World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [40]
In place of a “racial democracy,” Brazil’s urban favelados increasingly see an impoverished, humiliated black majority and a privileged, powerful white minority. Almost overnight, the hot group Racionais—which recently won a number of prestigious Brazilian MTV awards—has popularized expressions like “4P” “poder para o povo preto” (“power for the black people”) and “preto tipo a”—literally “class A black” but referring to blacks who are proud and fight for their rights. Similarly, in “Stop Sucking Up,” hip-hop star MV Bill scathingly attacks Brazilian blacks who deny their African heritage. A recent poll revealed that a startling 93 percent of those surveyed in Rio de Janeiro now believe that racism exists in Brazil.
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Nonetheless, the reality so far is that racial consciousness remains surprisingly muted in Brazil, with the myth of Brazilian racial democracy still broadly defended by many Brazilians spanning different social classes. As a Brazilian graduate student recently said to me, “For better or worse, there is no serious sign of ethnic conflict or ethnic mobilization in Brazil. Poor favelados are totally marginalized and Brazilian rap is certainly not changing that or posing any real threat to whites. In fact, Brazilian hip-hop is extremely popular among white university students.” Most Brazil watchers agree that the economic and political dominance of a white elite in Brazil is probably guaranteed for a long time to come.
Obviously, Latin America differs from Southeast Asia in countless respects. Because of extensive miscegenation, ethnic and racial lines in this region are not nearly as starkly drawn, and Latin America has been able to avoid the extreme ethnic animus and violence seen in Southeast Asia. Moreover, throughout Southeast Asia economic and political power have historically been divorced, with entrepreneurial Chinese minorities always at the political mercy of the indigenous majorities around them. By contrast, in Latin America a small landowning and to a certain extent hereditary elite has historically held both economic and political power.
Nevertheless, despite these and other differences, the same striking phenomenon holds. Like the indigenous populations of Southeast Asia, the uneducated, disease-ridden, desperately poor but numerically vast Indian- or African-blooded majorities of Latin America experience little or no economic benefit from privatization and global markets while finding themselves suddenly filled with contradictory new materialistic and consumerist desires. Meanwhile, along with their foreign investor partners, a tiny, well-connected, ethnically distinguishable minority dominates virtually every aspect of the modern economy, from export agriculture to wireless telecom, and uses liberalization, privatization, and globalization to increase its advantages. Moreover, despite the vast incidence of ethnic intermixing in Latin America, Latin America’s white elite tend, like the Chinese in Southeast Asia, to be surprisingly endogamous, intermarrying only amongst themselves. As in Southeast Asia, so too in Latin America these by-now hypercapitalized market-dominant minorities are, as a practical matter, economically untouchable.
They may not, however, be politically untouchable. In 1998, to the shock of Venezuela’s business elite, former paratrooper Hugo Chavez swept to landslide presidential victory, attacking free markets and “oligarchs” and championing the rights of the country’s brown-skinned pardo majority. A silver-haired tycoon I met in Bolivia predicted worse for his country. “Bolivia,” he said, “is a country where 3 percent of us control everything, and 65 percent of the population have no future. This place is definitely going to blow. It’s only a matter of time.” Most of my former student Augusto’s other friends were not nearly so pessimistic. But this is the subject of Part Two.
CHAPTER 3
The Seventh Oligarch
The Jewish Billionaires
of Post-Communist Russia
In the spring of 2000, a professor whom I’ll call