By Tarsus Son-in-law*

The pandemic will have more influence in the Brazil of the future than the “horse race” between Moro and Bolsonaro, who accuse each other of being bandits after a honeymoon.

The mediatization of the criminal process continues to take its toll in the demoralization of justice institutions, but it is now undergoing an innovative process. In the conflict between Sergio Moro and the President of the Republic, the Globo need to crush one of them, Bolsonaro. To the same extent that he needs to protect the other, Moro, a sure instrument of the “elimination” of the PT from the electoral leadership and the subtraction of Lula from the 2018 elections.

The theory of the “two extremes”, by which a visibly unbalanced person and with a disqualified passage through the National Army was opposed to a Professor who had been a brilliant Minister of Education in the country –as well as a great mayor of São Paulo – was engineering psychology that won large social sectors for the Bolsonarica adventure, which today humiliates Brazil on a world scale.

At this moment, the situation is critical for the Globo: if the criminal process is not mediatized to the extreme, to the point of convincing society "of good", that the dispute is not between two delinquents, but between an immaculate judge who was deceived and a cursed President - who was only good when facing Haddad – all the work done by the Network, together with Moro, to clean Brazil of the PT “corja” will fall to the ground.

But, how to do that, if both accuse each other of criminals, if they worked together and tolerated each other while they had unity of immediate purposes in politics? There is only one way out: to place the conflict between them as if it were a horse race, that is, one of the two has to lose. And in this circumstance, Bolsonaro is likely to lose, at least in the media’s “due legal process”, which has had an enormous influence on electoral processes and on many decisions of the Judiciary.

In this mediatization, jurists “without any legal training” appear – on TV stands and in traditional newspapers – who build true doctrines in the field of Criminal Law, which help “jurists with legal training” to formulate their answers always according to the editorial line additionally chosen to address the complicated issues of procedural and substantive law, present in the concrete conflicts under examination. This was a successful experience at the time that Lula was embittered in jail due to measures taken by a judge who is now called a liar and dishonest by the President of the Republic himself, accused by him of being a criminal.

On Saturday, May 2nd, at 16 pm on Globe News two “lawyers with legal training”, before answering the innocent questions of the journalist-jurists, paid tribute to the commentator Ana Flor, for the opportunity and importance of the question asked, until she – inadvertently – makes an extraordinary synthesis of the editorial line chosen for the theme approach. She said, confronting Moro and Bolsonaro, something like let's see "who will win and who will lose", as if it were a horse race. Suddenly we are all facing a private dispute between two political actors, in which one will defeat the other, no longer in the presence of a question of State, in which it would be verified whether one, the other, or both, had committed serious crimes , which could lead to a state crisis, as correctly provoked by the Attorney General of the Republic.

Hundreds of articles, virtual conferences, individual and collective books, are already circulating on the networks predicting what Brazil and the world will be like in the post-pandemic time. I have sincere admiration for anyone who risks diagnoses or predictions of this nature, which would be more appropriate – I think – to try to delve into History in moments of greater stability, in which longer or almost circular cycles could be approached. Understanding historical moments – fragmentary and explosive – in which real life is concentrated, dismantling the most daring or “scientific” narratives, I think would require a greater temporal distance.

Long narratives – until the 60s – were anchored in more predictable social and political reactions and in more orderly and visible historical conflicts, such as the “Cold War” and the passage of time was slower than today. The speed of historical time is determined by the speed at which facts enter our lives and our understanding of time is not centered on the cycles of the moon and the tides, nor on our biological clock, but on the flows of indetermination that concentrated facts cause in our lives. our imagination. For example, all narratives of the conjuncture, which predicted the developments of the Bolsonaro Government, were precarious with the resignation of Minister Moro.

The pandemic will have more influence in the Brazil of the future than the “horse race” between Moro and Bolsonaro, who accuse each other of being bandits after a honeymoon with their hitherto clandestine disorders. It seems to me that the manipulation that Globo this dispute will shape our destiny more than the brutal misfortunes of the Pandemic. In post-modernity, misfortunes concentrated in relations between criminals – I'm just saying what one says about the other – sometimes have more power to forge History than the universal misfortunes that cover long periods of History.

Reducing the focus for our country, in relation to the Pandemic, I also think that any change in direction in our country will depend more on who will win the elections in the United States than on the number of deaths that it will cause in Brazil, in this contest universal funeral, in which the lives of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians, homeless and unaware of the tragedy that besets us, are at stake. The motorcades against isolation show that the sectors that most form opinion in our country have managed to accustom millions of people to thinking that the lives of others, when there is no direct collective threat, have no value.

And people do not do this because they are “bad”, nor even because they wish other people dead, but because they have been accustomed – by the really existing way of life, in which the market and consumption forge alienated morality – that they have the right to protect themselves as they wish, even if it costs the lives of thousands of other people, in a radical break with the relationships of solidarity artificially constructed by enlightened humanism. Times are tough. I repeat a phrase by Steinbeck, which always made me think, taken from his book Grapes of Wrath: "the lands of the West stir like horses before the storm". All the more terrible now that the horses are bandits who cannot offer the full truth about their crimes.

*Tarsus in law he was Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil.