By LISZT VIEIRA*
In the history of Brazil, nothing compares to the ongoing destruction of the nation's body and soul.
One of the possible starting points of modernity in Brazil was the Revolution of 30 and the government of Getúlio Vargas who, during the dictatorship from 1930 to 1945, and during his democratic government from 1950 to 1954, laid the foundations of a national industrialization project. with social protection, according to the Labor Legislation of the CLT.
Many criticisms can be made of the Vargas government, but it is undeniable that it was a milestone in the historical modernization of an agrarian and archaic Brazil, dominated by landowners, with nostalgia for the slave quarters. The heirs of this project of modernizing the country through industrialization were mainly the PT governments, attacked by neoliberal capitalism and its media under the pretext of combating corruption.
After the impeachment of former President Dilma, the deindustrialization of the country advanced by leaps and bounds. In the 1980s, the weight of the manufacturing industry in GDP was 33%, today it is 16%. In the last five years, foreign trade in this sector went from a surplus to a deficit of 65 billion dollars. In 2015, Brazil had 384,7 thousand industrial establishments and, at the end of last year, the estimate was that the number had dropped to 348,1 thousand. In six years, 36,6 factories were extinguished, which is equivalent to an average of 17 factories closed per day in the period. The numbers are from a study carried out by the National Confederation of Trade in Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC) for the Estadão/Broadcast (USP Journal, 4/3/2021). The Temer government and, mainly, the Bolsonaro government, strengthened the agro-export base of primary products, without adding value through industrial processing.
But, in the history of Brazil, nothing compares to the ongoing destruction of the nation's body and soul. Scorched earth in education, health, culture and, literally, in the environment. Destruction of rights and independent foreign policy. The current Government denied the pandemic, boycotted security measures, sabotaged the vaccine throughout 2020. We will soon reach 500 deaths, which in no way affects the genocidal president.
Behind it is the neoliberal vision of Milton Friedman, who advocated the destruction of everything and then rebuilding it in the neoliberal model of privatization of public services. Writer Naomi Klein tells in her book “The Shock Doctrine – The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” that Friedman welcomed Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city of New Orleans in 2005, bringing down a large number of public schools. He proposed to take advantage of the chaos to privatize the entire education system.
In the case of the current president of Brazil, there is an aggravating factor. Considered a psychopath or sociopath, he is undoubtedly a perverse being which, in psychoanalysis, means taking pleasure in the pain of the other. The more pain and death, the more pleasure. Since taking office, the president has made several proposals that cause an increase in the number of deaths, from removing the baby's protective seat in cars, suppressing prohibitions in traffic legislation on the roads, promoting agglomerations without a mask, to sabotaging the vaccine.
His project is to install a military dictatorship in the country, with him at the head, obviously. He is contaminating, like a plague, all national institutions, waging a veritable War on Democracy. Nothing is immune to this authoritarian onslaught, not even the Army, as we saw a little while ago with the Army Commander's refusal to punish the insubordination of General Pazuello who, contrary to the Army's Disciplinary Regulations, participated in a political rally alongside Bolsonaro .
Even more serious is his objective of raising the PMs to strike a blow in the event of an electoral defeat next year. For this, it will not be necessary for the tanks to leave the barracks. All it takes is for the tanks not to leave the barracks to prevent the coup. We have already seen this film in Bolivia.
All this to keep Brazil on the path of a brutal setback, of a dictatorship supported by religious fundamentalism, by the financial market, by the military who occupy high positions in the Government and by an increasingly reduced segment of the electorate that is now limited to 25 or 30%. Brazil is moving backwards. There is involution instead of development. GDP – a false measure of growth – is stagnant and, when it grows, it benefits a small economic elite that appropriates it. Bolsonaro – that terminator of the future – carries out the tragic plan of minister Guedes' ultraliberalism: to perpetuate dependency, privatize public services and transform rights into commodities.
The low-income population is struggling to survive. Food inflation is the biggest of all. In a pandemic year, food prices rose 15%, almost triple the official inflation rate in the period, which stood at 5,20% according to the IBGE (Folha de São Paulo, 11/3/2021). Unemployment rose to 14,4%. And 13% of the country's population, or 26 million people, are surviving on a per capita income of just R$250 per month (Valor, 29/3/2021). Poor people become miserable, but the number of Brazilian billionaires increased during the pandemic: it grew from 45, in 2020, to 65 now (Uol, 7/4/2021). It is not surprising to find that social inequality has increased.
Many Bolsonaro voters have already regretted it, starting with the large commercial media that supported him in 2018, turning a blind eye to his corruption, support for militias, defense of torture, weapons for all, civil war, military dictatorship and his prejudice against woman, gay, black and indigenous. They voted for barbarism and now they regret it, in the name of an increasingly attacked civilization.
Civil society took to the streets throughout Brazil on 29/5. Hundreds of thousands of people across the country have shown that they will not sit back and passively accept the ongoing destruction of democracy. Bolsonaro doubles down on his crazy project to promote civil war in the country. He has been debasing the institutions, and even the Army has fallen to its knees at his feet.
How will the military behave when Bolsonaro, in the wake of his idol Trump, launches the coup with the support of his Military Police, his Militia, his Attorney General, his Ministers, his Businessmen and his Evangelical Pastors? Will the Armed Forces defend Brazil and its Constitution or will they also become Bolsonaro's FFAA?
*Liszt Vieira is a retired professor at PUC-RJ. Author, among other books, of Identity and globalization (Record)
Originally published on the portal Major Card.