Bolsonaro Intensifies Persecution of Press and NGOs, but His Support Base Decreases

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – President Jair Bolsonaro’s media bombs as a method to reinforce his extreme right-wing identity by attacking democratic principles are becoming routine.

This time, he managed to challenge even the highest paid actor in Hollywood, Leonardo DiCaprio, implying that he is investing in the NGOs behind the burning of the Amazon, to the point that the actor had to react to the provocation.

In addition to this accusation against DiCaprio – unfounded in fact -, Bolsonaro decided to attack democracy by barring the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo in a bids by the federal government, following the same methods of far-right rulers around the world.

“I recommend all of Brazil not to buy Folha anymore,” he said in a live broadcast to his followers, saying he will boycott products from the newspaper’s advertisers.

The authoritarian escalation is loud, but it also detracts a little more of his support, as the political scientist Andrei Roman, of Atlas Político, observed.

The rejection of President Bolsonaro has risen in recent days, while the number of supporters who consider his government great or good dropped from 27.5 percent on November 12th, to something around 25 percent this Saturday, says Roman, who monitors the networks for financial market customers through daily tracking.

“Rejection has climbed again,” explains Roman, although he does not disclose by how much. But in the last Atlas survey, on November 12th, it stood at 42.1 percent.

The list of arbitrary government misfortunes was long last week. The attack on NGOs included the president celebrating the suspicious arrest of four volunteer brigadiers in the Alter do Chão resort, in the state of Pará, whose detention was surrounded by several inconsistencies.

The case was challenged by the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, which had been investigating the affair, and stated that there was never any suspicion against the four youths arrested on Tuesday.

This was also challenged by several environmental and human rights organizations, and had negative repercussions abroad, on the eve of the World Climate Conference, which takes place in Madrid.

Young volunteers, João Victor Pereira Romano, Daniel Gutierrez Govino, Marcelo Aron Cwerner and Gustavo Fernandes, were released from prison together on Thursday. The exit footage, filmed by the collective Mídia Ninja, is self-explanatory.

All four had their heads shaved when they were imprisoned, and are visibly humiliated. As they walked out hand in hand, they found their relatives. One of them breaks down in tears on his father’s shoulders and repeats “I didn’t do anything, Dad”.

AI-5 is used more and more as a threatening gesture

The gamble on ‘all or nothing’ of Bolsonarist authoritarianism also included the second mention of the 1968 AI-5 decree, which inaugurated the hard line of the military dictatorship. In a press conference in Washington, the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes, spoke about the AI-5 when addressing the protests in Latin America.

“So don’t be alarmed if someone asks for the AI-5. Hasn’t it happened once before? Or was it different? Taking the people to the streets to destroy everything,” said the minister, who became the guarantor of Jair Bolsonaro’s candidacy when he was still a mirage on the 2018 elections’ horizon.

Guedes was harshly criticized by the forces seeking to counterweight the boldness of the president and members of the government. But this was already the second attempt at raising the issue. Deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, the president’s son, had already alluded to the need for a new AI-5 if Brazil were to face social upheaval, such as Chile, or post-election Bolivia.

From speech to speech and the sequence of arbitrary acts such as censorship of Folha in the bidding process, Bolsonaro’s government has shown that it is working to reduce democracy, just as Steven Levitski predicted in his book ‘Como as Democracias Morrem’ (“How Democracies Die”).

In August, he had already made another attempt to stifle newspapers, particularly the business newspaper Valor because he was displeased with the coverage.

That month, Bolsonaro signed a provisional measure (MP) so that the balance sheets of publicly held companies, now a source of income for newspapers, would no longer need to be published in newspapers, but could be displayed only on the companies’ websites.

At the time, he made it clear that it was a retaliation against the attacks he suffered from the press. “I hope that Valor survives the measure signed yesterday,” said Bolsonaro one day after signing the ordinance.

The MP was suspended by a Supreme Court injunction, by Justice Gilmar Mendes, and then toppled by a Chamber of Deputies committee. But the artillery to change the rules is ongoing and dangerous for being under the cloak of democracy, as noted Pedro Abramovay, director of the Open Society Foundation, in the article entitled “O sapo escaldado da democracia” (“The scalded frog of democracy”), published by Piauí magazine.

“The new authoritarianism is gradually raising its temperature until democracy dies calmly, with no shouting or bayonets,” writes Abramovay, who resorts to the metaphor of the frog that gets in the cauldron of cold water, until it gradually heats up and it dies oblivious to the trap.

In an editorial entitled Fantasia de Imperador (“Imperial Fantasy”) this Saturday, Folha de S.Paulo harshly criticizes Bolsonaro’s combination of “impudence and authoritarianism” in the face of the exclusion of Folha from a bidding process – and the threat that it poses to all its 5,000 advertisers -, recalling that the Planalto Palace is not an extension of his home in Rio de Janeiro, “nor of his neighbors in the Three Powers Plaza”, it states.

Bolsonaro lives in a condominium in Barra da Tijuca, and one of his neighbors is Ronnie Lessa, who is in prison as a suspect in the murder of city councilor Marielle Franco.

In an interview with Folha, Floriano Azevedo Marques Neto, director of the USP Law School, explained that censorship of the newspaper in the bidding process could be considered as administrative misconduct or even a “crime of responsibility”, grounds for impeachment .

The president’s gamble stirs up his radical base, but it proves to be a risky game for his own political survival even before completing one year in office.