The Cacareco effect

During his career, the Pulitzer Prize winner George de Carvalho reported on the landslide win of a surprise contender, Cacareco, in neighbouring Brazil, who ended up being an unlikely international inspiration. “Suburban sewers were in bad shape, prices were high and there was a serious shortage of meat and beans. There was no shortage, however of candidates – 540 of them running for 45 council seats,” the well-travelled, Hong Kong-born correspondent wrote in an article for Time-Life.

Charging into a council election with the hefty hide of a true politician, and unhindered by ubiquitous charges of misconduct, nepotism and foreign citizenship, the inscrutable victor proved impervious and implacable to the volley of criticisms and vicious insults about her obvious bulky girth, gender and lack of looks, garnering a then record 100000 votes or 15 percent of the tally, enough to swamp 11 opposition parties. With a pleasant enough personality and real animal magnetism, she pulled off the stunning success without so much as a single speech, a smile or a smidgen of self-campaigning, but was swiftly denied the dignity of stylishly spreading across her seat.

As Carvalho recounted, “‘Better elect a rhinoceros’ somebody said, ‘than an ass.’ And so they did.” In October, 1959, the disillusioned electorate of the country’s biggest city, São Paulo symbolically chose Cacareco, meaning “Rubbish,” a fat, four-year-old black rhino, born in Brazil, as their local representative. Borrowed from the zoo in Rio de Janeiro, for the opening of a sister facility in São Paulo, she was getting ready to return home, when a group of students had the brilliant idea that the popular Cacareco might prove a greater star attraction in the upcoming municipal polls. Faster than the phrase “Hold your horses,” stacks of printed ballots appeared in tens of thousands, stirring slogans were slapped on to slum walls, and a proud tradition of protest prevailed.