By CHICO WHITAKER*
The difficulties to overcome the challenge of curbing the sinister figure of the President of the Republic
Despite being quite numerous, participation in the October 2 demonstrations in close to one hundred Brazilian cities was still a little frustrating. And it is still painful to note that the presence was still not “popular”, as one would say, that is, the participation of people without greater ties to parties, unions and social movements is still not very significant. In this sense, perhaps the choice of a Saturday to hold the demonstrations was not a good one – a day that is a day of work for many. Furthermore, the opposition to Bolsonaro does not make significant use of the transport offer to fill the streets, as government supporters do massively, as we saw recently on September 7.
With “Bolsonaro out” as the main flag and the impeachment to remove him, this was the “message” given by the “voice of the streets” to the Chamber of Deputies, so that it at least formally discuss the more than 150 requests accumulated on the table of the its President. It remains to be seen whether he will be heard. We may have doubts about it. The impeachment is in fact blocked by a majority in the Chamber of Deputies co-opted by Bolsonaro through the spurious means that we know. Its President, who is part of that majority, does not even forward the requests to the House for discussion, as the previous President did not.
In fact, it can be said that the majority of the current Chamber represents only a minority of Brazilians who are still faithful to Bolsonaro, and only listens attentively – to take advantage as well – to the voice of opportunistic social sectors that take advantage of everything, even disgrace. popular. This majority is in fact at the service of the main objective that Bolsonaro has defined since he took office: to destroy all the civilizing advances that Brazilian society has painfully achieved since the end of the military dictatorship.
In fact, we live in conditions similar to those experienced by Spaniards when the “Indignados” movement emerged in their country in 2011. In their demonstrations, they shouted to the parliament, “you do not represent us!”. The difference is that in Brazil there is little space left for the existing indignation to grow.
The “naturalization” of the killing of which we are victims is visible, despite the fact that we have all lost – forever – good friends and family. This is all the more painful because more than half of these deaths could have been prevented. It was provoked, and still is today, by the actions and omissions of the Captain-President and by his denialism, assumed by his entire government. In practice, little by little, we are going to become world champions in this macabre competition, in which we are still runners-up, behind the United States.
On the other hand, militancy became bureaucratized, in political movements and parties and in State agents who were supposed to protect rights. And as if all this were not enough to put an end to illusions, the “powerless” citizens who would in fact want Bolsonaro out find themselves paralyzed by their political leadership and by the candidates for that leadership. These, a year and a half earlier, think much more about the 2022 elections and their collective and personal political projects. At all levels, candidates are already multiplying fighting for electoral strongholds, support, alliances and resources, within the competitive culture proper to the economic regime in which we live, which also makes it difficult to form more powerful “fronts” to remove the President of the Republic.
Most of these leaders accommodate themselves to the permanence, until these elections, of the morally repugnant character who occupies the Presidency of the Republic, as if he were facing a terrible degenerative disease, but without remedy. Mentally unbalanced, he said, before being elected, that he was "formed to kill" - not even Hitler was so explicit in his designs. And for that, he decided to become “an accomplice of the virus” that plagues the planet, as Miguel Reale Junior, one of the legal advisors of the CPI on the pandemic, has already said.
The political strategy of these leaders is less to push him away than to let him wear out so that he leaves after the votes are counted, as if we were living in normal times and conditions of “change of ruler”, as in the alternations in power typical of more democratic countries than ours. That is why they consider demonstrations with the slogan Out Bolsonaro to be useful, but only to wear him out, since deep down they do not believe it is possible to get the current President removed before the elections. One could even say, in other words, that for them the cry “is not for real”. With that left talking to themselves those who consider that it is necessary to remove the criminal this year 2021 from the position he won. For those who think so, this objective is inescapable because, as long as he remains president, he will continue to use all the objective and symbolic power he has in his office to confuse the people. And because a health policy that stops the death caused by Covid 19 will not be possible with the government under your Presidency.
Forget, those facing 2022, that to be elected he massively used the dissemination of lies directed at parts of the population liable to be deceived, and the montage of a farce that victimized him in the eyes of the unwary and protected him from debates elections that would dismantle it. And that, in power, new lies and new farcical theaters will always be possible, in times of the internet in which malicious intelligences have discovered how to use the mathematics of large numbers, the fake news and social networks to “guide” the majority.
To worsen the prospects, those who only think of 2022 focus their attention on winning the leadership of the Executive Branch. That is, they do very little or nothing, as parties and as social movements, to take care of the future composition of the Legislative Power. As is our tradition, the importance of voting for the Legislature is not discussed. With that, also as always, among those elected to this Power, the opportunists and corrupt people who aim to get to it to earn money with “cracks” and other tricks, or by blackmailing the Executive and the companies it hires, when these depend on your vote in Parliament to legalize your actions. And again we will sadly have to shout: “you do not represent us!”
But even more worrisome is that those who dream of winning elections in 2022 disregard everything that Bolsonaro's sick mind could prepare until then, even to prevent the holding of the elections themselves, or at least to deny their results. And thus create even more painful situations for all of us. Didn't he already say, with all the letters, that the only way to effectively solve Brazil's problems is to make it live a civil war?
It would therefore be necessary to find a way to break through the widespread blockade of Bolsonaro’s impeachment, or else some other way to urgently remove him. Now, discarding the path of a decision by the TSE annulling the 2018 elections for electoral crimes, as it is almost politically impossible, and the banning of Bolsonaro for mental insanity, as it is technically unrealizable, there remains the criminal process. This path was opened in March of this year, without much notice, by the Associação Juízes pela Democracia – AJD, on behalf of the Attorney General of the Republic – PGR. His initiative was subsequently reinforced by three other representations in the same direction: the Federal Council of the OAB (with the support of the Arns Commission), the 342 Arts Movement and the Association of Relatives of Covid Victims – AVICO.
It was in this context that one of the political groups I belong to, the self-styled “All for the Common Good”, set aside, for the time being, its initial objective, which was to encourage the multiplication of reflection and action centers for the political self-formation of the base of society – since one of the causes for the election of the current irresponsible President was the abandonment of this formation by social organizations, parties and Churches. And it launched a campaign to support representations to the PGR, with the name “Ô Ministério Público, Denuncia Já!” which aimed to make them better known, as well as the path they proposed for criminal prosecution to remove Bolsonaro.
For this purpose, it created a digital platform (ocandeeiro.org) and a petition https://www.change.org/ÔMinisterioPublicoDenunciaJá. And it has been promoting live debates on the internet – which, once recorded, remain on the platform, to be seen and heard by anyone who is interested. Taken over by 40 civil society organizations, the campaign was aimed at the body of Federal Attorneys and Attorneys, so that they could demand that their top boss fulfill his ethical duty.
This new path faced, however, two obstacles, which made it difficult, but not impossible: the proven inaction of the Attorney General of the Republic in forwarding these representations – which even led the Arns Commission to represent to the Federal Supreme Court denouncing the crime of prevarication that the PGR would be committing; and the authorization, by the Chamber, of opening a criminal case, for which the same 342 votes required by the impeachment would be necessary.
As for the PGR, it is certain that it is one of the protective shields that the criminal President has. He recently even entered the nuclear area, less frequented by the Public Ministry, to serve the interests at the service of the current government: he asked the STF for unreasonable declarations of unconstitutionality of state constitutional precepts that seek to prevent the insane multiplication of nuclear power plants in Brazil. But he begins to suffer pressure against his inaction to protect Bolsonaro in his crimes in the pandemic, pressure that comes from within the very institution he heads, as well as even from the STF.
In addition, a light at the end of this tunnel began to flicker: the CPI of the pandemic will also present to the PGR a request for Bolsonaro's criminal complaint to the STF, listing even more crimes than those presented in the representations already made. It will therefore be even more difficult for him to continue his inaction when he receives, in November, the thousands of pages of the CPI report.
As for the difficulty of authorizing a criminal case by the Chamber, a request with this objective coming from the STF will already have more weight than a hundred requests for impeachment coming from civil society. And if the latter were to mobilize and overcome the inaction of the Attorney General of the Republic, this first victory would already create gaps in the resistance of the majority co-opted by Bolsonaro, and we would already have many more “powerless” to start putting pressure on Federal Deputies.
However, as in a democracy all political action encounters resistance, the path of criminal prosecution is still semi-blocked. Proposed almost seven months ago, it remains literally ignored by parties, unions and social movements, and unknown to the vast majority of the population.
The journalists, bloggers, newspapers and TV stations that could supposedly be counted on still haven't registered, in their booklets, the need to put pressure on the PGR. They already deal with the traditional agreements and clashes between presidential candidates that emerge in the political swamp. The organizers of the Fora Bolsonaro campaign have not yet discovered the possibility of criminal prosecution as a working hypothesis. In the speeches of the demonstrations on the 2nd, he was not mentioned by any speaker, as far as I know, nor did he appear on any banner or poster that attracted attention in the mass of demands raised, alongside the requests for impeachment. And since the demonstrations on the 2nd were less massive than we all would have liked, it is already said that this was not what was intended, but to start the path towards building unity to win the electoral clash with Bolsonaro – in 2022…
In turn, the campaign to support the criminal process, launched by Candeeiro three months after the first representation to the PGR, that is, four months ago, remains equally unknown, in limbo, since it lacks the resources to disseminate it, such as the that greedy businessmen make available to hate offices and the like to spread fake news. Your undersigned advances slowly, competing with hundreds of others provoked by the “destroying herds” that all sectors of the Bolsonaro government systematically launch in Congress and on Brazilians. And not all organizations that represented the PGR – equally requested, intensely, by the resistance to the “boiadas” – find time to make their own representations better known, even less to participate in Candeeiro initiatives, with their lives. as if they also didn't trust so much the path they opened for Bolsonaro's removal.
We could bring many more findings to this wailing wall, given the enormous difficulty we are experiencing in overcoming the challenge of “eliminating from the political horizon of Brazil the sinister figure of Jair Bolsonaro and the strain of Nazi microbes that inhabits his soul”, as he wrote Luiz Francisco de Carvalho Filho in a recent article in Sheet.
Will we have to “get used to” the nightmare of the dark and cruel Bolsonaro as President of the Republic until the end of 2022, if we manage to get there without Covid victimizing us? And since we mentioned religious symbols, will we be left with no choice but to ask God to be Brazilian again, before even worse things happen to us?
*Chico Whitaker is an architect and social activist. He was councilor in São Paulo. He is currently a consultant to the Brazilian Commission for Justice and Peace..
