By LUIZ WERNECK VIANNA*

Brazil is conceived as a territory occupied by forces that are foreign to it, committed to destroying the foundations of its civilization.

In an extreme point of the Amazon, on the border with Peru, the mysterious disappearance of a Brazilian indigenist and an English journalist, until then inexplicable, both passionate about the region, takes the electoral process out of the focus of the conjuncture and puts the visor in full for the real theater in which Brazilian capitalism moves in search of an expansion of its borders towards new forms of accumulation such as mining and the expansion of new opportunities for logging companies and illegal fishing, which, in practice, are complicit in organized crime that dominates in the region for drug trafficking.

There, the hidden character of government action is revealed, revealing its predatory nature, its anti-civilization agenda and its opposition to the values ​​cultivated by our best traditions, many of them constitutionally enshrined, insofar as by deliberate omission in the repression of illegalities and crimes committed there favors their multiplication. Brazil is conceived as a territory occupied by forces that are foreign to it, committed to destroying the foundations of its civilization and resting on its ruins a capitalism without brakes and excluding its population left to its own fate.

Certainly, the episode involving the whereabouts of these two Amazonian explorers is still uncertain, although frightening suspicions hover over their fate, but in any case, we are facing a revealing fact of the harmful policies carried out by the Bolsonaro government in order to open the way for penetration orchestrated shady business in the heart of the Amazon treated as a lawless western under the control of adventurers in search of fortune.

In the region, the strong features of Bolsonaro’s project to remodel the country by the neoliberal pattern of entrusting the country’s directions to a Victorian capitalism in the face of an absentee State specializing in pure coercive intervention over its citizens to ensure for the purposes of preserving the law is evident in its strong features. from the wilds. Margaret Thatcher's dogma, that there is no such thing as society, rejected in her home country, becomes a watchword here.

The authoritarian capitalism project, exhausted in the glossy blocks of Faria Lima and adjacent areas, seeks new sap in the Amazonian landscapes subjected to attacks against its forests and its indigenous populations with genocidal fury for the purposes of yet another expansive movement of capitalist accumulation. For this purpose, a sort of guerrilla war is unleashed, piloted from afar by agents of the Bolsonarist project, carried out by adventurers with biographies dedicated to crime who lead in armed bands the invasions of indigenous lands and expropriate their natural resources such as the forest , fishing and hunting, squandering their lands with deleterious mining practices.

On the pretext of defending national sovereignty in the Amazon, the destiny of the strategic region is entrusted to the greed of business and the eagerness for the easy wealth of men without a threshing floor, bringing back to life the tragedy of the colonization of the American continent. From the people of the Amazon against this war machine aimed at its destruction under the approval of the current government, resistance arises, especially from its new intellectuals, many of them descendants of the original peoples, already identified with the meaning of the defense of the Amazon in planetary terms, and capable of establishing direct interlocution with world public opinion as well as with its indigenous populations.

Bruno Pereira and Dom Philipps, with different histories and life trajectories brought together by their common love for the Amazonian nature, defenders of the integrity of the region and its populations, as is known, have been missing for days without their fate being known. The fact is that they went on an investigative mission in a simple vessel, motivated by the zeal to investigate wrongdoings that they had already found in reports and that are now public knowledge.

Knowing those unsafe river routes, the possibility that they got lost is remote, and as the days pass, the chances that they may have been victims of a crime are confirmed as probable. Whose question is asked, and all eyes turn to what is everyone's suspicion, as always camouflaged although which in the cat story leaves the tail out.

*Luiz Werneck Vianna is a professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Author, among other books, of The Passive Revolution: Iberism and Americanism in Brazil (Revan).