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Brazil & Southern Cone - November 2011 (ISSN 1741-4431)

BRAZIL: Snow White and the seven dwarves

With a seventh cabinet minister clinging onto his post by his fingernails, the leading opposition senator and 2014 presidential aspirant Aécio Neves declared on 7 November that the government led by President Dilma Rousseff “only punishes wrongdoing when it becomes a scandal”. Neves, of the opposition Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), said he “lamented” the fact that all the denunciations of corruption this year have come from the press and not from the government’s own organs of control. Neves is not the first to argue that President Rousseff’s ‘zero tolerance’ stance against corruption is merely an exercise in PR and crisis management, and that it is purely reactive, rather than any genuinely pro-active attempt to clean up government. The president’s hands are tied, the argument goes, by Brazil’s highly clientelist coalition politics and the need to preserve stability in congress around the executive’s legislative agenda.

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