Interview with Fernando Gabeira, June 2015

It is a mark of an intelligent man that he should have more doubts than answers. It is no accident, therefore, that Fernando Gabeira’s two best-selling books are titled as questions. While wise enough not to answer them, Gabeira has never been too cynical to stop asking. And he has gone wherever the questions took him. Yet on the wild ride through the hills and valleys of his quest, Gabeira has drawn a strange parabola for career. Once a symbol of the armed revolutionary left, the man now finds himself an involuntary darling of the right, though he never chose to be an emblem for either. Called many things throughout his political life — terrorist, kidnapper, faggot, pot-head, traitor — Gabeira has survived his detractors by remaining loyal to a single master: his thoughts.,

Known throughout the world as one of the people involved in the kidnapping of US Ambassador Charles Elbrick in 1969, Gabeira had not even come back from exile when he started showing signs of regret, however much he may dislike the word. “I don’t indulge in it, especially because life is full of new things and challenges — there isn’t enough time left for regret,” he told me during our two-hour-long interview. Yet he practically admits to it when describing Elbrick’s kidnapping as an error to Ragga magazine: “The armed struggle wasn’t the only and it was certainly not the best solution. We made a mistake.” In his more recent memoirs Where Is All That Now?, he is unambiguous: “It is a very grave thing for a person to kidnap another.” So grave, in fact, that Gabeira seems averse at using the word, often preferring the less encumbering action. He doesn’t belittle the reaction, though, imprinted on his character like a branding iron on skin. “My life would be marked by it.”

Those who admired Gabeira for his revolutionary zeal may be disappointed to know he has disavowed it almost completely. “The armed struggle is a mistake, in general, except in a very few, very special circumstances. Those were not the circumstances we had in Brazil,” he told me. But while he discards it as method, he also renounces communism as goal. In his two memoirs Gabeira intersperses the hard facts of his life with his suspicions about the left, his beliefs, himself. Perhaps mostly himself.

The mind, Gabeira seems to realise, is a mouldable mass explicating what it cannot explain, rationalising things it may not even agree with. But the intelligent mind also knows how to trick itself, sifting through books and treatises for the parts it already believes in, outsourcing its own validation. Gabeira knows enough to reject the idea that he was fooled. “I dreamed the wrong dream,” he would say many years later when quitting the Workers Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores). If he was fooled, it was by no other than himself. This is where Gabeira is at his most candid in his memoirs, when he admits to being both the deceived and the deceiver.

Eliminating dissonant arguments from his head, Gabeira would read Sartre for the ideology, and Camus only for the literature. Sartre helped justify the obliteration of the individual in favour of the collective, and violence against the oppressed when the oppressed didn’t agree with what was decided in their name. But Gabeira doesn’t blame Sartre either. “I searched through existentialist writings for all that interested me. If they hadn’t existed, I would end up composing another amalgam, piecing together other influences, to justify the choices that would come.” But if he was good at selective processing, Gabeira is even better at recognising it. Tropicalismo, the Brazilian artistic movement that was a target of the ideological purists, was not one Gabeira had “the open spirit to understand”. The movement, which defiantly promoted an “anthropophagic” fusion of mixed influences, only interested him “as far as it repeated what I already believed.”

That self-convincing was rampant among communists. Gabeira remembers hearing slogans all the time. “We lost the battle but will win the war.” It was like succumbing to the tricks applied by organised religion. “We suffer on this earth, but the Kingdom of God will be ours,” he wrote. Uplifting catchphrases were repeated like martial music to keep soldiers in step. “‘Reality has again confirmed our predictions’; or ‘Socialism goes forward in the world while capitalism has no way out.’” Gabeira himself needed those self-help affirmations. “We needed to believe capitalism was collapsing in order to wake up early and indoctrinate blue-collar workers,” he says of his leafleting at factories.

In a way, Gabeira had already taken a major step away from his initial disinterest. At the beginning of his journalistic career, successful at a very early age, his salary was always rising and for that reason he “wasn’t sympathetic to strikes.” But his awakening came with a vengeance. He not only put himself in the shoes of the oppressed, but started to think on their behalf. Like many other communists, he decided to make a revolution for the workers, without the workers. It’s what he calls “the great illusion of that time — that the fight against the government could be waged independently from the people.”

The conceit of ersatz representation was often compounded by a forced romanticism. Gabeira would encounter it again almost two decades later, when he joined the Workers Party (PT) to run for governor of Rio de Janeiro. Some members objected to his name because “the candidate should be a worker.” Gabeira argued back that he was “an intellectual worker,” even though he was back from an exile where he was employed as a gardener at a cemetery, a metro driver, and a cleaner at hospitals. He saw more of that affectation amidst the resistance. “There were people who wanted to have sex with a blue-collar worker so they would link their convictions to amorous practice. Nothing personal in that: they wanted a blue-collar worker like one wants a blond, a brunet, an Asian.”

In a way, such fetish was crucial to keep the revolution going. Already exiled in Havana, after a day of studies Gabeira asks a comrade: “What if the working class is not what we think of it?” Bent over a book by Marx, his friend answers “I’ll commit suicide.” May 1st rallies in Rio would be missed by an “overwhelming majority of workers”, who preferred to go watch football at Maracana instead. But the problem was not only with the people, of course — it was with the movement. For one, communists acted like the capitalists they blamed for importing a foreign culture, by importing themselves a whole theory. Fighters tried and failed to emulate their success with Cuban campesinos on people of a completely different reality. “(Take) An indian chewing coca leaves and staring at the infinite for hours without saying a word,” Gabeira writes. “You can recite the three volumes of The Capital and he will continue to stare fixedly at a single point.”

Brazilian communists were trying to confine a whole multicultural country within a single stereotype, perpetuating the misconceptions. “Even tourists are surprised when they don’t see Brazilians wearing sombreros and a long moustache, holding our guitars and singing Curucucu Paloma.” But the typecast had more serious implications. Some communists, according to Gabeira, claimed “the coup d’état of 64 was the product of the union between latifundio owners and American imperialism,” but even historian Caio Prado refuted these ideas as “wrong, a mere carbon copy of European models, as there had never been feudalism in Brazil.” As it happens, Brazil communists were fighting American imperialism with a Russian blueprint. “Is the Soviet Union imperialist?” Gabeira asked. “What is imperialism after all? Wasn’t it defined by Lenin?”

But questions were not encouraged. “Thinking was dangerous, for we started to dispute the truth.” How to reconcile the fact that both “Che Guevara and Trotsky ordered the death of so many people”? Those things, he says, got lost in the romantic atmosphere, and were duly replaced with the eternal mantra: “Socialism will compensate each one according to his work; communism will compensate each one according to his necessities.”

Yet the main disagreement Gabeira had with communism seemed to go beyond, or rather beneath, pure ideology — it related to the body, or the existential conflict between the fight for the collective good and personal desires. That issue was so crucial it inspired the title of his first book. During the time before the kidnapping, Gabeira had a comrade called Dominguinho. He was a teenager who carried a gun and indoctrinating literature, yet knew nothing about girls, comic books or parties (the entertaining ones). One day, perplexed by that life so prematurely cast into a self-obliterating role, Gabeira asks “Why don’t you buy a sticker album, or find a girlfriend to caress on a garden bench?” Shocked at the moral decadence and anti-revolutionary thought, Dominguinho threw back a question that would become the name of Gabeira’s best-selling book, What is that, Comrade?, which in Portuguese sounds more like “what’s wrong with you, man?”

“Everything is politics, they were right,” Gabeira says. “But they could not capture the true dimensions of the politics of the body.” Biology, as a relevant factor in politics, has been widely ignored by all sides of the ideological spectrum. But with communists the self-imposed sacrifices were so rigid and demands so superhuman that, even without a god, it looked very much like a cult. On one hand, the ideology required a type of faith in the afterlife, as the main goal of communism would be fulfilled in the long term — so long indeed that by then most revolutionaries would be dead. Years later, in 1979, Gabeira was quoted on the cover of Lampiao, the first gay newspaper in Brazil, saying “We can’t wait 70 years for an orgasm.” http://www.grupodignidade.org.br/cedoc/lampiao/22%20-%20LAMPIAO%20DA%20ESQUINA%20EDICAO%2018%20-%20NOVEMBRO%201979.PDF Manuals dealing with torture also involved a lot of idealism, recommending that one “smile with disdain at the torturers.” Gabeira, himself tortured in jail, writes that “Whoever thinks he is capable of smiling with disdain at his torturers has a very poor knowledge of his limitations.” What he calls the “smashing of the individual” was applied with fervour and followed “an implacable logic”. A mere handwritten note to a friend was labelled as personal necessity, and if that risked security it was considered anti-revolutionary. Gabeira summarises what may be the major weakness of communism in two sentences: “On a collective level, the price (of the New Man) was repression and some firing squads. On the individual level, one needed only to kill a part of oneself.”

In The Triumph of Stupidity, Bertrand Russell wrote that “in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” And doubt, as the doubting know, is at once balm and affliction. Gabeira remembers when he was demonstrating at the rallies on the street in front of the newspaper where he worked, Jornal do Brasil, making speeches against the “bourgeoisie press”. “It was a weird sensation,” he wrote. “It felt like I was booing myself.” After the kidnapping, when he left his hideout for the first time to dye his hair, he explains that “the objective was to wear a disguise, but I felt identical to myself.”

Which self? , he might have asked.

Consistent in his uncertainty, at least post facto, Gabeira seemed to have had only a few encounters with equals. He mentions with fondness the then boyfriend of Very Magalhães (his future wife), someone he liked very much for his ability to mock himself. “With him it was possible to conjecture: what if this is all an illusion?” But while Gabeira’s mind was silently conflicted, his body became loud with action. And that action came back to haunt him dressed as remorse. After the kidnapping, a journalist friend was arrested and tortured because he was Gabeira’s guarantor on a credit card application. Another friend, Francisco, was implicated because a car still registered to his name was used in the crime, even though the man never took part in it. Francisco was exiled. “That’s one of the sadness I inherited from the action,” Gabeira says, “an exile shared by me, him and my guilt.”

Before guilt had come to visit, the enemy kept him company. After the kidnapping, hiding in complete silence to avoid alerting the neighbours, Gabeira spent several days in solitude. The only other creature around was a fly, which would show up at the coffee table. He named it Eduardo. At times he would think about killing it, but he never did as he knew “very well how we need an enemy at moments like that.” But it was in jail, perhaps, that Gabeira had the chance to see his enemy as up-close as a mirror.

At the precincts, interrogated and tortured, Gabeira saw a familiar type of conviction. “It is very possible that some begun by thinking they were torturing for a noble cause. But even these people, at the end, would realise that noble causes do not torture.”

They possibly don’t kidnap either, he may have conjectured. And it’s possible that he did. The account of his time in jail is a real tour-de-force, but not because Gabeira was tortured so gruesomely or because he was superhumanly stoic. What is remarkable is his lack of interest in proving anything, and the way he refuses to preach to the audience, turning down the chance to please either side of the deep-yet-shallow divide that split the world into Team Prisoners and Team Wardens. The blurring of his own black-and-white world is summarised in a short dialogue, when a policeman tries to strike conversation with the famous prisoner, telling him he had “a communist cousin in Goias.” Gabeira retorts saying he had “a cousin with tuberculosis in Minas.”

“I speak of torture like an artist, because I have no right to talk of it as someone who was majorly tortured. Sometimes my blood splattered on the wall [out of the IV in his penis]. Captain Romero would recoil in horror: “I am a torturer but not a doctor, I cannot stand this disgusting mess.” Gabeira was subjected to several sessions of electric shocks. “My reaction to the first electric shocks was that of a civilised man, I believe: I was perplexed to know such a thing existed. […] Seeing it was like watching kids pluck feathers off a bird. How was such thing possible among grownups?” Sometimes he’d come across torturers who would “work overtime with pleasure”, and they would attach the wires to different places in his body, without much purpose and “without even taking notes.” “I was revolted. The pain was horrible, but the hatred was even bigger.” But how did Gabeira fare under torture? There’s little reason to doubt his account, for it is unusual in its humility. “I saw in jail many [of the people tortured] not answering absolutely anything. Many would declare they were communists and had nothing else to say; others would hide in a vague ‘I don’t know’ and would never leave it. That was not my case, and I don’t think it will be in the future. I believe, sincerely, that it is a game, full of back-and-forth, full of small defeats and small victories. Many times I left the interrogation room defeated.”

There was verbal aggression too. Gabeira, who descends from Arab immigrants, had to hear Captain Thomas call him “Turk son of a bitch”. “I found that type of treatment strange, almost intimate in a way,” he writes. And intimate it possibly was. Gabeira would later learn that Captain Thomas was an Arab descendent himself, who insulted Gabeira in the best way he knew, with the same abuse he heard when it was his turn to be kicked. As Gabeira said somewhere else in his book, “The enemy, in some way, set the dimension of my own stature.”

The enemy, in another way, was also his friend. In the 16 years he spent as a deputy in congress, Gabeira was for a time a member of PT, the Workers Party he vilifies today. He travelled with then presidential candidate Lula in ’94 in one of the so called “Citizenship Caravans,” and defended Lula against condemnation from within his own party for Lula’s budding association with Jose Sarney — an accidental president and politico who ruled for decades over one of the poorest and most illiterate Brazilian states, a politician who somehow perfectly embodies all that is rotten in this country. Gabeira eventually left PT for good, as it never quite supported his fights: a democratic drug policy, end of the mandatory military service, environmental protection, minority rights, especially LGBT. As a quixotic, solitary member of the Green Party, he would sometimes be called to speak by the congress leader, who would say with some mockery that “You have a minute to defend the position of your bench.” Gabeira would double down and retort that, as a divided person, he would “authorise the bench to vote as it wishes.”

Less amusingly, Gabeira had to face Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing deputy hailing from the armed forces who would often ask from the dais that Gabeira be arrested for terrorism. Then one day Gabeira went up to Bolsonaro and asked to be warned in advance of his next outburst, just in case the congress guards took him seriously. Bolsonaro never asked for Gabeira’s arrest after that. Today, the two men metaphorically rub shoulders among the vociferous anti-government brigade. Both Bolsonaro and Gabeira have asked for Dilma Roussef’s impeachment, a political mechanism PT now calls a “coup” but once demanded when the president to be impeached was Collor de Mello. Now, it is PT and Collor who find themselves on the same side of Brazilian seizure-inducing political landscape.

In his decade and a half in congress, Gabeira has had his victories. Many of them could be considered Brazil’s victories. Gabeira was crucial in getting the congress to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. He was also fundamental in making the government sign the demarcation of 5% of Brazilian territory as protected area. He had an important part in the fall of corrupt politicians, staging protests in congress and making the fight public. Some of those politicians, for years maligned by PT and unwittingly playing the role of PT’s antithesis, are now back in power under PT’s imprimatur. But there appears to be one event that embarrasses Fernando Gabeira. And that is not the “bikini affair”, though it brought him much notoriety. (Gabeira had his photos splashed all over Brazilian media the day he appeared on a Rio beach wearing a crochet sunga. Confident, and yet again with nothing to prove, it turned out that the immodest male sunga was in fact a female bikini, which he borrowed from his cousin, journalist Leda Nagle.) What embarrassed him was something different. In what has been known as “the plane tickets scandal”, a group of congress members were found to be using their allotment of plane tickets for private purposes. The scandal broke but Gabeira’s name was not in it. He came forward, though, calling a journalist to reveal he had given one of his plane tickets to his daughter. He then apologised publicly, gave back the ticket money, and helped implement the rules that would spare the taxpayer millions in plane tickets for politicians in Brasilia. The fact that he was “ashamed for having made a mistake” says more about Gabeira than the mistake itself. The error was a small, negligible stain that became very visible on the translucent surface it tarnished. In Brazil and elsewhere, one could run for president on that stain and win. But Gabeira says he doesn’t want to get back into politics, and will confine his participation in public life to journalism.

In his weekly TV program on GloboNews Gabeira seems truly at home. Different than most journalists today, who go “investigate” a story whose headline they’ve already written, Gabeira searches small towns and the Brazilian countryside to find out what no one was even asking about. The stories are varied and unpredictable: the life of prostitutes; what is it like to be a transgender inside a male prison; the life of a man who is a writer but whose day job is to bury people in a cemetery. Letting the characters speak for themselves, guiding no one, Gabeira’s show may appear puerile or too simple for the untrained eye, but it is instead one of the most refreshing, unmediated journalism in Brazilian television these days. Elsewhere, however, Gabeira leaves little room for the unexpected. In weekly and fortnightly articles he writes for two of the best-selling Brazilian newspapers. His anti-government stance is hammered incessantly. Prolific, eloquent and with sophisticated prose, Gabeira has built a large captive audience for his opinion. But he may also have conversely become captive to that audience himself. His very memoirs are philosophical warnings on the black-and-white reduction of political discourse, even of his own. Alas, like most humans, Gabeira is expected to make other, fresh mistakes. Unlike most humans, though, he will probably be the first to admit it.

Below is an edited version of my two-hour long interview with Fernando Gabeira in May 2015.

When I came back to Brazil after years abroad, I thought I was going to find Collor and Sarney in jail*. (*Two former presidents, targeted by PT as some of the most corrupt politicians in Brazil] Not only they are free, they are part of the government. How do you explain this?

This question deserves no explanation, but the tone of condemnation you just gave. The truth is that PT decided to govern like the others before it and made a pact with the decadent elite. This alliance with the old colonels, which have always existed, not only were not dismantled but were amplified by PT.

Many PT sympathisers allege that this happened because our presidential system is set in such way that if there were no political alliances PT could not rule the country. It’s as if PT had to make a pact with the devil to be able to govern.

This is the excuse they also used to cover their corruption. Those who admit the corruption — privately, because publicly they don’t — they allege that corruption was necessary to develop their project. Those a bit more intellectually sophisticated say corruption is just a footnote, that what matters is the increased income of the poorer people, wealth distribution. But this project worked when there was a period of economic growth. Now that the crisis is here we know this is unsustainable, it was much more an electoral project of increasing income and consumption so that PT could keep itself in power.

But didn’t the income of the poor actually increase?

It did actually increase, but it was not PT that increased it, the economic conditions did. PT focused on consumption and ignored investment, development, rationality in public administration. It’s what we call the ‘flight of the chicken’. PT made spurious alliances with the decadent elite, it made a pact with corruption, it corrupted itself.

Was corruption a consequence or a project, an objective?

I don’t know if it was an objective. If it was, it must have been on a more unconscious level. On a conscious level it happened because it was necessary to do good for the people, and that good could only be done if they did evil. In a way, they reproduced a concept very common in the 20th century, that the end justifies the means.

So you believe there were good intentions at the core of PT.

That’s not exactly what I am saying. I am saying that the rational defence they make of the process is that they aim at doing good. But if emotionally or psychologically they actually intended to do good then it’s problematic because many of them have gotten rich. The increasing wealth of many of them means that they ultimately wanted their own good. They were well-intentioned in their discourse, though. […]

I worked with them thinking they represented a social democracy similar to the European social democracy […] but PT was different, they were more to the left. I thought the left was where we would anchor ecological ideas, libertarian ideas…

And do you think capitalism offers that, those progressive ideas?

I think comparing to socialist countries and with other modes of production, that’s where you got more personal freedom, freedom of expression, the free choice of your lifestyle.

Why are those values associated to a mode of production, to an economic system? […] What is your ideal model…

I don’t work with an ideal model anymore. I did it when I thought we could have the script of history. I work with a few principles. The first fundamental principle is democracy as the highest political system. The second is respect for human rights, something that should be fundamental but that unfortunately the left ignored. It dehumanised its adversaries, humans were only those on its side. See for example the opposition in Iran or in Cuba — they are not worthy of being defended [by the Brazilian left]. The other principles are wealth distribution and the preservation of the environment. Those are my four guiding principles.

And how has PT fared on those four principles?

From a democratic standpoint, very badly, because they have a recurrent desire to censor the media, they support dictatorial governments, like Cuba, they support repression of the media like it’s happening in Venezuela, they are not really with the democratic workforce.

But what about demonstrations in Brazil? Aren’t they a good sign that democracy is going very well?

No, the existence of popular demonstrations is just one side of the issue. I’m referring to the use of public money to influence the propaganda machine, on the internet, several things that are characteristic of authoritarian governments. Of course PT did not manage to end democracy in Brazil because they don’t have enough strength for that, they cannot do it. In human rights too PT managed to stigmatise human rights. Finally, as far as the environment goes, PT was never quite clear. They always had a rhetorical tendency that manifested itself at the beginning of their government, similar to eastern European communist countries, which is to prioritise economic growth regardless of how much devastation that will bring.

Was that what made you leave PT?

Well, this point was non-negotiable, that’s why I left PT at the beginning of their rule in 2003, for several reasons but also because they accepted that we import used tyres from Uruguay, which would only bring problems regarding safety, it would increase the number of used tyres discarded in the environment, the risk of dengue fever… they were getting favours from the industry to accept that deal… the rainforest was being devastated. But I think of all those points, the most serious is the democratic question. The Brazilian left has always been way too romantic and tolerant with the violence of the Cuban dictatorship. Homosexuals have been awfully repressed there, almost a whole generation of Cuban intellectuals was decimated, there are several books and personal testimonies about that. There has never been a condemnation of that, or the imprisonment of journalists […]. This blindness regarding leftwing dictatorships, always set on concentrating power, made me doubt they could be democratic partners.

You forgot to mention wealth distribution.

On the point of wealth distribution we are in agreement, but not on how to go about doing it. You cannot simply increase wealth to stimulate consumption without preparing society to produce more. This system is unsustainable, and it is ultimately guided by electoral reasons. This is not genuine wealth distribution. Take the ‘family aid’ (bolsa familia). They [PT] begun to depend on that more than the families themselves. Because that is how they win their elections. They never had the imagination to go beyond. People don’t want to simply get family aid — they also want to develop their potential, the talent that we have all been endowed with.

What about the use of public money to sponsor “cultural” projects that could be financed by companies? The other day I watched this movie called Praia do Futuro and it was sponsored by BNDES (the Brazilian development bank) and even the Ministry of Technology, Science and Innovation. I heard that only 95% of towns in Brazil have movie theatres. Isn’t that a way of actually concentrating wealth, rather than distributing it?

I think it’s important to recognise that the state has a role in stimulating culture… Today, there’s a discussion in Brazil on whether the state should or not sponsor well-known artists, people already consecrated by the industry. I don’t think so. However, there are situations in which the state helps well-known artists who don’t have the capacity to survive in this market but are very important for the country’s culture, like the Pina Bausch ballet. What happens here is that even culture is considered under political and ideological criteria, and becomes a permanent way of keeping friends, acquaintances and partisans active, producing things that sometimes have no… Public television in Brazil has 1% of the total audience. What is the point of maintaining a television that requires such a gigantic investment… you may say ‘but good television can educate, inform, show aspects not seen in commercial television.’ Ok, that may be, but if no one watches it, then you are throwing money away.

Is there someone in PT today who you think is doing good work?

No, not really, not that I know of. Of course there are sectors that function almost autonomously.

How about Renato Janine Ribeiro (the new education minister)?

I don’t know him well, I just know he used to criticise the government, now is in the government, but I don’t know him.

Mangabeira Unger?

I know him more or less but… he has a certain political innocence. I think he is an intellectual but politically he is a bit naive, but he is still the planner of the government, has always been. He is linked to the government as far as strategic planning goes. He is just a man who has some political ideas and decided to associate with PT and even the Universal Church [of the Kingdom of God] without any problems. I think he is a respected intellectual but from a political standpoint…

Is there someone that has left PT that you admire?

I don’t admire everyone who has left PT. [He agrees with me when I suggest the names of Helio Bicudo and Plinio de Arruda Sampaio as two of the most respectable politicians who have left PT]

Is there something markedly positive resulting from PT rule, something you may credit to them?

I think PT has brought the question of social policies to the centre of the political agenda. No one can escape that anymore, even if it has always existed, now no one can evade the topic. I think that is a great advancement, the fact that there is a preoccupation with a social agenda, a discussion about how to improve the conditions of the poorer population. PT did keep some policies that were implemented before. From a political standpoint there has been an awful degradation. PT not only associated with some decadent sectors of society but became decadent itself. From an economic angle, devastation was also huge. To give you an idea, the largest Brazilian company lost for six years and six months 17 million and a half reais per day, 929,000 per hour of losses.

You mean Petrobras?

Yes. It’s been a disastrous administration. So when a party positions itself before these two very grave accusations of corruption and incompetence, I think either it should reformulate itself radically or it will tend to disappear […] like the Italian communist party. PT is going through a crucial crisis. Despite PT’s sympathisers, I feel the process towards transparency today, the ‘car-wash operation’ that unveiled the scandal in Petrobras but also opened the way for the revelation of other scandals in the energy sector, pension funds. We are talking about numbers that would shock humanity. Petrobras has undergone corruption of 6 billion and 200 million reais. I don’t remember any corruption like this…

They say it started way before, many governments ago.

Yes, but I don’t remember anything like that. It’s within their government that this has been organised, politically organised. In the pension fund of the postal services you have a hole of 5 billion and 200 million reais.

When PT talks about wealth distribution, how can the banks have had the largest profit ever in the history of Brazil during PT’s government?

Actually, the term ‘wealth distribution’ is not the most adequate. They talk about the increased income among the poorer classes, because obviously the biggest increase [in wealth] was among the wealthiest, that was the largest increase in the period.

Do you know if there are media companies getting money from the government to support it?

No, I don’t think so, I don’t know, but I know the government has some money reserved for… there was a leak of an internal memo from the communications secretary in which they mention ‘friendly blogs’.

With that expression, friendly blogs?

Yes, they go after blogs that are paid by them, internet newspapers, sometimes internet bots, but the big media… I don’t think PT would have the conditions to change their position, I think it would be the embrace of death if an important Brazilian newspaper started to support PT after all. [inaudible. Gabeira then mentions how the government helps large media conglomerates] This is normally financed with projects by Banco do Brasil, government agencies etc.

I read on your blog that PT put a star [the party symbol] in the Planalto Palace.

That was Lula’s wife, she is the one who had it done. There was a very negative repercussion because the Planalto Palace is the seat of power, the symbol of Brazil not of a party. They have always confused the state with the party.

Are you in favour of public campaign financing?

I think perhaps the most correct system is the American one, you know, a combination of private and public financing. In my case, particularly, it was possible to have financing from individuals, a campaign mobilised by people who believe in your ideas.

Do you think the people who financed you believed in your ideas?

Yes, that was a presumed, not even my ideas but my standing. There was never an expectation of a quid-pro-quo but also there was never an expectation of power… only once did I almost won elections…

I find it difficult to imagine that an elected politician can get help a second term without paying back those who financed him previously. […]

Obama for example got so much private financing that he gave up receiving public financing. Some companies sometimes contribute because they want a better country and they themselves have no business with the government, you know, but there are also those who have business with the government and are the biggest financiers of those campaigns, like the large contractors.

You mean in Brazil?

In each country there’s a group.

Do you think you went from left to right? I read that you define yourself as leftwing.

The world has changed a lot. There are some positions in society that tend to be considered left positions, like preoccupation with retirement, public health services, public schools, rights of immigrants… there are a bunch of ideas that characterise the left… in the USA, democrats are not a leftwing party and republicans are not only a party of the right, they have individual values…

Libertarianism?

Exactly. So it’s very difficult today, after the cold war, after the division of the world between socialism and capitalism, and with so many new references that were not on the horizon of political scientists when they defined left and right after the French Revolution, that it’s very complicated today… For example, there are things today that mean you are leftwing if you support the Venezuelan government… but then, individual rights… I think there are times when a person must be free of these two paradigms and try think for himself, regardless whether he is momentarily considered to be left or right wing.

I would like to talk about that artificial division that you say PT is promoting: south against north, rich against poor, black against white.

I think this also came with culturalism. There has been a time in history in which the question of identity became a very important political question, especially because many people arrived in Europe and the US with a different culture. So they developed the idea of plurality and respect for different cultures, a fight that involved blacks, women, Turks, everyone claimed for an identity. The respect for that is something I find very interesting. When PT got to power it did not have a clear position about that, the party had not reflected on the topic, but it got the push from the gay movement and PT said ‘I will bring the gays along’. The problem is that the majority of the population is not gay, and it has some reservations that can only be overcome with time. You cannot apply a state policy similar to the policy of a movement, otherwise the people sending their kids to school will feel you are making an apology of homosexuality when in fact that’s not what you propose, because the state cannot make an apology…

Where is the government making this apology?

No, for example when you start teaching kids about homosexuality in schools, create text books and decide from the top to bring gay pride… I think most people would say ‘this was not mentioned in the syllable, we respect personal choices but want to discuss that in another manner within the schools….’. The state cannot behave like a movement.

Is the opposition worth what it’s fighting against?

No, I don’t believe it, the opposition has always been very feeble. I’ve always said the opposition in Brazil is no opposition. The true brave opposition against PT came from the people who left PT, or that founded PSOL [Socialism and Freedom Party]. This is the opposition with the spirit of opposition. PSDB and DEM are like government in exile, they were in power and then they were thrown in the opposition. Until they acquire, let’s say, an inspiration for the opposition, the gestures of the opposition, the attitudes, coherence of the opposition, they will have to go through a long period. They are getting better lately, but why? Because the correlation of forces is changing, people went to the streets and they [opposition parties] are feeling more secure. The problem is the following: they should have acted as opposition even when people were sleeping, because that was their task. They only came to embrace that type of main role when they realised the people were on the streets. But they are very feeble, you know, and did not present themselves as an alternative, so much so that in 2013 and part of 2015 the demonstrations were against all politicians, without necessarily considering the opposition worthy [of its name].

Would PSOL be this worthy opposition?

No, not PSOL, no, because in many cases it is not opposition, only in some matters like corruption. They supported PT on the second round of the elections, they are linked to PT, they are simply the PT that hasn’t yet succeeded. So much so that their vision on democracy is similar, they support the Cuban regime. Recently I read — I don’t know if that’s true — that Luciana Genro declared that if the North Korean government were so bad it wouldn’t be supported unanimously by its people.*

I read you referring to PT and its new iterations as PT of God, or PT Quadrangular. Sounded a bit like the People’s Front of Judea instead of the Judean People’s Front.

I was talking about PT wanting to re-read its bible and reinterpret it. PT had this a lot, about re-read Marxism and reinterpret it. The supposition that there is a right path written in a book, a path that you lost, I think that’s a religious way to face renewal. I am saying that it is possible to survive a book, something written, a couple of coordinates. Life is much richer, surprising [than that], there is no renewal that goes through the same bible.

Speaking of the confinement of ideas, you defend prostitutes and their right to work, when even some self-purported feminists are against it.

There is a law by me that provoked some debate and received criticism even from friends, feminist friends, who complained that prostitutes sell their bodies. To begin with, they do not sell the body, they rent it, there is a difference there, the prostitute is not a slave. It’s was during slavery when your body was sold. Other critics would say that it is impossible to regulate something that defends sex without love. I would answer that I, personally, think sex with love to be the best thing there is, as I love some specific, marvellous wines, but I will not go around forbidding people from drinking cheaper wine. Why must someone have sex only with love? Other people said my position ignored prostitutes as social victims, that they became prostitutes because they were pushed by destiny, that the main thing was not to regulate the profession but to take them away from that life. I answered that many are there because they chose to, because they want, they prefer it to other work. There is no point in rounding up these people and tell them now they must have a proper job.

I know intellectual work that is far more “prostituted” and genuinely harmful.

ACM Neto, who was then the rapporteur of the draft and today is the mayor of Salvador, he said the law was preposterous because it threatened the Brazilian family. I said not really, if you examine the work they do carefully, prostitutes in fact work to maintain their families, they are the bread-winners. There’s a town in Parana that is fully sustained by prostitutes, I can’t remember the name.

Do you have any idea about new ways to fight corruption in Brazil? What do you think of this project that wants to classify corruption as a heinous crime?

There is no doubt that corruption must entail harder penalties, especially corruption in the public health sector, because it clearly kills. But I don’t believe very much in adding an adjective to a crime. It reminds me of the trains in Italy, rapido, molto rapido, rapidissimo. It just didn’t work. It’s necessary to work preventively, and that is not related to moral guidance that says do this and don’t do that. The most important preventive work is to have transparency, complete vigilance etc. I think that we the available resources we can do intensive supervision. PT sometimes says that they are the ones who allowed many things to be revealed… there are no heroes in this process. But the internet had a crucial role to play.

I learned that BNDES [the national development bank] can refuse to disclose its loans…

It argues that those are under bank secrecy, but the congress has just approved a bill that BNDES must release the loan data, even from previous governments. We hope Dilma won’t veto it.

Can she veto it?

Yes, she has the right to veto and the congress has the right to reject her veto. What is happening now is that there will be a congress investigation on BNDES, and then we will examine the deals they made abroad following an ideological rationale, like the help to Cuba, to Venezuela. They [BNDES] put a billion dollars in the Venezuela metro, almost another billion dollars in the Cuban port. We are not retracting, what has been decided is decided, but we must see if they paid [the loans] or not, what were the conditions, interest rates. There are doubts relating to a company in Brazil that produces meat, Friboi, it’s omnipresent and this company gets financing from BNDES and simultaneously gives 250 million for PT’s campaign.

Did it give to the opposing candidate as well?

Yes, a little.

Not 250 million.

No. Another partner [of PT] getting public money is Odebrecht. Lula travels as a lobbyist for the company, he is paid per conference, he promises public works that BNDES finances and Odebrecht builds them and makes fortunes. But Lula is paid to speak at conferences. It’s the same thing done by Hillary Clinton, but a bit less subtle. And that too, once it’s public money, it is important that we know about it, that we have access to those numbers. I say that it’s crucial that we examine BNDES’ black box. So there is a bag for the poor [“family bag”, or bolsa familia, the monthly stipend paid to poor families] but there is also the Louis Vuitton bag.

* Luciana Genro’s website clarifies:

“There are people who will believe any silliness they read on the internet, and there are those who confuse jokes with real life. It turns out that a rightwing comedian invented a story about an alleged debate in which I would have manifested support to Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator. At the beginning I gave this story no importance, but when someone I know — a well-intentioned person — asked me if that was true, I realised one cannot let an idiotic joke go unanswered. The ones who do support the North Korean dictators are in PC do B [Communist Party of Brazil], the party of Jandira Feghalli, Manuela Davila, Aldo Rebelo. PSOL has nothing to do with that. Do not confuse me with those self-proclaimed ‘socialist’ experiments. ”