Today I witnessed again a local street drama that is played out over and over again, perhaps even on a schedule...who knows? It is the rousting of the street vendors by the police. There are nuances to this process that I still don´t understand.
Of course my sympathies lie with the street vendors. Yes, even the ones selling pirated movies and music. My limited experience with their products is that they are bad quality versions, and I think they are mostly are sold to people who could never afford the real thing anyway. I don´t see them taking much money away from Sony or Viacom or Whoever. But, anyway, they make up a small portion of the vendors overall. In a country with such extreme income inequality, and with little or nothing in the way of social safety nets, all of these vendors are entrepreneurs who probably are a hair´s breadth away from sleeping on a piece of cardboard in the street. We should be celebrating their existential spirit, it seems to me.
In the past, when I´ve witnessed these productions, the police have always been so inept that I assumed the whole thing was a farce, which was enacted just so a report could be made to someone a few rungs higher up on the ladder. In a country where I can´t think of anything good to say about them, the police in these instances seemed almost sympathetic to the people they were harassing. They are usually so clumsy in their approach that the vendors all have time to fold up their perfectly portable little stands and flee. It is literally nothing to see 4 or 5 cops walking slowly down a street as the vendors they are nearing bag it and take it off running. The police never change the pace of their walk and, in fact, there were probably other police on the street, in the midst of the vendors all the time who are bystanders to this whole charade.
What I saw today was a bit different. The area involved consists of several square blocks, and the police seemed more aggressive than usual. I saw 5 or 6 police dumping one vendor´s inventory of soft drinks from his cooler into the police´s garbage bags. From a distance and on an elevated street, I saw police on foot a couple of blocks away actually chasing some fleeing vendors. Today people in the street stopped to watch. Someone screamed as we watched the foot race pass through an open intersection.
As I said, I don´t understand all the nuances of this procedure. A few things seem apparent though. For one, the cops never operate in groups of less that 4 to 6 when they are making these sweeps. It takes a half dozen of them even to empty a cooler of soft drinks into a garbage bag. I hope this is because they know the popular sympathy is with the vendors and not with them. And, even more, I hope they have good reason for this assumption. I see a lot of passivity to authority, and I´d like to think there is some history to make the police a little fearful of the people in these situations. (Mind you, I am taking a very passive attitude, no matter what implied criticisms I might make of the passive Brasileiros; I´ve no interest in seeing the inside of a police station.) I have seen it before, and I saw it again today, where there were two police officers alone in a street of vendors as they were packing up and leaving. Neither of the cops said a word or took any action.
It is probably bad karma for me to have said all of those bad things about the police. Tomorrow I have to take my documents to the Federal Police and make an application for the Brasilean identity number...the CPF number. I actually did this a few months ago, and it went nowhere, I am assuming because I only had a tourist visa at the time, and I probably shouldn´t have even been allowed to make the application. Now that I have the permanent visa, I am actually required to make an application within 30 days of my arrival here.
Apropos of my CPF application, the following is from Robert M. Levine´s The History of Brazil.
"Another Brazilean cultural characteristic is the jeito, a ´knack´ or ´fix,´ the way in which citizens cope with the often-unyielding formal legal system. Some use personal connections--relatives or other members of their panelinhas (networks)--to see that a rule is bent or not applied. Others, mostly less well-placed in the power structure, hire professional expediters (despachantes) to cut through red tape to obtain permits, passports, official documents and the like. The unwitting foreigner who does not understand the jeito system may spend hours or days waiting in line, mired in a bureaucracy that seems to have been created simply to provide sinecures.
Often, moreover, the Brazilean ´way´requires tips or small gifts, whether or not a despachante has been used. Doing business in Brazil often requires these payments, although this rule is unwritten. When the United States Consulate prior to President Bill Clinton´s visit in October 1997 issued a pamphlet describing the country´s business climate as ´generally corrupt,´Brazileans yelled in protest and the Americans apologized--although both sides knew that the description was not incorrect, at least from the American perspective."
Wish me luck. Heitor will be leading me by the hand in this process. I´m hoping he has a firm grasp of jeito.
Tchau.
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