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By MARIA RITA KEHL*

After the failed parade of war tanks, Bozo calls on “his” army, the military police and the crowd of supporters in boots and gaudy to demonstrate, on the 7th, their support for another coup project

Have you noticed? Every time the president's approval starts to, shall we say, lose steam, he summons a motociata. We had a fourth (or fifth?), this year – which indicates that the strength of the man who misgoverns the country is quite threatened. At these times, nothing like having a powerful machine between your legs.

After all, what is a motorcycle? A bunch of men who, mounted on noisy objects, try to intimidate their opponents and show off their own power. True, the solid "body" of the motorcycle has to stay firm between the legs of the rider. I understand the illusion of potency caused, even among women, by this innocent conjunction. In addition, motorcycles make noise, depending on the use of the accelerator pedal. But, come on: the power of motorcycles is not necessarily transferred to those on top of them. The president's motorcycles are a resource reminiscent of the upset child's tantrum: he kicks and screams as much as he can, but is unable to convince the adult to do what he wants.

In this case, the supposed “adults” available are not very reliable. The opposition, at a congress led by Lira and Pacheco, recalls the mother who immediately gives the child the candy so as not to have to face such a tantrum. It is up to us, the 64% of Brazilians who disapprove of the president, the role of adults in the room. I don't know if we're prepared for that. We are still stunned, trying to understand how this happened and how we should act. Intimidating the tantrum is dead. We are not capable of imagining evil and threats at the height of what he and his followers have been practicing for almost two years.

How did he even end up in the post he wasn't prepared for? Oh, sure: corruption. who read Brazil, a Biography, by Heloisa Starling and Lilian Schwarz, knows that corruption has been embedded in the Brazilian State since the monarchy. It was the pretext (not the just cause) to arrest Luís Inácio and try to demoralize the Workers' Party. So explain to me why now, with dozens of signs in the Bolsonaro family, no one cares about corruption anymore? Hypocritical people.

Was Moro the hero of Brazil?[1] Why, then, are the convictions that went through his sentence, in Lava Jato – starting with that of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva – under suspicion today?

Now they have invented a new pretext to demoralize our far-light left: Bolsonarist extremism – whose most grotesque examples I will try to list later on – is the counterpoint to its antipode to the left, PT extremism. Part of the population bovinely repeats this mantra. The liberal press makes pathetic attempts to sift through a “third way” among candidates who do not reach double digits in voting intentions. A more enlightened part of the bourgeoisie decided to decline its preference for the vexatious and violent president, as long as that third way between the two extremes emerges. As long as the only alternative is not, like this... the extremist Lula. It would be comical if it were not tragic.

Why, gentlemen. It would be offensive to call them uninformed or unintelligent. Perhaps they prefer that I consider them only in bad faith. By happy coincidence, this is exactly what it sounds like to me: bad faith. Lula, extremist?

Perhaps you are not remembering the Letter to the Brazilian People, in which Lula, in the 2002 campaign, guaranteed that he would not interfere with bank profits. Part of his leftist supporters wanted to jump ship at that moment. Our dangerous extremist got together with the group (to which I was attached, although I didn't want to jump ship) and gave us a lesson in historical materialism. He knew the country he wanted to govern. He did not dream of a society ready for socialism – which, it is worth clarifying, was never on his horizon – but of a society that, from being conservative and shamefully unequal, intended in its government to start transforming by attacking (sorry: I can't find any substitute the height for the good and reliable gerund) its most rotten pillar: the tremendous social inequality. He summed up his project – remember? – like this: in my government I want to get every Brazilian to have breakfast, lunch and dinner. Extremely dangerous, isn't it?

Well, maybe the PT candidate's modest proposal causes some discomfort, some emotional instability, let's say, for the 1% of Brazilians who own 50% of the wealth that Brazil produces.[2]

For a country that has enslaved Africans for three centuries, that seems about as extreme as proposing a revolution. For a country that abolished slavery, without granting any compensation to descendants of Africans brought here by force, kept in captivity and punished with whips, it seemed threatening to a part of the elite that the Lula government promoted – through the law of quotas – that part of these people study at the same universities as their children. And what about Bolsa Família, then, which raised millions of poor people to the middle classes? I have heard more than once, in several boarding queues, people complaining about modest-looking families taking their first plane trip. “This airport looks like a bus station”!

Lula's successor, Dilma Roussef – a former political prisoner and victim of torture – even had the nerve to get Congress to vote for the establishment of a National Truth Commission. Yes, Brazil was the only country, among those that suffered from military dictatorships in Latin America, to only approve the creation of a CNV three decades after redemocratization. We were unable to find out almost anything, as the soldiers we summoned to testify had the right not to say anything – and so they did.

Even so, CNV bothered a lot of people. In one of the Commission's hearings in the Chamber of Deputies, the current president made a performance macabre by honoring the torturer Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra. The same one who tortured the president. Colleagues did not think the gesture hurt parliamentary decorum. Perhaps they forgave what would have been just an emotional reaction to the extremism of the president who created a Commission to investigate, three decades late, the crimes committed by the Brazilian State in the period 1964-85. Bolsonaro's tribute to the Ustra was for that reason. Did everything we suffer today start there?

Dilma was unable to approve that the Truth Commission – as in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile – also belong to Justice. He had to slow down his project. Even so, he bothered. Uninformed people asked if we wouldn't investigate “the other side”. The side of the “terrorists”. It was no use clarifying that this “side” was not symmetrical to the other, as common crimes should not be equated with State crimes. It was no use arguing that members of the “other side” had already been arrested, tortured and, in many cases, murdered in prison. Bodies of 126 of these youths were never found. They are, to this day, politically disappeared.

In the face of such “extremisms”, it is not surprising that after 14 years of PT governments, Brazil would go for the force by electing a retired captain (for indiscipline) adept at torture. This did not scandalize the majority of his voters. The problem is, well... he has no idea what it means to run a country. O rictus The increasingly tense expression of his expression reveals that he is bewildered and frightened.

No, this is not good news.

After the failed parade of war tanks trying to intimidate the deputies who would vote against the proposal of the printed vote, Bozo calls on “his” army, the military police [3] and the crowd of supporters in boots and gaudy to demonstrate, on the 7th, their support for another coup project. Congress remains bovine. Perhaps they think that the initiative to try to stop the man who promises a bloodbath on the Independence holiday is somewhat extremist, after being responsible for almost 600 deaths due to the lack of serious measures against Covid-19.

Not knowing what to do with the power that was attributed to him, the president tries to demonstrate strength by promising the right to carry rifles to his supporters. This does not mean that he considers himself an extremist; but he warns his opponents that “everything has a limit”. Where have you ever seen an election promoted with the same transparent methods used since redemocratization? Methods that, incidentally, elected him in 2018, with a little help from the dissemination of lies (called, elegantly, fake news) against Fernando Haddad, PT candidate.

The investigation, better late than too late, of this electoral fraud, runs the risk of also being considered an extremist initiative, to be faced with threats of an imminent coup. That's what the former captain is plotting, who as the nation's representative holds command of the army: the same one from which he was almost expelled in 1986 for insubordination. He was saved by the fear, among the high-ranking ones, that his punishment would provoke an insurrection among lower-ranking soldiers.

At the other “extreme” of the electoral scenario, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva has more chances than the former captain. Judging by the polls, at the time of writing, he would defeat Bolsonaro by a wide margin in the second round. How dangerous, people. The return of descendants of slaves to university benches. The return of the poor on planes. The return of decent pay for workers. The return of some lightness, some joy, some hope for improvement in this country today dominated by class hatred, racism, misery and disenchantment.

I can bet that many of you yearn for that third way. Even if you don't have a road project at all. Before the motociata announced for the 7th of September makes another “Búúú!” on our scared faces.

*Maria Rita Kehl is a psychoanalyst, journalist and writer. Author, among other books, of Resentment (Boitempo).

Notes


[1] I once saw a book on a newsstand with the square face of the former judge with this title: Moro, the hero of Brazil.

[2] Credit Suisse bank report on global wealth: in Brazil, 1% of the rich own 44% of the wealth. Quoted by Marilene Felinto in her column on Folha de São Paulo of August 29th. The great threat of a new Lula government would be that the disproportionate advantage of the rich would fall again, as in 2010, to 40,5%.

[3] One of the recommendations of the Truth Commission was to end the militarization of the police – that excrescence of the 1964-85 Dictatorship.

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