Carnival Redux

After a two-year pandemic hiatus, and with Bolsonaro still in Florida, the political temperature at carnival was much lower this year than it was in 2019 and 2020. Violence – including homicide and sexual harassment – was lower than it is ‘normally’, in everyday life and death, and participation in the blocos was massive throughout Brazil.

Among the visitors to Salvador was the US ambassador, Elizabeth Bagley, who was photographed leaning from a window to shake hands with Governor Jerônimo Rodrigues as the blocos passed below. Bagley tweeted that her first trip to the city ‘could not have been better’, thanks to the ‘contagious energy’ and the ‘music, colours and people’. Gilberto Gil performed with Margareth Menezes, the new culture minister. Other musicians included BaianaSystem and Ivette Sangalo.

An estimated million tourists came to a city with a population of less than four million in the entire metropolitan region. The circuito and the blocos are now so centralised, however, that the people who historically have given carnival its identity are today largely excluded from it. A more decentralised version might feature and invest in distinctive neighborhood traditions, promoting greater circulation and less concentration.

Three-fifths of Bahians – nine million people – lack ‘food security’, i.e. do not get enough to eat. They can only take part in carnival as dispossessed informal workers, roped off from the pay-to-play festivities of the blocos: hundreds if not thousands of unlicensed vendors camped out (with or without children) on either side of the main avenue between the Farol da Barra and Ondina five or six days before carnival started in order to secure their places to sell water, beer, soft drinks and food on the fringes of the circuito. With only their portable umbrellas to protect them from the brutal sun and occasional rain, they had no running water or access to showers. (Rows of portable toilets were everywhere available for revellers.)

Vendors had to be licensed by the city to get inside the circuito. Fifteen thousand cordeiros were paid 60 reais a day, along with food, water and transport subsidies, to handle the rope that separated the blocos, and those who had paid to party and dance near them, from everyone else. On Saturday, cordeiros from Bell Marques’s bloco protested that they had not been paid by the security firm subcontracted to employ them. BaianaSystem, exceptionally, do not use cordeiros or otherwise separate those who can pay from those who cannot, as a matter of principle.

There was one murder inside the circuito, apparently a settling of accounts between rival criminal facções. The gun was probably planted beforehand, since the police – who were out in numbers – conducted thorough searches of everyone going in. Following an incident of sexual harassment in the Muquiranas bloco – a group of men surrounded, shoved and showered a woman with water guns before the municipal police showed up – a formal investigation has been opened by the federal and state authorities.

Beyond the issues of crowd control and protecting women – which are serious, with millions of mostly young people drinking and taking drugs in the streets – stands the question of investment. The state government of Bahia, which has been PT since 2007, and the mayor’s office in Salvador, which is bolsonarista, provided 200 million reais. Private sector sponsors included the Ambev beer conglomerate (which spent 27 million reais), TikTok and Zé (a drink delivery app). The blocos are run like small businesses, selling the equivalents of expensive seats and T-shirts (abadás), plus the massive sound system trucks cost a small fortune to rent and set up.

President Lula, who came to Salvador before leaving to visit victims of a landslide in São Sebastião, São Paulo, has promised to reinstate the Bolsa Família, a subsidy for poor families, and the Minha Casa, Minha Vida housing scheme. These public programmes especially benefit the Afro-Bahian majority, most of whom are poor.

In Porto da Barra, renters of furnished apartments were forced out during carnival week to make way for people paying exorbitant daily rates in euros or dollars. This short-term, seasonal orientation of the neighbourhood’s landlord class meant that gentrification had stalled until recently, but now luxury apartment condos, with names like ‘Porto Privilege’ or ‘Barra Life’, are sprouting up everywhere.

The finance-driven, speculative model of urban development, backed by large insurance and construction firms, goes hand in hand with tourism, which includes the sexual exploitation of minors and young adults. ‘Tour guides’, an untold number of them unlicensed, charge (older, usually white) men from out of town a commission of 15 per cent for the sexual services of (younger, mostly darker-skinned) local women and men. Plenty of quid pro quo also takes place, via Tinder and Grindr, without the intermediary.

Rather than tourism, which doesn’t alleviate but appears to exacerbate existing inequalities, Bahia needs a robust programme of public works and reindustrialisation. When the Ford plant in Camaçari closed in 2021, it led to the loss (directly and indirectly) of 72,000 jobs. Lula is negotiating its reopening.

The president has said he would like Dilma Rouseff to be the next head of the BRICS New Development Bank. Her former chief of staff and education minister, Aloízio Mercadante, who helped form the PT in 1980, is now in charge of Brazil’s National Bank of Social and Economic Development. He has indicated that reindustrialisation will be part of a long-term planning strategy that emphasises value-added manufacturing exports, in addition to agriculture and mining, which will need to comply with environmental regulations and human rights.

Along with climate change, industrial strategy will also need to address regional inequalities, while state and municipal authorities will need to consider the problems and contradictions of urban development based on tourism, services, real estate speculation and the labour of informal workers. Mercadante has pledged a massive programme of federal loans and credits for the self-employed, which cannot arrive soon enough. ‘Now that carnival is gone, so is the investment,’ an informal parking attendant told me, ‘so it’s hunger that remains.’