Se Bolsonaro tivesse uma "estratégia meridional, como argumenta Jon Lee Anderson, da New Yorker, isso representaria um enorme progresso, pois significaria que haveria algo, ainda que minimamente racional, em lugar do caos criado pela famiglia Bolsonaro, com três zeros igualmente caóticos dividindo o trabalho para atrapalhar o governo, um na política externa, outro na interna e um terceiro sabe-se lá com quem exatamente, pois os vínculos com as milícias criminosas é o que foi reportado pela imprensa.
Ou seja, ainda falta um enorme progresso para que se chegue a um arremedo de estratégia.
Por enquanto, o que se tem é um "esquecimento" providencial de coisas do passado, das quais se encarregou de lembrar Jon Lee: “I would prefer that my son die in an accident than show up with some guy with a mustache.”
Mas Anderson também parece minimizar a gigantesca corrupção do regime lulopetista:
[Lula's] administration did little to diminish Brazil’s tradition of corruption, and not enough to reduce crime or develop industry,...".
De fato, Lula foi o maior mafioso quadrilheiro de toda a história do Brasil, o maior ladrão do hemisfério, um psicopata megalomaníaco.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Jair
Bolsonaro’s Southern Strategy
In
Brazil, a budding authoritarian borrows from the Trump playbook.
Jair Bolsonaro promises prosperity
and order. His critics fear tyranny.
Illustration by
Bráulio Amado; photograph by Simon Dawson / Bloomberg / Getty
The
authoritarian leaders taking power around the world share a vocabulary of
intolerance, insult, and menace. Jair Bolsonaro, who was elected President
of Brazil on
promises to end crime, right the economy, and “make Brazil great,” has spent
his career gleefully offending women, black people, environmentalists, and
gays. “I would be incapable of loving a homosexual son,” he has said. “I would
prefer that my son die in an accident than show up with some guy with a
mustache.” As a national legislator, he declared one political rival, Maria do
Rosário, “not worth raping.” Immigrants are “scum.” The United Nations is “a
bunch of communists.” He supports the torture of drug dealers, the use of
firing squads, and the empowerment of a hyper-aggressive police force. “A
policeman who doesn’t kill,” he has said, “isn’t a policeman.”
On
New Year’s Day, Bolsonaro was inaugurated in the capital city of Brasília.
Standing in the back of a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith convertible, he waved at
crowds of supporters, and they shouted back, “The captain has arrived!” “The
legend!” Bodyguards trotted alongside the car, flanked by uniformed cavalrymen
on elegant white horses. Bolsonaro is sixty-four, tall and slim, with sharply
parted dark hair and heroically bushy eyebrows. His third wife, Michelle, stood
next to him, waving at the masses.
After
the inaugural ceremony, Bolsonaro gave a speech outside Planalto, the
Presidential palace; huge video screens magnified his image for tens of
thousands of supporters. Many wore Brazilian flags draped over their shoulders
and T-shirts featuring the outline of Bolsonaro’s face, in the style of the
movie poster for “The Godfather.” At the ceremony, Bolsonaro had spoken broadly
of the need to “unite the people.” Now, addressing his most fervent supporters,
he could relax. He said that he had come to free them from the scourge of
socialism—an allusion to his left-leaning predecessors Luiz Inácio Lula da
Silva and Dilma Rousseff, who had governed from 2003 to 2016. “Our flag will
never be red,” he said. “It will be red only if we need to bleed over it.” The
crowd took up a chant: “Never red!”
A
former Army captain, Bolsonaro served seven undistinguished terms in the
Chamber of Deputies, Brazil’s highest legislative body, representing four
different political parties. Over twenty-seven years, he delivered some fifteen
hundred speeches and introduced more than a hundred and fifty bills, but only
two passed—one exempting computer equipment from taxation and another approving
a controversial cancer drug. Mostly, he spoke on behalf of the armed forces,
even calling for a restoration of the repressive military dictatorship that
governed Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In one interview, he discounted the idea
that democracy could bring order and prosperity: “You’ll only change things by
having a civil war and doing the work the military regime didn’t do. . . .
If a few innocent people die, that’s all right.”
Like
many autocrats, Bolsonaro came to power with a suddenness that alarmed the
élites. He had run a low-budget campaign, consisting mostly of a social-media
effort overseen by his son Carlos. At events with supporters, he posed for
selfies making a gesture as if he were shooting a machine gun. He promised to
“reconstruct the country”—and to return power to a political right that had
been in eclipse for decades. In the inaugural ceremony, he vowed to “rescue the
family, respect religions and our Judeo-Christian tradition, combat gender
ideology, conserving our values.”
Afterward,
Bolsonaro received a procession of foreign dignitaries, and as they stepped up
to pay their respects the crowd greeted them with cheers or boos. The Hungarian
autocrat Viktor Orbán got perfunctory applause; the bolsonaristas seemed
not to know who he was. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin
Netanyahu, who is fending off charges of fraud and bribery, got a riotous
cheer. Bolivia’s President, Evo Morales, the only left-wing leader to attend,
was subjected to shouts of “Get out, communist,” and “índio de merda”—“fucking
Indian.”
Despite
Bolsonaro’s divisive rhetoric, American conservatives were enthusiastic about
his Presidency. He had expressed leeriness of China and hostility toward
socialists in Cuba and Venezuela; he promised to move Brazil’s Embassy in
Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Donald Trump didn’t
attend the inauguration, but he tweeted his solidarity: “The USA is with you!”
Bolsonaro, who sees in Trump a kindred spirit and an opportunity, tweeted back,
“Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to
our people!”
Brasília,
built in the late nineteen-fifties, is a city of immense spaces, with sweeping
lawns and public buildings in curvilinear shapes—a “Jetsons”-era vision of
optimism for the future. As the seat of government, it is home to tens of
thousands of middle-class bureaucrats and their families. It is also a place
where destitute people camp out in improvised shelters alongside highways and
use grand fountains to wash their laundry. The country’s population, two
hundred and nine million people, is bitterly polarized. Violent crime is endemic.
In 2017, nearly sixty-four thousand Brazilians were murdered, an average of
about a hundred and seventy-five every day. The economy, after several years of
devastating recession, is virtually stagnant. Twenty-five per cent of the
population lives below the poverty line of five dollars and fifty cents a day.
A
decade ago, Brazil was prospering, amid a boom in oil and other commodities.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the President at the time, was a
charismatic leftist; the son of farmworkers, he had gone from shoeshine
boy to steelworker and union leader before taking office, in 2003. Lula was
popular, and his Workers’ Party (known by its Portuguese initials, P.T.)
instituted generous domestic programs. His administration did little to
diminish Brazil’s tradition of corruption, and not enough to reduce crime or
develop industry, but, as long as commodities prices stayed high, the economy
thrived. In 2005, his government finished paying off a fifteen-billion-dollar
loan to the International Monetary Fund, a year ahead of schedule.
In
2010, Lula stepped aside, having reached the legal limit of two consecutive
terms, and his protégée Dilma Rousseff—a leftist guerrilla in her youth—became
Brazil’s first female President. But commodities prices were slipping, and in
her second term a corruption scandal exploded around the state-run oil company,
Petrobras. Brazilians came to the streets to protest, and Rousseff’s political
rivals sensed an opportunity. In 2016, they began hearings to impeach her, on
charges of improperly using loans from state banks to obscure a budget deficit.
Rousseff’s supporters complained of hypocrisy, noting that many members of the
Brazilian legislature had been indicted for crimes ranging from bribery and
money laundering to kidnapping and slavery. (The legislator who led the
impeachment effort, Eduardo Cunha, was subsequently convicted of taking forty
million dollars in bribes.) But the bid to remove Rousseff worked. It also helped draw
attention to Bolsonaro. During the proceedings, he dedicated his vote to Carlos
Brillhante Ustra, who had commanded the military unit that captured and
tortured Rousseff when she was a young guerrilla.
For
Brazilians watching the news in recent years, the country can appear to be
perilously in decline. An enormous scandal—called Operação Lava Jato, or
“Operation Car Wash”—seems to involve every third official in the government.
Two dams have collapsed at mine sites in the countryside, releasing millions of
gallons of waste. Last September, an accidental fire broke out at the two-hundred-year-old
National Museum, destroying an irreplaceable ethnographic collection. “The country
is overwhelmed by a terrible feeling that we have failed as a nation,” Gunter
Axt, a Brazilian historian, told me. “And perhaps it is true.”
When
Bolsonaro won his party’s nomination, in July, 2018, he seemed to offer a total
inversion of political power and ideology. The military, despite a
constitutional mandate to stay out of politics, backed him openly, as did a
raft of wealthy business interests. His strongest competitor, Lula, was sidelined;Sérgio Moro, the judge who oversaw the
Car Wash trials, had sentenced him to twelve years in prison, on charges of
corruption and money laundering. Still, Lula retained a large lead in the
polls, and he appealed to the Supreme Court to allow him to remain free so that
he could run in the election. The appeal was denied, a few days after the
commander of the Brazilian Army suggested on Twitter that the armed forces
wanted him in jail. This February, Lula, who is seventy-three, was given an
additional thirteen-year sentence. Moro is now Bolsonaro’s minister of justice.
Bolsonaro’s
Vice-President, Hamilton Mourão, told me that his boss’s greatest virtue was
his humble roots. “People have to understand, he comes from one of the poorest
parts of São Paulo state,” he said. “He is a self-made man. He understands the
problems of poor people, and he says what they want to hear.” Bolsonaro is
often compared with Trump, but Mourão disputed the analogy. “Trump has always
had a lot of money,” he said. “Bolsonaro was never rich. But both came in the
moments that their countries needed them.”
Bolsonaro
grew up in Eldorado, a sleepy town in Brazil’s “banana heartland,” south of São
Paulo. His parents, who were of Italian and German descent, moved there when he
was a boy, and his father, an itinerant dentist, set up a practice. One of six
children—several of whom have never left Eldorado—Bolsonaro did not get along
with his father, whom he has described as a heavy drinker who inspired discord
in the family. He has claimed, perhaps straining credulity, that he did not
speak to his father until he was twenty-eight, at which point he stopped hoping
for him to change and decided to buy him a drink; after that they became “good
friends.”
In
1970, during the first decade of military rule, a Brazilian Army unit descended
on Eldorado in pursuit of Carlos Lamarca, an officer who had gone rogue and
joined a Marxist guerrilla group. As the soldiers ransacked houses and searched
the woods for hideouts, Bolsonaro, who was fifteen, was enthralled; he offered
to help them in their search.
Three
years later, Bolsonaro was accepted into the Army’s cadet corps, and he soon
transferred to the élite Agulhas Negras (Black Needles) Military Academy. While
he was training, Brazil’s Army was engaged in a vicious campaign to eliminate
leftists. Thousands of Brazilians were detained in secret torture centers, and
more than four hundred were killed, their bodies disappeared. Bolsonaro apparently
played no part in the repression, but he hasn’t condemned it. He has said of
the military regime that its “biggest mistake was to torture and not kill.”
In
1985, Brazil returned to democratic rule, and the military returned to its
barracks. Soon afterward, Bolsonaro wrote an unauthorized magazine article in
which he complained about the military hierarchy and argued for increased wages
for the troops. His superiors imprisoned him for two weeks, for creating
an “environment of unrest.” A year later, he faced a more serious charge: as
part of his campaign to increase wages, he had conspired to put pressure on
commanders by setting off grenades at military garrisons around Rio. Although
he proclaimed his innocence, investigators found sketches for the bombing plan
drawn in his hand. Bolsonaro was found guilty by a disciplinary committee but
cleared in the Superior Military Court, where a majority of judges decided that
there was insufficient evidence; he was allowed to enter the reserves as a
captain, with a full pension. There were reports that Bolsonaro had been
treated favorably, to prevent unrest in the lower ranks—although several judges
chided him for being “consumed by vanity.”
Around
that time, Bolsonaro won a seat on Rio’s city council, representing the
Christian Democratic Party. In 1990, he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies,
where he became known for intemperate behavior, registering more disciplinary
proceedings than any of his peers. In 2003, he grew violent during a dispute
with the legislator Maria do Rosário, twice shoving her roughly in the chest.
When she protested, he said that she was a “slut” and told her to “go cry.” In
2014, he called out to Rosário during a congressional session, crudely
reminding her of the incident. Bolsonaro was fined twenty-five hundred dollars
for having “offended his colleague’s honor.”
During
Bolsonaro’s Presidential campaign, women protested his candidacy, under the
slogan #NotHim. Nevertheless, he got more than half the female vote. When he
was denounced, it often seemed only to strengthen his support. Last September,
a month before the first round of voting, he visited the provincial city of
Juiz de Fora. He was relaxed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, as his supporters
carried him through the streets on their shoulders. Suddenly, a man carrying a
knife concealed in a plastic bag lurched forward and stabbed him in the
stomach. The attack nearly killed Bolsonaro; his liver, lung,
and intestines were punctured, and he lost a great deal of blood. But it gave
him a clear bounce in the polls. On October 7th, he won forty-six per cent of
the vote. His nearest opponent—Fernando Haddad, called in at the last minute to
replace the imprisoned Lula—got twenty-nine per cent. In the second round, Bolsonaro beat Haddad again, and
he began to speak of the attack in providential terms. At his inauguration, he
thanked God for saving him so that he could “carry out the honorable mission of
governing Brazil.”
In late
November, Bolsonaro appeared at an anniversary celebration for Brazil’s
Paratrooper Infantry Brigade, from which he graduated, in 1977. The Brigade is
stationed inside the Military Village, a fastidiously maintained complex on the
run-down outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. When Bolsonaro arrived, in a procession
of black S.U.V.s, officers in camouflage swarmed around, greeting him with
salutes and affectionate hugs. Bolsonaro stood at the podium, watching with
satisfaction, as parachutists jumped from planes and descended onto a wide
lawn.
Later,
Bolsonaro spoke to a group of reporters, who seemed unfazed by the habitual
abuse that he directed at them. One asked about rumors that he was using a
colostomy bag after the assault, and that he would have to undergo more
surgery. He said yes, with a disdainful look. Asked whether his son Carlos
might join his administration, Bolsonaro replied defensively: “My children are
still with me, without any problem. He can have a place in the government if he
so desires.”
Bolsonaro’s
three sons from his first marriage, who are in their mid-thirties, are a
central part of his political team. He calls them Zero One, Zero Two, and Zero
Three. Flávio, the eldest, won a seat in the Senate last year. Carlos, who
helped run his father’s campaign, is an alderman in the Rio city council. Eduardo,
the youngest, is possibly the most extreme of the brothers. In the impeachment
proceedings against Rousseff, he stood behind his father, mouthing along with
his words as he cast his vote in the name of her torturer. A former federal
policeman, Eduardo recently joined Steve Bannon’s
far-right organization, the Movement, as its Latin America representative.
(Bolsonaro also has a fourth son, Renan, a law student, from his second marriage,
and a young daughter, Laura, with his current wife.)
Bolsonaro’s
administration is heavily stocked with military leaders; eight of the
twenty-two cabinet positions are filled by ex-generals. His ideas are informed
by Olavo de Carvalho, a philosopher and a former astrologer who has attracted a
following with eccentric interpretations of works by Machiavelli, Descartes,
and others. Carvalho, seventy-one, lives in Richmond, Virginia, where he
identifies with American “redneck” culture by hunting bears, smoking
cigarettes, and drinking. Two current cabinet ministers were appointed on his
recommendation: the education minister, Ricardo Vélez Rodríguez, a conservative
theologian; and the foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo. Both subscribe to
Carvalho’s notions that “cultural Marxism” has contaminated Western society and
that climate change is a Marxist plot. Carvalho lends a patina of
intellectualism to Bolsonaro’s proposals; recently Carvalho told an interviewer
that Brazil’s problem with violent crime might have been averted if the
military regime had killed the right twenty thousand people.
Much of
Bolsonaro’s political support comes from agribusiness, the arms industry, and
the religious right, a nexus of power referred to as the Three “B”s—beef,
bullets, and Bibles. In Brasília, I met with Alberto Fraga, one of his
oldest friends and a close political ally, who headed the “bullet bloc” in
congress for two decades, until a recent conviction on bribery charges. (Fraga
is appealing the decision.) In office, Bolsonaro had moved quickly to loosen
gun laws, and Fraga, who was a police officer for twenty-eight years, was
pleased that more people would be able to own weapons. (It was also good for
business; the stock value of Taurus, Brazil’s largest gun manufacturer, has
doubled since Bolsonaro secured his party’s nomination.) “Guns don’t increase crime,”
Fraga said. “Public policies do.” He had forty-eight guns himself, he told me,
shrugging: “I like them.”
Bolsonaro
posits authoritarian violence as the way to solve Brazil’s crime problem. In
one television interview, he said that officers who kill dozens of
troublemakers “need to be decorated, not prosecuted.” His allies, like Trump’s,
at least feign exasperation at their leader’s rhetorical excesses. Fraga told
me, “I think that’s just him talking. We need to get him to control that.” But
these sorts of views are common among his loyalists. The newly elected governor
of Rio de Janeiro state recently initiated a “shoot to kill” policy against
armed criminals and recommended that police helicopters patrolling the favelas
carry snipers to “slaughter” anyone openly carrying a weapon. In February,
police officers in the Fallet-Fogueteiro favela killed thirteen young men, most
of whom were reportedly executed after they had surrendered.
Bolsonaro’s
programs risk giving greater license to a police force that is famously violent
and corrupt. For years, Marielle Franco, a popular left-wing city councilwoman,
spoke out against extrajudicial killings by police officers in the city’s
favelas. In March, 2018, Franco, an openly bisexual black woman, was killed in
downtown Rio.
One
afternoon, I visited Marcelo Freixo, a fifty-one-year-old congressman from
Franco’s party, who has spent years investigating Rio’s milícias—paramilitary
groups, linked to the police, that compete for territory with criminal gangs in
the favelas. Because he has received many death threats, he lives in a closely
guarded building, next to an Army base, and travels with armed guards provided
by the state. He told me that he believed Franco was killed by former members
of the police’s Élite Squad, working for a group of hit men known as the Crime
Bureau. “Her assassination was the most sophisticated in the history of modern
Rio,” he said. Franco was tracked by men driving a car with a cloned license
plate, and killed with four precise shots to the head; the weapon was a
submachine gun often used by Rio’s military police. Freixo surmised that her
killers were hired by rival politicians. “You can’t understand Rio unless you
understand the organized crime here,” he said. “Naples has nothing on us. It’s
not a parallel state—it is the state.”
Franco’s
killing has led to one of the Bolsonaro administration’s biggest scandals, as
the Brazilian press has noted links between suspects and the President’s
family. Flávio served in the state legislature alongside Franco, and the two
sometimes clashed. Like his father, he has argued to legalize the milícias,
in the hope of putting pressure on drug-trafficking gangs. In January, it was
revealed that Flávio had employed the wife and the mother of Adriano Magalhães da
Nóbrega, a former policeman who was now the leader of the Crime Bureau. Nóbrega
was wanted in connection with the killing, but he had fled before he could be
detained. As an investigation began, Flávio persuaded a friendly judge to have
it quashed, but another judge reversed the ruling, and the inquiry has
continued. Flávio maintains that he has “nothing to hide,” and Jair Bolsonaro
says that he believes his son—though he has promised to let justice take its
course. Steve Bannon dismissed the case as politically motivated—a witch hunt.
The forces of “cultural Marxism,” he said, had attacked the Bolsonaros, who
were “extraordinary people.”
The
investigation has produced no conclusions, but there has been some political
fallout. Jean Wyllys, one of the country’s three openly gay lawmakers, was on a
trip abroad when the news broke about Flávio’s connection with the Crime
Bureau. Wyllys, a friend and political ally of Franco’s, announced that he
would not return to Brazil; he did not want to choose between living with
bodyguards and risking death. Wyllys was an antagonist of Bolsonaro’s. When
Bolsonaro cast his vote during Rousseff’s impeachment, Wyllys spat at him.
After Wyllys announced that he was not returning, Bolsonaro tweeted, “Great
Day!” with a thumbs-up emoji. Freixo, from his apartment in Rio, shot back:
“How about you start behaving like President of the Republic and stop acting
like a brat? Show some dignity.”
On the left,
the new administration has inspired fears that the country is “going back to 1964,”
the year that the military seized power. But some liberals have strained to
understand the new order on its own terms. One of the most visible is Fernando
Gabeira, a founder of Brazil’s Green Party who is legendary for his involvement
in a Marxist guerrilla group that, in 1969, kidnapped the American Ambassador
to Brazil. In the eighties, Gabeira gained additional celebrity by posing for
seaside photographs wearing only a crocheted bikini bottom.
Gabeira
is now seventy-eight. A lean man with silver hair and rimless glasses, he lives
in an apartment near Ipanema Beach. Working as a television interviewer, he
spoke with Bolsonaro supporters during the campaign, trying to understand their
motivations. Gabeira told me that he saw Bolsonaro’s victory as a reaction
to the “moral collapse” of the left, owing to the P.T.’s corruption scandals.
In his view, “the left is finished unless it deals with its failings and
engages in self-criticism.” Many leftists evidently believe that the criticism
is better applied elsewhere; after Gabeira had a friendly exchange with
Bolsonaro on the air, he was accused of “normalizing barbarism.”
Brazil,
particularly in the countryside, is a traditionalist, Catholic country, and at
times the urban left has made it easy for Bolsonaro to score points. In Rio, a
woman who works as a literary translator told me about a fracas in her son’s
public high school. Last year, amid a debate on gender identity, the chancellor
decreed that the female school uniform was valid for both sexes, and some male
students and teachers began wearing skirts to class. Conservative parents were
furious. “You can just imagine,” she said. The school had also hosted a
commemoration of China’s bloody Cultural Revolution, with activities that
uncritically celebrated Mao’s “achievements.” Worst of all, the teachers
belonged to a communist-linked union, and often went on strike, sometimes for
months. A parents’ group was formed to get the children back into the
classroom, with little success. “The Maoist and gay stuff was crazy, but we
were able to deal with it,” she said. “We couldn’t get the union to budge.” She
laughed bitterly and held open her hands. “And so now we have the fascists.”
In
situations like these, Bolsonaro has deftly exploited conservative resentments.
Under Rousseff, the government offended traditionalists by legalizing same-sex
marriage and designing materials for schools to combat homophobia. During the
Presidential race, Bolsonaro repeatedly told crowds that the P.T. had tried to
introduce a “gay kit” to their children. A rash of messages linked to his
campaign arrived on voters’ phones, accusing P.T. candidates of endorsing
pedophilia.
For
gay Brazilians, these actions intensified a sense of siege. There has been an
alarming increase in homophobic attacks. Brazil already had the world’s highest
levels of lethal violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people, with four hundred and
forty-five murders reported in 2017. During the Presidential election, some
fifty attacks took place that were directly linked to Bolsonaro’s supporters;
among them were at least two incidents in which trans women were killed by men
who invoked his name.
