RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chilean ex-President und current U.N. commissioner Michelle Bachelet dared to point out the reduction in democracy and increase in police killings in Brazil since Jair Bolsnaro took over and had to pay for that statement right away.
In retaliation, the Brazilian President attacked Michelle Bachelet’s father, Alberto Bachelet, this Wednesday, September 4th, who was the UN’s high commissioner for human rights and former president of Chile. He was killed by Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.
The criticism came after Bachelet said in an interview that Brazil suffers a “reduction of democratic space”, especially with attacks against defenders of nature and human rights.
“Bachelet, following the line of French President Emmanuel Macron in meddling in internal affairs and Brazilian sovereignty, spoke against Brazil in the human rights agenda (of bandits), attacking our brave civilian and military police officers,” Bolsonaro wrote on social network.
“She (Bachelet) also says that Brazil loses democratic space, but she forgets that her country is not a Cuba thanks only to those who had the courage to stop the left in 1973, among these communists her father who was brigadier at the time,” said Bolsonaro, who also published a photo of Bachelet as president, along with former presidents Dilma Rousseff (Brazil) and Cristina Kirchner (Argentina).
Alberto Bachelet, Michelle’s father, was an Air Force brigade general and opposed Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in September 1973. He was arrested and tortured by the regime and died in custody in February 1974.
The former president herself had also been arrested and tortured by Pinochet’s agents in 1975.
The president said further that the high commissioner of the UN (Michelle Bachelet) “defends human rights of vagabonds. Michelle Bachelet is accusing me of not punishing policemen who are killing many people in Brazil. This is her accusation. She is defending human rights of vagabonds,” he said.
“Mrs. Michelle Bachelet, if it weren’t for Pinochet’s people defeating the left in 1973, among them her father, today Chile would be a Cuba. I don’t think I need to say anything more to her. When there are people who have nothing to do, they go to the chair of Human Rights at the UN,” the president added.
Bachelet made the statement on reducing democracy in Brazil at a press conference in Geneva. “In recent months, we have seen (in Brazil) a reduction in civic and democratic space characterized by attacks against human rights defenders, and restrictions imposed on the work of civil society,” she said.
Bachelet also pointed to an increase in the number of people killed by police officers in Brazil, which affects blacks and favela residents the most. (The favelas are the low-income and slum areas of Brazilian towns.)
The former Chilean president also lamented that the “public discourse that legitimizes summary executions” and the persistence of impunity. She also questioned the government’s policy of facilitating access to weapons.
The commissioner recalled that at least eight human rights defenders were killed in Brazil between January and June and that most of these deaths were related to property disputes related to “illegal exploitation of natural resources, mainly agricultural, forestry, and mineral resources”.
For her, this violence occurs all over the country and especially affects indigenous communities. “33 percent of forest fires occur in indigenous or protected areas,” she said.
“We told the government that it must protect human rights and environmental defenders, but also examine the measures that could trigger violence against these defenders,” said Bachelet.
On Twitter, Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo insinuated that Bachelet is ill-informed considering that Brazil “lives a full democracy” and that Brazilians “engage in politics like never before”.
“What is shrinking is the space of the left. Maybe that’s what’s really worrying her. It is shrinking because fewer and fewer Brazilians believe in an ideology that has only given us corruption and poverty,” Araújo said.
The space of freedom, development, and security in Brazil is increasing, he added.
Read here about Chile’s reaction.