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Brazil's Consigliere: Unger leaves lectern to stand behind the throne By Carlos Castilho If the pollsters are right, the next Brazilian president will likely be former finance minister Ciro Gomes, whose main political asset is his éminence-grise, the former Harvard professor and amateur cello player Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Never before in recent Brazilian political history has a candidate relied so much on the neurons and ideas of someone else. Local leaders are traditionally too egocentric and selfish to tolerate a shadow figure, immortalized in Italy as il consigliere—the advisor. That's not the broken rule associated with Unger. Together with Mexican author Jorge Castañeda, he is proposing an alternative to neoliberalism in Latin America, an upstream effort bucking the predominant ideology among government elites in the Western Hemisphere. Unger is better known abroad than at home. Only two of the twenty-five books he has written may be found in Brazilian bookshops. In China, Unger has five published books. In the United States, he shares the academic floor with intellectuals such as Perry Anderson, Cornel West and Richard Rorty. Unger, now 53, was born in Rio de Janeiro of a Brazilian mother and an American father. He spent his childhood in the United States until he was 11, and then returned to Bahia State, where his grandfather was a well-known liberal politician. A compulsive book reader, Unger graduated from college in Brazil and, at 22, became the youngest professor ever to be hired by Harvard University, where he has taught for 28 years. In 1997, he made a radical twist. "I was afraid of accommodation and stability," he said. "I always believed in the idea that confusion and complexity were the best forms for achieving creativity." So Unger gave up his $150,000 salary at Harvard, told his wife and four children to pack their belongings, and plunged into the confusing political landscape of Brazil. "Life, for me, is a mix of monasterial life and battleground," he told the Brazilian weekly news magazine Isto in June 1998. Unger became the closest advisor to Ciro Gomes when the former minister was still looking for a party to support his presidential bid. The choice was odd. Gomes and his consigliere accepted an offer from the Social Progressive Party, or PPS (the Partido Progressista Social), the name adopted by the former Brazilian Comunist Party after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Neither Gomes nor Unger has any previous proximity to Marxism.Unger is an acid critic of Das Kapital and the former Soviet Union. In the 1970s, when the Brazilian left revered Fidel Castro and Mao, Unger was a radical adept of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. In the past, Unger has wandered through two other center-to-left Brazilian political parties. In 1990, he tried for a seat in the lower house of Congress while still teaching at Harvard. Failing to win, he received a scanty 10,000 votes. As a candidate, Unger's political record is associated with liberalism and the economic reform plan that, in 1994, ended chronic hyperinflation in Brazil and opened the country to globalization. Thin as a fakir and speaking Portuguese with a slight English accent, the now free-lancing intellectual rejects the label "Rasputin" given to him by some ultra-neoliberals in Brazil. "There are many persons trying to create a sort of prejudice against me and Ciro Gomes," Unger told a local newspaper at the end of 1999. Academic colleagues and friends of Unger show no hesitation in defining him as a "compulsive theory creator" rather than as an illusive master of political tricks. He loves polemic and sometimes gets obsessed by details. In the electoral Brazilian arena, Unger says the Social Progressive Party is the only new option for Brazilian voters fed up with both the government of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso and former trade-union leader Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, who has disputed the three last presidential polls in the country, losing all of them. "Brazilians are longing for a political alternative since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985," Unger has said. "Mr. Gomes is a newcomer and can impersonate the voters' desire to have a President who listens to civil society and not to the professional politicians." Last October, Unger gave a hint that he probably won't be satisfied playing just the role of "the man behind the throne" if Gomes becomes president. He told friends that he could enter the electoral race for mayor of São Paulo, the biggest and most chaotic city in Brazil. For someone who has traded the monasterial lifestyle of Harvard for the confusion and chaos of South America's biggest metropole, there could be no better deal. Carlos
Castilho is The WorldPaper associate editor for South America. |