RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) With each passing day, Brazil wakes up with the feeling that, more than a democracy, it is experiencing a mild dictatorship. Mild because President Jair Bolsonaro was elected at the polls and because, theoretically, the institutions are still officially standing.
But there is no doubt that the country has a growing feeling that such institutions, like Congress and the Supreme Court, are besieged by the President’s authoritarian decisions and the ongoing threats against them on social media.
The seeming change displayed by the President on Sunday during the rally in his favor at the Ministries Esplanade in Brasília, praising democracy and demanding respect for state institutions, surrounded by 11 of his Ministers, was only a strategy at a time when he finds himself plagued by a number of lawsuits that could result in his loss of office. It is his well-known tactic of taking one step back and two steps forward in his attempts at authoritarian escalation.
One could say that for the time being it is only a case of Bolsonaro and his armies threatening democracy, although at times the lines of a dictatorial regime have emerged clearly. There is concern that Bolsonaro is preparing an institutional coup supported by the military, according to the document published on Sunday by six former defense ministers, in which they remind the armed forces that they owe allegiance to the Constitution and that “they can only be called upon by one of the established powers to uphold order in the event of anarchy”. Fear is on the streets.
When at the State Council on April 22nd, in which several Army General Ministers took part, the President threatened to deploy the military to the streets; when the Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, can allow himself to say with impunity, at the aforementioned meeting, that the 11 members of the Federal Supreme Court are such “sons of bitches that they should be imprisoned”, and when the Minister of Women, Family and Human Rights, Damares Alves, openly calls for the governors to be imprisoned as well, with no one present to intervene and say that this was barbaric, then democracy is broken.
The President is committed to supporting a eugenics policy, not to say genocidal, in relation to the coronavirus epidemic that is costing thousands of lives. Not only does he attack the universal scientific consensus of fighting this tragedy, but he also hints that it matters little if the elderly and those who are chronically ill should die. It seems to him that only the workforce has a right to live. The economy, to him, is more important than the lives of thousands of innocent people.
Even before becoming President, Bolsonaro had stated: “I am an Army Captain. My specialty is killing, not healing anyone”. Hence his passion for weapons. The few times he is seen laughing is when he displays them and caresses them. Is it pleasure?
When a President challenges the authority of his own Minister of Health, shamelessly violating the norms of prevention imposed on the population to halt the spread of the epidemic, and even encourages disobedience, then democracy is in danger. This explains why in less than a month, amidst the escalation of the epidemic, two Health Ministers, both doctors, had to leave their posts because it was impossible to accept the President’s suicidal commands.
Bolsonaro mocks democracy when a union of entrepreneurs and lobbyists comes to the Supreme Court unannounced to demand a meeting with the President of the court, and it is Bolsonaro who sets the demands at the meeting.
And when, in a democratic regime, the President publicly insults journalists, threatens to punish media outlets, newspapers, and television networks by revoking licenses and official publicity and encouraging entrepreneurs to do the same? And when he insists on saying “I am the Constitution” and he is in charge of the country, as if the remaining state institutions should be at his command?
The president, a retired (or expelled?) Army Captain, bears a psychological trait that resembles those stubborn boys who, when they scolded, know how to take a step back to immediately take two forward. They always end up getting what they want. They say it’s also a trait of some madmen.
Today we know that establishing a dictatorial regime is possible regardless of the ballot box. We have examples right here in South America, as in Venezuela, where President Nicolás Maduro was elected and ended up establishing a dictatorship regime with the complicity of the army. Bolsonaro does not need the complicity of the military since he has them, by the hundreds, in the government and in other spheres of the state.
What assurance can the retired Captain President provide that at some point he will not be able to convince the Army that Brazil is suffering from an excess of democracy and that it would be better to curtail freedoms?
A President who, before completing his two years in office, finds himself rejected by the majority of the same population who voted for him and who is increasingly taking refuge in a minority group fed by his anti-democratic outbursts, his bigotry of seeing left-wing ghosts right under his bed and his tactics of stirring up the politics of hatred and his persecution complex can only be a threat to democracy.
And so that his authoritarian and violent tactics should not be lacking, his militias of unfortunate Nazifascist tradition that openly demand the death of democracy are starting to emerge with increasing frequency. And they no longer settle for slogans against democratic freedoms and their institutions and use brute force to attack their opponents in the finest fascist style.
And if all of this is serious and is starting to cause international concern and could be a hindrance for companies to invest in the country for fear of a constitutional rupture, it is no less serious that the state institutions that should and could stop this totalitarian temptation of the President, such as Congress and the Supreme Court, seem perplexed, not to say frightened, faced with his bravado and threats.
If the beginning is to claim prudence in the face of threats, the end is to kneel down on humbled knees before the tyrant rather than have the courage to say: “You will not cross this line”. This is the sacred limit of democracy.
In fact, more than 20 motions for impeachment against the President are sleeping in Congress without being addressed on the excuse that it would be a very slow and exhausting procedure. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court shields itself stating that it cannot take action without Legislative authorization. All this has a name: it is fear, if not complicity, since everyone knows – because it is already a predominant cry in the country – that Bolsonaro no longer represents the will of the majority.
Against Bolsonarism and its paraphernalia of hatred for democracy, there is also evidence of the deception made in the electoral campaign won by the Captain brandishing three flags of national renewal that were promptly sacrificed on the altar of the worst of politics. Bolsonaro and his men pledged at the time to put an end to the corruption that Lava Jato had begun to uncover and firmly fought.
They vowed to put an end to the concept of “old politics” that abased the essence of democracy by bending it to the interests of groups and figures in the political and even judicial world. Against it they proposed to strengthen the fight against the old corrupt practices of governance, just as they promised the nation “less Brasília and more Brazil,” that is, an economy with less State and greater openness to free initiative and to foreign capital. To do so, he placed two stars in the government: former Lava Jato judge Sérgio Moro in the Ministry of Justice and the liberal Paulo Guedes of the Chicago School of Economics.
The new government did not take long to expose its lie. In a few months, it burned its three flags and set in motion a persecution of democratic values, proving to be not only a changed government but a traitor to all its pledges. Brazil was deceived and today it pays a heavy price for that lie.
Not always in history have dictatorships been enforced with a coup d’état and an open institutional collapse. There are many ways to murder democracy and one of them is the tactic that the President of Brazil is using to intimidate institutions, heightening the violent instincts of extremist ideological minorities that serve as a wick to set the fire. Pure Mussolinian fascist itinerary.
Just as a person can be murdered in many ways, whether with weapons or with hunger, democracy can also ultimately be sacrificed to the tactic of undermining its institutions through fear and violence. The result is always the same: more poverty, less freedom, more clearance for the violent, greater international isolation, more contempt for life, and the murder of everything that smells of culture, science, the defense of human rights.
Dictators and their apprentices also tend to share the same common denominator, which is a special hunger and thirst for religion. Not for their values of freedom, but rather for their methods of numbing and terrorizing consciences. And Bolsonaro, so as not to be left behind, has already started placing God “above all”. But a God who today proves to be an accomplice of his totalitarian follies, not the God of freedom and passion for humanity and the excluded, the meek of heart and not the violent.
Is this what one wants for Brazil? So what do the other institutions, the democratic leaders, those who fought for a free country expect? Sleeping on achievements when the beast’s jaws begin to flaunt its teeth can be fatal. Every waiting day and truce to the threats against democracy can mean signing the sentence of a one-way road to tyranny.
Source: El País