For Brazil’s president, deadly blaze highlights larger cause

For a gruff, no-nonsense technocrat known for intimidating even her closest aides, the tears rolling down President Dilma Rousseff’s face were especially striking.
After receiving a phone call at 7 a.m. on Sunday notifying her of a nightclub fire that killed 235 people in southern Brazil, Rousseff cut short a visit to Chile and was on the scene by midday. One photo showed her in a Santa Maria gym that had been turned into a makeshift morgue, cradling the head of a victim’s mother with both hands as the two women cried.
The hundred or so corpses created an overpowering, acrid smell but Rousseff stayed for about half an hour, consoling the families of the survivors one by one before flying to Brasilia. An aide said she was “emotionally devastated.”
Those close to the president say the tragedy has hit her hard for two main reasons.
First, the high death toll, magnified by the fact it occurred in her adopted home state of Rio Grande do Sul. Second, because Rousseff has staked her presidency on battling the reckless, anything-goes legal and political culture often seen in Brazil, which many blame for the high number of deaths.
“It seems this tragedy could have been minimized if Brazil had better, more responsive institutions ... and that’s what this president has consistently and vigorously pushed for, more than many other leaders,” said Eliana Calmon, a federal judge who has gained nationwide fame for battling corruption.
Police investigations have pointed to a number of breakdowns that led to the disaster at the Kiss nightclub in Santa Maria, a relatively wealthy university city of about 250,000 people.
The club’s safety permit had expired last year, and some lawyers say city and fire department officials shouldn’t have allowed it to continue to operate while it sought a renewal.
Other questions remain about whether the club was operating above capacity, and if it broke the law by only having one working exit at the moment a band started a pyrotechnics show that set the roof ablaze and filled the room with toxic smoke.
Many Brazilians doubt the Santa Maria disaster will lead Rousseff or other leaders to push for better safety or regulatory enforcement. They point to past incidents such as a 1972 fire in a Sao Paulo skyscraper that killed 16 people. Despite angry cries for reform, just two years later a fire at another skyscraper a few blocks away left 179 people dead. Yet, in contrast to that era’s military dictatorship, which was often indifferent to public opinion, Brazil now has one of Latin America’s most mature democracies.
An economic boom last decade led to a historic expansion of the middle class, enabling Brazilians to focus less on core needs like hunger or unemployment and more on issues like better governance. They are demanding change from their leaders at the ballot box and through social media like Twitter, which is used by more people in Brazil than in any other country save the United States. “Dilma, don’t ever let this happen again! We need better politicians, better laws, a better state,” a Facebook user named João Oliveira said in an online forum on Thursday.
Rousseff’s clear ability to respond to that outcry — on display long before the Santa Maria tragedy — has led some Brazilians to hope this time may, in fact, be different.
The daughter of a Bulgarian aristocrat who fled political oppression in Europe, Rousseff was a leftist guerrilla who fought for more representative government and greater social equality in the 1970s. Aides say she is genuinely disgusted when public institutions are inefficient or corrupt — one reason she has a reputation for berating her underlings.
From a more cynical perspective, Rousseff may also realize that her job depends on it. Despite an economy that has barely grown during the past two years, Rousseff’s approval rating has stayed above 65 percent in large part because of her reputation for concern with good government, political analysts say.
Unlike her predecessor, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, she has forced several ministers to resign when graft allegations have surfaced.
She championed a freedom of information bill that gave the public access to data and government workers’ salaries and other spending for the first time, despite opposition from the military, the Foreign Ministry, and leaders in Congress.
When several of Lula’s top aides went on trial and were then sentenced to prison by the Supreme Court last year on corruption charges, Rousseff stayed quiet in public even as members of her party begged her to speak out against the court’s judges.
That focus on allowing institutions to do their job — and pushing for them to do it better — has characterized Rousseff’s reaction so far to Santa Maria.
In the hours after the fire, several ministers urged Rousseff to champion a new federal law that would set more stringent safety standards for nightclubs nationwide, the presidential aide told Reuters on condition of anonymity.