To speak well of it, I would note that it has a little bit of almost every Brazilian city I’ve visited: it has a lagoon like Rio and Florianópolis, it has long, wide beaches like Maceió, it has a colorful colonial center like Salvador, and it has office towers and political offices in high-rise buildings in the middle of nowhere, like Cuiabá and Salvador. In fact, I would consider it Salvador in miniature, with the same long looping roads, inexplicable traffic, coast and historic center, racial diversity, and (until recently) oligarchic politics.
To say the very least about São Luís, I would comment that it’s almost like a bad caricature of Brazil and the challenges that Brazil faces. The lagoon surrounded by luxury apartment buildings smells of sewage (a constant algae bloom, according to one respondent). It rains a lot, and every time it rains, the lovely beaches are unfit for swimming. I walked into the ocean the morning after a rain and had two little white worms with black eyes attach themselves to my arm and bite. I crushed them both, and never went into the water again. Open rivulets of city water carry trash and debris onto a beach that is otherwise stunning. The historic center is colorful, in that you can look at the buildings, but the museums don’t offer much information and aren’t terribly captivating. The center is pretty, but it lacks a sense of life. (According to my new maranhense friend, almost all the residents were expelled from the center when the city got UNESCO status and the state government developed it into a tourist attraction.) I was the only visitor at two museums, and there just weren’t that many people - tourists or locals - on the streets on a Saturday.
Photos below are of colorful streets in the city center. My favorite is the Rua da Giz, the middle picture. I wish there was some exhibit on the design of the streets, or their history, or settlement patterns, or name origins. If there was such an exhibit, I missed it.
The city is famous for its use of azulejos, or blue-and-white tiles in a Portuguese style. According to the guide, it was discovered that azulejos worked well in cooling buildings and fending off São Luís’s ever-present humidity. I can understand how the first task works by reflecting sunlight; I can’t really grasp how the latter works.
At the Visual Arts Museum, a curator named Mario explained the differences among old Portuguese tiles (connect in sets of four to form very straight geometric patterns), French tiles (form more artistic, curved patterns in sets of four), German tiles (much more elaborate, multi-colored) and English tiles (mass-manufactured, all the same, don’t connect to each other). I took some photos from around the historic center.
Ah, but I wasn’t here for the azulejos. I was in São Luís for the politics.
The story begins and ends with the Sarney clan. (“Clan” is the preferred term used in Folha de São Paulo.) In 1966, an ambitious young federal deputy named José Sarney was appointed governor of Maranhão by the military regime. His clan would only lose a state-level election for the first time in 2006. In the meantime, José Sarney has been governor, senator, vice-president, President of the Republic, and President of the Senate, as well as a well-acclaimed fiction writer.
To understand how the clan has stayed in power so long, it helps to know that Maranhão, the state of which São Luís is the capital, is among the poorest in Brazil. I recall (but can’t locate at the moment using XP) an article from 2000 noting that, of the 100 poorest municipalities in Brazil in 2000, 83 were located in Maranhão. The bus ride into São Luís from Belém certainly didn’t offer any evidence to undermine this statistic. (I really can’t or shouldn’t judge relative poverty levels from a bus window.)
I can’t state for sure that the Sarneys (oh, it’s plural - his daughter is currently governor, having engineered to throw the candidate who beat them in 2006 out of office in 2009 by means of judicial rulings on vote-buying) employ vote buying or turnout buying. Or that they engage in electoral fraud. I have no solid evidence. Not having evidence, however, didn’t stop plenty of Maranhenses from leveling these accusations in our discussions.
In any case, here’s the view of the colonial center from the north end of the José Sarney Bridge. By coincidence, I took these photos on the Senator’s 80th birthday.
Sarney, you might recall, was previously in the news last spring for a series of accusations that he, as President of the Senate, issued a bunch of secret acts to give relatives and friends jobs and contracts. I can’t remember all the details because it’s all gone down the Great Brazilian Memory Hole and we’ve all moved on to present scandals. He’s still President of the Senate, being a Senator from Amapá. (He stepped aside so that the next generation of Sarneys could take over in Maranhão; Amapá is a smaller state where it’s presumably cheaper and easier to win elections. After all, he’s a former President of Brazil.)
In any case, being a poor state with a nationally-prominent patriarch from the right-wing means that federal monies are very important, and that Mr. President of the Senate matters in getting the pork from Brasília. Thus, as a corollary, they’re always on the side of the president. Roseana Sarney was an ally to Fernando Henrique Cardoso. She’s now an ally to Lula. (Painted walls in town read Roseana 25 Lula 13, which is not a football score but rather the two electoral codes for their respective tickets.)
I talked to two sets of non-Sarney administrators. A former governor, who broke with the Sarneys after being appointed and elected with their support, pointed out that Vale’s projects to invest in steel plants in Maranhão were all shelved after José Sarney objected. Cooperation with the World Bank on a sanitation project was stopped because the Senate would never approve a loan. In short, the governor said, after his break, Maranhão received no money that wasn’t already its legal automatic due. José’s hope was that his daughter would win in 2006, and receive all the acclaim for re-starting the stalled investments and projects.
I’ve been to other states before where conflicting personalities among political elites stall or reverse projects. Rio de Janeiro comes readily to mind. But Rio de Janeiro isn’t as desperately poor and in need of investments as Maranhão is. I don’t mean to dramatize the situation, but lack of investments in sanitation mean that people are dying of preventable illnesses. Lack of investments means that people aren’t getting jobs or better jobs.
(Oh, it almost goes without saying that the good Senator from Amapá also blocked extra federal monies for the administration of Jackson Lago, who beat Roseana in 2006.)
It started to put a human face on the costs of sub-national oligarchy and one-party rule in Brazil. The political science term “sub national authoritarianism” isn’t exactly right, but the phenomenon is similar. I was more than a little sickened by these tales. (I still need to find numbers to corroborate the stories.)
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Oh, and the governor’s palace sits perched on a hill overlooking the river, at the north end of the historical center. It’s the Palace of the Lions, but I never learned why.
The city was originally founded by the French, specifically by a guy named Daniel de la Touche. Write your own silly joke with that. The Portuguese expelled them soon after.
The visit was unremarkable. I stayed on the northern coast, ate at touristy but empty restaurants for lunch, sweated a lot, cursed aloud when I found out that the day after my arrival was another national holiday, and ran on the beach until wild dogs and rivers of run-off blocked my path.
It rained every day, usually in quite heavy bursts. The city sits on the margins of the Amazon ecosystem, but still close enough to receive the Amazonian downpours.
I did make a new friend, who grew up in São Luís but goes to graduate school in Belém.
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I’m now in Fortaleza. On Friday afternoon, I showed up early to the airport hoping to get some work done on the laptop. São Luís’s airport, however, is the first I’ve encountered in Brazil that isn’t air-conditioned in its lobby. It was a long wait.
I did go to my first running event here in Fortaleza (and in Brazil). That story is forthcoming.
Below, a view of the upper-class neighborhood Ponta d’Areia (Sand Point), looking back across the muddy Rio Anil and the Ponte José Sarney. Also, an explanation of the state flag, from the plastic bag of a Maranhão-only grocery chain, Mateus. It’s not the only state flag in Brazil that bears a passing resemblence to the Stars and Stripes, and the resemblence is not coincidental.
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