By HOMERO SANTIAGO*

The episode at the Pinheiros terminal in the capital of São Paulo rekindles terrifying memories of newspaper stands blown up, an explosive letter at the OAB in 1980, and Riocentro in 1981.

1.

The Pinheiros terminal, in the capital of São Paulo, houses 41 urban bus lines and connects with it the yellow metro line 4 and the emerald CPTM line 9; hundreds of thousands of people use it daily, especially during peak hours, coming from all over and going to all corners of the city.

On March 12, according to security camera footage, at around 5:30 a.m., a man left two bags near the line for bus stop 209P-10 (Cachoeirinha – Pinheiros Terminal) and left. Each bag contained a bomb; one exploded shortly afterward, and the other was later disarmed by the police bomb squad.

Along with the artifacts, pamphlets were found with the following slogans, as reported in the mainstream press: “Down with the coup generals! Death to the fascists! Long live Maoism! Long live the People's War! Long live the Democratic Revolution! Communist Party of Brazil – PCB”

In these brief lines, two details immediately draw attention. Firstly, the chronological confusion, since an apparently current reference (“coup generals”) is followed by a series of formulas typical of the world of the middle of the last century (“people’s war”, for example) that no longer have any meaning (not even the Chinese Communist Party proclaims “long live Maoism!”); overall, the temporal confusion leaves one with doubt: are the “generals” in question those of today or those of yesterday?

The second striking fact is in the company that claims authorship of the pamphlet and, by extension, of the attack: “PCB”, which in reality is the acronym for the Brazilian Communist Party, and not the organization whose name is spelled out in full: the Communist Party of Brazil, PC do B; how can we believe that the dedicated militant who carried out the action mixed up the balls, that is, those blessed letters that in history determine a not insignificant political difference?

At the very least, these details make us wonder. Were the bombs the work of a lone wolf among the crazed and ignorant, or were they the tip of a larger operation (albeit poorly executed due to failure) to spread fear? In fact, what else was the aim of the bombs other than to terrorize, by leaving two bombs next to a line of buses?

2.

The episode rekindles terrifying memories of newspaper stands blown up, an explosive letter at the OAB in 1980, and Riocentro in 1981, when two clumsy military men accidentally blew themselves up while committing a terrorist act against a show during the Labor Day celebrations (one died on the spot; the other, in addition to his very serious injuries, lost his tongue and never said anything about it).

Now, who is interested in spreading fear?

In the history of the Brazilian far right, both civilian and military, the tradition has always been to resort to terrorist acts when feeling threatened or too weak in the current political balance of power. This was the case when protesting against Ernesto Geisel’s “opening up”; it was the case during the redemocratization process or while the Constituent Assembly was working; it was the case even when it was no longer possible to impose minor demands such as salaries; and it is worth remembering that Jair Bolsonaro had his days as a firecracker in the 1980s, when he planned to set off time bombs in military units in Rio de Janeiro (he was convicted and later acquitted).

Due to tradition, the question remains: could something like this be starting again? The old-fashioned vocabulary makes us suspicious of minds haunted by the Cold War and the communist threat; minds that were those of the military in 1964 continue to be those of Captain Jair Bolsonaro and that should not differ much from those of the crazy people who tried to blow up a tanker truck near Brasília airport in December 2022 and those of the coup vandals of January 8, 2023.

Invariably, the aim is to create panic and thus confuse the population; in a particularly gruesome way, the perpetrators of the misdeeds are even attributed to a political opponent. Although the expedient of spreading fear and demonizing opponents is not unprecedented, the pettiness and lack of common sense (not to mention basic knowledge) of these people never ceases to amaze.

But who is interested in spreading fear right now?

Let us make a little effort to understand how the action at the Pinheiros terminal worked, which perhaps by no coincidence took place precisely in the days leading up to a decision by the Supreme Court on whether or not the former president captain will be a defendant, and in the midst of investigations into the attempted coup d'état in 2022, with a former vice-president general in prison and an ongoing campaign for amnesty for those responsible for the regrettable January 8th.

Now, it is not very difficult to conceive the following: if the population becomes convinced that those who want the coup plotters punished are violent and seek to pressure public opinion through terrorist acts, it will not be impossible for the population affected by fear to gradually rise up against the scarers who want to corner them.

3.

Let us sketch the sordidness as follows: P causes V; X suffers with V;

therefore, X stands against P.

In line with the pamphlets found at the Pinheiros terminal, P should be read as a party; however, we can also read, under the superficial reference, a political position that defends the punishment of the coup plotters of 22-23 (or also of 64, since as said above the chronological confusion is enormous). Now V refers to violence, in this case bombs and their potential effect, caused on X, under which can be subsumed anyone who, suffering violence and suffering fear, tends to justifiably oppose P, which functions in the context as the fusion of a terrorist agent and a position in favor of punishing coup plotters.

All things considered, in political terms, terror serves to demonize precisely the cause that the pamphlet wants to make us believe it defends and the party (let's say, the entire left-wing political spectrum) that supposedly signs it. On the contrary, the coup plotters (of today and yesterday, it should be said) are the ones who, when all is said and done and the bombs set off, seem to profit from the whole farce. Only they.

It is not impossible that the reasoning developed here contains a considerable amount of conspiratorial fantasy. I sincerely hope so. Otherwise, March 12th will have marked the beginning of a dark time for Brazilian democracy, the repetition of acts that have already caused it much suffering and that portend bad, terrible things to come.

N 'The 18th of Brumaire Marx suggested, following Hegel, that great events and characters in history are staged twice; he only noted that “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce”. Well, what can we say about the stupidities, evils and brutalities repeatedly practiced by our mediocre and execrable characters, like those “ten-star generals”, who presciently lamented the Legião Urbana in the 1980s, in Country Western, who ordered “a bomb to be placed in a newspaper stand” while they hid behind the tables “with their asses in their hands”?

It seems that we have descended into a comedy of gross and laughable errors, in which the characters get acronyms wrong, try to make texts disappear by moving them to the computer's trash, grab onto truck cabs to overthrow the regime, and so on. It's a shame that we don't stop at this farce. The uncontainable laughter is accompanied by serious concern about the direction of the nation; it's not impossible that we are also watching the opening scenes of a musical revue that comes to proclaim bad news, announcing the chilling days to come.

What happened recently at the Pinheiros terminal could reveal and anticipate many terrible things, or it could mean nothing. Let's hope that's what happens, sending those explosive bags to the bag of insignificant facts in our history. However, whatever the case, the little rodent remains active. Is it as common as leaving an umbrella on a bar counter, especially when the drizzle has stopped, to leave the house with two bombs and leave them at a bus stop, in that kind of accidental way, just because your hand was heavy?

Wow, what intriguing bags!

* Homer Santiago He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at USP.

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