By MARCELO GUIMARÃES LIMA*

Excerpts from the author's Introduction to the newly published book

1.

Impeded democracy is a recurring theme in our modern history. The power relations in the life of the Brazilian nation have expressed and continue to express a glaring gap between the superficial political order, the emblems, rituals and images of the so-called “popular” representation – formally democratic – and the underlying structures of vertical and concentrated power. Without a consolidated point of support to sustain it, Brazilian democracy seems to live and die by a purely external self-representation, without an effective memory of the constant challenges and obstacles to popular sovereignty and, therefore, without a “proper” past and, therefore, without a future.

There is obviously no room for any nostalgic vision when it comes to the topic of collective memory. It makes no sense to idealize political structures of the past. Even so, the 2016 coup made it clear that even the specious Brazilian democracy, fragile, limited, so often debased and curtailed throughout our modern history, has on several occasions proven to be an obstacle to the designs of power and the “sovereign will” of the ruling class, an obstacle to be overcome or eliminated.

The memory of the struggles of time, the struggles of the recent past that is ours, is a living and active memory that updates the energies of the multicentennial struggle in the country called Brazil for popular sovereignty as a response against the domination of a few over the destiny of the majority and the procession of material and moral misery that this domination produces and reproduces in the history of the nation.

This is also the struggle of the people in these times when the dominance of the minority of global wealth grabbers becomes more and more disastrous, costly and unbearable, imposing wars, misery and suffering and threatening not only the survival of certain human groups (see the genocide of the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, a genocide supported and sustained by the USA and the European Union) but also with the ecological crisis, added to the still existing nuclear arsenals, threatening life on the planet.

2.

The initial text is a brief essay that I wrote at the invitation of Willis Santiago Guerra Filho for one of the first analytical publications that examined the context of the so-called “June protests” of 2013, which, despite intentions, assessments and subjective initiatives, would constitute a kind of antechamber to the coup against Dilma Rousseff, against the PT and against the democratic choices of the Brazilian people in 2016.

In this case, the “cunning of history”, which is carried out through and despite the conscious intentions of human actors, was shown in the guise of the old trickery of the Brazilian coup-plotting right, favored by the local and global neoliberal context, a true enigma of the sphinx for the various Brazilian progressive forces at the time.

The justification for republishing this essay is to serve as a kind of general introduction, something like a premise outlined for the following considerations on the context, actions and actors of the narrative entitled Brazil, which necessarily mixes, by nature, documentary and “fiction”, the plausible with the “unlikely, yet real”, typical of our constitutive supra-reality, as pointed out, in other times and in another context, by Oswald de Andrade, mythographer and mythologist, thinker of critical and imaginative Brazilianness.

The other texts gathered here were published on the blog Democracy and Art, which I started in 2016 as an individual response to the parliamentary/legal/media coup that, in an abject, cowardly and illegal manner, deposed President Dilma Rousseff and began yet another period of civilizational regression in the country. From 2020 onwards, my writings were welcomed on the pages of the website the earth is round, whom I thank for the opportunity.

Apart from necessary corrections, stylistic improvements and some modifications aimed at greater clarity of exposition, the texts remain, in essence, as they are. They are expressions of the moment, a kind of reflective diary, with assessments made in the heat of the moment, some of which time and reality have corroborated, others which have not. Overall, a stance taken against arbitrariness, against naturalized despotism, against barbarism.

3.

The military dictatorship that began in 1964 had set the country's "clock of history" back by at least 50 years. In 2016, the farce of a coup involving the annulment of the popular vote that elected President Dilma Rousseff recalled and re-actualized, in its own way, the nefarious period of the military dictatorship with the same grotesque characters, the same anti-people and anti-nation ideology, the same fabricated justifications, a parade of lies and insults to the intelligence of Brazilian citizens.

The opposition to the neo-fascist military regime in the second half of the 2016th century resulted in imprisonment, torture and death. In XNUMX, the military leadership, nostalgic for the dictatorship and the Cold War, remained in the background, supporting and seeking to direct the coup efforts of reactionary parliamentarians. In parliament, the holy alliance between conservatives, the so-called liberal right and the extreme right established with the so-called lower clergy, bringing together opportunists of various stripes, professionals in politics as a business counter, allowed the rapid offensive against the country's fragile political order. The coup aimed to turn back the clock on recent history, extinguish rights and, finally, establish the neoliberal dictatorship of financial capital and its permanent and occasional allies on the most solid and unchallenged foundations possible.

The damage was great, but since 2016, the youth, students, intellectuals, artists, minorities, popular organizations, professional organizations, and the working class have resisted, denounced, and fought against the misgovernments of Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro. This resistance has brought to light the contradictions and conflicts within the coup movement.

Jair Bolsonaro's defeat in the 2022 election and Lula's return to the political scene marked the mid-way stagnation of the neo-fascist adventure.

Today, popular forces are still confronting the country that emerged from the 2016 coup: a nation under the yoke of monopolized communication, a perverse legacy whose foundation was laid during the military dictatorship, with Rede Globo acting as the unofficial spokesperson for the dictatorial regime. A country still conditioned by the global neoliberal situation and the discretionary power of transnational financial capital, framing states as de facto supranational powers. A context of marked ideological regression, instrumentalization of religion as an ideology, as a justification for moral and material oppression, as the opium of the masses, the spread of a single way of thinking also among the working classes, the promotion of a sociability adapted to the law of the jungle of competitive disorder, the disintegration of common bonds of solidarity, exacerbated individualism, the impoverishment of language and the sterilization of thought that affects both the lay majority and professionals of ideas; both the discourses of experts and the representations of everyday life.

4.

From the perspective of early 2025, certain facts, deeds and characters mentioned here may seem, to some, to be references to other times, other contexts, almost another country. On the other hand, the siege of the Lula government is taking shape in the period between the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025 as a bet by the Brazilian oligarchy, associated with the financial mafia, the communications monopoly, the parties that shelter the extreme right and the so-called “conservatives”, in sexual relations whenever their interests require.

The awareness of time in everyday life is always limited, but everyday life is inscribed in more than one temporal dimension. The lived dimension of present history is what we propose to present, with our limitations, through these chronicles, images, and portraits that on the one hand formalize, so to speak, the ephemeral, and relate the experience of time that passes with time that accumulates, in an attempt to understand the present, point out possible paths, and contribute, as much as possible, to unveiling the future or possible futures.

I believe that these texts gathered in a book can be justified, with all the limitations of contemporary writing, produced “in the heat of the moment”, as an invitation to update memory through the written word considered, exercised, produced as a dialogue, a two-way path uniting author and readers in a common field of questions and search for answers.

Updating memory and critically perceiving the historical context are urgent tasks today as they were yesterday, and they are even more essential and relevant when we are currently witnessing the interference of the “Faria Lima people”, the hard core of the neoliberal oligarchy (which we could characterize as an essential part of the Not So Deep State Brazilian, the de facto owners of power), in the country's economic situation, taking on for themselves and their assistants several of the tasks of Bolsonaro's failed military coup and reinforcing the tradition of what we call “structural coup d'état” in the country's political life.

*Marcelo Guimaraes Lima is an artist, researcher, writer and teacher.

Reference

Marcelo Guimaraes Lima. Memories of the future: chronicles of democracy prevented. Illustrations and photos by the author. São Paulo, Hipergrafia, 2025, 232 pages.

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