Two men holding guns in the LAAD Defence and Security Fair 2015, Rio de Janeiro. Demotix/Marcelo Fonseca. All rights reserved.

“Brazil is the country of the future and always will be.”
So went the clichéd adage that for decades underscored Brazil’s perennially
unfulfilled potential. But then Latin America’s sleepy giant finally seemed to awake
from its slumber. Coupling progressive social policies with economic growth,
Brazil looked set to claim its place in the sun during the 2000s. That moment,
however, is long gone. And now it’s the country’s the future that is lying in
jeopardy.

It is no secret that the economy is performing poorly: In
April, the IMF lowered its 2015 growth forecast from 0.3% to 1% contraction. According to
the Fund, investments have been “sluggish” and despite the fact that
consumption has been just moderate, the Brazilian Central Bank (BCB) is
fiercely increasing interest rates in order to fight inflation. The current base interest rate of the BCB is 12.75%. At the same time, investment
in Petrobrás, the semi-public Brazilian oil corporation, has dropped significantly
due to a major corruption scandal. In late April, after Petrobrás published its
first accounting report since investigations began, Moody’s justifiably downgraded the company’s
rating to Ba2.

Much less noted internationally, yet arguably much more
worrisome to Brazil’s future than the economy, are the measures currently being
adopted in the National Congress. Elected in 2014, the current legislature of
the Chamber of Deputies is the most conservative since the
end of the Brazilian dictatorship. Simply put, it is economically liberal,
socially conservative and retrogressive on human rights. Of its 513 deputies, more
than one hundred are members of parliamentary caucuses that are against
homosexual rights and legalisation of abortion and marihuana, and in favour of opening
up Brazil’s indigenous territories to industries, of reducing the criminal age
and of repealing the Brazilian Statute against Gun Fires. And it is the area of
public safety that the recently elected Congress is taking Brazil backward
first.

The power
of the Bullet Caucus

In March 2015, the Constitution and Justice Committee of
the Chamber of Deputies approved the constitutionality of the
Proposal for Constitutional Amendment (PEC), which reduces the criminal age
from 18 to 16. The main argument put forward by members of the Reduction of
Criminal Age Caucus was that minors were being used by adults to commit crimes,
because the former wouldn’t be imprisoned. It follows that the cognitive
capacity of a 16-year-old is not different from that of an 18-year-old and thus
they should face equal treatment before the law. The arguments are put forth without
shame, without mercy and with lots of prejudice. Prejudice because the target
is known, i.e. poor and little educated black youngsters, probably the same
ones that are the victims of 77% of the youth homicides in the
country. In 2012, while the Ferguson case sparked an uproar in the US and then
internationally, as many as 30,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 were
killed in Brazil. Nearly 80% of them were black. Less than 8% of the cases have
been tried. Little is heard of it outside of Brazil.

To strengthen their position, representatives in favour
of the reduction of the criminal age argue that more than 80% of Brazilians support
their proposal. The data comes from a major poll conducted during the
second half of 2014, whose results were aligned with another survey from 2013, according
to which 93% of the population supported the reduction of criminal age.

Ironically, less than ten years ago, representatives of
the “Bullet Caucus” had simply ignored all the polls which showed that citizens
were against the production of fire guns in the Brazilian territory.  Instead, they launched an intensive PR campaign
to change public opinion. In October 2005, when asked in a referendum whether
the commercialisation of fire guns and ammunition should be prohibited in
Brazil, 64% of the population voted no and 36% voted yes. The outcome was
drastically different from polls conducted only three months before the
referendum, when 80% of citizens agreed that the commercialisation of gunfire
should be prohibited. So, what happened in between?

First, the two biggest producers of gunfire and
ammunition in Brazil invested over US$2 million in the “No” campaign; more than
double all expenses of the “Yes” campaign. Second, the “No” campaign confronted
those that were in favour of prohibition by accusing them of taking away from
citizens the right to self-defence. In three months, the population feared the
consequences of not being armed. The Bullet Caucus had proved its strength for
the first time.

In a country where youth homicides committed with gunfire
grew by 314,7% between 1980 and
2010, restrictions on gun ownership is a dire necessity. Clearly not for the
Bullet Caucus, which is now pushing to loosen the rules of the Statute against
Gun Fires. In a highly conservative Congress, there is no tribute to or
acknowledgment of the serious and extensive amount of research available in
Brazil demonstrating the inadequacy of and the damage caused by the proposed policies.

An embattled president

Against this backdrop stands a beleaguered President
Dilma Roussef, whose approval ratings have been plummeting ever since her eventful re-election last
October. In mid-March they stood at a dismal 13%, while 62% of the population
considered her government terrible or bad. She has faced street protests on two
occasions, where some called for her impeachment because of the corruption
scandal at Petrobrás. Around two million took to the streets people on the 15 March
and 700,000 thousand 12 April. In Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais,
a survey showed the
conservative profile of the protesters: around 80% were supporters of the
centre-right Social Democrat Party, most were in favour of the reduction of the
criminal age and did not believe that poorer people were informed enough to
make public choices.

These have weakened Dilma’s hand vis-à-vis the Congress. She
is weaker than her predecessor, Lula, who had a notable influence on the gun
control debate in 2005, but also weaker compared to her first mandate as
president. Known as a tough manager of the Federal Executive, Dilma lacks some
of the political skills of her predecessor. In her first mandate, she established
little dialogue with the Congress and took long to negotiate specific issues. That
relationship has since deteriorated and become more thorny, after the
Labor Party lost 19 seats and the president’s base another 36 in the Chamber of
Deputies, while the opposition gained 25 seats in the 2014 elections.

Vulnerable as her government is, the president and the
Labor Party are unlikely to put up much resistance against the conservative
agenda in the Congress. Embattled and facing challenges on multiple fronts,
Dilma needs to negotiate a much larger agenda. And in that context, anything is
possible, including relinquishing the dubious honour of being “the country of
the future”.