How the PT re-created the Crab Cycle in Brazil

In the 1930s, the endocrinologist Josué de Castro studied the low-income population of the city of Recife, the capital of Pernambuco, one of the northeastern states in Brazil. Their data pointed to the poor population as being 1/3 of the total. These poor were migrants from the interior who could not find a more suitable area to live in and lived in borders of flooded rivers and mangroves feeding, basically, the crustaceans found there and in the ebb tide. As the main food source of these animals consisted of the human waste found there, the feces formed a cycle described by Joshua as the “cycle of the crab”, responsible for food with low nutritional value for the local population.

With the passing of the decades something has changed, the sub-morasses have gone up the land forming the favelas as we know it in Rio de Janeiro and other big Brazilian cities, but the ‘cycles’ are constantly recreated: if today we are not crabs and feces we have in the country whole stock exchanges and populism that ‘nourish’ these populations with income, but of low quality, because it does not come from a productive role and even if it were bigger would not produce the dignity that only those who work knows what it means. Therefore, the third element absent in the old Recife mocambos, but abundant in the current Brazilian peripheries: the ideology that is necessary for our miserable people to finally believe that they deserve alms and all their dignity is summed up in a welfare equation.

Break with this, break with the PT, the party that created a true “voting industry” in Brazil and that abused the mechanisms of income transfer as a bargaining chip to perpetuate in power by imposing on Brazilian society the largest corruption scheme ever seen in the world. It is urgent to break the legs of this party, a true gang of organized crime with legalistic facade and institutionalized hypocrisy.

Anselmo Heidrich
2018–01–18