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Anna Ternova

21 September 2016
The Long Road to a Middle Class
In the 1960s, the Peace Corps sent a young American woman to be a community health
worker in Alto Cruzeiro, a shanty town in the northeast of Brazil. Many of the towns
impoverished inhabitants lived in straw huts and dinky houses, and the infant mortality rate was
high. When she returned twenty years later, the town had adopted some modern influences, but
not much had changed. Malnutrition, stunting and illiteracy was abundant. This part of Brazil has
long contained the largest single concentration of poverty in Latin America due to things like:
unequal landholding, frequent droughts, political corruption and backwardness, poor transport
infrastructure and lack of education. It would take decades for any significant amount of progress
to be made.
In the years of Cardoso and Lula, the government began several big investment projects
in the region. One of these was a massive relief operation which distributed monthly food
baskets to millions of families, created jobs, and granted almost half of a billion reais in cheap
loans for various daily services. Although many of these families were still considered poor, the
minimum wage had increased by 60%. By the first decade of the 2000s, poverty and income
inequality fell remarkably low as the country experienced faster growth and job creation. This
fall in poverty swelled a new social Class C which was a step above poverty, but still well
below the middle class level. Between 2003 and 2011, 40 million Brazilians moved into Class C,
which soon made up 55% of the total population. It was dubbed the new middle class and
created a consumer market for the first time that awoke the interest of local businesses and
multinationals. Public services improved fastnearly everyone had electricity, piped water and
sewerage, and advances in healthcare rose life expectancy rates for both adults and infants.
Regardless of all that, there was still a large contrast between Class C and the actual middle
class.
In addition, education was still the single most important issue facing Brazil. A
centralized educational system was vulnerable to political interference and corruption. It only
started improving once individualized authority was given to each state over their own school
system. After the Cardoso and Lula governments created multiple reforms to improve schools,
the number of student enrollment jumped by 19 million, and adult illiteracy gradually declined.
Issues still riddled the system; violence and drugs pervaded the schools, teacher absenteeism was
a chronic problem, and many of the students dropped out for various reasons. The students that
could afford private schools and better education came from better-off families, and were mainly
white. This provoked a heated debate about racial discrimination and the lack of equality and
opportunity in the country. The 51% of Brazilians that identified themselves as either black or
brown in the 2010 census had an income less than half that of whites, and many were
disadvantaged in their level of education. Activists insisted that slaverys long past of injustice
could only be reversed by following affirmative action policies like those in the USA. It wasnt
that race determined life chances, but it did affect them; the hardest task was to change the
attitudes of Brazilians who believed blacks belonged at the bottom of the pile. Social divide was

also represented by architectural contrasts between the favelas and the middle class. Although
those in favelas have been offered to be relocated into better conditions by the government, many
of them feared change and did not want to travel long, daily commutes on crowded busses
another issue that could be solved by better public transport. Drug trade in the favelas became
prevalent and even though police forces were installed, most of its members became corrupt (this
also characterized the police in Brazil in general). In 2012, Brazil had become the worlds second
largest market for cocaine. Fear of crime was at the top of Brazilians concerns. Nonetheless, the
last two decades proved to be full of progress for the countryBrazilians are less poor, less
unequal, and less badly educated than ever before.
Reflection
The style in which Reid writes this book makes it feel like you are on a roller coaster. He
will start off each chapter listing problem after problem, and then go on to explain how the
government put all their effort into creating reforms and reinforcing laws to try and make a
change in society. He lists statistics of the improvements, which makes you feel as though you
are on the top of the rollercoaster. Suddenly, you are rolling downhill at lightning speed
immediately afterwards, once he goes back to his previous statement to explain how Brazil is
still not good enough in comparison to the rest of the world, even with all its progress. He
continues to write in this fashion as he switches between topics, and whether he means to or not,
it brings out emotions in the reader. It brings out a sense of anger and irritation in me, personally,
reading about all of Brazils inherent problems that it just cannot seem to conquer. I know that
every country must have had issues getting on their feet before they got to their modern-day
standpoint, and maybe it appears as though Brazil has it the worst only because I know the most
about it from reading this book, and have no other country (of which I have the same amount of
knowledge) to compare it to (besides the USA). However, considering the problems facing the
country today, it is still not as developed as many others. I am not positive if Brazil has asked for
advice from countries that are doing much better off than it, or held conferences in which others
could help in reformations, since the book has not (yet, at least) mentioned anything about
outside help. This makes me wonder why Brazil does not use the same tactics as other countries
to solve similar problems, or if they do, why those tactics arent working for them. I understand
that progress and change takes a significant amount of time and effort, but Brazil has been on a
long and grueling road for quite a while, and is still marred by deep-rooted issues from its past.

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