Further comments on Brazil's identity crisis(2): an article.

[Carlos Eduardo Rebello <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fernando Henrique Cardoso echoes Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

by Elio Gaspari

O Globo, 26th april 2000.

"What did Cardoso say about the protests in Porto Seguro? That they
'echo an slaveowning, oligarchical, patriarchal past that bears upon
Brazilian society and makes it one of the most unequal in the world'.
[...]Already in 1996, a document issued by the Office of the President
said that 'the causes of our social ills are many and very deep' one of
them being 'our slaveowning heritage'

The 'echos of the past' and ' the slaveowning heritage' are nothing but
a swindle. A superb swindle, in that it allows those from above to lift
the responsabilities for what they do from themselves to people who have
been long in their graves [...] The USA did away with slavery a
generation before Brazil[...] If there were an American politician who
chose to explain racial tensions speaking about 'echos of the past' or
'slaveowning heritage', s/he would be thrown in a loonie-bin [...] When
Cardoso says that Brazil is one of the most unfair societies on earth,
he behaves like some foreign tourist doing sight-seeing of Pindorama's
[Brazil's] landscape...

Where can one find a Brazilian racist in jail? In Washington D.C.,
where, serving a sentence, is jailed that felon who smmuggled into the
US a black maid and paid her no salary[...] The echoes that Cardoso
hears are the echoes of his own voice. Since 1995, wherever there was an
oligarchy, that oligarchy was made stronger. Cardoso thinks himself
different, only he does not realize how much he is the same."

trans., Carlos Rebello