Edmilson’s Track Record

Even skeptical observers express respect for Edimilson’s previous municipal governments. Edmilson, who was then a member of the PT, managed to implement some major changes in a period of extreme financial constraint. In the cidade ribeirinha or “riverine city,” which includes thirty-nine islands, with the poorest neighborhoods worst affected by flooding, rainfall, and sewage, Edmilson launched macro-drainage projects in the Tucunduba and Una basins, in collaboration with the state government and with financial support from the World Bank.

In the early 2000s, his city government introduced participatory urban and budget planning known as Orçamento Participativo, and school scholarships for its poor and homeless citizens. In addition to social and cultural programs, Edmilson realized a vision of public urban space, including the revival of Belém’s famous Ver-o-peso market and the construction of the Ver-o-Rio recreational park. This was all done in defiance of the control exerted by capitalist interests like cargo shipping companies over the city’s development.

Two decades later, there is an emergency political situation with COVID-19 and rising levels of unemployment, poverty, and hunger. In its first five months, the municipal government has again been addressing the most urgent social needs. Its first major policy was the basic income project Bora Belém (“Let’s Go Belém”) promised in the election campaign.

By January 8, the city council had approved the funds that would initially benefit about nine thousand people in extreme need who were already registered and would receive R$450 (approximately ninety US dollars). In addition, the Sanitation Authority, headed by Ivanise Gasparim (PT), immediately started to clean the city’s sewers and canals. It is extending this work to the islands, and plans to install the largest sewage treatment plant in the Amazon.

Our Land

In early May, the city government launched the citizen council platform Tá Selado (“It’s Agreed”), that organizes real and virtual assemblies with citizens in all neighborhoods of the city. Its aim is for politics to reflect the city’s diversity in city panning. Seventy percent of Pará’s population identifies as pardo or caboclo, and Belém is characterized by a mixture of indigenous, black, and European-colonial cultural diversity, as well as by the persistent marginalization of the majority in access to social services and political participation.

Edmilson, in collaboration with the state government, also launched the community land regularization program Terra da Gente (“Our Land”) in February. By December of this year, the program will have granted four thousand land titles — as many as previous administrations had granted in a full sixteen years. This represents a concrete approach to social security for the poorest, since about 60 percent of Belém’s land plots — roughly 360,000 in total — are irregular.

Edmilson supports indigenous and traditional communities in their resistance to Bolsonaro’s racist development agenda as well as the neoliberal discourse of “green growth.” The city’s role as a portal to the Amazon gives it a vital platform in the global climate change debate. On April 15, Edmilson urged US president Joe Biden to show solidarity with the peoples of Amazonia by opposing a controversial economic pact with the Bolsonaro government.

An important part of this strategy will involve hosting the Pan-Amazon Social Forum in 2022, twenty years after the forum’s origin in Belém. This institutional space for regional alliances between social movements and organizations offers a way to strengthen their voices and their autonomy, helping them to present local alternatives in a debate dominated by Brazil’s southern regions and by domestic and transnational agro-industrial interests.

Like many cities in Brazil, Belém has severe ecological problems, including a neglect of green spaces. According to journalist Catarina Barbosa, the previous mayor, Zenaldo Coutinho of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), ordered the cutting down of many trees and the planting of other species that were unsuitable for the city’s conditions. Edmilson’s programs for environmental sustainability in the city face the enormous challenge of reconciling conflicting interests among Belém’s citizens in order to meet social needs for infrastructure, sanitation, reforestation and urban mobility.

Among other things, the mayor will support a market for organic products from family farmers and landless settlements. In the nationwide system of Brazilian budgeting, which favors the south of the country, Belém has received very little funding for social services, sanitation, and culture, compared to other historic centers such as Salvador in Bahia. The mayor’s team is seeking to counter these difficulties by working with the population and enlisting help from experts at the local university.

Facing the Pandemic

Edmilson’s predecessor Zenaldo Coutinho has left behind several dubious construction schemes, such as the repeatedly postponed Belém BRT project, which had promised to improve transport networks in the metropolitan region since 2013. But the first, enormous task for the city government is to vaccinate the population against COVID-19, in the face of sabotage from the federal government.

Edmilson is vice president of the Committee of City Councils that coordinates vaccine procurement. He is implementing a comprehensive vaccination program in collaboration with the state government. Many people are counting on the mayor’s expertise and his ability to negotiate to steer this through. He has previously involved all parties in government, seeking pragmatic cooperation across ideological lines, and Edmilson’s campaign in 2020 received informal support from some of his former opponents.

It is the implementation of left policies and the forging of alliances that may offer lessons for the Left in Brazil and further. As the diplomat Antonio Freitas has observed, the Belém government will be an important experiment for PSOL. The party has been more involved in the legislature than in city governments, with its support especially concentrated in São Paulo and the Brazilian south.

The relative success of the traditional right-wing parties in the municipal elections shows how persistent anti-PT sentiment is in Brazil. While Edmilson himself left the PT after his previous terms as mayor and founded PSOL in Pará in 2005, his government includes many PT politicians, including his vice mayor, Edilson Moura.

However, Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity is also waning. Never before had so many black and indigenous deputies been elected as in the municipal elections of 2020. PSOL is now emerging as an alternative to the political approach associated with Lula and the PT, giving voice to representatives of previously marginalized sectors. This points to a qualitative change in the scenario facing the democratic and left-wing camp in Brazil.

As the Brazilian people face rising hunger and unemployment, environmental degradation, police violence, and the ongoing pandemic, with Bolsonaro’s far-right government still at the helm of the state, the Belém experiment offers the chance for a reversal of these destructive trends.