Tecido
Social Carnaubais, Rio Grande do Norte: 21st
Century Feudalism in Northeast Brazil If one were to visit the lost
town of Carnaubais, found on the interior of the state of
Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, s/he might think that s/he
had traveled back in time-- a time when Lords and Barons
ruled the serving Class, and the concept of rights for the
people had not yet reached the people. But the shocking
reality is that we are present in the year 2004. The question
is: have we progressed at all? Sure, we have written, agreed
to, and even ratified formal documents that state our inherent
Human Rights, but what good is that if we cannot enforce
and guarantee their protection? In Carnaubais, you will find
a mayor that has placed twenty of his immediate family members
into positions of public office, who has bought the support
of the city council, who has monopolized the commercial
sector of the city, and who has left his people to suffer
under inhumane conditions. Mayor Luiz Gonzaga Cavalcante
Dantas (Partido Socialista Brasileiro, Brazilian
Socialist Party) has gone as far as paying the people in
his office with stamps that are only valid in the stores
and businesses owned by his very own family members. Cavalcante
and his oligarchy affiliate themselves with the Brazilian
Socialist Party out of mere convenience, being that the
current governor of Rio Grande do Norte, Vilma de Faria,
is a member of the aforementioned party. This opportunism,
unfortunately, has become more the rule than the exception
throughout Brazil’s interior. Just to demonstrate the extent
of the Cavalcante family involvement in almost the entire
commercial sector of Carnaubais, in a city of 8,000 inhabitants,
the family owns over 17 businesses ranging from supermarkets
and pharmacies, to clothing stores, bookstores and construction
companies. Suffice it to say, it is not surprising that
the Citizenship Commission of Carnaubais (Comissão da Cidadania) made formal denunciations when Cavalcante’s
brother, Paulo Cavalcante- the Secretary of Education, conveniently
obtained a food service license enabling him to sell school
lunch to the Secretary of Education, or rather, to himself. While the wealth of the Cavalcante
family grows exponentially, the people of Carnaubais are
drinking contaminated water, paying taxes on energy which
several parts of the city do not even recieve, and living
without any sort of representation or protection in neither
the public or economic spheres. It is the obligation of the
government to guarantee and protect social, environmental,
political, and civil rights, but under the leadership of
Luiz Cavalcante, roads remain unpaved and unmaintained,
and police violence, violence against women, environmental
destruction, and child prostitution have flourished. Moreover,
the lack of access to basic health programs from the Only
Health System- SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde) has left
the people with few alternatives, while the untreated water
that the public hospital utilizes remains an immediate concern. But these people will not remain
silent pawns on the Mayor’s Monopoly board. The Citizenship
Commission (Comissão da Cidadania), a small yet determined
group of five citizens from the city, has come together
and made formal denunciations of the mayor and his threat
to democracy, demanding transparency and justice. One denunciation
in particular referred to a particular group of farm workers
in the rural areas of Carnaubais suffering from grave discrimination
under the government of Cavalcante. Cavalcante holds the
tractor that the farmers need to cut the land, along with
oil financed by Petrobras.
Because of the farmworkers’ refusal to vote in Cavalcante,
they no longer have access to the tractor, nor the basic
right to work the land. This grievance, among several others
has been brought before the courts and a seed of hope has
been planted in the forgotten city of Carnaubais. Together
with the Human Rights Network of Rio Grande do Norte (Rede
Estadual de Direitos Humanos do Rio Grande do Norte)
based in Natal, the state capital, this group aims to triumph
over such blatant corruption and violence against the people. So, why is it important for
the rest of the world to be concerned with the insignificant
city of Carnaubais? It is because Carnaubais represents
a microcosm of this great and contradictory world which
we share. Carnaubais, in fact, is quite significant in that
real human beings live there and suffer under a corrupt
and self-serving regime. It is quite significant in that
the story of Carnaubais is not one isolated story, but the
story of many cities throughout the world. In these cities,
people live in immobile societies, without hope, and without
the basic right to live a healthy life free from fear and
free to prosper. Rights that we take for granted in the
“first world” are only images on the television screens
in cities like Carnaubais. How did corruption in Carnaubais
come to fruition in a supposedly democratic society? It
seems like a never ending cycle: the greed of those in power
leaves the citizens to live in desperate situations of poverty,
without access to basic education or health, and obliged
by law to vote in elections for “leaders” that buy votes
from uneducated and apathetic citizens eager to sell this
abstract notion in order to put food on the table, and thus
the cycle continues. How do we put a stop to such
a depressing state of affairs? This local human rights movement
is taking a step in the right direction, educating the people,
from the big cities to the forgotten ones like Carnaubais,
in their rights and how to protect them, and in creating
grassroots Commissions such as the Citizenship Commission,
that speak out demanding regional, state, national, and
if need be, international protection - in sum, putting the
systems that we have so eloquently written on paper, into
action. Veja
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