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Frontier friendship
Canada and the United States
VA N CO U V E R
Two remote towns want the border reopened
It’s the isolation that has them spooked
gramme’s minimum payment of 89 reais.
In the poor north-east, the
pt
’s heartland,
the share of people who call the govern-
ment’s performance “bad” or “terrible” fell
from 52% in June to 35% in August.
The government has extended to De-
cember the emergency benefit initially
meant to last three months (but will reduce
it by half). Mr Bolsonaro wants to replace
Bolsa Família with his own Renda Brasil
(Brazil Income), a benefit that will unify all
social programmes. Its details are still
vague. To give the economy an extra boost
Mr Bolsonaro wants to borrow 5bn reais
more this year to build infrastructure.
Pro-poor spending makes sense. The
economy shrank by 9.7% in the second
quarter. It is the same size as it was 11 years
ago. Without the relief programme it
would have shrunk more. The jobless rate
climbed to 13.3% in the second quarter
from 12% in the same period last year.
But the prospect of big deficits worries
Mr Guedes. The government is set to smash
through a ceiling on spending, which is in-
scribed in the constitution. (A workaround
can probably be found.) The primary defi-
cit, ie, before interest payments, jumped to
$94bn in July from $6.5bn the year before.
It is expected to reach $147bn for the full
year, 11% of
gdp
.
Disagreement between president and
minister flared in late August, when Mr
Guedes said the government should pay for
Renda Brasil by cutting back other welfare
programmes. Mr Bolsonaro rebuffed him.
He would “not take away from the poor to
give to the poorest”, he said.
The two men seem to have reached a
truce. Mr Guedes may accept a breach of the
spending cap if Congress acts to control fu-
ture spending, says Chris Garman of Eur-
asia Group, a political-risk consultancy.
His other demand is reform of the tax sys-
tem, which is among the most complex in
the world. A mid-sized Brazilian firm typi-
cally spends 1,500 hours a year dealing with
tax, compared with 175 for an American
firm, according to the World Bank.
But reforming tax is as complex as tax-
ation itself. One of Mr Guedes’s ideas—re-
placing two taxes on company turnover
with a 12%
vat
—would anger farmers, who
have a powerful lobby, notes Marcos Cin-
tra, the chief of the federal revenue service
until September. Consumers would also
object. Reform, if it happens, will be “a very
noisy process”, says Mr Garman.
Mr Guedes has apparently decided he
can still do some good. After tax reform
could come measures to reduce public-sec-
tor employment and benefits. Perhaps. But
Mr Bolsonaro has now seen that enlarging
the state is more popular than shrinking it.
As the presidential election approaches in
2022, the salience of that lesson will grow.
Brazil’s experiment with economic liberal-
ism may prove short-lived.
7
The Economist
September 5th 2020
37
1
O
n the edge
of Beni, a city in north-
eastern Congo, a field is strewn with
bricks and broken glass. Three Malawian
soldiers, working for the
un
’s peacekeep-
ing mission, known as
monusco
, lounge
under a tree amid the rubble. It is all that is
left of
monusco
’s offices after they were
burned down in November by locals furi-
ous that the mission had failed to protect
them from rebels. “We have suffered years
of massacres,” says one of those who took
part in the burning. “We see
un
soldiers all
over town, but when the rebels are killing
us they never come.”
The peacekeeping mission in Congo,
with over 16,000 soldiers and police, is the
largest and third most expensive in the
world.
un
troops have been in Congo since
1999, when they arrived to oversee a cease-
fire in a civil war that had left between 1m
and 5m people dead, thanks to bullets, ma-
chetes and disease. For two decades the
mission has tried to pacify the country’s
embattled east. Yet more than 100 armed
groups still hide there in the forests. They
survive by smuggling minerals, looting
and extorting cash from the locals.
This year alone about 1m Congolese
have been displaced by violence. Some of
the bloodiest fighting has taken place in
Ituri province, where two rival tribes have
been clashing. Rebels have hacked at least a
thousand people to death with machetes,
attacking 60 schools and raping children.
Even though the violence still rages (see
map),
monusco
is under pressure from the
un
Security Council to pack up and go. A re-
port commissioned by the council last year
says
monusco
should aim to be out by
2022, largely because it is too expensive
and has sputtered on for so long. President
Donald Trump’s decision to cut America’s
contributions to
un
peacekeeping has
squeezed
monusco
’s budget to $1bn a year,
almost a third less than in 2016. Yet condi-
tions for the mission’s total withdrawal
will plainly not be met by 2022, when Con-
go’s army is supposed to be largely back in
control. So
monusco
will probably be
shrunk but will not leave altogether.
The peacekeepers are far from fulfilling
their mandate to disband militias, protect
civilians and stabilise the state. Armed
groups are multiplying. Few Congolese ci-
vilians think the mission really protects
them. According to a poll in 2018 by peace-
buildingdata.org, an American
ngo
, only
15% of those surveyed said they trusted
mo-
nusco
to keep their neighbourhood or vil-
lage safe. Still, with nobody else to turn to,
displaced people do often huddle around
monusco
bases.
At the best of times, bringing peace to
eastern Congo is a very tall order. The east-
ern provinces are ten times the size of Swit-
zerland. Much of the land is jungle. Murder
and mayhem can occur quickly at night, so
by the time
un
soldiers arrive—if they do at
all—the rebels have invariably melted back
into the bush. “Whenever I see the blood-
shed, I always ask, where were we?” says
Leila Zerrougui,
monusco
’s head. “We can
never do enough.”
United Nations peacekeeping in Congo
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