Voters Faced With Dismal Choices
In 1955, the voters of Jaboatao, a Brazilian industrial town eleven hundred miles north of Rio de Janeiro, were disgusted with their municipal officials. To express their disdain for the incumbents, they elected a goat named Fragrant to the city council. Four years later, in 1959, the voters of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s most populous city, did them one better. As befit their status as the country’s biggest metropolis, they elected a much bigger quadruped: a rhinoceros. Sao Paulo’s voters were fed up that year. Corruption was rampant, garbage went uncollected, sewers overflowed, inflation was on the rise, even as supplies of basic foodstuffs such as meat and beans dwindled.
As elections loomed that October, the voters faced a choice of a crowded field of 540 candidates who competed for 45 seats on Sao Paulo’s City Council. Few inspired confidence, and many were corrupt or outright criminal. Faced with such dismal options, some local students decided to nominate a five-year-old female black rhinoceros as a candidate. As they put it: “Better elect a rhinoceros than an ass“. Named Cacareco, the new politician was a local celebrity on loan from Rio de Janeiro’s zoo to the recently inaugurated one at Sao Paulo. So the students printed and distributed 200,000 ballots with her name on them. It was a joke – but then she actually won.