JOÃO MAURÍCIO DA ROSA

activations, scheduled blackouts and reduction of energy tension in the distribution network are ingredients of a very old Brazilian film. They date back to the “Golden Years”, as the 50s became known, which, in fact, was twilight, the color of the institutionalized afternoon blackouts that marked the first years of that era.

“You could barely see the house. Rationing and blackouts disrupted industrial production and served as an electoral platform for the opposition to consolidate candidacies like that of Jânio Quadros for the São Paulo Chamber”, recalls historian and political scientist Ricardo Frota Maranhão, professor at the Department of Political Sciences at the Institute. of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) and member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Energy Planning at Unicamp (NIPE).

Maranhão defended his doctoral thesis in 1993 on the evolution of energy policy in the State of São Paulo, focusing on Light, a large company at the time, of Canadian origin. According to him, it was the incompetence of private companies in managing the electrical system that led to nationalization in the 60s and not the exacerbated nationalism of their consumers.

It was also not due to the State's incapacity that the business returned to the private sector from 1995 onwards, but due to a set of external pressures to demand, at high interest rates, the payment of the debt owed by Brazil for the construction of the state-owned electrical system model. and efficient that survived until the beginning of the
90s.

Long before that, in the 50s, foreign capital controlled the entire energy generation and distribution system. Light in the city of São Paulo and, in the interior, CPFL (Companhia Paulista de Força e Luz), then controlled by Amforp – American and Foreign Power Company –, an American company with operations in Cuba, Guatemala and Panama. Both had to appeal for the blackouts immediately after World War II.

“The two largest multinational companies in Brazil did not make the necessary investments to accompany the country's economic development, giving the opportunity for heavy attacks for their nationalization, because they did not demonstrate competence”, argues Maranhão.

Nationalization – Amforp was nationalized in 1964 by the federal government and later transferred to Cesp (Companhia Energética do Estado de São Paulo). “Light survived because in the early 50s it borrowed money from the World Bank, with the approval of the Brazilian government. A privileged international loan: it was the first time that the World Bank lent money to a company and not to a government”, says the historian.

After the nationalization process, according to Maranhão, the government began to invest heavily in electricity generation in the 60s, 70s and 80s, completely eliminating the problems of blackouts and rationing. “While it worked, the state model was highly efficient in terms of offering services, which demonstrates that nationalization came to meet an objective rather than an ideological need, as the private sector was not coping”, he analyzes.
The business went well until the beginning of the 90s, when, according to research in Maranhão, cracks began to appear resulting from large investments in generation through the taking of international loans in a way that was inappropriate to the global financial reality of the late 80s. “The government took spot money in terrible conditions, worsening the external debt situation.”

“Furthermore, oblivious to the international crisis, the government insisted on building Itaipu all at once, ignoring studies showing that the hydroelectric potential of the Platina Basin could be used by several plants that would be built, with less onerous financial commitment”, adds.

Crazy decision – The reason for the insistence on the construction of the Itaipu Hydroelectric Power Plant, states Maranhão, was an unreasonable euphoria on the part of the military government. “The plant, one of the largest in the world, also met the delusional idea of ​​some military personnel that a dam downstream of Argentina would be a true weapon of war. They were always thinking about a war with Argentina. So, they thought that at any moment they could abruptly open the floodgates and flood the neighboring country, as part of their military efforts against an old utopian enemy.”
The consequences of this “crazy decision”, in the professor's expression, and the international pressure demanding the loans in the early 90s, began to crack the state model. “The World Bank, large banks and financial institutions began to force privatization around the world, as a way of quickly recovering the assets they used as loans in the previous decade.”

Maranhão guarantees that, contrary to official speeches, public companies were able to continue investing and modernizing, as long as they had political planning and political will. “But, instead of remedying the flaws presented by the state model, they preferred to use them as a pretext for the disappearance of the state in the sector”, he states.

The professor credits the current collapse in the sector to the speed with which the government acted in the privatization process to meet international pressure, without listening to advice from technical experts and legal experts on the need to first create an inspection and regulatory body. “They privatized quickly, at the lowest possible cost, without creating the corresponding set of rules and standards to be followed so that the sector functioned as it did when it was state-owned.”

Defenseless – Aneel (National Electric Energy Agency), which should regulate the electricity sector, according to Maranhão, is still nothing more than a small ineffective agency, with very few conditions to protect the consumer in the face of a possible speculative attack by companies on the energy stock, as was considered during the beginning of the energy crisis in California, to raise the tariff. “It has not yet equipped itself with a regulatory, control and inspection apparatus.”

Furthermore, the state transferred the system to the private sector, claiming it no longer had investment capacity. The idea was to sell so that companies could invest what the State could not invest. “But who guarantees that they will invest?” asks the professor, remembering that a large part of the globalizing financial capital that has acquired some state-owned companies has a clearly speculative function.
“It is capital that is passing through. So much so that some of these privatized companies are already for sale. This process of buying and selling for financial profit is much more significant and characteristic of this globalizing capital than an effective interest in creating a competent electrical sector”.

If, as the saying goes, the future repeats the past, the 2002 election year promises to repeat the old movie, with the energy crisis fueling electoral speeches. According to Professor Ricardo Maranhão, contrary to what another saying says, the Brazilian people do not have the government they deserve. “A people who had the agility to respond to calls to reduce consumption, received in return arbitrary measures that, in practice, constitute a tariff increase”.