By Tarso Genro*

Fascism will only be defeated if we unite to defeat the pandemic, as it is the crisis made explicit in its most cruel and expressed materiality, in its most concrete reflections in the daily lives of the popular masses and the middle classes themselves, the true class profile: who it pays for what here in Brazil it was only possible to recreate with the cruel marriage of our ruling classes with militia fascism.

The Uruguayan facts that I report in this political memory article have to do with another historical era in Latin America and the world. They can be useful to an entire generation of young intellectuals and activists in these difficult times that we are – I suppose – going through. The era I am referring to is that of the ascending Cold War, of historical communism (the one that occurred, “in fact”) x imperialist capitalism. Today the fundamental contradiction of global politics is another one: between the democratic forms of capital control (if they exist at all) and the normative force – political and military – of the era of liberal “rentismo”.

The events I am referring to are three years before the US defeat in Vietnam and before the end of the mandate of General De Gaulle, who had politically commanded and directed the defeat of the student insurrection of May 68; facts, therefore, of fifteen months before the assassination of President Allende, by Pinochet and his uniformed delinquents.

These are facts from a time when Brazil was in the hands of the Medici Government, whose only meeting of its “Human Rights” Commission – chaired by the then Minister of Justice Alfredo Buzaid – would come to the conclusion that these violations of Rights did not occur in Brazil. The very interpretation of the Amnesty Law, which reached the torturers to save them from jail, proves that this fantasy version would not prosper in our recent history, just as it did not prosper in the evaluation of the new Getulist State or the Moscow Processes.

These are times that were once filled with struggles and hopes, which are now far from the memory – bitter or utopian – of those who were there in one way or another. I remembered that Pinochet was a delinquent, because a true General (or Colonel, or Captain) – in victory – knows that, in consolidating it, he must speak not only to the victors he commanded, but also to the defeated and to History.

Delinquents do not need to do this: they have no historical sense, they live exclusively in the present, unlike true commanders, who record – in their rough core – their universal glories or their barbarism, based on the ethics that guided them, in the period that it was given them to direct men and ideas.

Pinochet was a delinquent in uniform because he stole and killed. I remember that De Gaulle was never one because, when his Minister of Police suggested the arrest of Sartre – who distributed the illegal “Le Cause de Peuple” on the corners of Saint-Germain – he said to his eager subordinate: “But you don't arrest Danton !”

The victorious De Gaulle knew that a statesman, especially being the Commander of a great victory, could not ignore the integrated future of the nation, to which he had pledged his oath and that the nation would not look with pity on anyone who treated philosophy with inquisitorial eyes. of the Middle Ages. As our demented Brazilian government does.

The facts I refer to in this article are reported in Senator Zelmar Michelini's speech, on July 31, 72, delivered in the Uruguayan Parliament. He announced from the Tribune, in the midst of a guerrilla war – which would end with the total defeat of the MLN (Tupamaros) – the negotiation of a “truce”. It was, at that moment in progress, between a part of the Junta de Comandantes – which then held de facto power in the country – and the Tupamara leadership, which then headed the clandestine struggle against the regime. Boldness in both latitudes.

On the Tupamaros side, the most important negotiator was Eleutério Huidobro, who was imprisoned and had suffered all kinds of torture at the hands of the military and who would later become Mujica's Minister of Defense. Huidobro agrees – after discussing with his fellow prisoners – to be “released” “on word of honor”, ​​to contact the Tupamara Directorate underground, with the aim of starting talks with a “military wing” of the regime, which proposed the surrender of the guerrillas – already in retreat – through a peace agreement without humiliations. Both sides have people who risk themselves for a conjuncturally common ideal.

There was no ideological and political identity between the forces in negotiation – the Army represented mainly by Coronéis Trabal and Gregório Alvarez – but both found a “common sense” for the dialogue: to end the forms of struggle that were, on the one hand, deteriorating the State and, on the other, distorting the functions of the Armed Forces, by generating a bloody rupture in Uruguayan society, from which it would be very difficult to recover, as was later confirmed.

The political analogy I make with this text is not based on armed struggle, but on the basis of the war against the Pandemic, which will only be won under reasonable conditions, if democratic political forces of all origins unite to shift power the insane man who governs us, because his perseverance in brutality could be responsible for thousands of deaths in our country.

And it is incredible that our leaders in the democratic field do not speak and do not act united against the disaster of the pandemic, which is much greater than any crisis, because it engulfs and enlarges it, geometrically, with each precious day that shortens our future. Are they irresponsible or do they not understand what is happening? Are you worried about your immediate future or just the 2022 elections?

The social and political costs of armed struggle (those military supporters of General Alvarado's nationalist "Peruvianism" thought) would be - and were - heartbreaking for a country that in the 50s and 60s was recognized as the "Switzerland of South America". And that, without an agreement, it would follow the “script” of the most cruel Latin American dictatorships, supported by the CIA and the US governments, in the context of the Cold War. The costs of Bolsonaro's election, supported by most of the mainstream media and by almost all of our bourgeoisie (funded by the public purse throughout its history), are brutally becoming evident: we have no way out, we are between a dignified life, fighting for everyone's survival, or possible miserable death, minding our own backyard. .

Between June 30th and July 23rd, Uruguay went through a “truce” between the Tupamaros and the National Army, but contrary to the vocation for peace that the talks pursued, the country plunged into barbarism, for 12 uninterrupted years. The extreme right in the Army would win: Colonel Gregório Alvarez adheres to its catechism and Colonel Trabal, in 1974, is assassinated in Paris, where he had been moved by the Government to die, where his constituents remained incognito.

At the first conversation meeting between Huidobro and the Colonels, a Tupamaro leader (Manera) stated that torture was the preferred method of interrogation by the military, to which Colonel Christi replied, without batting an eye: “son hechos normales, de tiempos abnormales”. The same philosophy that surely guided Trabal's murderous hand in Paris.

In that period, the most important political forces were divided between those who were pro-"Yankee" imperialists, on the one hand, and a myriad - on the other side - of communist, socialist, left-wing nationalist, democratic and non-democratic forces, on the other. regarding its links with the defense of the formal rule of law. It was a time when Governments emerged from coups d'état or counter-coups of a nationalist, anti-imperialist nature, “due to” the lineage of the left, which influenced groups of Latin American officials, tired of being guardians of imperial interests.

General Torres in Bolivia, General Alvarado in Peru, Colonel Omar Torrijos in Panama, are classic examples of these new leaders, who also inspired military cadres – democratic and nationalist – within armies that would fulfill or fulfill dictatorial functions in their respective countries. General Schneider in Chile and Euler Bentes in our country are examples of this surprising lineage, which refused to be subservient to the Empire, a position so disputed in post-War Latin America.

Fascism will only be defeated if we unite to defeat the pandemic, as it is the crisis made explicit in its most cruel and expressed materiality, in its most concrete reflections in the daily lives of the popular masses and the middle classes themselves, the true class profile: who it pays for what here in Brazil it was only possible to recreate with the cruel marriage of our ruling classes with militia fascism. This one, backed by Trump and his lethal thugs. Let's revoke them!

(*) 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 of the Brazil.