By VINICIUS SOUZA, HUGO OTTATI & SIDRATA LANDARINI*

To the streets to overthrow Bolsonaro now!

In Capão da Canoa (RS), the week started with a statue of Havan on the ground, knocked over by a strong wind. The image, in fact, is beautiful and allows us to enter the imagination that the fall of a symbol like this, linked to Bolsonarism, represents signs of new times. After all, would it be winds that arrive to curb the death policy? Or is nature responding to extermination and the politics of backwardness and ongoing environmental destruction?

It is natural that what happened provoke this type of reaction on social media, especially in difficult times like the one we are living in. But we need to go further, because only the practical reverberation of this symbolism has the potential to reflect and modify concrete reality. For this reason, in the face of so many demonstrations by public figures, relating the fall of the statue to an indication of Bolsonaro's overthrow, a truism needs to be said: the end of Bolsonarism will only come with people on the street, in the arms of workers, mobilized and organized in favor of a radical, socialist program that confronts private monopolies; rentism; the latifundio; environmental destruction; the privatist policy and the reforms that removed and continue to remove rights from the poorest; and that guides social and structural changes.

Looking at today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, the need arises to strengthen national acts for “Fora Bolsonaro Já!” May 29th and following days; and to endorse the creation of spaces, committees, communes or centers of solidarity, resistance and organization throughout the country, understanding: 1) the need to immediately interrupt Bolsonaro's genocidal policy, which is an urgent task for all consequent sectors of the society; 2) while the popular construction of a radical, anti-capitalist and eco-socialist program begins, as a real alternative for the working class as a whole not only for tomorrow, figured in the 2022 election, but for the post-election, aware of that the period of struggles and confrontations in Brazil will not end, given the evident limitations of the electoral process.

In this sense, action is needed. We cannot wait to “bleed”, because we are the ones bleeding daily.

It's ours who have been dying daily: from COVID; by hunger; unemployment; suffering evictions; in the extermination of native peoples; and genocide in the favelas. We do not need to deny the feeling of fear that exists in our daily lives, because, in fact, it is present; but it is important not to let fear paralyze us, because that is exactly the desire of those who practice exploitation, social control and maintenance of the current state of affairs.

They want us to be afraid, immobilized, with no chance of seeing another future. For this, they rely on various social technologies to instill fear, such as the war on drugs, which fragments the popular classes, making it impossible for our black youth to see a way out of this way of life. The most recent example was the massacre of 27 young people in the Jacarezinho favela in Rio de Janeiro, with the Civil Police of Rio de Janeiro imposing a five-year secrecy on the documents relating to the operation. In addition to failing to comply with the decision of the Federal Supreme Court, which prohibits police operations at this time, violating the fundamental rights of thousands of people who live there and of the victims - signing a man in front of a child in his own room -, they still intend to create obstacles to the transparency to get away with such barbarity.

At the same time, our forests continue to be destroyed, like a large farm for first world countries, giving prestige to large estates, exploitation and land concentration, while our population starves or is intoxicated by hundreds of pesticides. Aiming to “pass the cattle”, they encourage deforestation and mining in the Amazon; the destruction of fauna and flora; mining and agribusiness; the poisoning of rivers and the systematic violation of land rights; and the criminalization, persecution and murder of indigenous leaders, as in the most recent attack on the Yanonami and Munduruku Tribes – the latter while Bolsonaro was speaking at the climate summit.

We cannot fail to mention, moreover, the refusal by the federal government of eleven proposals and millions of doses of vaccine, certain that Bolsonaro remained, at all times, focused on the boycott of social isolation and restrictive measures, including not guaranteeing the maintenance of emergency aid. A denialist, anti-scientific stance, which is directly responsible for the deaths of almost half a million people in the country.

The irony of this situation is that they do everything to make us afraid, because, in fact, they are the ones who carry fear on their shoulders. They carry the fear of seeing organized people demanding a better life. Right now, it is necessary that our fear give way to courage! And courage here even means going against and having a debate with sectors that say that this is not the time to protest in the streets, or that the way out is simply to wait for the 2022 elections, while they talk about electoral unity and abandon unity in concrete struggles against the ongoing genocidal project. This is a false hope, which, incidentally, without concrete practice on the streets, becomes meaningless. Hope for a better world only becomes real if accompanied by courage.

If the President of the Republic defended, successfully, that “Brazil could not stop”, forcing millions of workers to leave their homes to work, without guaranteeing a vaccine, protection against COVID-19 and decent income, resulting in the death of almost half a million people, it is our duty to leave our homes and take to the streets to overthrow him, as we wish not one more day for a genocide in power.

Obviously, no one would want to take to the streets in the midst of the worst moment of the pandemic. But, unfortunately, this act is a reflection of the absence of alternatives, as it is not possible to wait any longer to defeat this policy of death. The only way to stop the increase in the number of deaths in Brazil is to immediately overthrow Bolsonaro and all representatives of this project. Life comes from organized people on the street!

* Vinicius Souza is a PSol militant.

* Hugo Ottati is a union lawyer.

* Siddhartha Landarini is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Sociology and Anthropology at UFRJ.