Brazil: for sale

When any Brazilian citizen wants to sell something that belongs to them through another person, it is necessary for the interested party to issue a power of attorney, authorization, or delegation so that the third party can represent them and handle the business according to their interests and wishes.

Now, imagine someone taking your assets and selling them, bartering them away, and handing them over to other people without any authorization from you, or worse, without any legitimacy and against your will and interests. That is exactly what is about to happen in Brazil.

Once the coup against President Dilma began, one of the first actions of the illegitimate president Michel Temer was to issue a Provisional Measure, MP 727 of 2016, with the objective of creating a large program to enable privatizations and concessions of Brazilian assets, the PPI – Investment Partnership Program.

Given the speed with which the Provisional Measure was presented by the interim government, it is clear that its content and text were already prepared, waiting for the hands that would place them on the country's political agenda. These hands were those of Temer and all those who supported the coup plot—especially those financed by international capital and financial institutions.

Upon carefully reading the text proposed by the Provisional Measure and the subsequent text approved by the Joint Committee, the privatizing bias of the so-called PPI (Partnership Program for Investments) of the illegitimate government becomes clear. It dismantles national assets by providing the necessary conditions to promote speed, ease, and lack of regulation in privatization and concession processes. It is also clear that the plan is a grand scheme involving the government, private sector interests, and pro-privatization intellectuals.

Among the serious changes that the PPI brings about are:

1) The significant centralization of the infrastructure and privatization agenda in the Presidency of the Republic, through the creation of an Executive Secretariat responsible for managing the program and with elevated powers, such as issuing regulations, thus undermining the role played by ministries that had previously been central to the development of national infrastructure policies.

           

2) The creation of a Council responsible for advising on and managing privatization actions, chaired by the President of the Republic. A council of a few, without any voice or space for the representation of the interests of civil society, converging towards an authoritarian centralization of the fate of national assets and public infrastructure policies.

3) The creation of the so-called Partnership Structuring Support Fund, which provides services aimed at structuring infrastructure projects and asset privatization projects, and the conditions for public financing for the privatization of our own assets, through BNDES.  

4) The so-called "Qualified Invitation," which is among the strange and suspicious facilitations that the PPI brings, alters the current public procurement law and invents a new type of public bidding, without presenting elements that justify its creation and without specifying values ​​and spending limits.

5) The threat to federal autonomy. According to the program, the federated entities, states and municipalities involved in enabling PPI actions will have a duty to act in favor of the release and advancement of the projects. The text presented, however, does not make clear what such releases refer to, which poses serious risks to the integrity of policies, sectors and resources, since it could encompass environmental, indigenous, heritage, water, mining and similar licenses.

In addition to going against the autonomy of states and municipalities, the PPI (Partnership Program for Investments) gives carte blanche to projects linked to them, overriding the entire existing legal and bureaucratic framework, whose objective is the preservation of our natural, cultural, and human resources. For the coup government, therefore, anything goes in the privatization of Brazil, and privatizations take precedence over all other public policies.

Considering that the main focus of the PPI (Partnership Program for Investments) is infrastructure issues, encompassing the entire transportation structure, basic sanitation, and the electricity and oil sectors of Brazil, we can say that Temer's illegitimate government wants to hand over the most basic and necessary services for the Brazilian population to foreign capital. Above all, it wants to hand over our main wealth: oil, and our largest company: Petrobras.

The PPI (Partnership Program for Investments) is the payment of the debt owed by the coup plotters to the financial and economic sectors that financed and sustained the fraudulent narrative of the impeachment, which could consolidate a coup against President Dilma. The program constitutes yet another attack on national sovereignty and on a conception of the State that meets the needs of Brazilian citizens, offers them basic services, and is capable of bringing about significant changes in the Brazilian social and economic structure, such as reducing social inequality. Alongside the PPI are PLP 257, PEC 241, and PL 4567/16, all with the explicit intention of minimizing the size of the Brazilian State, handing over national assets, and stripping away hard-won rights.

As stated at the beginning, someone without any authorization, legitimacy, delegation, or representation is appropriating our assets. The patrimony of every Brazilian man and woman is being handed over, sold for a pittance, without our consent and without heeding the will of Brazilian society, which, incidentally, chose a different project at the polls than the one being implemented.

But the dismantling has already begun. The Carcará oil field, considered highly productive, has already been sold for up to 10 times less than its real value. And the dismantling is likely to continue, given that the PPI (Partnership Program for Investments) remains firmly in the National Congress, and that Temer has already announced a package of privatizations and concessions for the beginning of September.