silva of the Green Party played a significant role, threatening the two main national candidates. Second, I was surprised that the campaign climate persisted through the postelection period, with a war of accusations launched by the allies of the candidate who lost the election.

The first round of that presidential election was unique in Brazilian history because it pitted two unusual contenders against one another. On one side there was Dilma Rousseff, the former urban guerrilla fighter from the South, descended from European immigrants, and on the other Marina Silva, the former rubber tapper, a cabocla from the North, from the forest, the daughter of peasants who had participated in the rubber war and a woman who had gained notoriety for her fight against deforestation. It was interesting to see how the Workers’ Party campaign targeted Silva, who had been a party member and a political ally in the past, more than the other challenging candidate, Aécio Neves, of the Social Democrats. Indeed, Neves moved on to the second round of the election, against Rousseff. However, by favoring his candidacy in the second round, the Workers’ Party also favored the upsurge of the most striking duality discourse in the history of the Brazilian republic: the battle between the “developed” South-Southeast (where the Social Democrats had political power) and the “underdeveloped” North-Northeast (where they did not). The ironic twist in this scenario is that the party that won the underdeveloped area supposedly controlled by the colonels was the party that 12 years earlier had opposed the local oligarchies.

The supporters of Neves, especially the party’s business and intellectual ³ elite, reacted to the results of the first round with aggressive statements toward Rousseff’s supporters. “Ignorant, stupid Northeasterners” and “politically illiterate” were some of the terms used to describe Rousseff’s electorate. Sexist and abusive terms were directed at the candidate herself, who was also the country’s president at the time. These insults spread with unusual speed and intensity, illustrating the large-scale process in which the far right is reemerging in and authoritarianism is returning to Brazil. This phenomenon is a break from the pact established at the end of the military dictatorship, when an agreement among the Brazilian elites (as usual) allowed the perpetuation of the violation of human rights under the cloak of democracy. It also shows how persistent the state of emergency is in this project of an emerging state.

While I consider internal colonialism the most important contradiction, I understand the ways in which transformations, extensions, and inversions solidified the other mistaken theses in Brazil. The same processes affected gender and ethnic-racial prejudices, which are always mentioned but rarely scrutinized. That election year also witnessed the presentation of the report of the National Truth Commission, which revealed that the native peoples of Brazil had the largest number of victims during the dictatorship. Indeed, they were the victims of an idea of progress that had been guided by the third mistaken thesis (“The existence of backward, traditional, and archaic rural areas is an obstacle to the formation of an internal market and to the development of a progressive and national capitalism” [Stavenhagen, 1967 (1965): 30]). About 8,500 natives were killed in that period throughout the country but primarily in the Amazon and in the Center-West regions to allow the construction of the “strange cathedrals” that Chico Buarque denounced. Thus the Transamazônica Railroad, the Balbina and Tucuruí power plants, the Great Carajás Mining Program, and the plans to colonize the Amazon region, among other projects, led to the forceful removal and even disappearance of entire ethnic groups (CNV, 2014: 204):

In 1970, the mining project in the state of Pará began its operations. In the 1980s, it became known as the Carajás Project. The first stages of the Tucuruí Power Plant and the Carajás railroad were built as support infrastructure. All these projects have a direct impact on various native peoples in the region. The Parakanã, for instance, were relocated to make way for the Transamazônica road. Once again, they were relocated to give way to the Tucuruí lake. The tribe was moved five times between 1971 and 1977.

In this context it is interesting that the military regime changed the national discourse. The idea of racial democracy is dominant in Brazil. It is also the local variant of the sixth mistaken thesis. During the dictatorship, native tribes were incorporated into the category of “internal enemy, under the charge that they were influenced by foreign interests, or simply because the territory they occupied was rich in mineral resources, was located near the frontier, or was in the way of some development project” (CNV, 2014: 205). Although this was a mistaken thesis that Fernandes had strongly criticized, it was well suited to an official discourse in which not all racial democracy or racial mixing was desirable.

Today in Brazil, any effort to show that any document of civilization is mainly a document of barbarism is met with a violent, sometimes even deranged reaction. Only in this way can I understand the relevance attributed to Jair Bolsonaro, the congressman from Rio de Janeiro, a military man in the reserve who tirelessly advocates torture and executions. In Congress he has persistently created a climate of homophobia, racism, and sexism. If it were not for his large following, he would amount to nothing more than a caricature. However, he has not only been part of Congress’s Human Rights Commission for the Defense of Minorities (a blatant contradiction) but also stated during a session of Congress that he would not rape Maria do Rosário, a congresswoman and former minister of the Secretariat for Human Rights, “because she did not deserve it.”

This brutal reaction from the elites may also be considered in light of the fifth thesis: “Latin America’s development is the work and creation of a nationalist, progressive, entrepreneurial and dynamic middle class, and the social and economic policy objectives of the Latin American governments should be to stimulate ‘social mobility’ and the development of that class.” However, it is a challenge to identify the middle class in the midst of media and even government rhetoric in the case of a government that relies on the incorporation of the poor into the middle class through consumption. Moreover, we observe among the upper classes the reemergence of organizations similar to Land, Family, and Property, a far-right group that helped destabilize the Goulart administration and supported the military coup of 1964. These organizations today advocate a form of jingoism that seemed buried in the 1980s. Accordingly, we can only call it a nationalist middle class if we use “nationalism” here pejoratively, the form embodied by the German strain of fascism (Stavenhagen, 1967 [1965]: 33):

The sectors which form the middle class in its restricted sense—small and medium-sized farm owners, small businessmen, public employees, small entrepreneurs, artisans, different types of professionals, etc. (i.e., those who work on their own or who receive a salary for non-manual labor)—usually do not have the characteristics which are attributed to them. Instead they are economically and socially dependent upon the upper strata: they are tied politically to the ruling class; they are conservative in their tastes and opinions, defenders of the status-quo; and they search only for individual privileges. Far from being nationalist, they like everything foreign—from imported clothing to the Reader’s Digest. They constitute a true reflection of the ruling class, deriving sizeable benefits from the internal colonial situation. This group constitutes the most important support for military dictatorships in Latin America.

The existence of this last group is particularly alarming not only because they have acted in an authoritarian and openly fascist way but also because they have been able to count on the support of significant portions of the population.

Indeed, reflecting upon this resurgence of authoritarian thought in Brazil, one of Stavenhagen’s comments refuting the seventh thesis seems to have been written last year: “São Paulo’s working class (the largest concentration of industrial workers in Brazil) has constantly been electing the most conservative governors in the country” (Stavenhagen, 1972 [1965]). In the midst of a water supply crisis, when the state’s main reservoirs ran dry, the population chose as its governor in the first round of elections the Social Democrats’ José Alckmin, a politician who had done nothing to avoid the crisis during his first four-year term and who had become famous among human rights activists for, among other things, having led a government whose police force was responsible for more deaths than the entire U.S. police force in the same period (HRW, 2015).

Unfortunately, this increase in hate speech seems to be the result of a range of options chosen by the current government party to arrive at and remain in power. For some time, social scientists have been worrying that the Growth Acceleration Program resurrects a series of projects generated during the dictatorship (the Xingú hydroelectric power plants, the Proálcool program, the Amazon roads, and the river diversion projects on the Tocantins and São Francisco Rivers). Consequently, its implementation has elicited the criminalization of social protest and the censorship of dissident voices despite the existence of constitutional mechanisms that guarantee the rights of those affected by large-scale projects.

In the case of the Xingú power plants, the problem looks like the myth of continuous return: the same consultancy group that analyzed the project in 1980, the National Consortium of Consulting Engineers, is responsible for the project today. Muniz, who was the president of Eletronorte in 1989, has returned to the company. In his previous term leading the firm, he was attacked by a native during the First Conference of the Xingú Tribes.

The Belo Monte dam project stands as the sum of all possible mistakes. In addition to relying directly on the idea of empty demographic space (the third thesis), its execution spills over to the other theses. For instance, one of the reasons the second thesis is mistaken—that “the spread of manufactured industrial goods into the backward zones often displaces flourishing local industries or manufactures, and therefore destroys the productive base for a significant part of the population, provoking what is known as rural proletarianization, rural exodus, and economic stagnation in these areas” (Stavenhagen, 1967 [1965]: 29)—may be observed in Belo Monte through the implementation of the “Emergency Plan.” Norte Energia, a consortium created to build the dam (budgeted at US$18 billion), preferred to pay a financial penalty—R$30,000 (about US$10,000 at the time) per month per tribe, with the funds to be employed at the affected natives’ discretion—to observing the conditions established by the natives in the region and ratified by the environment impact studies. In the context of populations that had only recently started to interact with outsiders and as a result were extremely fragile, this decision had devastating consequences: in a little more than a year, 19 tribes had been fragmented into 34 and the levels of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, alcoholism, and other ailments had increased dramatically. Unfamiliar with the consumption patterns of Western societies, the native people had no idea what to do with the money they received. They bought cookies, soda, and French fries, while ceasing their agricultural activities and abandoning other traditional habits. Moreover, workers at the dam engaged in sexual exploitation of minors. Finally, the government prosecutor responsible for defending the legal rights of the indigenous population in the region declared, “If I write a petition saying that I am trying to defend the rights of the native population, the judge won’t even read it. I have to state that I am trying to obey the law.” In other words, in Belo Monte we are treading a fine line between ethnocide and genocide, leaning toward the latter. A researcher at the Institute for Society and the Environment stated his concern in an interview: “I see Belo Monte as a future Berlin Wall. People will come here to take home a piece of it, as a memento of something that should have never happened.” ⁴

Reviewing the seven mistaken theses, it is clear that the fourth—“The national bourgeoisie has an interest in breaking the power and dominion of the landed oligarchy” (Stavenhagen, 1967 [1965]: 31)—is the only one that has lost strength in the discourse of the Brazilian government. However, this has only meant the strengthening of Stavenhagen’s central argument about the importance of internal colonialism in thinking about Latin America.

The largest caucus in the Brazilian National Congress is the one called BBB (Bible, Bull, Bullet), representing the fundamentalist Christian churches, agribusiness, and the weapons industry. Nowadays, the dominant groups in the government no longer worry about defending a social agenda even rhetorically. Brazil’s government today has two agriculture ministries, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Supply (the one that represents the powerful) and the Ministry of Agrarian Development (the one that represents the powerless). The former has twice the budget of the latter and a universe of beneficiaries a tenth the size. Moreover, in the past 12 years the country has witnessed increasing land concentration and a slowdown of popular agrarian policies (land reform, demarcation of native territory, and recognition of the territories of quilombolas). This situation is only likely to worsen for two reasons—the co-optation of the leadership of important land reform movements under the Lula administration and the appointment to the Agriculture Ministry of successive recipients of Greenpeace’s Golden Chainsaw award (the fourth and seventh theses). Perhaps here we can best detect a very problematic change in the world of politics (Žižek, 1999: 14):

Nowadays, the most relevant trait of this “lie under the guise of truth” is cynicism: with disarming frankness, everything is admissible. However, this frank recognition of our interests does not stop us from pursuing them. Cynicism’s formula is no longer the Marxist dictum “They do not know it, but that is what they are doing.” Now, it is “They know full well what they are doing but do it anyway.”

As Žižek argues, “it is as if words no longer mattered” in late capitalism. They do not generate indignation, commitment, or reaction. Thus a political actor may say anything because in practice it is all the same.

This is a new development. We do not yet know how the struggle will develop. In June 2013 a good portion of the Brazilian population took to the streets to ask for better public services (cheap or free public transportation and “FIFA-quality hospitals” [a reference to the lavish spending on soccer stadiums for the World Cup in 2014]). In October 2014 Brazil elected its most conservative congress since the dictatorship. Today’s House of Representatives is led by a congressman whose campaign was paid for by health insurance companies and whose political agenda includes the weakening or eradication of the National Health System. Between these two events there was a tenacious counterinsurgency movement that began during the June 2013 protests. By the last day of the largest demonstration, the tone of the grievances had changed to “no corruption,” and people in various groups began to wear the colors of the Brazilian flag, as if the nation were at risk, and vilified the protesters identified with black-bloc tactics.

The results are still unpredictable, but at this moment there is the risk that rights may be lost to an unprecedented degree: Constitutional Amendment Project 215 transfers from the executive to the legislature the authority to demarcate native land and allows the reduction of its area. Alas, the future has turned darker. The producers of the most recent movie in the Mad Max saga may have understood well this world of profound inconsequence, depicted as a time when, although water and oil are the most precious goods, they are burnt in V8 engines used in a insane fight for a few breeding women who suddenly develop a tenuous consciousness of their own place and reject their role.

Epilogue

In a 2010 interview (Lima and Cabral Junior, 2010: 138), Stavenhagen said,

I have never rewritten the text because I still maintain those ideas and believe that I would not change a single one of “the seven theses” today. Of course, there have been significant changes in Latin America after half a century. It is also true that important changes in the social sciences force us to see things differently. Moreover, even personal changes that take place in the course of 50 years ensure that one does not think or write in the same way. It would be regrettable to see someone repeating himself after 50 years. However, if I am asked about the seven theses in this context, my response is this: “I keep them as a perspective from that time, a youthful perspective, if you will.” I was 32 years old. That was my point of view, my interpretation of Latin America, and I do not think I would change it. I would fine-tune something here, change a paragraph there, but I fundamentally maintain the seven theses as they were.

The few possible alterations were unpredictable at the time of publication: they would have addressed the emergence of neoliberalism and transnational colonialism, which Pablo González Casanova (2007) discussed in his redefinition of internal colonialism, and the appearance of cynicism as the dominant trait of politicians in the twenty-first century. It was impossible for a Latin American researcher situated between the Cuban Revolution and the Brazilian coup to predict these developments, and they do not substantially change the structural contradiction that he pointed out. Thus Stavenhagen’s diagnosis will endure for a long time, at least for as long as the contradiction that characterizes internal colonialism remains.