Not long ago, South America was a promising continent. Economic growth and unparalleled political stability offered good reasons for optimism. Gone were the coups, and the region welcomed transitions of power through elections. Now, however, this era of hopefulness feels like a distant memory.

South America’s largest country, Brazil, has gone from boom to bust thanks to years of poor economic decisions. Brazil is battling its worst recession ever. And, in the meantime, congress impeached a president and the electoral justice could oust .

Meanwhile, Paraguay and Venezuela are experiencing even worse political crises. Currently, . Facing an economic crisis far worse than Brazil’s, the country witnessed a  over parliament.

In Paraguay, violent protests erupted in the capital city, Asunción. On March 31, demonstrators stormed congress and  after the senate held a vote behind closed doors to allow President Horacio Cartes to run for re-election. One activist was shot dead as the police reclaimed control of the building.

And in Ecuador, a highly disputed presidential election recently created turmoil. Lenín Moreno, who enjoys the current administration’s support, won a tight race with 51% of votes. His opposition accused his campaign of fraud and demanded a recount.

South America’s Crisis of Representation

Researcher Jorge I. Domínguez, from Johns Hopkins University,  as “the land of the unfree and the home of the coup.” Virtually all countries in the region have experienced a coup d’état and lived under dictatorial rule.

There’s a sense that the levels of official corruption are intolerably high, as evidenced by Brazil’s Operation Car Wash. Every major party has been implicated in the Petrobras scandal, as are most candidates from the 2014 presidential election. And not even our meat, one of Brazil’s most important exports, has been untarnished by plutocratic corruption.

During the 1990s, the impeachments of President Fernando Collor in Brazil and President Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela enforced the notion of widespread corruption. So did the drug money-laundering accusations against former Colombian President Ernesto Samper.

It is only natural, then, that the region would have a cynical relationship with democracy. The fact these fallen leaders presented themselves as “reformists” has only fueled skepticism about new leaders seeking change.

Since 1995, the nonprofit organization  has conducted surveys in Latin America concerning democracy and representation. At first glance, the 2016 report reveals a deep crisis in the region’s democratic regimes.

The organization highlights the problem in the report’s title: “The Decline of Democracy.” Apparently, just one-third of Brazilians prefer democracy to other forms of power. The truth, however, is more nuanced than that.

“For several years, the research we have conducted at USP [University of São Paulo] shows that more than 70 percent of Brazilians want democratic governments. What the  is a deep disenchantment with how the institutions work — especially Congress,” says José Alváro Moisés, a professor at USP.

Can you blame them?

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In 2016, Dilma Rousseff lost her office as the Brazilian president after a highly controversial impeachment process. Officially, she was ousted for having doctored the federal budget and committing fiscal crimes. Her supporters, however, cried foul and wrote off the impeachment as the reaction of a corrupt political establishment against an “” who refused to play by the men’s rules.

There’s no doubt that the Brazilian political establishment is corrupt. But how much truth is there in calling Rousseff an “honest president”? It depends on what we consider honest.

According to businessman Marcelo Odebrecht, the former CEO of Brazil’s largest construction firm, Rousseff knew about the dirty money financing her re-election campaign. In a statement to Brazil’s superior electoral court, Odebrecht said that the former Brazilian president was aware of his company’s massive contributions. She also knew that the money wasn’t on the campaign’s books.

In Brazil, however, people try to separate a politician who benefited from corruption to finance his or her campaign from the one who puts dirty money into their pockets. Rousseff, as far as we know, does not belong to the latter group. Unlike former Governor Sérgio Cabral, she didn’t receive an allowance from corrupt businessmen. Nor did she spend $1 million during a Paris trip, as did the wife of former House Speaker Eduardo Cunha, the nation’s poster boy for corruption. But can we still say that Rousseff was an honest politician, with no nuance in that assessment?

Of course, there is a moral gap between those who use dodgy campaign funds and those who use bribes to pay for a lavish lifestyle. But considering any of those politicians as “honest” is dangerous. Elected officials shouldn’t be able to pick and choose which laws they will respect.

Brazilian President Under Threat

In addition, Odebrecht’s statement further complicates the situation of incumbent President Michel Temer. Odebrecht is a key witness in the case that is investigating whether or not the Rousseff-Temer re-election campaign of 2014 received money from corruption schemes. The case began immediately after the election and continued even after Rousseff lost her office.

If the court decides on a conviction for the campaign, the presidential race will be annulled. The result will be the impeachment of Temer and new, indirect elections for president.

Temer’s defense team wants to prove that the presidential and the vice-presidential committees had separate finances. His lawyers say that he didn’t benefit from any funding coming from the Workers’ Party.

However, as  2016, that defense strategy has major holes. A construction company donated $300,000 to the Workers’ Party National Committee back in 2014. According to the executive, that money was a kickback. But the check in question was not to the Workers’ Party, nor to Rousseff’s campaign committee. The check had Temer and his party, the PMDB, as beneficiaries.

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In the first two weeks of 2017, Brazil witnessed a grand total of four prison riots. By January 17, at least 134 inmates had died inside the Brazilian penitentiary system. The deaths were the result of clashes between rival gangs that fight for the control of both prisons and drug routes.

The country is being forced to deal with the  of its facilities and has exposed the . These recent events have led to a big question: Does Brazil risk becoming a narco state?

I discussed the issue with , a researcher at the Forum for Public Safety and one of Brazil’s most respected experts in organized crime.

To answer this question, we first need to properly understand the definition of a narco state. The term refers to an area under the control of drug cartels, where law enforcement is effectively nonexistent. This is hardly the case in Brazil, although it remains true that the government has failed miserably to crack down on organized crime.

So, why will Brazil not become a narco state?

“For starters, Brazil is not a major drug producer. And that is a big difference between Brazil and countries like Peru, Colombia and Bolivia. Nor is Brazil the main route to a larger market, like Mexico,” explains Mingarde.

Back in the 1980s, Bolivia experienced a narco state during the dictatorial government of Luiz García Meza. His regime rose to power thanks to the financing of Roberto Suárez Goméz—aka the “King of Cocaine.” In return, Meza appointed the drug lord’s cousin as the minister of interior. That narco-regime, however, collapsed just one year later.

Such a regime is difficult to replicate in Brazil. First and foremost, the country is gigantic, and putting such a model in place would require the kind of muscle that Brazilian cartels lack. Bolivia, on the other hand, is a country with a population smaller than that of São Paulo.

“Furthermore,” Mingarde points out, “in those Latin American countries, the economic elites got involved in the drug business. That hasn’t happened in Brazil. As much as I hate our elites, they are the same [as] they were centuries ago—and they are not dealing drugs.”

Brazil’s superior electoral court has expressed concern with drug cartels financing political campaigns. In some of Rio’s favelas, gangs coerce residents into voting for a specific candidate.

Mingarde, however, says that such power is relative: “While there is some degree of success in a few communities, that’s not a widespread phenomenon.”

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The Military Police Department of São Paulo has a long history of brutality and racial profiling. An points out that in São Paulo, “serious human rights violations continue to be denounced, such as homicides committed by the police, as well as torture and mistreatment of people in custody. Young black men living in slums and poor areas on the outskirts of cities are more in danger.”

No other episode, however, was as shocking as the Carandiru Massacre that took place in a SĂŁo Paulo prison on October 2, 1992. On this now-infamous day, at least 111 inmates were slaughtered by police agents.

The bloodiest episode in Brazilian penitentiary history began at 10am when two inmates housed at the Carandiru prison started a fight during a football match in the prison yard. The brawl quickly escalated into a general rebellion. By 2pm, prisoners were burning mattresses and blocking entrances to the cellblocks. State authorities attempted negotiations for about an hour, after which police troops stormed the prison and, within half an hour, 111 inmates were dead—each was shot an average of five times, and not a single agent lost his life.

Symbol of Violence

This brutal massacre went onto not only become a symbol São Paulo’s police violence, but also of impunity in Brazil. Twenty-four years after the massacre, not a single law enforcement agent has been arrested. Although 74 agents were convicted for murder and human rights violations—with a combined sentence of nearly 700 years of imprisonment—the verdict was appealed and the accused never served jail time. To make matters worse, São Paulo’s State Court , which has brought the case against them back to square one.

One judge denied that the massacre took place, pushing for the dismissal of the charges. According to Judge Ivan Sartori, the event “wasn’t a massacre, but self-defense.” Let’s not forget the fact that the prisoners didn’t have firearms, and that many bodies were found with bullet holes in the back of their heads, classic execution style.

State judges based their decision on a technicality: According to the court’s decision, it is illegal to convict the 74 law enforcement agents involved in the raid since no analysis was performed on the ballistics. It is impossible, the judges insist, to determine which officer killed which inmate. Because of this technicality, the judges maintain that the convictions of the agents were unsupported by evidence.

The brutality of the Carandiru Massacre was a defining moment of the 1990s Brazil. The episode served as material for musicians, such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and the director Hector Babenco, who directed the 2003 movie .

Impunity Is The Norm

Even more disgraceful was the leniency displayed at the time toward state authorities. Colonel Ubiratan Guimarães, for example, who coordinated the blood bath, was elected to Congress in 2002. Candidates in Brazil are identified by numbers, and Guimarães chose a number that ended in 111—a nasty reference to the number of inmates murdered. He was himself murdered in 2006 without ever facing formal punishment for his actions. Then-Governor Luiz Antônio Fleury Filho, to whom the Military Police answered, is currently a member of the PMDB’s (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement) National Committee, Brazil’s largest political party.

This flagrant disregard for justice ultimately encourages police brutality, according to Sandra Jardim, who prosecuted the officers involved in the Carandiru Massacre. According to Jardim, Judge Ivo Sartori’s ruling “tears down the Brazilian Constitution” in choosing not to punish violent excesses in police actions. This is particularly disturbing if we recall the recent episodes of police violence directed toward black and low-income populations. A March shows outraging data on the practice.

In August 2015, two massacres took place in violent parts of the São Paulo Metropolitan Area. It is believed that seven policemen and guards acted to avenge the death of a coworker, resulting in a bloodbath that killed 19 people—a 15-year-old among the victims.

Cases involving for the officers involved. This occurs even when victims have been shot from close range or execution-style. Impunity is the rule when it comes to murder cases, and not just for cases involving law enforcement officers. According to Amnesty International, only . Multiple factors contribute to this statistic, including flawed investigations and forensic work, as well as a slow-moving justice system.

Despite the arguments presented by those who defend “vigorous action” by the police, massacres don’t protect law-abiding citizens. The outcome of the Carandiru Massacre was instead the union of several criminal actions, which came together to form a major drug cartel called the  (Primeiro Comando da Capital, PCC in Portuguese). Now, drug lords rule many state prisons in Brazil, and control organized crime both inside and outside of the penitentiary system.

The Structure of the Police Must Change

There are three main police forces in Brazil: Federal Police, Civil Police and Military Police. The first is our equivalent to the FBI, and it is attached to the Ministry of Justice. The remaining two are state forces. To simplify the distinction between them: the Civil Police are the detectives, and the Military Police function more like beat cops. The former investigates crimes, while the latter is supposed to prevent them from happening by monitoring specific areas. Not only does the Military Police fail greatly in crime prevention, but it are also thought to contribute to criminal activity: are attributed to these cops.

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The daily reality endured by policemen is not an easy one, either. Salaries are notoriously bad, especially for a job like theirs: They survive on under $600 a month. They also must work with outdated equipment, if they have it at all.

Many experts argue for the demilitarization of the police and a major overhaul of Brazil’s law enforcement structure. Defenders of the current system, however, maintain that the police militarization is specified by our Constitution. At least this was what the Brazilian government told the UN back in 2012. Sure, it’s constitutional—but that doesn’t mean it should stay that way.

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On January 1, 2007, the Dilma Rousseff project was set into motion. That was the inauguration day of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s second term as the president of Brazil. His minister of justice, the late Márcio Thomaz Bastos—the Workers’ Party’s then-guru for legal matters and a man who enjoyed the absolute trust of Lula—informed Rousseff, who at the time served as the president’s chief of staff, of the “ambitious project” that their boss had in store for her. Rousseff’s first reaction was a big laugh.

She had her reasons for not believing it. She was not a leader within the Workers’ Party, having instead made her political career in the Democratic Labor Party and joined Lula’s political family less than 10 years prior. She was perceived as an impatient technocrat with zero charisma, and had never run for office. Up to that point, Rousseff had never been tested electorally, not even for class representative.

But Lula, the sun around which the Workers’ Party has turned, was facing a dilemma. The two men he was considering as possible successors had both fallen, one after the other, to corruption accusations. José Dirceu, his first chief of staff, had been impeached from his position as a representative after the prosecutor-general charged him for operating a bribing system in congress to assure the government would receive the votes it needed to pass certain pieces of legislation. Antonio Palocci, his first minister of finance, was accused of participating in clandestine meetings with lobbyists and prostitutes in a mansion in Brasília—and accessed confidential bank data of the mansion’s keeper—while heading Brazil’s economy.

To avoid an internal battle during his second term for the candidate nomination, Lula decided to appoint his heir on his own. Even though Lula was betting on an unknown political figure, his reasoning was something along the lines of this: If the economy goes well, his prestige would be enough to elect his successor. As he often is, Lula was right in his reading of the political conjecture of that moment. Brazil’s first president to have come from the working class would choose Brazil’s first female president. Talk about symbolism.

The First Term

In her first year as president, Dilma Rousseff was forced to change seven ministers due to corruption allegations, including her first chief of staff. After the press published cases of bribing demands from public officers, she started firing members of her cabinet, thus giving her the nickname of “Moral Cleaner.” Her approval ratings were never higher among voters, but among other politicians, her reputation started to sink.

Whenever these decisions were contested, she would offer the same response: “Have you had 55 million votes or have I?”

Rousseff wasn’t fond of the small gestures of “goodwill” so common in politics; she constantly refused to meet with party leaders and members of parliament who requested a word with the head of state. This is most obvious in the case of Senator Eduardo Suplicy, a Workers’ Party member, who sent her a grand total of 24 letters trying to request a meeting with the president to discuss his social welfare propositions. Suplicy represented more than 6 million voters in São Paulo, Brazil’s richest state. And yet in four years, she never met with him—and he was one of her allies.

She also infuriated congressmen because of her lack of will to authorize amendments to budgetary laws. In Brazil, every congressman has a small quota of the budget, often used to privilege their constituency, but the money needs the green light of the president to be used—and Rousseff would take her time in deciding whether or not it was a go.

As the president, Rousseff revealed her particular taste for micromanaging. She sponsored a project of surveillance cameras that allowed her to monitor federal projects in Brazil. From her cabinet, she started checking out the waiting lines in federal hospitals, even looking for leaks in public buildings.

She also revealed herself to be a hesitant decision maker. In 2013, she took six months to appoint a new Supreme Court justice after one of the court’s member retired. The same lack of urgency happened two years ago, when she waited 10 months to replace another justice. The omission was labeled by other members of Brazil’s highest court as “unreasonable” and “abusive,” as it left the court with an even number of judges, thus making it easier to have stalemates.

In terms of the economy, her presidency was a succession of errors. She insisted on placing Guido Mantega as finance minister despite having no credibility among economic actors. Meanwhile, she intervened constantly in the economy’s direction, forcing interest rates to go down and controlling both energy and oil prices. Rousseff also empowered two men who became notable for their fiscal “creativity”: former Secretary of the Treasury Arno Augustin and former Minister of Planning, Budget and Management Nelson Barbosa—who would become the architects of Brazil’s economic crisis. The government began to employ measures meant to mask a growing deficit, all in the name of reelection.

The 2014 Campaign

If Dilma Rousseff was already not a favorite among politicians, her reelection campaign marked the decisive moment when she burned all possible bridges. Her campaign heavily used the “us versus them” discourse, according to which her fellow contestants would cut social benefits and put austerity measures in place—not caring if Brazilians had food on their table or not. And the television ad war that followed between the opponents was really something.

She also wanted to sabotage the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB), the party which was also on her presidential ballot with Vice President Michel Temer. Instead, her administration helped other intermediate parties to diminish the PMDB’s number of seats in congress. Like many of her political strategies, it didn’t work. The PMDB received the most house seats (13%) instead. Plus, with that strategy, the government created a sworn enemy with Eduardo Cunha, the man who would become house speaker and later set Rousseff’s impeachment in motion.

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During her three months of campaigning, Dilma Rousseff insisted that the crisis was a reflection of the ailing international economy, stressing that everything was fine in Brazil, that no changes were necessary. Pessimistic citizens were simply cast as “antipatriotic.” In her victory speech, as well as in her inauguration speech, Rousseff did not even mention her opposing candidates. And right after securing four more years at the helm, she announced the name of a conservative minister of finance and planned to pass austerity measures.

But the government never shouldered the responsibility for taking those measures, instead allowing congress to take the blame for deciding on the harsh, and always unpopular, economic decisions. Thinking of their political future, congressmen started vetoing her proposals one after another. Not even her Workers’ Party backed her suggestions. The crisis was there for real, and she wasn’t able to approve what needed to be done.

The Implosion of the Dilma Administration

In 2013, the first demonstrations against corruption of public officers started to appear in Brazil. One of them finished with protesters seizing congress, throwing Molotov cocktails into the Foreign Affairs Ministry and threatening to take the Presidential Palace. Rousseff addressed the nation, promising a project meant to reform the political system—something that never went further than mere words.

With Operation Car Wash, public indignation started climbing to record levels. People were doing the math, saying to themselves: “We have terrible public service in Brazil, and politicians are syphoning money into their pockets.” And those things were not disconnected. Operation Car Wash investigations reached further and further into the corruption of publicly held companies, but Rousseff continued to live in denial. She was confident that nothing would get back to her office.

Politicians at the heart of her administration began to be targets of accusations, among them her campaign treasurer. But the government was always certain that, once the economy would get back on track, her approval ratings would return to positive levels. Another mistake.

But no strategic error was greater and more determining to her fate than her miscalculation of how to handle former House Speaker Eduardo Cunha. A man proven to be corrupt, Cunha is also extremely dangerous, controlling more than a hundred votes in the house—and occupying parliament’s most powerful position. He was the one who could ignite impeachment proceedings against the President.

The government had no means to destroy him, nor the means to seduce him. Until the very end, high-profile members of the Rousseff administration attempted negotiations with Cunha, but he remained determined to destroy her government and receive a pardon from the one that would follow. Once the impeachment was set in motion, Rousseff’s solution was to secure 172 votes—i.e. one-third of the house—to end the proceeding.

That process is the most telling of the president’s political ineptitude. On the eve of the April 17 impeachment vote in the house, Rousseff and Lula received congressmen at the presidential residence and tried to persuade them into refusing her removal from office. Some left offended by the fact that, after five years in office, she didn’t even know them by name.

One day later, the house overwhelmingly approved the continuation of Rousseff’s impeachment, with an astonishing 367 congressmen (out of 513) voting against her.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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