The other day he said that the Brazilian will “beat up the Koreans and the Chinese.” With R$41.7 billion in investments in 890 works, Lula’s naval hub 3.0 is here. Brazil has been chasing a national fleet since the 17th century, when one of the largest boats in the world, the galleon Padre Eterno, left the shipyard on Ilha do Governador. Unfortunately, Lula’s phrase can only be attributed to the delusions of a candidate in an election year. To this day, the one who took the beating from the shipping industry was the Widow.
Lula’s generation, born in the first half of the 20th century, has a brand with no known similarity: it has already paid for three naval hubs, and will pay for the fourth.
The first naval hub came under the government of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). It went wrong, but almost all of the bill went to the shipyards. It’s the game played.
The second pole came during the government of Ernesto Geisel. It also fell apart, but the bill went to the Widow. The hub was financed by shares from the Merchant Marine Superintendence, Sunaman. They fell into the ditch of “rotten papers” and, in a cruel construction, the creativity of the banks returned them to their face value to win over state-owned companies. Thus, they turned monkeys into currency.
The third pole came with Lula 1.0. It seemed to be going well, when it started to crumble. The first large vessel produced at the hub was the oil tanker João Cândido. It listed at launch in 2000 and underwent repairs for two years.
Lula’s first naval hub was the one that cost the country the most. More than 100,000 workers lost their jobs. To get an idea of the degree of voluntarism embedded in the initiative, Itamaraty granted an agrément to a “non-resident” ambassador from Singapore. He was neither a diplomat nor a public servant, but the CEO of a messy shipyard in Pindorama.
A company entered the third naval hub that was supposed to manufacture probes for Petrobras. It created a scandal and a bankruptcy worth R$36 billion. In the 17th century Rio built one of the largest galleons in the world, in the 21st Sete Brasil produced the biggest bankruptcy in the history of Pindorama.
Brazil does not have a competitive naval industry because it sweeps the causes of failures under the carpet. They are the product of fancary capitalism. The robberies built into the third pole were grotesque, they crippled Petrobras and broke paper yards. After a few years, misdeeds by Lava Jato prosecutors and judge Sérgio Moro contaminated the cleaning produced by the Operation. This resulted in the idea that it broke the shipping industry, putting thousands of people out of work. The shipyards went bankrupt because they recycled incompetence and lack of competitiveness in a network of personal and political relationships. These networks can produce many things, except ships.
With the fourth naval hub on the street, all one can hope is that it will include an official tasked with reminding those in power when the project is taking the beatings of its predecessors.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
