Opinion: AMANuensis, or how to “commemorate” March 31st

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) Fifty-seven years ago today, on the evening of March 31, 1964, the Brazilian military high command carried out a plan to overthrow Brazil’s elected civil government and install a military dictatorship. The coup found little initial resistance, and only 7 people were killed on April Fool’s Day when President João Goulart resigned and fled the country.

The soi-disant “revolution” lasted 21 years, with generals, admirals and brigadiers running the country until 1985, when Brazil once again elected (albeit indirectly) a civilian president – Tancredo Neves.

During that time, the military arrested, tortured, deported, “disappeared” and executed thousands of Brazilians. The exact number of killings is unknown, as most records were expunged.

Jair Bolsonaro, when he was still a backbench member of Congress, infamously stated (July 8, 2016) the “mistake of the dictatorship was that it tortured rather than killed.”

In March 2021, as Brazil languishes under the presidency of a former Army captain whose ministerial cabinet is dominated by compliant generals, the number of Brazilians killed by Covid-19 every single day – EVERY SINGLE DAY! – has surpassed 3,000 – a number far exceeding the total executed during 1964-1985.

Yesterday, March 30, 2021, Brazil’s newly-installed Minister of Defense, General Walter Braga Netto, issued the Daily Agenda to the military, calling for the “celebration” of the “Movement of March 31st”, which led to the “pacification” and “redemocratization” of the country.

Braga Netto thus echoed Bolsonaro, who in 2016 said, “March 31st, 1964; yes, we should commemorate this date. After all, it was a new September 7th.”   [Brazil’s Independence Day]”

Braga Netto issued his pronouncement immediately after he summarily dismissed the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, who had all publicly supported his predecessor, General Fernando Azevedo e Silva, when he affirmed that the Armed Forces are state institutions, not political institutions.

Jair Bolsonaro has never believed the military should stay out of politics. He has not only appointed them to politically sensitive ministerial positions but has also, tellingly, allocated to them the offices physically closest to his own in the Palácio do Planalto (Brazil’s White House).

What explains Bolsonaro’s infatuation with keeping the military in power? This writer has a simple answer: “AMAN” – the acronym of the Academia Militar de Agulhas Negras, Brazil’s West Point.

Since 1944, AMAN’s campus has been located in Resende, nestled beneath the eponymous “Black Needles” peaks straddling the states of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais.

Senior professors at AMAN, all of them military officers, were, in the early 1960’s, in the forefront of the military’s discontent with Brazil’s left-leaning governments, which they saw as seeking to turn Brazil into a second Cuba – a communist stronghold.

These officers turned AMAN into a sort of activist think tank, espousing the right-wing political and philosophical bases for the March 31, 1964 coup d’état. They also, after the successful military takeover, continued to drum these ideas into the heads of cadets.

Jair Bolsonaro entered AMAN as a cadet in 1973 and graduated in 1977. All of the generals he has awarded with cabinet positions were likewise at AMAN during similar periods, and all of them underwent the same indoctrination as Bolsonaro.

Part of the AMAN indoctrination is that, in any military struggle, there will be “collateral damage”, sometimes known as “acceptable losses”. In the struggle against Covid-19, Bolsonaro clearly regards 300,000+ deaths – 300,000+ DEATHS! – as acceptable losses. Whenever he “laments” them he follows up by saying “stop whining” or “get over it”.

The 1970s AMAN indoctrination has manifestations in several political and economic arenas. Bolsonaro’s blithe acceptance of the discredited “cultural Marxism” theory, and his a priori rejection of anything “communist”, including vaccines, can both be attributed to AMAN.

Bolsonaro’s vision of the Amazon also reflects his AMAN training. During the dictatorship, the military decided they needed to “open up” the Amazon to economic development, as well as protect the country from invasion by communist guerillas using the jungle.

Under the banner of “Order and Progress”, completion of the north/south Belém/Brasília highway and the east/west “Transamazonica” highway decimated vast stretches of rainforest, while displacing thousands of indigenous peoples.  For Bolsonaro, as for the military dictators, this was merely “collateral damage”.

Put another way, Bolsonaro is not “genocidal”, because he is not purposefully seeking to exterminate people; rather, he simply does not care if people die – for him, death is normal and acceptable.

To close, dictionaries define “amanuensis” as a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another. In this writer’s opinion, Jair Bolsonaro is now, and always has been, an “AMANunensis” – he is copying what was written for him and his fellow cadets during their time at AMAN.