The Sarney dynasty has governed the state of Maranhão, Brazil, for five decades, but residents are ready for change -By SIMON ROMERO DECEMBER 25, 2014 The tribute is lavish. Slip into the Convento das Mercês, an elegantly restored colonial gem built here in 1654, and learn of the feats of José Sarney, a former president of Brazil and chief of the political dynasty that has held sway over the vast northeast state of Maranhão for five decades. A documentary depicts Mr. Sarney as a generously mustachioed governor lifting Maranhão ( pronounced mar-ah-NEEOW) from its economic isolation in the 1960s. Outside the Convento das Mercês, which houses a state-financed foundation heralding Mr. Sarney, residents are quick to point out the family’s mark all around São Luís, the state capital. Need a place to live? Consider the neighborhood of Vila Sarney, they joke. A hospital? There is the Maternidade Marly Sarney. Want to check out a book? Try the José Sarney Library. Need to go to the old center? Take the José Sarney Bridge. And if you have a problem, you can always file a lawsuit — at the Sarney Costa Courthouse. But all the visible celebration of Mr. Sarney now stands in sharp contrast to the way the patriarch, 84, and his offspring are widely perceived both in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, and the rest of Brazil. Voters ousted Mr. Sarney’s political loyalists in Maranhão in state elections in October, and Mr. Sarney, long one of Brazil’s most powerful men from his perch in the Senate, announced that he would not seek re-election, possibly opening the way for one of the more profound shifts in Brazilian politics in recent years. “The last great colonels of Brazil are finally in decline,” said Rodrigo Lago, a lawyer and transparency activist, using the term for the strongmen asserting power over big areas of Brazil, largely here in the nation’s poor northeast. Powerful dynasties elsewhere in Brazil are showing signs of strain. In Paraíba, another northeast state, the son of Ronaldo Cunha Lima, a former governor who infamously shot his predecessor in a crowded restaurant in 1993 without ever serving time for attempted murder, lost a bid for governor this year. Similarly, voters recently thwarted the son of Jader Barbalho — a powerful senator with a regional media empire who has long battled corruption charges — from being elected governor of Pará, the huge state in the Amazon bordering Maranhão. Of course, powerful political families are resilient, and dynasties can always mount a comeback. In Alagoas, one of Brazil’s poorest states, the 34-year-old son of Renan Calheiros, the president of Brazil’s Senate, was elected governor in October. But here in the Sarney bastion of Maranhão, many people are sanguine about the chances of finally turning a corner. “We’re done with the Sarneys, who stayed in power just to enrich themselves,” said Sueli Celeste, 48, the secretary at a school near the Convento das Mercês in the old center of São Luís, which abounds in one derelict palazzo after another. “Hide your phone when you walk around here,” she added. “The crack addicts will steal it if they see you taking pictures.” The roots of resentment are not hard to see. Maranhão remains one of Brazil’s poorest states, with many of its people eking out an existence as subsistence farmers. Yet the Sarney family has managed to assemble a powerful collection of mass media holdings, including the newspaper O Estado de Maranhão and TV Mirante, an affiliate of the Globo television network, enabling the clan to celebrate its achievements and attack its critics. “The media constantly extol the great things Sarney and his allies have done and are doing,” said Sean Mitchell, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who has conducted extensive research in Maranhão. “Despite this, the provision of public services by the Sarney family and allied officeholders is terrible.” Maranhão ranks second to last among Brazil’s 26 states in the United Nations Human Development Index, a comprehensive measure of factors like education levels, incomes and life expectancy. Writing this year in his Sunday column in O Estado de Maranhão, the Sarney family’s newspaper, Mr. Sarney argued that the development index was created as a strategy by “imperialist countries” to exploit weaknesses in the developing world. “This is the index they crow about when they want to talk bad about Brazil and worse about Maranhão,” he said. (The index was actually created by a Nobel laureate from India and a former finance minister of Pakistan). Flávio Dino, a former judge and member of the Communist Party of Brazil, glided to victory in the governor’s race in October against the candidate allied with the Sarney family by campaigning on a platform of raising living standards. Mr. Sarney was born in a town in the interior of Maranhão in 1930 as José Ribamar Ferreira de Araújo Costa. He took his father’s foreign-sounding first name, Sarney, made it into a surname and began a political career with few parallels in Brazil. A supporter of a coup in 1964 that ushered in a military dictatorship, he thrived during authoritarian rule before emerging in 1984 as the running mate of Tancredo Neves, the leader of Brazil’s restoration of democracy. Elected president in 1985, Mr. Neves died of complications from intestinal surgery before taking office, opening the way for Mr. Sarney’s rise to power. Mr. Sarney, whose aides said he was unavailable for an interview, left office in 1990 with an approval rating of just 14 percent amid scathing criticism over management of the economy. At the time, Brazil grappled with an annual inflation rate of 1,765 percent. Then Mr. Sarney reinvented himself as a senator representing Amapá, a territory in the Amazon made into a state in 1991, overseeing the growth of the family’s media empire and the entrance of his children into politics. He rose to prominence again over the last decade as a president of the Senate, while battling claims of nepotism and corruption. His daughter, Roseana, the departing governor of Maranhão, is celebrated in the pages of the family newspaper (a front-page photograph in November showed her strumming a guitar while visiting a school). But her last year in office was hit by a crisis over prison uprisings involving decapitations and reports that gangs were raping inmates’ wives during conjugal visits. Citing personal reasons, Ms. Sarney stepped down this month with only weeks left in her latest term, avoiding the ceremony of transferring the governor’s sash to her successor on Jan. 1. Meanwhile, testimony in a huge bribery scandal involving the national oil company has linked her to the scheme. Ms. Sarney, who has denied the claims, also declined a request for an interview. Some in Maranhão doubt that the Sarney family will now sit back and simply watch its opponents wield power. In fact, Ms. Sarney was knocked out of the governor’s palace once before, after the election of an opposition governor in 2006. But he was ousted in the face of criticism in Sarney-controlled news media over vote-buying accusations, enabling Ms. Sarney to step in and replace him. Her father, the family patriarch, remains defiant even at the end of his long political career. Writing in his Sunday column about the “new Maranhão,” Mr. Sarney said the state resembled “a body without a head” before he became governor in the 1960s. “Today’s generation has no notion of that struggle; the largest victory of all was changing the mentality of Maranhão,” Mr. Sarney said. “It was so strong that it produced a president of the republic, and Maranhão emerged as one of the most important states in the country.” -[The New York Times]
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 09:52:33 +0000
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