UK’s Red List Ahead of COP26 Exposes Long-Running Inequity

RECIFE, Brazil—On election night, the city of Recife erupted in cheers of joy.

In the capital of the Workers’ Party presidential candidate Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s home state of Pernambuco, thousands roared as the vote count showed Lula overtaking his rival, right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. While supporters set off fireworks over the Atlantic Ocean, others made the “L” sign with their fingers and thumbs to indicate support for Lula. When buses couldn’t get through the crowd of revelers, drivers gave up with beaming smiles, making the L as well.

Brazilians had just voted in their most consequential election since democratization.

But, just as after the first-round election, cheers soon turned into murmurs as people lowered their eyes to their phones to see if Lula would retain his lead. This was far from certain, given events earlier that day. The Federal Highway Police (PRF) had conducted over 500 operations by pulling over buses and cars. The miles of traffic jams that ensued impeded people from reaching voting booths, especially in northeastern states like Pernambuco. Then news broke that these operations were part of a plan the Bolsonarista-led PRF had hatched in the presidential palace.

While the Electoral Commission (TSE) condemned this, it did not take action to compensate for lost voting time. By contrast, in the first round, the TSE extended voting for the large Brazilian diaspora in Lisbon, Portugal, after someone wearing the green and yellow colors many Bolsonaristas adorn, broke into a voting booth to double vote, annulling dozens of votes.

“It’s as if,” Rômulo Cavalcante, a lawyer from the northeastern state of Alagoas, told Toward Freedom, ”[the TSE in the second round] was afraid of provoking some kind of conflict.” Due to the highway police’s unprecedented actions, Calvacante believes “democracy in Brazil remains more fragile than ever.”

Contrary to the TSE and PRF’s assurances, the operations stopped some people from voting. Yet, Lula retained his lead. He became the first candidate to beat an incumbent since Brazil emerged from a military dictatorship in the 1980s, but also won with the smallest margin since then (1.8 percent).

“[I] didn’t just defeat a candidate,” Lula proclaimed. “[I] defeated the entire machinery of the Brazilian state.”

Almost three weeks later, Bolsonaro still has not explicitly conceded. His supporters have staged roadblocks around the country, sometimes aided by the PRF. João, a tourist landlord in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, told Toward Freedom that he believes “the election was stolen.” That echoes a false belief still held by much of the Bolsonaro camp, said Danny Shaw, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Professor at the City University of New York. “[That camp] lives in a parallel universe of half-truths, misinformation and propaganda.”

“But,” as Shaw said, “the fact that Washington recognized [the election results] so early on, put pressure on Bolsonaro and his supporters.” The chances Bolsonaro could stage a successful coup—which his camp was “constantly measuring”—have diminished rapidly.

Beyond Bolsonaro

Talk of a Bolsonaro coup has subsided. In the last few days, he and his sons visited the Italian embassy to apply for citizenship, and Bolsonaro has told allies he may leave Brazil on Lula’s inauguration, to be held on New Year’s Day. This may be because he will lose political immunity. “I think he is planning to ask for exile in another country, like Hungary, where [President Viktor] Orbán is his friend or even Italy because he is going to be charged in Brazil,” Cavalcante predicted. That is partly because Italy’s governing party (Brothers of Italy) is far-right, and an iteration of a fascist party.

It seems more likely that Bolsonaro will flee while signaling as little clarity as he can about the result, than stage a coup. He has shown with basic questions—such as whether he’s received a Covid vaccine—that he can maintain strategic obfuscation, and observers have predicted he is likely to do the same with the election’s legitimacy.

Depending on what happens to the charges of wrongdoing that are likely to be brought against him, that could be how he hopes to return to politics in future.

And whatever happens to Bolsonaro, the right will have decent prospects at the next election. It remains to be seen how united it will be. Some elements prefer the anti-institutionalism and inflammatory cultural rhetoric of Bolsonarismo. While others prefer the more rationalized “Third Way” discourse of candidates like surprise third-placed Simone Tebet, who in this campaign was promoted by a significant section of the right-wing media. Both approaches have close ties to agro-business and prioritize what Brazil’s most-read newspaper recently called “fiscal responsibility” over reducing the country’s hunger crisis, in a recent op-ed attacking Lula for prioritizing tackling hunger. The anti-redistributive right in Brazil has been resilient, even when it had to get behind a leader who oversaw hundreds of thousands of avoidable Covid deaths.

The media will have a significant impact on Brazilian discourse over the next four years. Cavalcante explained Brazilians like himself “were successfully manipulated by the media” when former President Dilma Rousseff was deposed in a 2016 procedural coup. And he told Toward Freedom that the media will need to hold accountable politicians who espouse violence, in order to return Brazil to a time when “political polarization [didn’t involve Brazilians] being threatened by their bosses, neighbors and strangers in the street.”

Neoliberalism’s Future in Brazil

The president-elect faces significant struggles, particularly in reducing the hunger crisis. He has proven credentials, but faces a hostile climate.

Lula’s “Bolsa Família” program of conditional cash transfers during his 2003-11 presidency was cited as a major factor in the 28 percent decline in poverty rates in his first term. Bolsonaro ended Bolsa Família and, despite enacting a different cash transfer scheme, has presided over a huge increase in hunger, from 19 million in late 2020 to 33 million now. This, despite being the fourth-largest food producer in the world.

“Brazil is now back on [the United Nations’] Hunger Map,” Ediane Maria, a newly-elected Socialist and Liberty Party state legislator in São Paulo, told Toward Freedom. “People who eat breakfast today are not sure they can have dinner. Lula started the Zero Hunger programme [including Bolsa Família], which got Brazil off the Hunger Map; but [under Bolsonaro], our country is in a worse state than during the biggest hunger crisis of recent memory in 1993.”

And unlike in the 2000s, Brazil is not benefitting from a commodity boom, increasing pressure from the large section of Brazilian media who advocate smaller state expenditure.

Lula will not have the resources, power, and potentially the will, to transition significantly away from neoliberalism in Brazil. Neoliberalism is the systematic movement of public resources under private control. As Jemima Pierre, the Haiti/Americas coordinator for the U.S.-based Black Alliance for Peace (BAP), told Toward Freedom, “Even though [recent Latin American election-winners have produced] leftist governments, they’re still following the lead of the U.S. in terrible neoliberal policies. So, I think it’s a good thing that Bolsonaro lost. But I also think people need to hold Lula’s feet to the fire.” Pierre worries that “the left is so relieved that Bolsonaro lost that they’re not going to push Lula, because the fear is that if you go against Lula, then you’re going to get this right-wing government back. So, the left is really stuck between a rock and a hard place.”

As long as Lula governs effectively enough to implement key progressive policies, despite his obstacles, he could continue to increase popularity of such politics in Brazil, paving the way for further progression after his term.

Lula’s Global Moves

Advocates of multilateralism and environmentalism view this election positively.

For instance, U.S. human- and labor-rights lawyer Dan Kovalik told Toward Freedom Lula’s victory “would help bring about the multipolar world that we need.”

Lula already has touted creating a cartel of rainforest-endowed countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, to motivate conservation.

“Lula’s first foreign policy visit will be to Argentina to increase and expand the BRICS,” Shaw said, referring to the group of states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) that are trying to counter U.S. control over international finance. Lula also advocated the creation of a South America-wide currency—the Sur—during this campaign.

Like any leader, Lula will need to be held to account to meet his stated goals. As Pierre states, “We are happy that there’s a leftist president, but we also remember that it’s the same leftist president who was behind the snuffing out of Haiti sovereignty as it was trying to bring Brazil on the international stage,” referring to the 2004-17 Brazilian-led UN peacekeeping occupation of Haiti, where Brazilian troops abused their power and stayed for years after being asked to leave. Upon Washington’s re-intervention in Haiti this year, Pierre explains that the United States “has worked with leftist governments [like Mexico] to get its work done… What we’re worried about is that Lula will fall into this trap.”

Lula’s victory could probably be considered the crowning achievement of the leftist Pink Tide’s resurgence across Latin America. That’s something BAP National Organizer Ajamu Baraka believes “represents the continued shift of power away from the international colonial ruling classes”—as long as Lula has learned geopolitical lessons from the 2000s.

Inauguration is over a month away. Lula faces strong economic, political, international, environmental and societal pressures that can hinder progressive policymaking. But, just like on election night in Recife, if you’re a progressive or simply espouse democratic values, now is the time for cautious celebration.

Richard Matoušek is a journalist who covers sociopolitical issues in southern Europe and Latin America. He can be followed on Twitter at @RichMatousek and on Instagram at @richmatico.

SFAX, Tunisia—Until the first week of December, mountains of garbage littered the center of the coastal city of Sfax. For more than two months, locals put up with thousands of tons of rotten household trash and hazardous medical waste left uncollected in public areas.

The crisis began after Sfax governorate authorities closed in late September the governorate’s main controlled landfill, El Gonna, in the town of Agareb, some 22 kilometers (13.6 miles) from the city of Sfax, due to opposition from the local population. (Tunisia is divided into provinces called governorates. Sfax governorate contains a city by the same name.)

The people of Agareb rejected the Ministry of Environment reopening the controversial dumping site. Residents said it was full and being used to dump toxic chemical waste, causing the spread of several diseases. Reported health complications include respiratory and skin disorders, sight problems, and infertility.

Some private waste-management companies are known to illegally dispose of toxic material—such as medical refuse and industrial waste from factories—in the landfill to avoid expensive treatment processes.

Protests Turn Deadly

Opened in 2008 as a near-term fix to ease the burden on the Sfax governorate, the dump at Agareb was originally supposed to close after five years.

“We had a problem of trust with the government, which has still not implemented the solutions that they had announced,” said Sami Bahri, a Agareb-based environmental activist, during a webinar Paris-based think tank Arab Reform Initiative organized in December.

Weeks of protests against the trash crisis and the reopening of the landfill last month escalated on November 8 when security forces’ tear gas killed a protester. The next day, angry demonstrators burned a local national guard station. “We are choking on all this garbage!” was one of the main slogans of the day’s rallies.

The closure of the El Gonna site, which had already been overloaded since September, led to the accumulation of garbage and industrial waste on the streets of Sfax city. Local municipal services had stopped trash collection, citing a lack of alternatives for waste disposal.

“We are in a situation where seeing garbage in the open air becomes something ordinary,” said Hafez Hentati, coordinator of Collectif de l’environnement et du développement de Sfax (Environmental and Development Collective of Sfax) in the city of Sfax, speaking in an exclusive interview with Toward Freedom. “It’s dangerous for all economic and social activity, besides being a human health issue.”

The militant, who’s been campaigning on environmental issues for nearly 40 years, estimated above 44,000 tons of rubbish were discharged into the environment without any treatment for more than 70 days after the main landfill shut down.

“Sfax’s garbage issues have been ongoing since long ago,” said Aida Kchaou, a painter and active member of civil society in Sfax, in an interview with Toward Freedom. She alluded to years of government neglect. “People are used to dumping trash carelessly as if they want to punish the state somehow.”

The artist cannot remain indifferent to how environmental conditions have degraded in her region. In 2015, she performed an act of protest on Chaffar Beach, 26 kilometers (or 16 miles) south of the city of Sfax, by wearing plastic garbage bags and picking litter to raise awareness of the decaying state of the seashore because of long-time chemical industries in Sfax governorate.

Kchaou has paid more than one visit to Agareb, meeting residents and local activists, and taking part in small actions in the vicinity of uncontrolled hazardous landfills, very close to residential areas. Recently, she staged an action by standing in the middle of a dump near Agareb, holding her paintbrush as if she was going to cover all of the rubbish with paint. She ended by planting an olive tree. “I live my environment: I see there’s something wrong and I react,” the painter said.

Monem Kallel, professor at the National School of Engineering of Sfax and an environmental expert, pointed out the waste crisis is essentially connected with the method of burying waste in open dumps, which Tunisia has adopted for about 24 years.

“It’s an old policy—one of the worst approaches to waste management—that leaves the fate of the litter unknown and makes people think the state will take care of it,” the expert observed while speaking to Toward Freedom. “Meanwhile, the country’s dumps are getting filled up, and people are growing fed up with the accumulation of unremoved garbage.” He stressed an urgent solution to waste dumping, such as immediately hauling it away, must be accompanied by the longer-term sustainable process of sorting, treatment and recycling.

Striking Against Structural Stench

In the face of growing waste mismanagement, posing serious health and environmental risks, civil society groups in Sfax governorate announced they would hold a general regional strike on December 10. They also successfully filed a legal complaint against the parties responsible for the ecological catastrophe, namely the environment ministry, the National Waste Management Agency (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets, or ANGED for short) and the region’s municipalities.

With the local and national government coming under pressure—just a few days before the anticipated strike—the prime minister’s cabinet decided to resume on December 8 the clearance and dumping of household waste in a temporary collection point located near the port. This plan depended on the rubbish heaps being transported within five months to a new landfill to be created on the road to a town in Sfax governorate’s countryside called Menzel Chaker, about 62 kilometers (about 38 miles) from the city of Sfax. The cabinet also resolved to develop a regional plan for recycling and waste recovery within three to five years.

For Hentati, postponing the general strike was a mistake because pressure that should have served to obtain guarantees from authorities dissipated. The government quickly came up with a package of urgent measures to solve the crisis to avert the labor action. Though, he said, “It did not make any real commitment.” He added residents in the city of Sfax have been left in a disarray, as they are cautiously watching the government’s decisions.

The environmental activist made clear the issue is fundamentally a structural one. 

“Today, the garbage crisis in Sfax shows the limits of the long-applied waste treatment system, which only bypasses the problem without resolving it,” Hentati said.

Increasing numbers of local people are demanding the government introduce waste disposal policies that will protect their right to a safe environment because they refuse to allow their neighborhoods to be turned into landfills.

Poor responsibility sharing between the state and regional and local institutions have resulted in a deadlock in the handling of the ongoing crisis: The central government expects municipal councils to provide much of the waste management, while municipalities call on the state to find sustainable solutions.

Trust In the Dumps

Given their proximity to citizens, local governments are the first bodies held responsible for failing to effectively deal with waste treatment. Yet, it should be noted Tunisia’s elected local councils, which have been operating since 2018, “face severe budgetary and human capital constraints,” as Lana Salman, researcher in urban governance and international development, wrote in a research paper published in April. “[It] is a highly lucrative sector where opacity and corruption are not only endemic, but also institutionalized,” she penned.

While municipalities are responsible for hauling garbage to temporary transfer centers with the ANGED’s assistance, the agency is in charge of transporting waste to the final destination at sanitary landfills and managing such landfills.

Kallel specified greater efforts are needed to raise environmental awareness among the concerned institutions as well as among people, and that an adequate budget should be allocated to make possible feasible solutions. “Rather than shifting the responsibility from one to another, if everyone is involved responsibly through the whole waste management chain, the crisis will be overcome,” he said, underscoring the important role citizens can play in contributing to environmental protection.

The specialist maintained that trust in state institutions needs to be restored, after years of unfulfilled promises. “If the state engages by taking serious gradual steps, the average citizen will be confident that a real solution to this crisis will come,” Kallel said. “Else, it will persist.”

Kchaou similarly referred to lack of public trust as a critical matter, blaming the country’s successive governments for appointing incompetent people to ministerial posts over the past decade. She contended people will hardly act in respect of environmental protection as long as they see the relevant government structures—local, regional and national—not providing waste treatment.

Long-standing dysfunctional governance and corruption within Tunisia’s state administration underlie the garbage emergency in the Sfax province. More than half of the country’s landfill sites have reached their maximum capacity, threatening the environment and human health.

The state neglect mirrors the lack of national strategy to develop recycling capacity to deal with solid waste in Tunisia. The Ministry of the Environment has opposed the closure of dumps as no alternatives exist. In October, the new environment minister, Leila Chikhaoui, said while visiting the city of Sfax that no immediate solutions were available in the governorate.

Raouia Amira, head of the sanitation, health and environmental committee in the municipality of Sfax, pointed to the country’s solid waste management strategy being discontinued in 2016. “We need a national strategy,” Amira told Toward Freedom. “To that end, the state needs to put in place a communication campaign and spare no expense.”

She thinks incineration is the most realistic approach to treating household waste in the Sfax governorate. Tunisia has long suffered waste management problems, with an estimated 2.5 million tonnes of rubbish produced annually, 63% of which is organic, and most of it buried in landfills without being processed, recycled or incinerated.

Sustainable Solutions

The thorny matter is aggravated by lack of investment in sustainable solutions and endemic corruption within the sector in the North African country.

In a press conference in 2014, lawyer Faouzia Bacha Amdouni presented findings of an independent audit revealing “colossal funds” intended for environmental projects were channeled through the Ministry of Environment and its agencies, ending up in the hands of the government of Prime Minister Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (1987-2011) and its allies. The advocate declared several figures within the agencies were working to conceal their involvement in corruption as well as their plan not to design new strategies. “The department of the environment itself was created in 2005, not to develop policies and innovative projects for waste treatment or sanitation stations, but to receive resources from international donors and invest them in personal projects benefiting the clans in power and their relatives,” she said at the press conference. Some of those international donors reportedly include the European Investment Bank, the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation, the World Bank and the French Development Agency. 

In July 2020, then-Prime Minister Elyes Fakhfakh resigned following allegations of corrupt links to the waste industry. In December 2020, the environment minister was dismissed and arrested along with 23 other officials—including members of the ANGED, or National Waste Management Agency—for being linked to a scandal involving the illegal transfer from Naples, Italy, to the Tunisian port of Sousse of more than 200 shipping containers packed full of decaying household and medical waste disguised as post-industrial plastic waste. The Italian and Tunisian companies embroiled had signed a contract worth €5 million ($5.76 million) to dispose of 120,000 tons of Italian waste in Tunisian landfills.

An investigation published by Inkyfada last March revealed a vast network of corruption involving Italian waste.

The critical environmental situation in Sfax governorate poses a clear social challenge for President Kais Saied, who promised to close the El Gonna landfill during his 2019 presidential campaign. This came in a region that strongly supported his July 25 power seizure, in what his critics have called a coup.

The mobilizations against the re-opening of the toxic dump and the wider trash crisis in Sfax demonstrates Tunisian citizens’ yearning for a clean and sustainable environment. This, as they escalate their calls on the government to stop imposing short-sighted decisions without popular consent and demand it find alternatives to landfill sites.

“The extent of the garbage crisis we’ve experienced in Sfax has been of some use,” the artist Kchaou remarked. “If that didn’t happen, no one would be taking the issue seriously.”

Alessandra Bajec is a freelance journalist specializing in West Asia and North Africa. Between 2010 and 2011, she lived in Palestine. She was based in Cairo from 2013 to 2017, and since 2018 has been based in Tunis.

The world is shocked by the image of an 11-story residential building in Gaza collapsing because of a bomb dropped by the Israeli Defense Force, one of the most advanced armies in the world thanks to U.S. support. But in the United States, Andrew Yang, former presidential candidate and now candidate for mayor of New York City, proudly proclaims he stands with the “heroic people of Israel” who are under attack from the vicious, occupied Palestinians, who have no army, no rights and no state.

But as politically and morally contradictory as Yang’s sentiments might appear for many, the alternative world of Western liberalism has a different standard. In that world, liberals claim that all are equal with inalienable rights. But in practice, some lives are more equal and more valuable than others. 

In the liberal world, Trump is condemned for attempting to reject the results of the election and indicating he might not leave office at the end of his term. But as soon as Biden occupied the White House, one of his first foreign policy decisions was to give the U.S.-imposed Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse, a green light to ignore the demands of the Haitian people and the end of his term in February. He remains in office.  

In the liberal world, the United States that has backed every vicious right-wing dictator in the world since the Second World War, orchestrates coups, murders foreign leaders, attacks nations fighting for independence in places like Vietnam, trains torturers, brandishes nuclear bombs, has the longest-held political prisoners on the planet, is number one in global arms sales, imprisons more people than any other nation in the world, has supported apartheid South Africa and is supporting apartheid Israel—while championing human rights! 

In the liberal world, the United States can openly train, fund, and back opposition parties and even determine who the leader of a nation should be, but react with moral outrage when supposedly Russian-connected entities buy $100,000 worth of Facebook ads commenting on “internal” political subjects related to the 2016 election. 

In the liberal world, Democrats build on racist anti-China sentiments and the identification of China as a national threat, and then pretend they had nothing to do with the wave of anti-Asian racism and violence. 

In the liberal world, liberals are morally superior and defend Black life as long as those lives are not in Haiti, Libya, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, all of Africa, and in the jails and prisons of the United States.

In the liberal world, you can—with a straight face—condemn the retaliatory rockets from Gaza, the burning of a police station in Minneapolis, attacks on property owned by corporations in oppressed and exploited communities, attacks on school children fighting back against police in Baltimore, and attacks on North Koreans arming themselves against a crazed, violent state that has already demonstrated—as it did with Libya—what it would do to a state that disarmed in the face of U.S. and European aggression. 

And in the liberal world, Netanyahu is a democrat, the Palestinians are aggressors and Black workers did not die unnecessarily because the United States dismantled its already underdeveloped public health system. 

What all of this is teaching the colonized world, together with the death and violence in Colombia, Haiti, Palestine and the rest of the colonized world, is that even though we know the Pan-European project is moribund, the colonial-capitalist West is prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone in order to maintain its global dominance, even if it means destroying the planet and everyone on it. 

That is why Biden labels himself an “Atlanticist”—shorthand for a white supremacist. His task is to convince the European allies it is far better to work together than to allow themselves to be divided against the “barbarians” inside and at the doors of Europe and the United States.

The managers of the colonial-capitalist world understand the terms of struggle, and so should we. It must be clear to us that for the survival of collective humanity and the planet, we cannot allow uncontested power to remain in the hands of the global 1 percent. The painful truth for some is if global humanity is to live, the Pan-European white supremacist colonial-capitalist project must die.  

This article was originally published in Black Agenda Report.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was awarded the U.S. Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shirm award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.