For the past seven decades, defendants with college degrees sent to jail in Brazil had the right to go to a special wing, a single cell away from common prisoners.
A relief and almost a luxury in a country of infamous prisons where space and sometimes even food are at a premium.
The Supreme Court put an end to that prerogative a few days ago, but in Brazil, the homeland of privilege, many other anachronistic and extravagant perks remain in force.
One of the ones that generates the most anger is the lifetime pensions for the unmarried daughters of the elite of the Armed Forces and the civil service, a payment incompatible with having a husband or entering the civil service that 200,000 women still receive.
And some of them, to top it off, cheat, as recently revealed by the
Estadão newspaper
: the Court of Accounts has discovered that at least 4,000 receive it since the death of their father despite having married, having a legal domestic partner or working for the Administration.
They are different cases, but both the imprisoned university students and the single daughters of... illustrate the type of privilege that, together with an infinity of factors, contributes to perpetuating deep-rooted socioeconomic and opportunity inequality in Brazilian society. (synthesized in this photo by Tuca Vieira).
The examples are daily: from the existence of a service elevator and another social one in many buildings to a tremendously unfair tax system for the poor, suffocated by direct taxes and inflation while shareholder dividends are exempt from taxation.
A gap that can be summed up in an impressive figure: white men in the richest 1% have more income than all black and mixed-race Brazilians.
The Supreme Court considers that the special treatment for imprisoned university graduates is unconstitutional because, in the words of one of its judges, “it does not protect fragile people who deserve protection;
on the contrary, it favors those who are already favored by their economic position”.
University students were always a tiny part of the prison population (now around 1%) and once the sentence was final they went to the cells of common prisoners, a moment that could take years.
This right, established by Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, jumped into the public debate, especially after the Lava Jato corruption investigation (now buried and with a large part of the rulings annulled), which led to the imprisonment of dozens of politicians and businessmen considered untouchables.
Until then.
The current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was a worker and never attended university, received special treatment as his former president.
They built a custom cell for him in a Curitiba police station.
(Their convictions of him were overturned.)
However, judges, prosecutors, soldiers, priests and pastors accused of crimes deserving of pretrial detention, among others, retain the privilege that university students have just lost.
They also stand out among the caste of privilege, the single daughters of the civil service elite.
Some of the examples revealed by the aforementioned newspaper leave anyone speechless.
Mrs. Maria Lucia Rangel de Alckmin, 79 years old, cousin of the current vice president, receives a pension for being the single daughter of a former Supreme Court judge that is equivalent, attention, to the salary of the President of the Republic.
In other words, like Lula, she receives 39,000 reais (7,000 euros or 7,700 dollars) in exchange for nothing.
The payment to the 60,000 unmarried daughters of civil servants (not including the military) supposes to the public coffers almost 600 million dollars a year.
The descendants of the military leadership who never married are about 140,000 ladies who receive about a thousand euros a month.
Among the beneficiaries are two daughters of Vinicius de Moraes, who entered music history as the father of
bossa nova
but was previously a diplomat.
Since 1980, the year of the artist's death, both have received this payment created at the end of the fifties by President Juscelino Kubitschek, the man who promoted the creation of Brasilia as a symbol of a modern country.
The argument used at the time was that without a father or a husband, women could not support themselves.
As the Brazilians gained economic independence, the debate on these perks intensified.
Since the 1990s, new beneficiaries have not been incorporated, but payments are maintained to those who already had the right since they lost their fathers, some when they were still girls.
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