Opinion: the criminalization of Bolsonaro by the media and necessary comparisons

By Daniel Lara Farías*

(Opinion) Even before becoming president, Jair Bolsonaro is the victim of various attacks from the left-wing media dealing with Latin America, accusing him of being an ultra-right-winger, fascist, right-wing extremist, etc.

It is customary on both sides of the Atlantic if we compare and weigh the recent case of Giorgia Meloni in Italy, with whom the leftist media still do not agree on the label to be given, because where before she was called fascist, now she is called post-fascist.

Before it was called ultra-right, it is now called right-wing radical or traditionalist. And so on, little by little.

But Bolsonaro was least affected by this attack.

On the contrary, without them realizing it, they helped him to position himself in the electoral spectrum, fed up with the corruption of the left that had been in power for two decades, applying the recipe of the São Paulo Forum and its corrupt and corrupting tool of Odebrecht, to buy adhesions inside and outside Brazil.

Thus, by calling him a right-wing extremist, they helped him to position himself as the opposite of that left-wing that had fallen in preferences.

Given the impossibility of defeating him electorally or even argumentatively, the worst attack would be physical.

Bolsonaro’s rhetorical level in the face of the outrages of Lula da Silva and his acolytes of the “Workers’ Party” PT was not refutable since the facts were in plain sight, with two presidents indicted before the courts.

Therefore, he had to be killed. And they almost succeeded.

Adélio Bispo de Oliveira, a left-wing militant, supporter of Lula da Silva and fervent admirer of Maduro, Chávez and Fidel, went from diatribes in social networks to action.

He took a dagger, got as close as he could to Bolsonaro at a public rally, and stabbed him in the stomach.

He took Bolsonaro out of circulation in the toughest phase of the campaign and put his life at serious risk.

It was a thwarted assassination, no doubt. Bolsonaro depended on operating rooms and medical care for two years, including a colostomy that even limited his movements and public performances.

Nothing is said about that in the press that places him as a “promoter of hatred” but never as a victim of red hatred.

NECESSARY COMPARISONS

If we verify the deployment and the attention that the alleged attack on Cristina Kirchner still arouses a month later, the comparison is infamous in its totality.

In a gathering of acolytes in front of her house, the lady was approached by a guy who had been photographed with her several times as her supporter.

He pulled out a gun and did not shoot for reasons not yet fully clarified.

Either because his intention was not at any time to kill or because he had the intention but failed to materialize the fact, just look at the images of both events.

Bolsonaro’s gesture of pain when he was stabbed.

The work of his security team to remove him. His followers’ actions surround the place where the frustrated assassin was arrested, asking to take justice into their own hands.

On the other hand, Mrs. Kirchner was not removed from the place and continued her tour of hugs and kisses with salaried followers in the hooligan association La Cámpora, led by her son Máximo and financed with public payrolls.

What did the left-wing press say?

The only thing missing was to ask the Argentine Pope to canonize in life the martyred citizen, guilty of crimes against the Argentine treasury and suddenly enriched during her and her husband’s stay in the Casa Rosada.

The world has been urged to reject the horrible attack, which has also been almost equated with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke because of the hurricanes of civil war that could have been unleashed if the attack had been carried out.

Of course, the lines between the two events in Brazil and Argentina cross at the moment when the accusations against Bolsonaro for not having condemned the attack against Kirchner promptly start up again.

Once again, the man who won a democratic election in a fair fight is accused of being a “fascist” for not speaking out seconds after the event and asking for prayers for Kirchner’s health.

His response, days later, gives an account of the mood that the public judgment against the Brazilian had reached: “The lady does not sympathize with me, but I regret what happened to her, and I also regret that when an attempt was made to assassinate me, the left did not show solidarity with me.”

Bolsonaro was prudent. Because in reality, what the left-wing press did, even in Argentina, was to accuse Bolsonaro of a “fake,” a false flag attack to stir up public opinion and victimize himself in the campaign’s final stretch.

Not a word about the political affiliation of the frustrated assassin. Not a word about the severity indicated by the medical team.

Not a word about the temperance of the president, who remained in office despite the medical consequences and painful recovery he had to live through during the first three years of his government.

Has Kirchner been accused in the same way? No.

In fact, in the course of the investigations into the Bolsonaro case, the possibility of prosecuting the attacker was ruled out because he was supposedly a psychiatric dissociative, not imputable for his condition.

Of course, the main dissociation is being a socialist, which should count not only as pathology but also as a criminal record, given the cases. But the issue is different here.

The issue is that the left will always justify any attack, action, or violent act against those considered ultra-right, fascists, or any adjective thrown randomly at those who disagree with socialist ideas.

More of the same.

The normal thesis of socialism poses violence as the midwife of history. Thus, when an attempt is made to assassinate Bolsonaro, either it is “fake” or not a crime.

When an attempt is made to assassinate Kirchner, it is an act of war that should be universally condemned, and as a consequence, the woman prosecuted for corruption should be left alone and allowed to continue to profit from national budgets for personal and family gain.

Having understood this association, it remains to be said that whatever the electoral outcome in Brazil, Bolsonaro will have survived the left’s attack, and the left will always denigrate any favorable outcome for the current president.

He will be condemned as a continuist fascist if he wins the elections. If he is defeated, he will be condemned as a fascist loser.

If he continues to live, he will be condemned even more, for as a fascist, he deserves neither life nor commiseration.

And his frustrated assassins will always deserve the lax treatment of justice.

Nothing new.

* Journalist by vocation. Although his academic background includes his studies at the School of International Studies of the Universidad Central de Venezuela, where he graduated in 2002, he has dedicated the last decade to intense activity in the media inside and outside his country.

Dedicated to politics, first as a social-democratic activist and then as an apostate of all left-wing tendencies, he has been a member of the Venezuelan media for the last ten years.