Dodging the PPE Bandits

Governor Flávio Dino has plans for Brazil's left

(Street art in Recife, Brazil by @Zer0ff)

In mid-April, Governor Flávio Dino, a member of the Communist Party of Brazil, blew up on Brazilian Twitter after sneaking a plane load of personal protective equipment (PPE) into his northeastern state of Maranhão. The plane had traveled from China via Ethiopia to avoid confiscation by both the US and Brazil’s federal governments. Dino’s move came after another northeastern state, Bahía, saw its own equipment requisitioned before leaving a Florida airport and Dino made three failed attempts of his own to import PPE. So, when Dino succeeded, Brazilian twitter rejoiced and other governors asked the governor for advice on how to replicate the operation.

Dino’s profile has grown over the past 18 months as he has spearheaded efforts to protect his left-leaning region, the Northeast, from far-right President Jair Bolsonaro’s wrath and stepped up to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. Now Dino is calling for a new political alliance that can bring together centrists and progressives to push back authoritarianism. In an op-ed published in O Globo, Dino exhorts his compatriots to “walk with Mandela.” The South African revolutionary, Dino says, focused on “liquidating Apartheid.” For Brazil, the task is recognizing that “none of our differences is more important than defending Brazil from the apartheid represented by Bolsonaroism,” he says.

Dino is already reportedly talking with politicians from across the political spectrum. In a sense, it is an expansion of the survival strategy he implemented with his fellow governors from across the Northeast after Bolsonaro’s 2018 victory. This call for a new center-left party builds on the success of that initiative, even as it aims to reconfigure Brazil’s political scene. Still, such an alliance is unlikely to transform Brazil’s economic and racial disparities.

Nearly 53 million people in northeastern Brazil live in poverty, more than in any other part of the country. For a century, the region has been viewed as the country’s poor, ignorant cousin. And Bolsonaro was caught last year on a hot mic denigrating the region’s governors, singling out Dino as the “worst.”

A few months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the number of Brazilians living in extreme poverty had skyrocketed to 13.5 million. Of those, nearly half live in northeastern Brazil and nearly three-quarters are of African descent. Former President Lula used booming commodities prices to finance his leftist Workers’ Party’s social-welfare policies. But those programs have been slashed since his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was removed from office in 2016.

Once Bolsonaro took office last year, he also turned off the flow of capital to the region. Estadão, one of the country’s main newspapers, reported that only 2.2 percent of the new loans the government-owned Caixa Econômica Federal granted during the first 6 months of Bolsonaro’s term went to northeastern companies. By comparison, in 2018, 21 percent of Caixa’s loans went to the Northeast. 

Expecting such hostility, in March last year the nine northeastern governors signed an agreement creating the Northeast Consortium, an entity focused on regional cooperation and sustainable development. Spearheaded by Dino and Rui Costa, the Workers’ Party governor of Bahía, the Consortium was a practical response to Bolsonaro´s enmity. The governors pledged “to do more with less.”

One of the group’s first initiatives was to replace the “Mais Medicos” (More Doctors) program that Bolsonaro had threatened throughout his presidential campaign. Mais Medicos brought Cuban doctors to low-income, often isolated parts of Brazil to provide medical assistance. Cuba withdrew its physicians after Bolsonaro’s election because of the roadblocks he pledged to throw up for the program. As a result, some small, rural areas were left without a healthcare provider. 

The consortium sought lending lifelines in China and Europe. Governors have turned to China for medical equipment during the pandemic, and nearly a third of the Brazil’s exports head across the Pacific.

Dino’s state of Maranhão acts as a key exit point for those exports. The economic benefits have helped make him a darling of the left, but he has also been criticized for his human rights record. In February, for example, The Intercept Brasil published a story about Dino’s use of a SWAT team and pepper spray to evict low-income families living on the outskirts of the state capital, São Luís. The community stood in the way of a private port project being built (and majority owned) by the China Communications Construction Company.

With Bolsonaro in office, however, the stakes increased dramatically.

Just as the COVID-19 crisis was heating up, the federal government announced it would remove nearly 160,000 low-income families from Brazil´s flagship social-safety-net program. More than 60 percent of these families reside in the northeast. Pressure from the Consortium and the head of Brazil´s lower house of Congress forced Bolsonaro to back off the cuts.

Soon after, the Consortium coalesced the rest of country’s governors into a working group aimed at protecting Brazilians from the coronavirus while Bolsonaro dismissed it as a “little flu.” Governors and mayors issued lockdown orders. In a cabinet meeting, Bolsonaro said citizens should be armed to resist such measures.

Now, Brazil is a global hot spot with nearly 83,000 confirmed deaths, which is undoubtedly an undercount.

So, Dino and others from Brazil’s center and left are stepping into the void. The new political party Dino hopes to create could bring together his Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB) and the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) as well as attracting other prominent politicians from across the spectrum. Such a merger would give the new party a substantial war chest and give Dino a much better shot at the presidency than he has with the tiny PCdoB. It would also create a rival to the Workers’ Party, which has dominated the political left for decades.

In a polarized world, looking beyond ideological differences to pursue shared goals as Dino suggests may seem radical, but ousting a violent authoritarian like Bolsonaro is the lowest common denominator. A new center-left party might allow Dino to capture the presidency and even to revitalize Brazil’s social safety net, but it isn’t likely to change the underlying development model that has made the country so unequal and that threatens the greatest rainforest on earth.

Lisa Davis (mslisadavis64@gmail.com), Merrill Perlman and Kat Cisar (Katjusa.Cisar@gmail.com) provided editing support for this piece.