Poor people are being humiliated, says Tereza Campello, former PT minister

Absurd, bizarre, backward and inhumane are some of the terms used by economist Tereza Campello to define the results of changes in the social area made by the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL). Specialist in the subject, the former minister of Social Development and Fight against Hunger in the Dilma Rousseff (PT) government cites problems in several of the fronts of assistance to the poorest.

The queues for re-registration are the most recent. “Intellectuals like to use terms like invisible to define what happens”, she says. “But the people say they are being humiliated, and the situation is the same.”

According to Campello, one of those responsible for the social area of ​​Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (PT) candidacy, if the PT candidate is elected, his government will maintain the amount of R$ 600 for Auxílio Brasil, given the size of the income compression and the poverty in Brazil.

Another goal, after taking over the public accounts, will be to look for alternatives to guarantee the additional R$ 150 to children from zero to six years old.

However, she reinforces that a new public policy for the area will go far beyond financial transfers. “The design we want to rebuild doesn’t just have income,” she says. “Think also about day care, school lunches, Farmácia Popular — which are indirect incomes.”

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What would be a new framework for social assistance in an eventual Lula 3? As the work is with 20 million families among the most vulnerable, the first question is not to do anything abruptly. We are not going to make changes overnight, as this government did.

Our design considers, first of all, the need to maintain the value that families receive today. This may seem like a minor issue, but it is not, because the value of the benefit is not guaranteed in the Budget.

From Lula’s victory until December 31, our effort will be to guarantee the reconstruction of the budget piece to make the R$ 600 viable.

Unfortunately, we don’t know what they will do until then, how deteriorating public finances will be and what bombs will be armed. Every day, we wake up and get scared. We see that they spent another R$ 15 billion here or there. The level of irresponsibility is gigantic.

Only after we take stock of the situation will we be able to measure the speed we are going to give to the process of rebuilding social equity.

A strategic issue is to start with the youngest children. A child subjected to starvation in the first six years of life suffers differently from an adult. Our idea is to get R$150 per family that has a child from zero to six years old.

An example: a mother with two children would receive R$600 plus R$150 for one child and R$150 for the other child. The total would be $900.

However, we would proceed with this process gradually, because that’s not all we have to do. Today, there is no money for day care, school lunches or for the Popular Pharmacy, which for these families are income.

Like this? That mother with two children, if she has access to day care, for a period of the day will not worry about food or diapers and will be able to work or study. If one of these children has asthma, they can get the free medicine at the Popular Pharmacy. It became more difficult now to have day care and medication.

Bolsa Família was very different from Auxílio Brasil, but the main difference was that the family would have access to other benefits when they entered Cadúnico. [Cadastro Único para Programas Sociais]. We started to know if she needed a cistern, if she should enter Luz para Todos, if she had a small child and needed to be prioritized in a day care center. This meant efficiency and planning for public spending.

If you don’t have a good diagnosis, you can’t get results, and that’s what’s happening with this government right now. It’s a bunch of nonsense.

Can you name a few? When they launched Auxílio Brasil, I criticized two things a lot.

They said they were creating a way out, the Productive Inclusion Aid. If the person got a job, they would receive R$ 200 more. Do you know how much they spent on this program? Zero. Not a cent. Nor did they commit. They did a whole blah blah blah to justify why they were ending Bolsa Família, changing the name, and they spent zero.

Now, Bolsonaro is talking about making a program for those who find work. He says he will give R$800, R$600, plus R$200. It’s the same program he promised back there. The program is already law, it could be paying and they didn’t spend anything, but he’s promising again.

It is proven worldwide that this design of giving a person a carrot to work doesn’t work — as if he doesn’t already work. He assumes that the poor person receives help because he is lazy. It’s a pretty outdated concept. No country adopts this as a criterion for the construction of income transfer programs.

The Bolsonaro government also ended Brasil Carinhoso, an efficient program that worked and, in my opinion, needs to be resumed. He replaced the Child Citizen Aid, which gave a voucher, a daycare voucher, to the woman who found a job. The daycare should be private, it could not be public or contracted.

It’s a completely outlandish thing. First, women want to work and don’t need stimulation. Second, because, many times, she cannot find work precisely because she has nowhere to leave the child. So if she finds the job, then she gets the voucher? There is an inversion there, because, first of all, you have to offer the job —which is a right of the child, not just of the woman— and then the woman can look for a job.

I ask: how much do you think they spent on this program? So it was zero too. It’s unbelievable. A year and two months later, Bolsonaro has nothing. He has no way for me to comment. He didn’t get off the ground. I have to keep discussing conceptually.

Queue is usually a sign of trouble. What do the queues for the single registration that we’ve seen recently tell us? The queue, in this case, is for updating the registration. It is a normal, regular procedure, which should happen in a quiet and automatic way, with families being informed and called.

There is a conjunction of excesses generating these queues that, I would say, is inhumane. Intellectual likes to speak terms like invisible. But the people say they are being humiliated, and the situation is the same.

The first big question —and it’s going to knock on the doors of the municipalities, even to be fair to them— is that the government has created a structural problem. He has been cutting social assistance resources permanently. Without updating the figures, you can say that two-thirds of the budget was cut. In my period, it was R$ 3 billion. The projection for next year is R$ 49 million.

The cuts affected the networks built by us in the 2000s, Cras networks [Centro de Referência de Assistência Social que, basicamente, faz prevenção de vulnerabilidade] and of Creas [Centro de Referência Especializado de Assistência Social, que cuida das consequências]. It is with this set of equipment that the municipalities provide services to meet the federal government’s social programs, such as Bolsa Família, now known as Auxílio Brasil. Thus, the municipalities are on the edge, but it is at their door that people knock and curse.

It has Cras closed. Cras working part-time. Cras with two or three people to serve a queue of 500. You have to plan. But the government changes the rule, anticipates the date, changes the criteria — all without talking to the municipality. That’s how he promoted this act [o recadastramento]which crashes the system.

In this queue, in my opinion, there are people who were called for a cadastral review. But there are also people who went there not knowing what to do, and there are people who went there for fear of losing the benefit. As there is no information, there must also be a lot of people trying to register, in addition to families that are splitting up to make individual registrations.

Could you explain better why? The design that the government created for Auxílio Brasil encourages families to split up. You can have two to three people from the same family in the queue, which adds to the queue.

Now, you can count on another queue to appear, but at the door of Caixa Econômica. Has begun.

People, with difficult access to information, go after payroll loans. The government promoted this during this period — and we can’t even call it the wrong time, because they want it on the eve of the election — so that people can earn this bonus at the exit.

There are people who may be going to Cras after the consignment.

Is it possible to qualify as a dismantling of the system what we are seeing? To summarize, I would say that we have the dismantling of the Single Social Assistance System, the lack of communication to combine measures with the municipalities, which catches them off guard, and a poorly designed Auxílio Brasil.

Regarding the change in design, could you detail the major differences between Bolsa Família and Auxílio Brasil?

The first issue is in the way they made the Emergency Aid, using an app and giving the benefit per person, when the Bolsa was per family.

When the benefit is per family, you consider that it is proportional to the number of people — if the family is larger, it receives more, if the family is smaller, it receives less. When giving the individual benefit, they called for people to register individually.

They even tried to correct it later, but the damage was done. The new entrants, the new beneficiaries, registered individually.

To complete the problem, they set a floor—a fixed amount, I would say—that catches almost all people. As a result, the size of the family was disregarded. A poor man living alone — and I mention this example because most single-person registrations are men — and a mother with two babies receive the same amount.

I am not saying that a poor man should not receive benefit. However, in this way, he ends up creating injustices.

Lack of information, lack of organization of networks and pre-registration per application are generating a set of misinformation. In the future we will have more problems, because the registration was disorganized.

The single registry has always had a family perspective to contemplate the differentiated situations of poverty in Brazil. Often, in the same household, for example, you have a family, with a niece living together. The registry did that. Not now.

Mrs. say that public policy in the social area has lost the notion of family? Yes, lost. It disorganized this notion, and it has a benefit that does not include families. Thus, you create a gigantic iniquity. It is wrong for an individual to earn R$600, and a mother with two small children to earn the same R$600. The individual is receiving R$600 per capita, and the mother with children, R$200.

The concept of Auxílio Brasil is even a family one, but the program was poorly organized and poorly explained. The registration was not supported by social assistance, it was made by people who do not know poverty and there was no concern about how to organize the assistance to the families.

The amount of R$ 600 has already been the subject of debate. It is considered a lot by some, but little by others. What is your opinion? Today it is R$ 600 without the Popular Pharmacy, without school lunches, without many things. You need to look at the package, given the size of income compression and poverty in Brazil.

It is not clear to people, but programs such as Bolsa Família and Auxílio Brasil offer a supplementary value to the income of those of working age. They are for young families with children, and a large part of them with small children.

At the height of the refinement of the Cadastro Único, in 2012, we created a variable benefit, according to the severity of poverty of each family. One mother may not have a job, the other may be a cleaning lady. Rents vary. The level of improvement allowed for this very interesting design. In addition to being fairer, it was less cost-effective. As registration was disorganized and lack of income, now, we have to use this amount the same for everyone.

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Teresa Campello, 60

Born in Decavado (SP), she is an Economist from the Federal University of Uberlândia, a PhD in Public Health from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, with a post-doctorate in Food Safety from the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). With an intense academic life, he holds the Josué de Castro Chair at USP (University of São Paulo). A member of the PT, she participated in the coordination of numerous programs in the social and environmental areas. Minister of Social Development and Fight against Hunger in the Dilma Rousseff government (2011 to 2016). She coordinated the Brasil Sem Miséria Plan, which lifted 22 million people out of extreme poverty.