By EUGENIO BUCCI*
What is happening in Brazil is nothing ordinary. There's so much more to understand
The news only has eyes and ears for the future government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his deputy, Geraldo Alckmin. News about the already famous PEC of the Transition, to provide a slight pull on the spending ceiling, fill journalistic spaces and schedules. Arrangements and rearrangements to fill positions in ministries also parade prominently, alongside reports surrounding the numerous transition team itself. We also had the intense and unavoidable coverage of the ceremony for the diplomation of those elected by the Superior Electoral Court, on Monday.
Looking at the newspapers and television news, we even forget that there is still a President of the Republic still there, someone who is not called Lula. The strange thing is that the guy disappeared, he was lost. Maybe he should answer for job abandonment. To complicate the picture, he never declared that he admits the election result. Instead, he sends out sideways signals to bolster people who block roads and kneel in front of barracks pleading for a military coup. For that same citizen is still the head of state and the head of government of this country here. This is a shocking and inconceivable fact. The chaotic ineffectiveness of the Executive Branch in Brasilia is the biggest news of the season. What an appalling dismantling. However, there are almost no reports about it.
It is true that sometimes a little thing or other appears. For example: the protests that set cars on fire in the streets of the federal capital on Monday night ended up appearing in the pages of newspapers and television news. On Tuesday, the day before yesterday, the newspaper The State of S. Paul at the top of its first page, in good size, a photo of Wilton Junior in which the carcass of a bus burns in flames. War scene, terrorist attack. It was one of the few moments in which an event related to the current ruler deserved press coverage.
Yes, the arson attack that exploded on the avenues of Brasilia is part of the Alvorada Palace. The representative in question does nothing against the political violence that is spreading. Acts by default. He is responsible because he omits himself – at the very least. He seems only interested in panic and mismanagement. But why, exactly? Who does he talk to? What orders do you distribute? Doesn't this deserve more attention from journalism?
The Electoral Court was right to anticipate the diplomacy of Lula and Alckmin by one week. The official act that was supposed to take place on the 19th was transferred to the 12th. With the change in agenda, the TSE surprised the delinquents, who had no time to articulate more attacks – which would undoubtedly come. Just look at what the rioters got up to on the 12th to see that, if they had had seven more days, they would have raged even more. Expelled from the underworld of politics, they move around like the living dead, like zombies, like widows of the wildest band of the military dictatorship. To this day they idolize torturers. Subjects of a “chuchuca from the center” that doesn't show its face with an open chest because it lacks courage, they assume for themselves the role of hoodlums for rent. They will attack again.
The mandate of the one still in office is coming to an end, in an end without spotlights. The authoritarian and violent mentality is slipping back into the same darkness from which it once escaped. But that evil energy is going to stick around, at least for a while. Perched on the rackets of crime, the subjects of the tyrannical fantasy will still try to strangle roads, terrorize the country and destabilize the future government. They will lie in wait, waiting for the opportunity. They are the greatest achievement left by the president who leaves the chair. They barely managed to re-elect the dystopian pact that hallucinates them. They failed now, with their incompetent coup, but they will return.
Let's keep an eye out. These dark forces, which in the future will deserve the contempt of history, must not leave the focus of journalism. This is not the time to forget, nor to turn the page. What did this regurgitating of free will consist of? Why did it penetrate so deeply into families, cities, churches, fields and buildings in Brazil? What is this nexus that links social networks, churches, barracks, farms, militias and the delusional janotism of Faria Lima? Who finances them? As? What are the international links that sustain them? Why was his propaganda so powerful?
It is not enough to say that it was the money from the Auxílio Brasil that catapulted the votes for reelection, because that was not all. The questions are many and they are still looking for answers. What is happening in Brazil is nothing ordinary. There is much more to understand – and there are many more facts to know, hence the need for journalism. The country may have a short memory, but the press no longer has that right.
On Monday, at the inauguration ceremony of the elected president and vice president, the president of the TSE, Alexandre de Moraes, was straightforward: “Those who attacked democracy, I guarantee, will be fully accountable”. And the press, what does it have to guarantee?
* Eugene Bucci He is a professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP. Author, among other books, of The superindustry of the imaginary (authentic).
Originally published in the newspaper The State of S. Paul.
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