Bad Governance and a Catastrophe Foretold

my week in Porto Alegre's disaster zone

On April 31, 300 mm of rain fell in the mountains of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil in less than 24 hours. As the rivers and streams tripled in size, knocking down bridges and causing dam bursts, entire towns in the Taguari Valley were wiped off the map,on their way down to the only drainage basin for the northern 3rd of the state, the Guiba river, which runs past the city of Porto Alegre.

In 1941, Porto Alegre was hit with a massive flood after the river level rose by 5 meters. over the next 30 years, the local government slowly built an integrated flood prevention system, based on Dutch technology, which included 40 miles of dykes and two dozen pumping stations, designed to contain rises in the river level up to 6 meters.

During the 80s and 90s Porto Alegre became a world model of progressive city governance, with 16 straight years of governance by Lula's Workers Party. The first participatory budgeting program, where citizens are invited to attend neighborhood meetings to suggest and vote on projects for the city's investment budget, was enacted in Porto Alegre and has been replicated in over 1000 cities around the World. In 2002, a coalition of working class social movements, leftist academics and labor unions created the first World Social Forum as an alternative to the World Economic Forum in Porto Alegre. Unfortunately, those days are now long gone.

City residents waited anxiously for 3 days for the water to arrive down from the mountains. When it got there, they were shocked and angered to learn that years of neglect in maintenance of the flood prevention system caused it to fail miserably. As the water level rose to 5.33 meters, they discovered that half the pumping stations were inoperable. Furthermore, most of the flood containment gates along the 2 meter high dyke along the city were missing their rubber seals - some had rusted into their tracks and had to be closed with improvised excavators and soldered shut. Within 3 days, hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes as large swathes of the city were underwater, 85% of the city had no running water, and half the city had no electrical power. The airport, several commuter train stations and the intercity bus terminal were all underwater. 3 weeks later, big parts of the city were still flooded, as the river level remained over 4 meters above normal.

On May 18, I flew to Florianopolis, spent the night drinking beers at a friends house, got up at 5:30 the next morning and headed to the bus station. There were still no buses to Porto Alegre, so I took one to a little town called Osorio 6 hours away. There, I waited for a few hours until a local bus arrived for the 2 hour trip to Porto Alegre, a metropolitan area of 3.3 million.

It was cold and rainy when I arrived. Southern Brazil is not located in the tropics, it was late fall and the temperature was 48 F. This may not seem very cold to Chicagoans, but most houses don't have insulation or heat, so when it's 48 outside it's 48 inside. A fan from my Brazilian web TV program, Globalistas, had offered the use of her vacant one-bedroom apartment in the middle class neighborhood of Parthanon that had electricity and water and high speed internet - a necessity for someone like myself who was there to produce TV news stories for TeleSur, the socialist alternative to CNN founded by Hugo Chavez in 2007 that is financed by the governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba and Bolivia. Here, on the other side of a tall ridge that spreads out from downtown, everything seemed totally normal. I walked two blocks to a mall that had a huge supermarket in it and stocked up on food staples for the week, including a few cuts of the beef that Rio Grande do Sul, land of the Gauchos, is famous for, as the Pampas are one of the only biomes in the world where cattle can graze on natural vegetation.

The next morning I organized my video kit and headed downtown to the edge of historic district - a neighborhood full of Belle Époque low rise buildings that, ironically, is not the oldest section of this 380 year old city. After filming people traveling down the streets by boat and sloshing through the water in fishing waders, I cut up to the ridge and headed over toward the Municipal Market - normally one of the nation's best. I'd seen footage from the previous week showing it under 2 meters of water, but the level had dropped enough to leave parts of the surrounding area covered in stinking mud. As I walked around with my tripod shooting broll, the smell got worse and worse. Then, a group of elderly women called me over. They recognized me from my from Brasil 247, the webTV network I work at, which has a large audience that is primarily made up of the first generation of Workers Party supporters over the age of 50. I damaged my ears in the heyday of Chicago's punk and No Wave movement in the 80s and my hearing is getting worse now.

"Look at that," one of them said, "do you think that's a pig"? The smell was coming from underneath some plastic bags on the steps of the market building. I'd heard her wrong. "Porco" is the word for pig in Portuguese, but she was saying, "corpo", or corpse. Suddenly I recognized the smell and flashed back to my days in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. I had an interview to film at a squat on the other side of downtown so had to get out of there anyway so I walked uncomfortably back up the ridge, scraped my shoes off, and jumped in a taxi.

Over the next few days I interviewed social movement leaders, a former water and sewage department commissioner, a communist state congresswomen, displaced people living in shelters, and, getting a hold of a pair of rubber boots, walked through 3 blocks of sewage infested flood water to visit a slum that had turned into an island.

How did this happen? Why was so much of the city still underwater after 3 weeks?

In 2002, Workers Party Mayor Tarso Genro stepped down to run for Governor and turned power over to his vice mayor, a competent but bland technocrat, who lost reelection in 2004 to a conservative coalition which has been running the city ever since.

Just as Daley did after taking power after the Washington/Sawyer years, they began to gradually and methodically dismantle every gain that had ever been made by the progressives. In the name of a minimal state ideology they privatized everything they could. In 2017, they shut down the Municipal Department of Rainwater Drainage, along with 16 other departments. Over the course of 10 years, they laid off half of the workers in the Water and Sanitation Department and butchered funding as they prepared it for its privatization. 4 years ago the governor and mayor, both Jair Bolsonaro supporters at the time, announced plans for a London-influenced riverfront revitalization project that would rehab historic warehouses into fancy restaurants and microbreweries. Both the governor and the mayor gave now-embarrassing interviews about how important it was to rip down the flood containment dyke, which "separated citizens from their beautiful riverfront". Last November, when a smaller flood hit the city, residents learned that pumping station 17 was inoperative. The Mayor promised to fix it but he didn't. In February, he privatized a 3 km stretch of the riverfront adjacent to downtown to a private real estate developer and announced that they were going to rip down 1 km of the wall.

If their is any silver lining in this catastrophe, both Mayor Sebastiao Melo, who is up for reelection this year, and Governor Eduardo Leite, who flexibalized 480 environmental laws over the last 4 years, are now political has beens. With an initial operating budget of $10 billion usd, President Lula has bypassed both governments by creating an Extraordinary Ministry of the Reconstruction of Rio Grande do Sul. One of its initial tasks will be guaranteeing the federal housing program's promise to build new houses for every family in the state that earns up to two times the minimum wage. As President Lula recently said, "It's going to cost at least twice as much to fix this as it would have been to prevent it." Bad governance kills. Here's hoping the citizens of Porto Alegre will remember this when the next elections arrive.