A derrota no contexto

Reproduzo opinião de Elio Gasperi no New York Times de hoje:

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor 

                                             Brazil’s Dance With Defeat

By ELIO GASPARI
JULY 14, 2014


SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Last week, with great solemnity, Brazil’s president, Dilma Rousseff, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that “being able to overcome defeat I think is the feature and hallmark of a major national team and of a great country.”
So what happened to Brazil that was so dreadful? Was it something similar to the 1940 defeat that drove Charles de Gaulle to call for French resistance? Thankfully, it was nothing of the sort. It was just a soccer game — a national nightmare, during which Germany scored seven goals, four of them in under six minutes. Fortunate is a people that is capable of such commotion over a simple soccer match.

Since its independence, the nation of Brazil has suffered only two terrible defeats — both on home turf, in soccer. Headed for a draw with Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final, the Brazilian team left itself open to a goal that silenced the country.
Six decades later, it was expected that Brazil, as the host nation, would finally vindicate itself in the eyes of the world. Last week’s loss to Germany, which went on to defeat Argentina and win the championship, was arguably worse than 1950. Goals ceased to be surprising; they took on a humiliating regularity. The word “humiliation,” recalled during the game and repeated throughout the world, informed Ms. Rousseff’s conversation with CNN. It would never occur to a Brazilian to emotionally distance herself from what had happened to the national team’s players. It’s basically a question of patriotism.
It may seem naïve to argue that the soul of a country can be deeply entwined with the result of a sporting event. Maybe so, but Americans still take pride in Jesse Owens’s victories at the 1936 Berlin Olympics under Hitler’s nose and Joe Louis’s knockout of the German boxer Max Schmeling during the height of Nazism. And in terms of cultural competition, Americans felt a sense of triumph when the pianist Van Cliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 just months after the Soviet Union had shocked and shamed the United States by putting the Sputnik satellite into orbit.

Many nations identify with sporting victories but seek military successes above all. Sometimes this is for the good of humanity, like the allied efforts in World War II. Sometimes it is a terrible waste, like French and American actions in Vietnam. No nation likes to talk about its military failures. Americans don’t like to remember that in 1814 the British torched the White House.
Brazilian national humiliations tend to occur within the four corners of the soccer field. Perhaps we can chalk this up to geography — after all, Brazil is far from that cauldron of trouble called Europe. Or perhaps it’s luck. Since the end of the 19th century, no Brazilian soldier has died in a war that expanded the nation’s borders. Nine generals have governed Brazil. Six of them never fought a war. It’s better that way.
Before the World Cup began, opponents of the government bet on the event’s infrastructural weakness. Later, the government got drunk on the fleeting success of the team, despite having little to do with it.

Today it’s generally believed that the “7-1” debacle (and a 3-0 drubbing by the Netherlands in the third-place match) will influence the results of the presidential election in October. Behind this conviction lies a certain skepticism toward the universal right to vote, or worse, a disbelief in Brazilians’ capacity to intelligently exercise it.
Brazilian governments that have seen World Cup defeats have won elections. And others have lost elections despite World Cup victories. Add it up, and you’ve got nothing. Soccer depends on a ball in a goal. Elections, a ballot in the box. One requires the prevalent use of one’s feet; the other, one’s head.
The World Cup has been awarded, but Brazil’s problems will remain just as they’ve always been. Ms. Rousseff will seek re-election amid dismal economic indicators: too little growth (1.4 percent in 2014), too much inflation (6.4 percent according to forecasts by the central bank). And, above all, she will rely on a religious faith in marketing.

Her victory would increase the Workers’ Party’s run in government to 16 years. Never before in the history of Brazil has a political party with this degree of cohesion held on for so long in government.
The two candidates running against Ms. Rousseff have not yet made their campaign platforms clear. If they are thinking about education, health care or transportation, her adversaries Aécio Neves and Eduardo Campos haven’t said so — despite the fact that tens of thousands of Brazilians took to the streets one year ago to demand better services in precisely these three areas. As with the failed national team, the opposition is running a hollow campaign.
If the soccer team’s performance teaches us anything, it’s to remember the familiar aphorism: You can’t win before the game is played.

Elio Gaspari, a columnist for the Brazilian newspapers O Globo and Folha de São Paulo, is the author of a multivolume history of Brazil’s military dictatorship. This essay was translated by Alexandra Joy Forman from the Portuguese