Transparent Ceilings
A Previous Version of the
Transparent Roofs Article¹

Olavo de Carvalho

When any politician of the Right or of no ideological conviction is accused of misappropriation of funds and his party tries to elude investigation, the media overwhelmingly denounces the malfeasance, and with affectations of high dudgeon, calls for “transparency”².

But the president of the Republic has not been accused merely of corruption. He has been accused of receiving financial contributions from the largest criminal organization on the continent, which is responsible for the massive supplying of cocaine to the Brazilian market and for transforming Rio de Janeiro into a battlefield, where the monthly number of violent deaths is almost equal to the number of civilian casualties in Iraq.

To discourage the investigation, he did not resort to any parliamentary dodge, but rather to direct intimidation, announcing that he will prosecute his accuser, representative Albert Fraga (PMDB-DF), for the crime of exercising one of the basic prerogatives of his parliamentary mandate. At the same time – according to a column by Elio Gaspari –, government agents are maneuvering to avoid having Boris Casoy³, the only TV interviewer from São Paulo who had the audacity to ask da Silva anything about the FARC during the electoral campaign, be able to offend the sensitive spirit of the president of the Republic again. Maybe it is just concidence, but the death threats that I was receiving by e-mail suddenly became open calls for my assassination, published on the website of “Centro de Mídia Independente” with the full cooperation of its directors, who, disregarding the Brazilian Constitution, proudly showed off their habit of posting anonymous messages.

And no one in the media seems to be scandalized by these things. To the contrary, the journalistic class appears to be as caught up in concealing the accusation as it is in its repression, the former reported only by yours truly and by the “Jornal de Brasília”, the latter by tiny little articles tucked away in the corners of pages of about a half dozen newspapers.

Meanwhile, in parliament and on TV, there is all sorts of fuss and noise being made about incomparably lesser crimes attributed to Antônio Carlos Magalhães.

Derogatory messages about representative Fraga have already begun to make their way around the Internet in an operation of character assassination intended to undermine the public’s interest in the evidence and documents that he plans to present in the CPI for whose constitution he now has 114 colleagues’ signatures. I don’t know Alberto Fraga; I don’t know anything about his background, but I do know that in Fernando Collor’s era⁴ no one cited the poor moral character of his brother Pedro as an excuse for not hearing his testimony. I know that no one hesitated to call a notorious con artist and murderer as a primary witness against the “budget dwarves”⁵. What do I care, then, if the plaintiff is a good guy or a bad guy? All I want is for the evidence that he provides about what appears to be the biggest electoral crime of all time to be presented. But it doesn’t surprise me that the first ones to try to cover it up are the apostles of “transparency” themselves: glass ceilings, by definition, are transparent.⁶

The president of the Republic was founder, and for ten years, maximum leader of the São Paulo Forum, coordinator of the communist movement on the continent, in which legal parties joined together in a common strategy with terrorist and criminal organizations like the FARC and Chile’s MIR, the latter being the largest shareholder in the Brazilian kidnapping industry. This alone would be enough to make him appear suspicious, a man whose involvement in such shady company should be meticulously investigated before giving him the right to popular confidence. However, in the 2002 elections, the appelation “São Paulo Forum” was totally supressed in the media and in the debates. Never, in thirty-seven years in journalism, have I seen an effort at concealment so widespread, so cynical, so obstinate. And no wonder: among da Silva’s competitors, two were his partners in the São Paulo Forum, and the third, who knew all, wasn’t in the least bit willing to upset, with unpleasant discussions, an election intended to be an intimate celebration of leftist parties.

At the time, I wrote quite a bit of commentary against this, but I rejected any idea of financial interest in the links between da Silva and Colombian narco-guerrillas. Now, given these new accusations, the media’s silence ceases being simply immoral and has become frankly criminal.

How long will it take business, political, and military leaders to realize that a revolutionary scheme to which the right to complete immunity is granted has already become omnipotent, and nothing can stop it from turning Brazil into the communist regime of its dreams?

In this country no one else is scandalized that our governing officials fall all over themselves in praise of the dictator of Cuba the same week in which, to keep the news of the war in Iraq from turning against him, Fidel Castro jailed seventy-eight dissidents and journalists, imposing life sentences on ten of them. No, no one was bothered by that, though there was more than enough wailing over the firing of Peter Arnett.

When a country’s entire talking elite becomes subservient to false communist morals to the point of allowing such a scandalous double standard to become the normal standard of judgement, it is ready to admit that, in reality, a presidential candidate accepting money from drug traffickers is not a big deal, as long as they are leftist drug traffickers.

The distance which we have progressed on the way to this conclusion can be measured by the following: while American schools have taken great care that their explanations to their students about the war do not lead to political hostility against whomever, our youngest children were induced to take part in anti-American demonstrations with the promise of better grades. A country that treats its children in such a manner, prostituting them en masse with leftist manipulation, is ready to accept anything – anything – as long as it comes with the correct ideological stamp. Then we’ll think it wonderful that someone bring together schoolchildren to be human shields.

NOTES:

1. This previous version has informations that aren’t available in the final one (and vice versa). Since most of our foreign readers don’t know in detail what’s going on in Brazil, it seemed a good idea to upload it. Enjoy! – Editor’s Note. Back
2. “Transparency” meaning disclosure. – Fábio Lins’ Note. Back
3. Boris Casoy is one of the most experienced interviewers and anchormen on Brazilian TV and is reknowned for his sharp criticism. He was indeed the only one to question on air the then candidate da Silva about the Farc and their relations, to which a disconcerted but dry da Silva replied simply, “You’d better not ask these kind of questions again”. – Fábio Lins’ Note. Back
4. Fernando Collor de Mello was the first elected Brazilian President after the end of the military period, his main adversary on the electoral dispute having been the current President, Mr. Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva. He governed from 1990 until 1992, when the accusations made by his brother Pedro caused his impeachment and the deprivation of his political rights for 8 years. It must be noted that: a) he was responsible for the first openings of the Brazilian market to the outside world and for the beginning of the privatization (as far as this term is valid in the Brazilian context) of the state owned companies; b) most of the Brazilian people were happy about his fall because of, among other reasons, the confiscation he had made of millions of savings accounts on a failed heterodox attempt to solve the country’s economic problems; c) none of the accusations made against him were proved. – Editor’s Note. Back
5. The “budget dwarves” is a famous corruption case in Brazil. – Editor’s Note. Back
6. There is an old Brazilian saying that goes “One who has glass ceilings should not throw stones on others“⁷, implying that you cannot accuse someone of something if you have equivalent flaws or, in this case, have committed similar crimes because a reaction equal to your action would break your ceiling as well as perhaps your target’s with worse consequences. It is also common to say about someone who should express the truth or take a stand and does not that the person “has a glass ceiling”, that is, the person might have done something wrong that might be brought up by the accused should they try anything. The author is making a pun here with the old expression. – Fábio Lins’ Note. Back
7. The above expression is almost exactly the same as, and possibly derived from, the English expression “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones”. – Proofreader’s Note. Back

Translation: Ted Angell - Proof Reading: Jacqueline Baca