Social apartheid in Brazil

[1][2] According to Maria Helena Moreira Alves, early twentieth century inequalities between rich and poor in Brazil were exacerbated by the differing treatment of urban migrants during and following the Great Depression.

[5] Access to education is highly unequal and weighted toward privileged groups, resulting in a gap in labor skills that is substantially greater than other countries in the Americas such as Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.

[4] Some believe that these parallels between South Africa during the apartheid era and modern-day Brazil are associated with the country's history of slavery and associated racial castes, as inequities in the economic and social status particularly affect Afro-Brazilians in comparison to other groups.

[13] Some political theorists assert the role of the police in keeping the inhabitants of Brazil's many favelas from encroaching on the lives of middle- and upper-class Brazilians is key to maintaining this state of apartheid.

They write that in order to protect themselves, poor children often carry weapons, and that, as a result, "[t]he cost of maintaining this form of apartheid is high: an urban public sphere that is unsafe for any child.

"[15] Tobias Hecht writes that rich Brazilians see the often violent street children as a threat, so they try to marginalize them socially and keep them and the poverty they represent hidden from lives of the wealthy elite.

[17]Cristovam Buarque, Democratic Labour Party senator for the Federal District, says that "Brazil is a divided country, home to the greatest income concentration in the world and to a model of apartation, Brazilian social apartheid.

He argues that society is threatened by "a gap between the rich and poor so big that in every country there will be separate growth, along the lines of South Africa under apartheid", and that while this is happening globally, "Brazil is its best example".

"[19] Former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) was quoted in 2002 by Mark Weisbrot in The Nation as saying he was "fighting to bring the poor of Brazil out of economic apartheid".

[20] His loss in the presidential election of 1994 to Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) has been attributed in part to the fear Lula aroused in the middle class by his "denunciations of the social apartheid which permeated Brazilian society.