Brazil

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blindpig
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 15, 2023 4:09 pm

ANOTHER LOOK AT WHAT HAPPENED IN BRAZIL

william serafino

Jan 14, 2023 , 10:41 a.m.

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The assault last Sunday, January 8, on the headquarters of the National Congress, the Presidency and the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil at the hands of a mob of Bolsonaro militants was an event of unquestionable gravity due to its political and institutional connotation, representing for the South American country an unprecedented event and a general short circuit for its political map.

The interpretative convention as a result of the event has been that it is a frontal attack on democracy, a kind of insurrectionary maneuver equivalent to the assault on the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021, but in a Brazilian format. The way in which the violent action took place, the extensive audiovisual recording of the eccentricities of Bolsonaro's supporters and the damage caused, undoubtedly facilitate the superimposition of images with the events of the gringo Capitol.

At this point, after several days of mobilization called by the Bolsonarismo to challenge Lula's electoral victory, in which the intervention (coup) of the Armed Forces was demanded, it would be illusory to believe that the assault was a surprise, beyond the shock which represented the event itself. In short, the table for a violent action was set even before the first round in October of last year, with intelligence information, journalistic reports and political warnings that warned well in advance about the preparation of a coup device and street violence.

Bolsonarismo kept his followers fanatical after Lula's victory, centered around the fraud narrative, prolonged the mobilization spirit and with this they created the atmosphere of psychological tension necessary to bet on the violent action last Sunday, once Solidified the previous links in the military police, the body in charge of the security of the Plaza de los Tres Poderes that ended up escorting the assailants .

With all these elements and background, it would be naive to think that Lula and the top leadership of the Brazilian government had not planned an event of this kind. It is highly probable that the decision was to let the plan develop, avoiding direct contention hours before to break up the Bolsonarista camp at the Army Headquarters, given that Lula's life and position were not in danger by not being there. physically at that time in the Planalto Palace.

With this decision, Lula exposed the violent excesses of Bolsonarismo through the media, increased the metric of national and international support around his figure and now has real elements to deploy a narrative of widespread condemnation, lasting over time, that contributes to isolating Bolsonarismo from its peripheral alliances with conservative sectors of Brazilian politics. A good move by the president at the first exchange after having once again assumed command of the country. In short, he translated a coup attempt (with little chance of real success) into a justification framework to face the beginning of his term politically strengthened and positioned as the great arbiter of Brazilian politics.

Although from the tactical side everything seems to be in order, at least in the balance favorable to Lula that left the hysteria last Sunday, the long term of Brazilian politics looks conflictive and worrying. As Gabriela de Lima, a specialist in geography and history consulted by the newspaper La Marea , points out, Bolsonarismo goes beyond the figure of Bolsonaro himself., which means that not only does it have a life of its own as a movement, but it has incorporated new values ​​and meanings (political, ethical, institutional) into the country's politics. It has left a deep mark on Brazilian society, says de Lima, who asserts that Bolsonarismo's ways of doing politics (suppressing consensus as a form of government, presenting the dictatorship as a revolution, among other attributes) have had an attractive effect social important.

This reading, not at all encouraging in the immediate future for Brazil, seems to deepen when one carefully observes the way in which the assault was interpreted. That is to say, the story of consensus that the event left, and that the western left, in its different variations, drew as a binary confrontation, without gray areas, between democracy and authoritarianism.

First, the uncritical defense of the concept of democracy, a category that, in the Brazilian context, also has the problem of being the result of a constitutional transition process supervised by the power factors of the outgoing dictatorship. As Florestán Fernándes and Waldo Ansaldi pointed out at the time , the transition to democracy in Brazil preserved remnants of the national security state of the dictatorship, which have persisted to this day.

Democracy in Brazil, concludes an investigation by Everton Rodrigo Santos, was based on a conciliation model of elites from above that, using an institutional dynamic agreed upon by the military and traditional parties, has survived over time at the cost of a reduction in the real power capacities of the presidential institution.


From this perspective, the plea for the defense of "Brazilian democracy" in opposition to Bolsonarismo conceals the way in which that same model, which preserved the privileges and power of the military, incubated a movement with a neo-fascist profile. Seen this way, the current model of Brazilian democracy is not the solution, or the system to be defended from an authoritarian counterrevolution, but rather the problem itself. The origin of current evils.

This argument faces another problem, perhaps more decisive: it was the legal mechanisms of Brazilian democracy that made possible the overthrow of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and that facilitated the judicial cornering of Lula until he was sent to prison. It is paradoxical that it was Bolsonarismo, and not the PT, who attacked the physical infrastructure of one of the main institutions (the Congress) responsible for the persecution of Lula's own party.

The story of the defense of democracy as a neutral, totalizing and universal value on the part of the western left not only errs on excessive generalization, but also, in the Brazilian case, keeps legal and institutional levers alive, converted into coup instruments, which have already been used to attack Lula and his party.

Reading democracy as an end in itself, and not as a means for an existential political struggle, explains the intellectual naivety of a left that is always exposed to losing power after validating a system of rules of the game designed to limit its advance.

Uncritically defending democracy in Brazil, as it is conceived, only guarantees the radicalization and expansion of Bolsonarismo, since it is its immediate political and ideological product. The constituent path, a reformatting of the political and institutional model, seems to be the only way to contain fascism, as Venezuela has shown in different stages of its evolution.

Pretending to combat a Bolsonarismo that fights for a conservative counterrevolution defending the status quo that gave rise to it is an illusion.

Another interesting as well as paradoxical aspect that the assault leaves us is the exchange of roles in terms of political tactics and theoretical approaches. The left, historically associated with a revolutionary program of rupture, creation of dual power and dismantling of the bourgeois and oligarchic power structures, now settles in a defense of established democracy that would make the liberal intelligentsia proud. The right, on the other hand, linked secularly to the preservation of privileges and order, is dedicated to the destruction of state institutions and to make chaos a political instrument.

Perhaps the problem here is not so much how the complexity of postmodernism causes these displacements, but the very intellectual formulation of dividing the world into left and right, as both categories are emptied of meaning and lose any explanatory function of the political present.

In short, the assault in Brazil does not show the "threats against democracy", it has too many defenders on both sides of the political spectrum to be in real danger, but rather the intellectual limits of the western left itself to assess the moment with a criterion independent of the dogmas of liberalism and its system of supposedly "universal" values ​​and beliefs.

But the fact does raise a concern, which even goes beyond Brazil: the willingness of right-wing expressions to break the established (for purposes that clearly point to the most open political and economic oppression), fight in the streets for a world horizon (anti-communism) and co-opt political meanings of high symbolic value such as class or nation, to implement their political project.

Given this, the western left, which has taken the events in Brazil as an intellectual defining event of the time, seems to choose to operate passively on the existing rules of the game, aspiring to survive politically within the false neutrality of democracy.

Perhaps a bit of Bolsonarismo, his spirit of combat, his willingness to break the framework of normality and his political and ideological determination about what must be changed, would not hurt the western left and the one that now has power in Brazil. If not, the only thing we can hope for is a new 2016, under other methods.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ot ... -en-brasil

Google Translator

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A criminal attack on democracy: Why Brazil’s fascists should not get amnesty

From all the excitement echoing from the red tide that took over during Lula’s inauguration as Brazil’s President, the most significant was the call for “no amnesty”

January 13, 2023 by Gabriel Rocha Gaspar

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Pro-democracy protesters in São Paulo following the January 8 right-wing attacks on Brasília (Photo: Michelle Guimarães/Estudantes NINJA)

From all the excited cries echoing from the red tide that took over Brasília during Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (known as Lula) inauguration as the Brazilian President on January 1, 2023, the most significant—and challenging, especially from the institutional stance of the new government—was the call for “no amnesty!” The crowds chanting those words were referring to the crimes perpetrated by the military dictatorship in Brazil from 1964 to 1985 that still remain unpunished. Lula paused his speech, to let the voices be heard, and followed up with a strong but restrained message about accountability.

Lula’s restraint shows his respect for the civic limitation of the executive, standing in sharp contrast to former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s notion of statesmanship. After all, one of the characteristics that allow us to properly qualify “Bolsonarismo” as fascism is the deliberate amalgamation between the institutional exercise of power and counter-institutional militancy. As a president, Bolsonaro went beyond mixing those roles; he occupied the state in constant opposition against the state itself. He constantly attributed his ineptitude as a leader to the restrictions imposed by the democratic institutions of the republic.

While Bolsonaro projected an image of being a strongman in front of cameras, which eventually helped him climb the ladder of power, he maintained a low profile in Congress and his three-decade-long congressional tenure is a testament to his political and administrative irrelevance. His weak exercise of power revealed his inadequacy as a leader when he finally took over as president. Bolsonaro catapulted to notoriety when he cast his vote for impeaching former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

Before casting his vote, Bolsonaro took that opportunity to pay homage to Colonel Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, “convicted of torture” during the military dictatorship, whom he jestingly referred to as “the dread of Dilma Rousseff!”; Ustra was responsible for systematically torturing the former head of state when she, then a young Marxist guerrilla, was jailed by the dictatorship. From that day until Bolsonaro’s last public appearance—after which he fled the country to make his way to Orlando, Florida before Lula’s inauguration—the only opportunity he ever had to stage his electoral persona was by instigating his supporters through incendiary speeches. That combination led to an impotent government, run by someone who encouraged his supporters to cheer for him using the ridiculously macho nickname “Imbrochável,” which translates to “unfloppable.”

By endorsing the need for accountability while respecting the solemnity of the presidency and allowing people to call for “no amnesty,” Lula restores some normality to the dichotomy that exists between the representative/represented within the framework of a liberal bourgeois democracy. A small gesture, but one that will help establish the necessary institutional trust for fascism to be scrutinized. Now, the ball is in the court of the organized left; the urgency and radicality of the accountability depend on its ability to theoretically and politically consubstantiate the slogan “no amnesty.”

No amnesty for whom? And for what? What kind of justice should be served to the enemies of the working class? To the former health minister who, claiming to be an expert in logistics, turned Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas into a “herd immunity test laboratory” to deal with a collapsing health care system during the peak of the COVID outbreak in Brazil; To the former environment minister who sanctioned the brutal colonization of Indigenous lands by changing environmental legislation; To a government who supported expanding civilian access to army-level weaponry; To the national gun manufacturer who endorsed such political aberration and promoted weapons sale; To the health insurance company that conducted unconsented drug tests on elderly citizens, while espousing to the motto, “death is a form of discharge”; To Bolsonaro himself, who among so many crimes, decided to repeatedly deny science and advertisehydroxychloroquine and azithromycin as cures to COVID-19; To the chancellor who used the Itamaraty (Brazil’s equivalent of the US State Department) to intentionally marginalize Brazil in the international community; To the media owners who endorsed or tolerated all that misanthropy, whitewashing fascist rhetoric, and offered a megaphone for amplifying racism, sexism, LGBT phobia, and, underlying them all, the brutal classicism.

The list goes on. There are so many crimes, so many delinquent individuals and corporations, and so many victims—starting with the deaths of innocent people because of COVID and the trauma suffered by their families and spreading to all vulnerable populations: Indigenous people, the Black population, Maroons, and LGBTQIA+—that a dedicated agency to investigate and prosecute them all is necessary. Perhaps the substance we must inject into the cry for “no amnesty” is the establishment of a special court. As suggested by professor Lincoln Secco, that should be the Manaus Tribunal, named after the city that was used as a testing ground for Bolsonaro’s anti-vax propaganda, where patients were left to die at the height of the COVID pandemic. And hopefully, the Manaus Tribunal, observing all the rites, all the civility, and all the legal requirements will be capable of bringing about the historic outcome the Constitutional Assembly of 1988 fell short of delivering: close the doors of Brazilian institutions to fascism, forever.

https://peoplesdispatch.org/2023/01/13/ ... t-amnesty/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 20, 2023 3:23 pm

Brazil: Lula Purges the Police Force in 18 States
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 19, 2023

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Brazil’s government made major changes to the Federal Police commands of 18 states on Thursday. 26 of the 27 Federal Highway Police superintendents were also dismissed.

Leandro Almada, with the Federal Police since 2008, will take over the Rio de Janeiro superintendence. He was responsible for the inquiry into the attempt to obstructed the investigation into the death of councilor Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes.

Almada’s investigation concluded that military police officers tried to disrupt investigations into Marielle’s killing.

Among those dismissed at the Federal Highway Police in Bahia, was Virgilio de Paula Tourinho who was summoned by the Electoral Justice during the runoff election due to operations that made it difficult for voters to cast their ballots in the PT stronghold state.

The changes were published in the Official Gazette on Wednesday night.

Lula had already made changes to the Federal District’s police structure on January 8th, following the attacks on the Planalto Palace, National Congress and Supreme Court.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... 18-states/

Finally a left/'pink' seizes the bull by the horns... Will Petro have the strength and nerve to do the same in Columbia? Very tricky...

The role of the Brazilian military in the coup attempt
January 20, 2023 Pedro Marin

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Supporters of Brazil’s former President Jair Bolsonaro hold a banner that reads in Portuguese “Military Intervention” on Jan. 8, 2023, as they storm the National Congress building in the capital Brasília.

The far-right mob that invaded the federal building, Congress, and the Supreme Court and vandalized government buildings at Three Powers Plaza in Brasília on January 8, demanded a “military intervention” in Brazil. They had set up camps that had assembled in front of army barracks throughout the country since November, demanding the “military to overturn” the election of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula). On November 11, 2022, the commanders of the armed forces released a note giving the coup camps a safe haven—not only physically but also legally. It is important to note two elements of that document: first, the commanders stated, through an illogical interpretation, that the camps in favor of a coup were legal because the protesters were peaceful, and that “both possible restrictions on rights by public agents and possible excesses committed in demonstrations” would be reprehensible, despite the fact that demanding the military to stage a coup is a crime (Article 286). In practice, the commanders of the three armed forces acted as constitutional interpreters, defending the democratic legitimacy of the coup camps and saying, in advance, that any measure taken by the institutions against the camps would be considered illegal by them.

The second element of the note made reference to the concept of “moderating power.” Reaffirming their commitment to the Brazilian people, the commanders said the armed forces were “always present and moderators in the most important moments of our history.” The moderating power was introduced as part of the constitution of 1824, based on the ideas of Benjamin Constant, who predicted that to avoid “anarchy” that marked the concept of the three branches of the government, it would be necessary to grant one of the powers (in Brazil, the monarch) a fourth power, capable of solving institutional disagreements.

On January 2, when Lula’s Minister of Defense José Múcio said that he considered the camps to be a “manifestation of democracy,” and that he had “friends and relatives” who were part of these camps, he was only repeating what the military had been saying since November.

Brazil has a long history of military intervention in politics. The Brazilian republic was founded through a military coup in 1889. From then until 1989, Brazil experienced at least 15 coups d’état attempts, of which five were successful: including a 21-year-long military dictatorship. After the fall of the dictatorship, in 1985, there was an expectation among Brazilians that civilian control would be established over the military and that respect for democracy would prevail among them. But the redemocratization process itself was controlled by the outgoing military government, through a “slow, gradual, and safe political opening,” in the words of then-military President Ernesto Geisel, and the pressure of the army on the Constituent Assembly that wrote the 1989 constitution guaranteed them the role of “[guarantors] of the powers and defenders of law and order.”

During Lula’s first two terms (from 2003 to 2011) as president, the military adopted a lobbying strategy in dealing with the government. Since the impeachment of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, however, they seem to have returned to the forefront of politics. Statements encouraging coups began to emerge from among the reserve and active military personnel, without punishment, and even the then-commander of the armed forces, General Eduardo Villâs Boas, stated in a tweet that he “repudiates impunity” when the Supreme Court was preparing to decide on a habeas corpus petition filed by Lula in 2018. Villâs Boas later would describe his tweet as an “alert.” The army took important positions in former President Michel Temer’s government and expanded its political participation under the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and has continuously threatened the electoral process in 2022.

On January 8, as the governmental buildings in Brasília were vandalized by the angry mob, a Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) decree was discussed and 2,500 military personnel were mobilized, ready to respond to the escalating situation. If such a decree had been signed, the armed forces would have been responsible for controlling the security of Brazil’s federal capital. Lula, instead, decreed a federal intervention “in the area of security in the Federal District,” appointing Ricardo Capelli, executive secretary of the Ministry of Justice, to command it. The president later declared that if he had carried out a GLO, “then the coup that these people wanted would be taking place.”

The involvement of the military in the acts of January 8 is being investigated. Many reserve members of the armed forces participated in the acts. The reasons why the Presidential Guard Battalion, the army battalion responsible for the security of the Planalto Palace, did not prevent the demonstrators from invading the government headquarters is also under investigation. “There were a lot of conniving people. There were a lot of people from the [police] conniving. A lot of people from the armed forces here were conniving. I am convinced that the door of the Planalto Palace was opened for these people to enter because there are no broken doors. This means that someone facilitated their entry,” said Lula.

After the establishment of the federal intervention, the security forces, led by the intervenor Ricardo Capelli, repressed and arrested the coup demonstrators.. The army mobilized armored vehicles to block and prevent the police from entering the camp and arresting those responsible on January 8. According to the Washington Post, senior army commander, General Júlio César de Arruda, told the Minister of Justice Flávio Dino: “You are not going to arrest people here.” The police were only allowed to enter the camp the next day.

This incident is just a manifestation of what the armed forces have been saying since November 2022: that they consider themselves a moderating power and that they will not allow—even after the destruction on January 8—“public agents” to carry out any act they consider a “restriction of rights” of the coup demonstrators.

The army gave a safe haven to the coup demonstrators before and after they vandalized the buildings in Brasília and while they were asking for an army intervention against the president. At the same time, it was unable to protect the presidential palace from such a crowd. This sends a clear message about who the army was trying to defend and what it considers its true mission.

In Brazil, it becomes more and more urgent that the masses, who shouted in chorus “No amnesty!” for Bolsonaro during Lula’s inauguration on January 1, 2023, include the military in their demand.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/ ... p-attempt/

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Brazil: The Danger Posed by Bolsonaro’s Supporters
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 19, 2023
Julian Cola

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Danger lurks with election of large number of pro-Bolsonaro governors and radicalization of Bolsonaro’s supporters who refuse to accept election results.

Will Lula Go the Way of Peru’s Ousted Left Wing President Pedro Castillo?

The impeachment of Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was “carried out within the constitutional framework.” This comment was offered not by Lisa Kenna, the current U.S. Ambassador to Peru and former CIA agent, but by Brazilian president-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Similarly, Chilean President Gabriel Boric immediately recognized Castillo’s vice president, Dina Boluarte, as Peru’s new head of state.

On the morning of December 7, then-President Castillo proceeded to dissolve Congress after the legislative body, lagging well behind at a 7% approval rating (September 2022), attempted to impeach him for a third time in just one and a half years in office. Article 134 of Peru’s Constitution permits the dissolution of Congress based on obstructionism and, having experienced the first impeachment attempt in his fourth month in office, it is precisely what Castillo faced throughout his brief tenure as head of state.

“They intend to blow up democracy and disregard our people’s right to choose,” Castillo said. During a publicly televised address just before his impeachment, he said that the dissolution of Congress would be a “temporary” measure where he would govern “by decree” until new congressional elections were held.

“The United States categorically rejects any extra-constitutional act by President Castillo to prevent the Congress from fulfilling its mandate,” tweeted Kenna. One day before this post she had met with Peru’s defense minister, Gustavo Bobbio Rosas, a retired brigadier general who had been sworn in fewer than 24 hours earlier.

Apart from her ambassadorship in Peru and nine years at the CIA, Kenna also served as a senior aide to former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the ex-CIA director who once made it clear that he “was the CIA director. We lied. We cheated. We stole. We had entire training courses.”

Immediately after Castillo attempted to sack Congress, the legislative body cited constitutional Article 113, successfully voting to impeach the embattled president based on “moral incapacity.” Later that same evening, Castillo, an Indigenous campesino and public school teacher who, similar to Lula, was also a union leader who led strikes and speaks not in the tongue of political elites but local vernacular, was charged with rebellion and conspiracy and imprisoned. Days later, a judge ordered that the impeached president remain in pre-trial detention for 18 months.

With the presidency vacant, Vice President Dina Boluarte was sworn in as Peru’s new head of state. Faced with mass protests, she declared a nationwide “state of emergency,” deploying the military onto the streets. In January, Boluarte said she “had never embraced the ideology” of Perú Libre and was expelled from the party in which Castillo campaigned for president.

“The United States welcomes President Boluarte and hopes to work with her administration to achieve a more democratic, prosperous, and secure region,” stated Brian A. Nichols, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. He added, “We support her call for a government of national unity and we applaud Peruvians while they unite in their support of democracy.”

Just one day before Castillo’s removal, Argentinas vice president and former two-term president, Cristina Kirchner, was convicted on charges of corruption and sentenced to six years in prison and disqualified from holding public office. Analysts and supporters attribute her case to on-going lawfare campaigns waged against progressive governments in the region—the pink tide. Kirchner’s court case and verdict were only possible after an assassin’s firearm jammed as he attempted to shoot the vice president at point-blank range. Identified as Fernando André Sabag Montiel, a 35-year-old Brazilian national who had been living and working in Argentina as a driver, the incident is a reminder of growing political hatred in the region and the extent to which individuals or groups are willing to go to achieve their aims.

Though their socio-political contexts may differ, Castillo’s ouster did not occur in isolation from similar events witnessed in Brazil, starting with the removal of former President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The good news, at least for now, is that Lula has been released from prison, allowed by the same judicial system that initially put him behind bars four years ago to run in this year’s presidential election and, ultimately, defeated incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro.

However, this is a one-sided story. It paints only a portion of a larger landscape. Speaking about the return of the so-called pink tide, Tatiana Berringer de Assumpção, a professor of international relations at the Universidade Federal do ABC, said, “they are, in certain terms, more fragile, however…more numerous. They’re more fragile precisely due to their economic fragilities but also because of their own political limitations. Still, the synergy manifested between them can do away with their inertia, therefore, enhancing their potential.” However, with no effective response to lawfare, will progressive governments in mainland Latin America fulfill their potential?

Another less-discussed section of Brazil’s political canvas involves a closer breakdown of the 2022 general elections where a new parliament and governors were voted into office. Like Lula, Castillo also won the presidency. Just over a year into his mandate he was impeached, as was Dilma, and imprisoned, as was Lula in 2018. Unimpeded for the most part, lawfare continues to perfect its efficacy and voraciousness.

What Happened? First-Round Election Results

Five of Brazil’s seven Amazon region states—Roraima, Rondȏnia, Pará, Amazonas, and Acre—have either elected a pro-Bolsonaro governor in the first-round general election or a second-round gubernatorial candidate who favors the former president. Illegal mining and the expansion of agribusiness, industries detrimental to Indigenous communities and the environment, are among their proposals or implemented policies.

Taking home 56.2% of votes, Romeu Zema, another Bolsonaro loyalist, was re-elected as governor of the state of Minas Gerais. Part of Brazil’s southeast region, including the states of Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo, Minas Gerais was the sole state in this electoral zone, home to the largest percentage of eligible voters (43%), where Lula defeated Bolsonaro 48.3% to 43.6%.

Remaining true to form was Rio de Janeiro, Bolsonaro’s stronghold home state, where the incumbent president defeated Lula 51.1% (4.8 million votes) to 40.7% (3.8 million votes). Fellow Liberal Party (PL) member Cláudio Castro was re-elected to serve as Rio’s state governor in the first round of voting. Bolsonaro also defeated Lula 47.7% to 40.9% in the state of São Paulo. His gubernatorial candidate and former Minister of Infrastructure, Tarcísio de Freitas, went on to compete in an election runoff against the Workers’ Party (PT) candidate, Lula and Dilma’s former Minister of Education Fernando Haddad. According to an October 19 poll, Freitas led the race 55% to 45% and, indeed, he defeated Haddad in the decisive second-round vote.

Another key note in São Paulo’s gubernatorial race was the first-round knockout of Rodrigo Garcia of the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB). Serving as the main political opposition to the PT during Lula and Dilma’s presidencies, it is the first time the PSDB has been booted from the governor’s mansion since 1994.

While some party members viewed the loss as the party’s demise, it bears no consequence for the former party leader, co-founder and ex-governor of São Paulo, Geraldo Alckmin. In December 2021, the seasoned politician leapfrogged from the PSDB, his party for more than 30 years, to join the left-of-center Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). His new political membership occurred just ten days prior to the deadline for presidential hopefuls to be officially registered with a political party.

To the consternation of Lula’s supporters, the move paved the way for Alckmin to run as his vice-president candidate. When word first circulated that he was even being contemplated for the position, PT leaders released a signed petition titled: Manifesto Against the Lula Alckmin Affiliation. It recalled that Alckmin “publicly supported the coup and neoliberal operation” that resulted in the impeachment of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The letter also emphasized that his governorship of São Paulo was marked by attacks “against workers in general, against public servants, against health and education, against public security, against Black people, against youths and students, against residents of periphery communities, against the environment.”

The PT faced lesser disappointment in gubernatorial races in Brazil’s northeast region where their candidates, Fátima Bezerra (Rio Grande do Norte), Elmano de Freitas, (Ceará) and Rafael Fonteles (Piauí) were victorious. The PT also won a total of 68 legislative seats, two of which, Valmir Assunção (Bahia) and Dionilso Marcon, both members of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), were elected to Congress.

Most notable in the first-round general election was the number of ex-ministers, seven in total, who served in Bolsonaro’s cabinet elected to the Senate or Congress. Newly elected senators include former Minister of Women, Family, and Human Rights Damares Alves (Federal District); former Minister of Science and Technology Marcos Pontes (São Paulo); former Minister of Agriculture Tereza Cristina (Mato Grosso do Sul); former Minister of Regional Development Rogério Marinho (Rio Grande do Norte); and former Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro (Paraná)—the same former federal judge who convicted and sentenced Lula to 12 years and 11 months in prison on trumped-up charges of corruption and money-laundering. Incoming congressmen include former Minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles (São Paulo), as well as disgraced former Minister of Health Eduardo Pazuello (Rio de Janeiro).

Even before Lula defeated Bolsonaro in the second-round presidential election, Veja magazine was prepping the scene for another run at lawfare. In an article titled “Bolsonarista Advance in Congress Will Be a Tough Challenge for Lula,” Robson Bonin wrote, “Lula has made it to the second round of the election believing that he would be elected without having to assume accountability for past PT corruption.”

Citing the wave of pro-Bolsonaro representatives winning seats in the legislature, comprising the largest group in the body come 2023 with a total of 99 congressmen and 14 senators, the article went on to affirm that “Bolsonaro, consequently, will have influence over the Legislative branch even if he loses to Lula in the second-round presidential election.” That sentiment was echoed by Estadão newspaper. In a piece titled “Lula May Win But Bolsonarism Has Already Seen Victory,” Marcelo Godoy noted that the election of so many ex-ministers in Bolsonaro’s cabinet clearly demonstrates the “vitality of the right.”

During a press conference following the first Lula-Bolsonaro runoff debate, the incumbent president squeezed his former Minister of Justice, Sergio Moro, in front of the cameras to “please give a statement about corruption.” Positioning himself accordingly, the ex-federal judge reaffirmed that Lula “lies.” Moro proceeded to associate Lula to organized rebel gangs who, over a three-day period in May 2006, spearheaded attacks throughout São Paulo leaving 59 police officers and penitentiary guards dead. In response, death squads and the police killed 505 civilians over the next two weeks. “I’m against Lula and PT governance that want to, as Alckmin has previously said, ‘return to the scene of the crime.’ This is unacceptable.”

Moves to appease the financial sector and possibly avoid virulent, well-funded Bolsonarist opposition to an eventual Lula government were under way prior to the first-round presidential election. On September 27, less than a week before voting, Lula attended a private dinner in São Paulo hosted by João Camargo, founder of Esfera Brazil, and attorney Marco Aurelio de Carvalho, of Grupo Prerrogativas. Diners included businessmen and important figures in the financial sector who publicly expressed their support for and donated funds to Bolsonaro’s re-election campaign or allied politicians.

In the lead up to the first-round election, Ometto had donated a total of R$8.8 million (approximately $1.6 million at today’s exchange rate) to political parties and candidates aligned with Bolsonaro. Also in attendance was Henrique Viana, founder and CEO of Brasil Paralelo, a website that produces films and other content that recounts the history of Brazil from a right-wing perspective. With more than 375,000 subscribers, the company has seen a meteoric rise parallel to Bolsonaro’s ascendance.

Foreign Interference?

Despite the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety registering 939 electoral crimes and 307 detentions during this year’s first-round general election, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes, said, “the election occurred in peace,” and without any “serious difficulties.”

Foreign support for Bolsonaro was expressed not only via hyperbole but also capital inversion connected to his re-election campaign. Former Trump adviser and founder of Breitbart News, Steven Bannon, stated that Brazil’s presidential election is the “second-most-important election in the world,” adding confidently, “Bolsonaro will win unless it’s stolen by, guess what, the machines.” The media mogul has maintained close relations with Bolsonaro’s son and congressman, Eduardo Bolsonaro, since 2018, designating him as representative of his conservative international movement in Brazil.

Jason Miller, owner and director of the U.S.-based social media website Gettr, and former adviser to President Trump, sponsored political events in support of Bolsonaro’s re-election campaign before the start of the official electoral period, which began on August 16. Brazil’s electoral laws banned political campaigning prior to this date.

However, Gettr supported at least four events promoted by the think tank Liberal Conservative Institute (ICL) between September 2021 and June 2022. ICL is headed by Eduardo Bolsonaro, along with attorney and ex-adviser to the Ministry of Education, Sérgio Sant’Ana. Hosted events included two CPAC conferences, referred to as the “largest conservative event in the country,” as well as two conservative regional congresses called “Profound Brazil.”

Gettr was established in July 2021 with the support of a foundation associated with Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui, an associate of Bannon.

On March 12, Congressman Filipe Barros spoke at a “Brasil Profundo” event in Londrina, Paraná. He told attendees that Lula was the “first president of the republic to be imprisoned or the first person in the country’s history who was acquitted by the Supreme Federal Court, a clear and distinct interference in the electoral process. They did this so that he could compete in the elections against Bolsonaro in the hope that Lula wins but I’m sure that won’t happen.”

During a Conservative Congress held June 11-12 in Campinas (São Paulo), speakers explicitly requested votes for the incumbent president. “You all are the elite troops…Each one of us must obtain at least one thousand votes for our president Bolsonaro,” said Jorge Seif, ex-Secretary of Culture and Fishing and, at the time, a congressional candidate for the state of Santa Catarina. In attendance at the event, Dan Schneider, executive director of CPAC, stated, “When I return to Brazil next year, I want to be here to celebrate a victory, not to regret a defeat.” He concluded: “Come on Brazil, let’s win.”

For his part, Miller stated, without directly mentioning the upcoming presidential election that the situation is “critical not just for Brazil or the United States, but for all of Western civilization…If we do not defend and embrace our freedoms now, they will be lost forever. This is the time to exercise our God-given rights to free speech, free expression, free press, free assembly, and free worship.”

Concerning Brazil’s electoral legislation, Isabela Damasceno, President of the Electoral Rights Commission-Order of Attorneys-Minas Gerais branch, pointed out that foreign companies are prohibited from sponsoring events of an electoral nature. This includes Gettr’s live broadcasting of pro-Bolsonaro motorbike rallies in Ribeirão Preto, as well as Americana, a city founded by disgruntled U.S. Confederate soldiers, politicians and supporters who fled to Brazil in the wake of the U.S. Civil War. Damasceno stressed that this type of relationship “breaches regulations,” adding that “there’s been an attempt to conceal the sponsorship so as to avoid scrutiny by the electoral justice department concerning these types of donations…The irregularities in relation to the episode as told to me are alarming.”

Marcelo Weick, an attorney and member of the Brazilian Academy of Political and Electoral Rights (Abradep), also stressed that, with respect to political campaign funding, “money received from a foreigner,” regardless if it is a private individual or legal entity, “is prohibited since the 1940s.” Such means of backing “not only interferes in the transparency of the electoral process and equal opportunity but also, and more unsettling, our national sovereignty…This is a very serious problem that must also be investigated.”

Lawfare Review

To date, lawfare—falsely accusing political leaders of crimes in order to remove them from office—has been practised and seen more success in the U.S.’s proverbial “backyard” than any other political region on Earth. These actions are always in concert with the Global North, and are incapable of execution by officials and their interests solely without the Global North.

Example: Lawfare, as it has been employed in Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Brazil and Argentina, has yet to see the light of day in efforts to undermine, weaken or overthrow the Cuban government. However, lawfare is a crucial aspect of the U.S.-imposed blockade, an extraterritorial measure aimed at punishing third-party countries for engaging in commerce with the Caribbean island.

Apart from geography, what sets mainland Latin America apart not only from Cuba but other regions where it has not succeeded? For acknowledging lawfare’s existence and explaining its function from one place to the next, with critical and even leadership support from the “front yard,” is no longer the question. What is Brazil doing to clean house and political risk assessment to prevent these machinations from incubating and revisiting Lula in his third and final presidential term?

Vow to Regulate Media

Having been the victim of multiple hours of negative media coverage and not a second of positive reporting, Lula vowed to implement standard media regulations during the campaign trail. “I never imagined that lies spread via cellphones could have so much force on the internet,” he told a group of Evangelical representatives. He also reminded attendees that, for many years, he was bogged down trying to convince churchgoers that PT members were not demons simply because of the party’s red-colored logo or because he sported a beard.

Such media coverage served as a primer for lawfare in Brazil and Lula’s imprisonment precisely when he led all polls to win the 2018 presidential election. “Well, he can issue an executive order” in regard to implementing media regulations, one lady told me. True, however, pundits and talking heads have already made their case. The mere hint of this move would be met by calling Lula a “dictator” and “tyrant,” one who trashes the spirit of “free speech.” Theoretically, issuing an executive order to implement better media regulations could restart the lawfare ball rolling.

However, short of implementing basic media regulations and the democratic expansion and support to Brazil’s alternative media landscape, it is hard to tell how any independent, progressive media group will be able to keep up and compete with the magnitude of Globo and other well-funded mainstream media outlets.

Strengthening the Base

With Lula imprisoned (2018-2019), Fernando Haddad served as the PT’s presidential candidate substitute, going toe to toe with Bolsonaro in the 2018 election. Less than a week before the election, Mano Brown, lead artist of the rap group Racionais MC’s, took to the stage of a political rally in Rio de Janeiro. Reneging on his promise to “never again attend” such an event he had decided, in this instance, to come and “represent me”—that is, “me” in the plural, collective sense of his childhood periphery community in São Paulo and all periphery communities in major Brazilian cities. In no mood for the “festive gathering,” Brown challenged the audience to come to terms with the fact that “blindness that affects the other side also affects us.”

Seated right behind him were Haddad and his wife, Ana Estela Haddad, and vice-presidential running mate Manuela D’Avila of the Communist Party of Brazil; former left-wing presidential candidate Guilherme Boulos of the Socialism and Liberty Party; Lula’s former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Dilma’s former Defense Minister Celso Amorim; musicians Chico Buarque and Caetano Veloso; liberation theology priest Leonardo Boff; and a host of other important political and cultural figures. Marielle Franco’s mother, Marinete da Silva, was also in attendance, the only one sustaining a smile throughout Mano’s talk.

Denied credit for having awakened and cultivated the socially conscious, thus, politicizing a generation of youths starting in the 1990s, artists such as Racionais MC’s, authors and poets from the periphery literature movement (also referred to, mainly by the market, as marginal literature), and other grassroots organizations helped propel Lula to his first presidential win in 2003. Lacking these ingredients, previous presidential runs (1989, 1994, 1998) had all come up short despite the gradual escalatory push provided by the PT and allied political parties, workers’ unions, liberation theology, and untold liberal organizations, groups, progressive media, etc.

Back on stage in Rio, Brown said, “If at any point the communication of these people [pointing to the guests behind him] fails, then they’ll pay the price. Communication is the heart and soul of everything and if they’re not speaking the language of the people, they’re going to lose for sure, understood? Speaking well of the PT in front of PT fans is a piece of cake. There’s a whole bunch of people who aren’t present who need to be won over, if not, we’ll fall into the abyss…You people are screwing up and now you’re going to pay the price.” Boos poured in from the crowd. Brown held his composure, briefly scanning the audience, “If you all let me speak everything will be cool but I’d just as well stop altogether. Fuck it…Blindness is what kills us, not fanaticism…Return to the base”

When asked if he agreed with Mano’s remarks, Lula said that he “was right,” adding that “I like that guy like fuck. He’s gutsy.”

Part and parcel of the “communication” divide conjures another statement a friend from Prado, in southern Bahia and one-time grassroots MST member once told me—that the PT “não abre o leque” (doesn’t broaden its range). The limitation implied also speaks to a disconnect between political leadership and technocrats from base level, community supporters. That Lula was denied a resounding first-round presidential victory exemplifies deeper political polarization than some are willing to admit. Strengthening and improving communication with the base, broadening their range, might very well be the first step to regaining grassroots support, the shock troops required to advance public policies, defend against the spread of misinformation and disinformation associated with lawfare, and propel progressive platforms into a future when Lula is no longer president. The creation of the new Ministry of Indigenous People, which will be overseen by Sônia Guajajara, is one example of how Lula’s administration is “broadening its range” during his third presidential term.

In 2020, Campinas State University, one of Brazil’s most prestigious educational institutions, included Racionais MC’s seminal album “Surviving in Hell,” on its list of reading for students preparing to take the school’s entrance exam. Albeit the first time a music CD was endorsed as study material, the designation drew ire from conservatives for it, like others of the genre, dispelled Brazil’s creation myth and PR mainstay of being a country based on racial democracy.

Before Lula Is Sworn In

Jair Bolsonaro, the personality and figurehead the world has come to know over the past four-plus years, should have been defeated handily in the first-round presidential election. His track record as a politician, 27 years serving as a Rio de Janeiro congressman and counting just two proposals approved, is as low a bar as they come. That he was not defeated in 2018 and survived to a second-round decisive vote against Lula, the most popular president in Brazil’s history, leaving office with a record 83% approval rate, is a telltale sign of entrenched, polarizing factors canvasing Brazil’s socio-political portrait, an image more profound than Bolsonaro himself. Galvanized, mobilized, and fearless, his supporters brought the country’s 2022 presidential election to a nail-biting conclusion, a victory for Lula no less, but by less than two percent.

On Sunday morning, October 23, one week before voters went to the second-round polls, former congressman and Bolsonaro ally Roberto Jefferson grabbed his rifle and fired more than 20 rounds and tossed two grenades at federal police officers outside of his home in Rio de Janeiro. Based on non-compliance with the terms of his house arrest for helping to create a social media militia, his detention was ordered by Supreme Federal Court judge and TSE President Alexandre de Moraes. In an official statement Moraes repudiated Jefferson’s “cowardly” remarks and “abject aggression” directed against Supreme Court Justice Cármen Lúcia. The ex-congressman had posted on social media that the federal judge was a “prostitute and “whore.”

After a standoff, Jefferson surrendered to officers and was eventually taken into custody. Two officers were injured by shrapnel during the attack. Before the day’s end, Moraes had suspended the former congressman’s house arrest and reinstated his imprisonment. He has since been charged with four counts of attempted homicide. Although Bolsonaro tweeted that he rejects the “statement made by Mr. Roberto Jefferson against Judge Carmen Lúcia and the armed action against Federal Police agents.”

Prior to victory, Lula forewarned his supporters, “We’re going to have a problem, that is, we’re going to win the election. We’ll defeat Bolsonaro but Bolsonarism has been birthed. Following [the elections] we must raise awareness among society so that our people will not consolidate Bolsonarism as a definitive form of politics in Brazil.” The president-elect has also stated that he will not seek a fourth term as head of state.

Moving Forward

Without question, Lula’s run has been long and wide. It dates back to the mid-1960s when he was employed at a metal factory. It was during this period that his pinky finger was severed in a work-related accident. Then, in the mid-1960s, Lula, almost reluctantly, joined the metalworkers’ union. Years later he would confess that his preference at the time was either hitting the pitch for a football match or watching Brazilian soap operas. Rising through the workers’ union ranks over the years, he would be elected as president of the ABC Paulista Metalworkers Union in 1975. It was during this period, amidst military dictatorship violence and repression, that Lula led mass strikes for increased workers’ rights.

Lula’s trajectory, in fact, dates back even further, back to his childhood in the early 1950s. Migrating from drought, poverty and widespread hunger, the death of four siblings before reaching the age of five in the interior of Brazil’s northeast state of Pernambuco to the hustle and bustle of São Paulo, Lula would shine shoes and sell peanuts and oranges to help feed himself and his family. It dates back to his earliest, most formative years, learning to exhibit good “character…respect…dignity” and that he “must be bold” from his “illiterate” mother, Eurídice Ferreira de Melo—Miss Lindu. “She died as she was born, illiterate,” Lula said.

However, nothing of the sort would diminish lessons he learned from her, a battered woman who eventually rounded up her children and left Lula’s father. “I’d look at my mother’s visage and never saw her lose faith. She’d say, ‘Today we don’t have [food], but tomorrow we will.’ This is the belief that I was raised on…and we made it through. We survived.”

Acknowledging that this is his farewell presidential mandate, that the baton is ready for transfer, is a heads up to the younger generation. That baton, whether they are prepared to receive it or not, will be theirs in the coming four years. It will be a propitious and arduous four years, during which the conditions for lawfare will be ripe. Acute boldness is a must to help carry this administration through.

Postscript

Unlike his first-term presidential victory in 2003 and re-election four years later, Lula’s triumphant return to the political arena, represented by a phoenix-like third term, is met with through-the-roof expectations. The extended bucket list is due, on one hand, to Bolsonaro’s bombastic and corrosive leadership as president and, on the other, Brazil’s inherent socio-political structure, its society and its history and culture of open-ended dispossession.

Despite pressing internal and regional matters of importance banging at the door, one of Brazil’s leading progressive media outlets, just days after Lula’s victory, posed the question: Can Lula Help Negotiate (Peace) with the War in Ukraine? The government transition process had hardly begun and here was a media outlet imposing the president-elect upon a multi-faceted conflict playing out a continent away.

Such a proposition, however, did not come without merit, one that stems from the fact that, in 2010, Lula negotiated a nuclear deal between Iran and the United States. His efforts, shunned by former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former President Barack Obama, led him to question, “How do these people want to make a deal without dialogue?…I remember that Hillary Clinton worked hard against my idea to go to Iran. She even called the Emir of Qatar and asked him to convince me not to go. When I arrived in Moscow and met with [Dmitry] Medvedev, I found out Obama had called and asked him to help persuade me not to go.”

Projecting Lula back onto the international stage is a prerogative pushed by his team of advisers and handlers. Hosting a South American conference to protect and preserve the Amazon rainforest, as well as reintegrating Venezuela into regional political frameworks are just two priorities on the list.

To date his team remains quiet about whether or not the president-elect will attempt peace negotiations closer to home. The armed conflict between the Mapuche and Chilean government, which has included the militarization of the entire southern region (from the Biobío River to the tip of Chile’s southernmost coast), has seamlessly traversed from Sebastián Piñera’s government to Gabriel Boric’s. If there is one issue that unites far too many mainland South American governments, it is the response meted upon Indigenous people whenever they mobilize to reclaim their ancestral lands.

Similar matters reverberate within Brazil. Over a ten-day period, between the 3rd and 13th of September, four Indigenous adults and two Indigenous youths were killed in areas where land conflicts with loggers, miners or agro-industrialists prevail. Those killed included members of the Pataxó, Guaraní-Kaiowá, and Guajajara nations. During the same period, Cleiton Isnard Daniel, a 15-year-old Indigenous youth, committed suicide.

In the state of Bahia in 2021, 616 people were killed by the military police. Of that total—at least where the race of the victim was identified—603 were of African descent (98%). Compiled by the Security Observatory Network, the data were published in a study titled Skin Target: The Color the Police Extinguishes. It shows that Black people in Bahia, a state governed by progressive politicians over the past 16 years, comprise almost the totality of victims killed by the police. “Public security institutions…are not linked to left-wing discourses,” said Bruno País Manso, a researcher at the network and co-author of the study. A consensus among security officials is that, by “eliminating…the threat, order is established.”

South America’s giant lives and dies by its societal mainstay—“racial democracy”—promoting itself as being an at-ease, laissez-faire, miscegenated melting pot. What might have been Mano Brown’s response to being cursed out by a disgruntled Bolsonaro supporter at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar as opposed to Gilberto Gil is anybody’s guess. When faced with hard, factual numbers, the myth of “racialized democracy” is so outweighed by levels of institutional violence, racism and discrimination that it might have made Belgium’s King Leopold blush.

While Bahia’s percentage of Black people killed by the police is comparable to the state of Rio de Janeiro, the latter held the largest total number in 2021. Among 1,600 victims, 1,214 were Black people. The Skin Target: The Color the Police Extinguishes study also points out that last year, by compiling seven Brazilian states—Bahia, Ceará, Maranhão, Pernambuco, Piauí, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo— 3,290 people were killed by the police. Of that total, 2,154 were Black people.

Back in 2019, Rio de Janeiro’s police force killed at least 1,546 people. I reiterate “at least” for the body count, according to the Instituto de Segurança Pública, was compiled only from January to October that year. One of the victims, nine-year-old Ágatha Félix, was shot in the back by policemen who invaded the Complexo do Alemão favelas on September 20, 2019. Then-Governor Wilson Witzel publicly blamed her death on people who “smoke marijuana.” Daniel Lozoya, a member of Rio de Janeiro’s Public Defender’s Office, commented, “the more the state kills, the more it strikes…young Black youths in favelas.”

Brazil’s 2022 presidential election outcome proved tight, significantly tighter than polls suggested and what Lula supporters believed was possible. Bolsonaro, as evidenced by the truckers’ highway blockage, calls for another internal military intervention, and stacking parliament with his most trusted people, also proves that he has more shock troops to absorb the loss and move forward. Beyond pushing buttons inside a ballot box to promote, advance and defend Lula’s political project and policies, it is difficult to gauge where the same level and amount of enthusiasm and fervor will come from when the going gets tough. If the current moment is not bad enough, tougher times will emerge.

As president-elect, Lula has already made more than 80 promises to help salve the country’s economic woes. Policies aimed at remedying increased hunger (Brazil has been placed once again on the UN’s Hunger Map) are squarely on the table. Last year, the country’s pubic health service registered, on average, eight hospitalizations per day of babies at least one year of age due to malnutrition. If Lula fulfills just half of those vows, his third-term presidency might very well be considered a success.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... upporters/

*****

When the People Have Nothing More to Eat, They Will Eat the Rich: The Third Newsletter (2023)

JANUARY 19, 2023
Español Português Italian

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Maruja Mallo (Spain), La Verbena (‘The Fair’), 1927.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 8 January, large crowds of people dressed in colours of the Brazilian flag descended on the country’s capital, Brasília. They invaded federal buildings, including the Congress, Supreme Court, and presidential palace, and vandalised public property. The attack, carried out by supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro, came as no surprise, since the rioters had been planning ‘weekend demonstrations’ on social media for days. When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) was formally sworn in as Brazil’s new president one week prior, on 1 January, there was no such melee; it appears that the vandals were waiting until the city was quiet and Lula was out of town. For all its bluster, the attack was an act of extreme cowardice.

Meanwhile, the defeated Bolsonaro was nowhere near Brasília. He fled Brazil prior to the inauguration – presumably to escape prosecution – and sought haven in Orlando, Florida (in the United States). Even though Bolsonaro was not in Brasília, the Bolsonaristas, as his supporters are known, left their mark throughout the city. Even before Bolsonaro lost the election to Lula this past October, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil suggested that Brazil was going to experience ‘Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro’. This prediction is supported by the fact that the far-right Liberal Party, which served as Bolsonaro’s political vehicle during his presidency, holds the largest bloc in the country’s Chamber of Deputies and Senate, while the toxic influence of the right wing persists both in Brazil’s elected bodies and political climate, especially on social media.

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Mayo (Egypt), Un soir à Cannes (‘An Evening in Cannes’), 1948.

The two men responsible for public safety in Brasília – Anderson Torres (the secretary of public security of the Federal District) and Ibaneis Rocha (the governor of the Federal District) – are close to Bolsonaro. Torres served as the minister of justice and public security in Bolsonaro’s government, while Rocha formally supported Bolsonaro during the election. As the Bolsonaristas prepared their assault on the capital, both men appeared to have abdicated their responsibilities: Torres was on holiday in Orlando, while Rocha took the afternoon off on the last working day before the coup attempt. For this complicity in the violence, Torres has been dismissed from his post and faces charges, and Rocha has been suspended. The federal government has taken charge of security and arrested over a thousand of these ‘fanatic Nazis’, as Lula called them. There is a good case to be made that these ‘fanatic Nazis’ do not deserve amnesty.

The slogans and signs that pervaded Brasília on 8 January were less about Bolsonaro and more about the rioters’ hatred for Lula and the potential of his pro-people government. This sentiment is shared by big business sectors – mainly agribusiness – which are furious about the reforms proposed by Lula. The attack was partly the result of the built-up frustration felt by people who have been led, by intentional misinformation campaigns and the use of the judicial system to unseat the Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party (PT), through ‘lawfare’, to believe that Lula is a criminal – even though the courts have ruled this to be false. It was also a warning from Brazil’s elites. The unruly nature of the attack on Brasília resembles the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol by supporters of former US President Donald Trump. In both cases, far-right illusions, whether about the dangers of the ‘socialism’ of US President Joe Biden or the ‘communism’ of Lula, symbolise the hostile opposition of the elites to even the mildest rollback of neoliberal austerity.

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Kartick Chandra Pyne (India), Workers, 1965.

The attacks on government offices in the United States (2021) and Brazil (2023), as well as the recent coup in Peru (2022), are not random events; beneath them is a pattern that requires examination. At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been engaged in this study since our founding five years ago. In our first publication, In the Ruins of the Present (March 2018), we offered a preliminary analysis of this pattern, which I will develop further below.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and the Third World Project withered as a result of the debt crisis, the US-driven agenda of neoliberal globalisation prevailed. This programme was characterised by the state’s withdrawal from the regulation of capital and by the erosion of social welfare policies. The neoliberal framework had two major consequences: first, a rapid increase in social inequality, with the growth of billionaires at one pole and the growth of poverty at the other, along with an exacerbation of inequality along North-South lines; and second, the consolidation of a ‘centrist’ political force that pretended that history, and therefore politics, had ended, leaving only administration (which in Brazil is well-named as centrão, or the ‘centre’) remaining. Most countries around the world fell victim to both the neoliberal austerity agenda and this ‘end of politics’ ideology, which became increasingly anti-democratic, making the case for technocrats to be in charge. However, these austerity policies, cutting close to the bone of humanity, created their own new politics on the streets, a trend that was foreshadowed by the IMF riots and bread riots of the 1980s and later coalesced into the ‘anti-globalisation’ protests. The US-driven globalisation agenda produced new contradictions that belied the argument that politics had ended.

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Leonora Carrington (Mexico), Figuras fantásticas a caballo (‘Fantastical Figures on Horseback’), 2011.

The Great Recession that set in with the global financial crisis of 2007–08 increasingly invalidated the political credentials of the ‘centrists’ who had managed the austerity regime. The World Inequality Report 2022 is an indictment of neoliberalism’s legacy. Today, wealth inequality is as bad as it was in the early years of the twentieth century: on average, the poorest half of the world’s population owns just $4,100 per adult (in purchasing power parity), while the richest 10 percent owns $771,300 – roughly 190 times as much wealth. Income inequality is equally harsh, with the richest 10 percent absorbing 52 percent of world income, leaving the poorest 50 percent with merely 8.5 percent of world income. It gets worse if you look at the ultra-rich. Between 1995 and 2021, the wealth of the top one percent grew astronomically, capturing 38 percent of global wealth while the bottom 50 percent only ‘captured a frightening two percent’, the authors of the report write. During the same period, the share of global wealth owned by the top 0.1 percent rose from 7 percent to 11 percent. This obscene wealth – largely untaxed – provides this tiny fraction of the world’s population with a disproportionate amount of power over political life and information and increasingly squeezes the ability of the poor to survive.

The World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report (January 2023) forecasts that, at the end of 2024, gross domestic product (GDP) in 92 of the world’s poorer countries will be 6 percent below the level expected on the eve of the pandemic. Between 2020 and 2024, these countries are projected to suffer a cumulative loss in GDP equal to roughly 30 percent of their 2019 GDP. As central banks in the richest countries tighten their monetary policies, capital for investment in the poorer nations is drying up and the cost of debts already held has increased. Total debt in these poorer countries, the World Bank notes, ‘is at a 50-year high’. Roughly one in five of these countries are ‘effectively locked out of global debt markets’, up from one in fifteen in 2019. All of these countries – excluding China – ‘suffered an especially sharp investment contraction of more than 8 percent’ during the pandemic, ‘a deeper decline than in 2009’, in the throes of the Great Recession. The report estimates that aggregate investment in these countries will be 8 percent lower in 2024 than had been expected in 2020. Faced with this reality, the World Bank offers the following prognosis: ‘Sluggish investment weakens the rate of growth of potential output, reducing the capacity of economies to increase median incomes, promote shared prosperity, and repay debts’. In other words, the poorer nations will slide deeper into a debt crisis and into a permanent condition of social distress.

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Roberto Matta (Chile), Invasion of the Night, 1942.

The World Bank has sounded the alarm, but the forces of ‘centrism’ – beholden to the billionaire class and the politics of austerity – simply refuse to pivot away from the neoliberal catastrophe. If a leader of the centre-left or left tries to wrench their country out of persistent social inequality and polarised wealth distribution, they face the wrath of not merely the ‘centrists’, but the wealthy bondholders in the North, the International Monetary Fund, and the Western states. When Pedro Castillo won the presidency in Peru in July 2021, he was not permitted to pursue even a Scandinavian form of social democracy; the coup machinations against him began before he was inaugurated. The civilised politics that would end hunger and illiteracy are simply not permitted by the billionaire class, who spend vast amounts of money on think tanks and media to undermine any project of decency and fund the dangerous forces of the far right, who shift the blame for social chaos away from the tax-free ultra-rich and the capitalist system and onto the poor and marginalised.

The hallucinatory insurrection in Brasília emerged from the same dynamic that produced the coup in Peru: a process in which ‘centrist’ political forces are funded and brought to power in the Global South to ensure that their own citizens remain at the rear of the queue, while the wealthy tax-free bondholders of the Global North remain at the front.

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Ivan Sagita (Indonesia), A Dish for Life, 2014.

On the barricades of Paris on 14 October 1793, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the president of the Paris Commune who himself fell to the guillotine to which he sent many others, quoted these fine words from Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich’.

Warmly,

Vijay

https://thetricontinental.org/newslette ... ng-attack/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sun Jan 22, 2023 6:09 pm

The Role of the Brazilian Military in the Coup Attempt
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 20, 2023
Pedro Marin

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Mobilization in front of Buriti Palace in Brasília following the coup attempt. Photo: Ana Pessoagg / Mídia NINJA

Members of the military are being investigated as part of the investigation into the January 8 invasion by Bolsonaristas in Brasilia

The far-right mob that invaded the federal building, Congress, and the Supreme Court and vandalized government buildings at Three Powers Plaza in Brasília on January 8, demanded a “military intervention” in Brazil. They had set up camps that had assembled in front of army barracks throughout the country since November demanding the “military to overturn” the election of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula). On November 11, 2022, the commanders of the armed forces released a note giving the coup camps a safe haven—not only physically but also legally. It is important to note two elements of that document: first, the commanders stated, through an illogical interpretation, that the camps in favor of a coup were legal because the protesters were peaceful, and that “both possible restrictions on rights by public agents and possible excesses committed in demonstrations” would be reprehensible, despite the fact that demanding the military to stage a coup is a crime (Article 286). In practice, the commanders of the three armed forces acted as constitutional interpreters, defending the democratic legitimacy of the coup camps and saying, in advance, that any measure taken by the institutions against the camps would be considered illegal by them.

The second element of the note made reference to the concept of “moderating power.” Reaffirming their commitment to the Brazilian people, the commanders said the armed forces were “always present and moderators in the most important moments of our history.” The moderating power was introduced as part of the constitution of 1824, based on the ideas of Benjamin Constant, who predicted that to avoid “anarchy” that marked the concept of the three branches of the government, it would be necessary to grant one of the powers (in Brazil, the monarch) a fourth power, capable of solving institutional disagreements.

On January 2, when Lula’s Minister of Defense José Múcio said that he considered the camps to be a “manifestation of democracy,” and that he had “friends and relatives” who were part of these camps, he was only repeating what the military had been saying since November.

Brazil has a long history of military intervention in politics. The Brazilian republic was founded through a military coup in 1889. From then until 1989, Brazil experienced at least 15 coups d’état attempts, of which five were successful: including a 21-year-long military dictatorship. After the fall of the dictatorship, in 1985, there was an expectation among Brazilians that civilian control would be established over the military and that respect for democracy would prevail among them. But the redemocratization process itself was controlled by the outgoing military government, through a “slow, gradual, and safe political opening,” in the words of then-military President Ernesto Geisel, and the pressure of the army on the Constituent Assembly that wrote the 1989 constitution guaranteed them the role of “[guarantors] of the powers and defenders of law and order.”

During Lula’s first two terms (from 2003 to 2011) as president, the military adopted a lobbying strategy in dealing with the government. Since the impeachment of former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, however, they seem to have returned to the forefront of politics. Statements encouraging coups began to emerge from among the reserve and active military personnel, without punishment, and even the then-commander of the armed forces, General Eduardo Villâs Boas, stated in a tweet that he “repudiates impunity” when the Supreme Court was preparing to decide on a habeas corpus petition filed by Lula in 2018. Villâs Boas later would describe his tweet as an “alert.” The army took important positions in former President Michel Temer’s government and expanded its political participation under the government of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and has continuously threatened the electoral process in 2022.

On January 8, as the governmental buildings in Brasília were vandalized by the angry mob, a Law and Order Guarantee (GLO) decree was discussed and 2,500 military personnel were mobilized, ready to respond to the escalating situation. If such a decree had been signed, the armed forces would have been responsible for controlling the security of Brazil’s federal capital. Lula, instead, decreed a federal intervention “in the area of security in the Federal District,” appointing Ricardo Capelli, executive secretary of the Ministry of Justice, to command it. The president later declared that if he had carried out a GLO, “then the coup that these people wanted would be taking place.”

The involvement of the military in the acts of January 8 is being investigated. Many reserve members of the armed forces participated in the acts. The reasons why the Presidential Guard Battalion, the army battalion responsible for the security of the Planalto Palace, did not prevent the demonstrators from invading the government headquarters is also under investigation. “There were a lot of conniving people. There were a lot of people from the [police] conniving. A lot of people from the armed forces here were conniving. I am convinced that the door of the Planalto Palace was opened for these people to enter because there are no broken doors. This means that someone facilitated their entry,” said Lula.

After the establishment of the federal intervention, the security forces, led by the intervenor Ricardo Capelli, repressed and arrested the coup demonstrators.. The army mobilized armored vehicles to block and prevent the police from entering the camp and arresting those responsible on January 8. According to the Washington Post, senior army commander, General Júlio César de Arruda, told the Minister of Justice Flávio Dino: “You are not going to arrest people here.” The police were only allowed to enter the camp the next day.

This incident is just a manifestation of what the armed forces have been saying since November 2022: that they consider themselves a moderating power and that they will not allow—even after the destruction on January 8—“public agents” to carry out any act they consider a “restriction of rights” of the coup demonstrators.

The army gave a safe haven to the coup demonstrators before and after they vandalized the buildings in Brasília and while they were asking for an army intervention against the president. At the same time, it was unable to protect the presidential palace from such a crowd. This sends a clear message about who the army was trying to defend and what it considers its true mission.

In Brazil, it becomes more and more urgent that the masses, who shouted in chorus “No amnesty!” for Bolsonaro during Lula’s inauguration on January 1, 2023, include the military in their demand.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... p-attempt/

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President Lula dismisses the commander of the Brazilian Army

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General Júlio César de Arruda will be replaced by General Tomás Miguel Ribeiro Paiva, current military commander of the Southeast. | Photo: Twitter @GloboNews
Posted 21 January 2023 (17 hours 0 minutes ago)

The Brazilian Defense Minister, José Múcio, stressed that they are investing in bringing the Armed Forces closer to Lula's government.

The President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, dismissed the commander of the Army, General Júlio César de Arruda, two weeks after the coup attempt, which occurred on January 8, perpetrated by radical Bolsonarists.

The Brazilian Defense Minister, José Múcio, declared to the press that the replacement in office will be General Tomás Miguel Ribeiro Paiva, who had been serving as the military commander of the Southeast.

"Obviously, after these episodes, the question of the camps, the question of January 8, the relations, mainly in the command of the Army, suffered a fracture in the level of trust and we believed that we needed to stagnate that quickly from the beginning so that we can overcome that episode," said the minister.


Múcio stressed that "today we are once again investing in the rapprochement of our Armed Forces with the Government of President Lula."

"I wanted to introduce you to his replacement, General Tomás, who as of today is the new commander of the Armed Forces, of the Brazilian Army. Later, you will be able to talk better with him (...) starting next week when is the official assumption, they will have the opportunity to talk with him and recount everything that happened," the minister said.

Before being dismissed, Arruda participated the day before in a meeting at the Planalto Palace (government seat), with Lula, Múcio Monteiro and the commanders of the Navy, Admiral Marcos Sampaio Olsen, and of the Aeronautics, Brigadier Marcelo Kanitz Damascene.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-p ... -0016.html

Bold. That's taking the bull by the horns all right. Let's hope he's got more 'ass' than Castillo. Given his experience I don't think he'd make this move frivolously. The question is, what is the response of the hegemon? And if it is positive it is necessary to sniff for unwholesome compromise.

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Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon breaks a new record in 2022

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The institute also highlighted that in December 2022, 287 square kilometers of forest were felled. | Photo: EFE
Published 19 January 2023

Satellite monitoring detected that this is the largest deforestation since the Amazon region began to be monitored.

The Amazon Institute of Man and the Environment (Imazon) of Brazil announced Thursday that deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon registered a new record in 2022, with the loss of 10,573 square kilometers (km²) of forest, comparable to nearly 3,000 soccer fields per day.

"As a result, the accumulated deforestation in the last four years, between 2019 and 2022, reached 35,193 km². An area that exceeds the size of two states: Sergipe and Alagoas, which have 21 and 27 thousand km², respectively", detailed the Imazon in an official report.

According to the entity, Imazon's satellite monitoring detected that this is the largest deforestation recorded since 2008, when it began monitoring the Amazon region.


The institute also highlighted that in December 2022, 287 square kilometers of forest were felled, which represented an increase of 105 percent compared to the same month in 2021, when 140 square kilometers were lost.

"Regarding the jurisdiction of the deforested areas in 2022, 80 percent was in charge of the federal government, which is equivalent to 8,443 km². In these territories, devastation increased by 2 percent compared to the previous year, when they were deforested 8,291 km²," the report detailed.

Likewise, Imazon highlights that the states of Pará, Amazonas and Mato Grosso were the ones with the highest rates of deforestation, with Amazonas being the most serious region, since devastation increased by 24 percent compared to 2021.

"We hope that this is the last record of deforestation reported by our satellite monitoring system, since the new government has promised to prioritize the protection of the Amazon," said Imazon researcher Bianca Santos, presenting the data.

In this sense, the report highlights that close to 80 percent of the deforested area in 2022 is under the responsibility of the federal government, which until then was led by the far-right Jair Bolsonaro.

The current president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has indicated that the issue of the Amazon is one of his priorities, so among his first measures he unblocked the Amazon Fund, which has donations from Germany and Norway to be applied in environmental protection actions.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/deforest ... -0019.html

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 26, 2023 3:03 pm

Brazilian Senate Identifies Another 23 Implicated in Coup Acts

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Far right Bolsonaro supporters attempt to take over congress | Photo: Prensa Latina

Published 25 January 2023 (10 hours 12 minutes ago)

The Legislative Police of the Brazilian Senate reported today it had identified another 23 people involved in the terrorist acts on January 8 that devastated the headquarters of the National Congress here.

According to the G1 portal, given this information, the president of the Senate, Rodrigo Pacheco, must send this week to the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) a request for investigating these suspects.

Groups of radical vandals supporters of the defeated president Jair Bolsonaro invaded and looted the Parliament buildings, the Federal Supreme Court and the Planalto Palace, seat of the Executive Power, on January 8, in this capital.

With requests for military intervention and rejection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s assumption of power, the violent dissidents also damaged works of art and destroyed furniture and work equipment.

Due to these events, several lines of investigation were opened that led to the arrest of several of the terrorists and the Public Security of the Federal District (DF) was ordered to act.

In the same way, the ex-secretary of Public Security of the FD Anderson Torres was arrested, the governor of the territorial division, Ibaneis Rocha, was removed from office, and they identified soldiers involved in anti-democratic actions.

If the characterization of the coup leaders is confirmed, this will be the second representation sent by the Senate to the PGR.

On the 13th, Pacheco handed over to the attorney general, Augusto Aras, a first data on the vandals.

It transpired on the occasion that the Senate requested the opening of an investigation on 38 people. Subsequently, the PGR denounced 39.

Adding the two profiles, the number of people identified by the Senate as involved in terrorist acts in Congress could reach 61.

Likewise, G1 announced this Wednesday that Lieutenant Colonel Nélio Moura Bertolino will assume command of the Presidential Guard Battalion.

Bertolino will replace Colonel Paulo José Fernandes da Hora, investigated for the violent invasion of Planalto.

In addition to the absence of members of the Presidential Guard to protect the government premises, there is a video in which Da Hora argues with a military policeman who was trying to arrest the extremists.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0020.html

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Lula’s Robust Reassertion of Democracy, Social Progress and the Rule of Law in Brazil
JANUARY 24, 2023

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Celebrations at the inauguration ceremony of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, in Brasília, on January 1, 2023. Photo: Sintegrity under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

By Francisco Dominguez – Jan 21, 2023

“Under Lula’s progressive government, the significance of Brazilian democracy to the rest of Latin America cannot be stressed enough. Nor can the threat represented by the Bolsonarista militarisation of Brazil’s state institutions.”

On 8th January 2023, a week after Lula’s presidential inauguration, the world was shocked by a Trump-style mob attack on key state institutions in Brasilia, the country’s capital city. The world saw media images of thousands of Bolsonaro supporters invading Planalto (presidential palace), and the premises of both the Supreme Court and Parliament, who, when inside proceeded to vandalise just about everything within their reach whilst taking selfies of themselves.

It was a Bolsonarista insurrection aimed at not recognising Lula’s victory and keeping Jair Bolsonaro in power. Flavio Dino, Lula’s minister of justice, reported that Bolsonaristas had perpetrated similar acts of vandalism in at least ten states.

Former president Jair Bolsonaro, who refused to recognise his electoral defeat against Workers’ Party (PT) candidate, Inazio Lula da Silva on 31st October 2022, had conveniently travelled to Florida (30th December 2022) ostensibly not to be present at Lula’s inauguration but most probably not to be directly associated with the 8th January coup attempt if it failed.

To hand over the presidential sash on Lula would have been tantamount to accepting the people’s electoral will. Bolsonaro’s vice-president, retired army general Hamilton Mourão, who had also questioned the transparency of the election, refused to hand over the presidential sash to Lula too and did not attend the official inauguration on 1st January 2023, even though he was invited.

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s Orlando Vacation – Comparing the January Riots in the Brazilian and US Capitols


The issue was resolved by inviting representatives of the people of Brazil (a Black child, a disabled person, a street recyclables collector, a metal worker, a teacher, a woman cook, and an artisan) who were entrusted with placing the sash across Lula’s chest. Prominent among them was 93-year old Roani Metuktire, indigenous leader who accused Bolsonaro of crimes against humanity for both destroying their Amazon habitat and trampling upon indigenous rights.

A few days earlier (24/12/22), Brasilia detectives had foiled a plot to detonate an explosive device inside a truck filled-up with jet-plane fuel in the capital city’s airport. Three Bolsonaristas were arrested and are being tried for the terrorist attempt. One of them (Washington de Oliveira Souza) told police that Bolsonaro’s call to arms inspired him to build the arsenal he kept in his flat (shotguns, a rifle, two revolvers, three pistols, huge amounts of ammunition, camouflage uniforms, and many explosive devices). These criminals declared to the police they intended to cause a huge commotion hoping to provoke the military to declare a state of emergency. From Florida, Bolsonaro labelled the action a “terrorist act” yet he still praised protesters camping outside army barracks across Brazil urging the military to stage a coup.

The coup atmosphere created by Bolsonaro intensified during the election itself. In an unprecedented deployment of personnel, the Federal Highway Police (PRF) set up roadblocks in the Brazil’s northeast seeking to prevent voters in the PT strongholds from voting. In the nine-states sub-region Lula scored an average of 70% of the votes cast.

Silvinei Vasques, director of the PRF had posted a call to vote for Bolsonaro on Instagram, which was later deleted. Before the second round in October 2022, The Economist (8/09/2022) described the nearly 400,000-strong Brazil’s police forces as “trigger-happy and fond of Mr Bolsonaro”. The prompt intervention of Supreme Court judge, Alexandre de Moraes, president of Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), led the PRF blockade to be lifted and his order to extend the polls closure time in 560 places, prevented this Bolsonarista vote suppression effort from succeeding.

In a raid carried out by the Federal Police (12th January), a page with minutes for Jair Bolsonaro was found in the private residence of his (now ex) minister of justice, Anderson Torres, with a plan to issue a presidential decree declaring a state of emergency in the premises of the TSE aimed at changing (annulling) the 31st October election result and impose military rule.

Previously, Bolsonaro and some of the top brass, had proposed that the armed forces conducted their own, separate and parallel, vote audit to be contrasted with the TSE figures should Lula be declared the winner. On the 8th of January Torres was Brasilia’s security secretary appointed in that position by the capital city governor, Ibaneis Rocha, a Bolsonaro’s staunch ally.

With Torres in charge of Brasilia’s security the scene was ready for the putsch. Its Military Police (MP) simply opened the gates for the violent invaders. There are scores of posted videos showing sympathetic MP officers smiling, hugging and taking selfies of themselves with the insurrectionists. Brasilia’s Military Police Commander in chief, Fabio Augusto Vieira, is charged with openly conniving with them.

Another Bolsonarista top brass is ex minister of Institutional Security, general Augusto Heleno, who throughout 2021 and 2022 kept making threats of military intervention. In November 2022, after Lula’s victory in the second round, Heleno publicly tarnished the mental and physical health of the president and labelled him a drunkard.

There is also Walter Braga Netto, a retired army general, former minister of defence and vice-presidential candidate in Bolsonaro’s 2022 presidential ticket. In June 2022, Braga Netto stated that if Bolsonaro’s demand that the armed forces audited the election results was not accepted, the election could be cancelled. “Either we have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.” Reportedly, during the insurrection Braga Netto would have the task to deploy the armed forces in the streets.

Even though the idea of the army exerting tutelage over politics is appealing and popular among high officers, despite the persistent Bolsonaro and Bolsonarista calls the bulk of the armed forces were not persuaded to stage a coup. Bolsonaro had become so toxic that even substantial sections of the world far right seems to be ready to dissociate themselves from him, despite the BBC/PSB strenuous PR efforts made with “Rise of the Bolsonaros.”

On 9th January, Lula gave vent to his anger over the Bolsonarista violent insurrection against Brazil’s democracy announcing his government will not rest until finding and punishing all those responsible, including its financial backers. Brazil’s General Attorney Office has obtained that 6,5 million Reais (over 1 million Euros) belonging to 52 individuals and 7 companies be frozen to be investigated as suspects of having financed the coup attempt.

Followed by governors and Supreme Court judges, to symbolise institutional unity in defense of democracy, Lula headed a walk (09/01/23) from the presidential palace to the Federal Supreme Court premises to verify the damage done to the vandalised public buildings. Among those present were Brazil’s 27 state governors, the presidents of both Congress and Senate, and the General Attorney. Lula strongly criticised the lack of action and the silence of the armed forces for two months about the Bolsonarista camps outside military barracks demanding they stage a coup d’état. And for good measure, Lula has so far sacked over 50 military officers in charge of the presidency’s security.

After the institutional walkabout, law and order was swiftly restored by police forces: the Bolsonarista camp outside the army HQ in Brasilia was dismantled after an order from Alexandre de Moraes leading to the arrest of 1,500 protesters who were detained in over 300 detention centres. All such camps in other states of Brazil were also dismantled.

Torres Anderson is under arrest and the STF suspended Brasilia’s governor Ibaneis Rocha from his position for 90 days pending an investigation. During the coup attempt, as Rocha was sitting on his hands, Lula issued a decree turning control of Brasilia’s security over to the Federal Government until January 31. “Twenty minutes later, all government buildings had been completely cleared of rioters by the Brasilia Civil Police and the Federal Police.” Brasilia’s Military Police Commander in chief, Fabio Augusto Vieira, is also under arrest. Silvinei Vasques, director of the PRF, has ‘been retired’.

Senator Renan Calheiros (former Senate president) stated that it would request STF minister Moraes to investigate Bolsonaro’s responsibility in the coup attempt. STF doyen judge, Gilmar Mendes, pointed out that Bolsonaro carries political responsibility for not having dissuaded his supporters from executing acts of violence. Brazilian prosecutors have asked the courts to seize Bolsonaro’s assets as part of their investigation of the coup attempt.

Brazil’s General Attorney Office has included Bolsonaro in its investigation because he may have “publicly incited the commissions of crimes”. And STF judge Ricardo Lewandowski rejected a preventive habeas corpus request for Torres and Jair Bolsonaro.

Due to the perplexity surrounding the Bolsonarista insurrection, little attention has been paid to the implementation of Lula’s policies. On 2nd January, one day after being inaugurated, he cancelled the privatization of eight state-owned companies. He also reversed several reactionary Bolsonaro decrees: re-established financial support to fight against deforestation and repealed a measure on illegal mining, suspended the issuance of new gun permits and authorisation for new shooting clubs, guaranteed income support for the poor, and a tax exemption on fuel, among a raft of progressive measures.

To top it all up, he appointed Sonia Guajajara, a representative of indigenous peoples, in charge of the newly created Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, which he pledged to create during the electoral campaign.

Under Lula’s progressive government, the significance of Brazilian democracy to rest of Latin America cannot be stressed enough. Nor can the threat represented by the Bolsonarista militarisation of Brazil’s state institutions. During the election campaign he promised the sack around 8,000 military officers appointed at all levels of the state throughout Brazil.

We will need to both remain vigilant – Bolsonarismo has been defeated but it is not yet buried – and redouble our solidarity with the people of Brazil and the peoples of Latin America.

https://orinocotribune.com/lulas-robust ... in-brazil/

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s Orlando Vacation – Comparing the January Riots in the Brazilian and US Capitols
JANUARY 14, 2023

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Photo composition with the images of two iconic protestors in the storming of Capitols in Brasilia (left) and Washington D.C. (right). Photo: Orinoco Tribune.

By Roger D. Harris – Jan 12, 2023

Outgoing Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fled the county just before his term of office ended on January 1, apparently fearing legal prosecution for multiple wrong-doings once he lost presidential immunity.

Bolsonaro had long predicted that if he were to lose the Brazilian presidential election, which he did, it would only be due to fraud. While fraud allegations have been refuted, his rightwing followers – some 49% of the electorate – believe the vote was a steal.

Once Bolsonaro lost the Brazilian presidential runoff election on October 30 to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (aka Lula), he largely disappeared from public view. Reporting from Brazil, Leonardo Sakamoto speculated that the petulant lame-duck president had been “shredding documents, erasing hard drives, renewing his passport, or analyzing ways to avoid answering for the crimes he committed.”

For weeks after Bolsonaro lost, rightwing truckers blocked Brazil’s highways in protest, and evangelicals preyed outside military bases calling for the army to overturn the vote. While his followers ran amuck, for the longest time Bolsonaro neither conceded, nor commented, nor even appeared in public.

His Vice President Hamilton Mourão offered the excuse that his chief was reclusive because he had a skin disease preventing him from wearing pants. However, many other guys appear on Zoom with no such compulsion about their below the belt attire.

On December 30, Bolsonaro bolted to the home of Disney World. Although Orlando is the reputed venue of the “Happiest Place on Earth,” Mr. Bolsonaro apparently has not found it so. Reporting on his holiday, Bolsonaro complained: “I came to spend some time away with my family but these weren’t calm days” after being hospitalized for stab wounds in the stomach incurred in 2018, which acted up.

Bolsonaro has been staying at the home of ex-pat Brazilian mixed martial arts fighter José Aldo. Considered to be among the best MMA combatants, Aldo has been implicated in illegally receiving handouts from the former Bolsonaro government.

At the same time that Bolsonaro was chilling in the Sunshine State, thousands of his faithful had bused in from all over Brazil to Brasilia and had temporarily laid siege to the congress, supreme court, and presidential buildings on January 8.

Comparing the January Riots in the Brazilian and US Capitols

Many parallels are being drawn in the liberal media between the January 6th US capitol riot by Trump supporters claiming election fraud in 2021 and the storming of the Brazilian capitol two years and two days later by Bolsonaro’s supporters also claiming election fraud.

There were, however, some differences regarding the two events and its public perception. Progressives in Brazil don’t believe Bolsonaro won in 2018 because of Russian interference as do the majority of Democratic voters regarding Trump’s successful bid for the US presidency in 2016. Nor did the capitol police in Brazil shoot and kill any of the unarmed protesters.

Most notably Bolsonaro’s staff cooperated in the transition to Lula’s new presidency. And Bolsonaro mildly rebuked his violent followers. In contrast, Trump fanned the flames of discontent when Bolsonaro quietly retired leaving his angry movement leaderless.

Meanwhile, liberal pundits like Timothy Snyder are giddy in praise of the Brazilian government’s subsequent crackdown of the rioters. Note how strongly putative liberals in the US have embraced punitive law enforcement. Democrats have learned to love the security state at home (not to mention their romance with war abroad).

US liberal media is in an absolute frenzy linking the two events, which are both blamed on Trump as if the Brazilians themselves had no agency. The implied conspiracy is bolstered by Bolsonaro’s undeniably close ties to Donald Trump. MSNBC pontificates: “After this weekend’s events in Brazil, the parallels and connections to Trumpism, we must now wrestle with being an exporter of right-wing extremism.”

Implicit is MSNBC’s absurd notion that the US once exported democracy. Conveniently forgotten is the US collusion in framing Lula, who sat out the very election in jail that allowed Bolsonaro to get into office in the first place. Recall, too, the 21 years of US-backed military dictatorships in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

The left-leaning presidents in Latin America have also condemned the rightwing attacks in Brazil but from the perspective of being on the receiving end of so-called US democracy exportation. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro commented: “We categorically reject the violence generated by Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist groups that have assaulted the democratic institutions of Brazil.”

Maduro likely reflected on similar rightwing destabilization events that led to unsuccessful US-backed coup attempts against him and the 2019 coup in Bolivia. In the latter, leftist President Evo Morales was deposed with the connivance of the US working through the Organization of American States.

Calls to Boot Bolsonaro

Predictably, many Democratic politicians have demanded that Bolsonaro be expelled from the country in light of the brawl in Brasilia. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who speaks truth to power as long as it is not her party’s leadership, has called for Bolsonaro’s expulsion. Democratic representatives Ilhan Omar and Mark Takano have echoed the sentiment along with Senator Sanders. They all decry “fascist” influences in Brazil (while funding them in Ukraine).

In response to the mounting pressure from his party to banish the unwanted Brazilian guest, President Biden has done nothing or, as the AP euphemistically reports, “has proceeded cautiously.” State Department spokesman Ned Price has done what he does best by “sidestepping questions about Bolsonaro’s presence.” US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has been “similarly circumspect.”

Although the new Lula administration in Brazil is investigating potential offenses by Bolsonaro, no formal extradition request has been made to Washington. Further, an extradition request from Lula is unlikely. With all the challenges that his fledgling presidency faces, having his chief rival – especially one whose party swept the legislature and key states – quietly ensconced in self-exile is best.

However, Bolsonaro could still be legally deported under US law if the secretary of state finds his continued presence here “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

https://orinocotribune.com/former-brazi ... -capitols/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Jan 28, 2023 2:58 pm

They will present a report on the coup attack in Brazil

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Images published last Wednesday show, in more detail, the looting and destruction perpetrated against the place. | Photo: EFE
Published 27 January 2023

The objective is to investigate more deeply the violent revolt that the headquarters of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) suffered.

A report on the assaults on January 8 against government offices in Brazil will be presented on Friday to the head of the Supreme Court, Alexandre Moraes, by the federal inspector in Public Security of the Federal District (DF), Ricardo Cappelli.

According to the federal official, the objective is to further investigate the violent revolt that the headquarters of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) suffered at the hands of supporters of former President Jair Bolsonaro.

Images published last Wednesday show, in more detail, the looting and destruction perpetrated against the place, so the document could include reports from the security forces, as well as conclusions that can decant responsibilities.


One of the profiles of the document is the revelation of the increase in the number of people in the coup camp in front of the Army Headquarters, in Brasilia, days before the attacks.

On January 6, the shelter was occupied by around 300 people and the next day it jumped to 3,800, according to the blog of journalist Andréia Sadi.


Local media assure that the coup group in Brasilia was enriched by dozens of buses that arrived in the capital since the weekend before the attack.

The Military Police of the DF had few men in place, failed to stop the terrorists and was accused of omission.

During the presentation on Wednesday of Sandro Avelar as the new DF Public Security secretary, Cappelli spoke about the report and stressed that the work in question requires caution.

"It is excessive zeal, because it is a report in which we are trying to answer some questions, based on the collection of a series of documents that people owe to society and to the history of Brazil," he pointed out.

«It is the zeal for the care with the information, to be able to bring it more accurately to society. It is our responsibility to society and to history, "she reiterated.

In the Planalto Palace, seat of the Executive Power, the mob destroyed works of art and furniture, while the STF plenary was destroyed. To date, some 1,000 people continued to be detained for their alleged participation in the violent events.

https://www.telesurtv.net/news/brasil-p ... -0006.html

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**********

Insubordinate Military Points to Dangers of Fascist Coup in Brazil
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on JANUARY 27, 2023
Julian Cola

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Jair Bolsonaro supporters attack Brazil’s three branches of government in Brasília. [Source: agenciabrasil.ebc.com]

Newly elected President Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva remains in hotel accommodation in Brasília, still unable to reside in the Alvorada Palace due to material damage and security concerns.


On the 21st of January, Brazilian president, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva, sacked general Júlio César de Arruda as head of the armed forces. Tomás Miguel Ribeiro Paiva, military commander of the country’s southeast region, will assume the post. The move, according to an unnamed source in Brazil’s military high command, caused “disaffection” within the company.

Arruda assumed head of the military on the 30th of December last year, just two days before the presidential swearing-in ceremony and the start of Lula’s third term in office. However, the military’s inaction on January 8th, when thousands of supporters of former Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, stormed the Three Powers Plaza in Brasilia, ransacking the main buildings housing the country’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches, meant Arruda could not be trusted.

Four days before Lula sacked Arruda, on January 17th, Brazil’s new government relieved 40 military officials of their duties as members of the Administrative Coordination team at Alvorada Palace, the official presidential residence.

Less than one month into his third term as head of state, Lula has repeatedly expressed reservations and a lack of trust among segments within the country’s military. “I’m waiting for the dust to settle,” he told journalists, after which he wants to “view all of the recordings captured inside the Supreme Court, inside the palace. Many security agents were complicit. Many PMs [military police] were complicit. Many from the armed forces, here inside, were complicit.” Lula went on to state that he was “convinced” the door to Planalto Palace, the official workplace of the president, was intentionally opened “because the door isn’t broken, otherwise, somebody facilitated their entrance.”

Speaking poignantly to state governors, supreme court judges, the attorney general and presidents of the House and Senate on January 9th, Lula emphasized that his government would not react in an “authoritarian” manner, still they “will not be tepid with anybody. We will investigate and find out who financed” the arrival and stay of hordes of pro-Bolsonaro rioters in the capital city.

The removal of the 40 military officials stationed inside Alvorada Palace will not result in their discharge from the armed forces. Instead, they will resume activities at their previous posts.

Also last week, Lula’s government replaced 26 of the country’s 27 Federal Highway Police chiefs, as well as 18 Federal Police directors.

Persistent Old Wounds

As part of the effort to clean house of untrustworthy military authorities operating within Brazil’s executive branch, soldiers of the Institutional Security Office (GSI), responsible for the security of the president, vice president, and their official workplace and residence, were formerly relieved of their duties.

Included among this group was Marcelo Ustra da Silva Soares, a relative of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, an ex-colonel considered to be one of the main torturers during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1984) when he was head of the Department of Information Operations—Center for Internal Defence Operation in São Paulo from 1970 to 1974. Ustra was accused of the disappearances and deaths of at least 60 people and, in 2008, became the sole military official who was accused by Brazil’s Public Prosecutor’s Office of having committed torture during the dictatorship.

Despite Brazil’s Truth Commission citing Ustra’s name among 377 other officials involved with torturing and killing people during the dictatorship, as well as being found guilty of kidnap and torture by a judge in São Paulo, a sentence that was later overturned by the state’s Court of Appeals, Ustra remained a free man until he died of cancer at the age of 83 in 2015.

“The crimes that he committed were not completely addressed,” said attorney Aton Fon Filho, a victim of torture during the military dictatorship. “Ustra was a torturer, a criminal. The fact that he was not judged, that the acts that his actions were shamelessly covered up by the STF (Federal Supreme Court), against the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, demonstrates that Brazil’s judicial system is still designed to protect criminals at the service of the dominant class.”

Renan Quinalha, another attorney and member of the Truth Commission, added that “choosing whom we punish is symptomatic of our society. While a maid can be arrested for stealing a bon bon, Ustra, responsible for deaths and grave human rights violations, his impunity remains. This is why torturing, killings, and disappearances persist in our democracy.”

In 2016, during the parliamentary vote to start impeachment hearings against former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, then-Congressman Jair Bolsonaro took to the lectern and, before voting in favor of the motion, paid homage to Ustra. “They lost in [19]64. They lost in 2016. For families and the innocence of children in school classrooms, of which the PT [Workers’ Party] never had. Against communism. For our liberty. Against São Paulo Forum. In memory of Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the dread of Dilma Rousseff…For our armed forces. For Brazil above everything and God above us all, I vote yes.” In subsequent years Bolsonaro would refer to Ustra as a “national hero.”

Lula has opted out of GSI protection for now, choosing the federal police for security instead. Following the 8th of January attacks in Brasília, the president mandated that an emergency decree remain in effect until the end of January. Describing the rioters as “vandals…fascists…[and] fanatics,” he blamed the mayhem on his predecessor and military officials hostile to his third term in office.

Ronaldo Ribeiro Travasso, a GSI military official, stated that he was “certain the thief [alluding to Lula] would not ascend the ramp” to be sworn in as president on January 1st. When asked why he believed that, Ribeiro Travasso said “because I trust in the people at the QG [Army General Barracks], in barracks across Brazil. I trust the truck drivers and the Indians. If the armed forces do nothing, we’ll do it.”

Persistency and Consistency

Days before the inauguration ceremony, police in Brasília detained and charged George Washington de Oliveira Sousa and Alan Diego dos Santos Rodrigues with placing a bomb beside a fuel tanker near Brasília’s International Airport. However, flames against a potential third-term presidency were being fueled before he ascended the ramp.

In July 2022, Brazil’s vice-president and former army general Hamilton Mourão, said Lula “is not respected by the armed forces.” The previous year he called the ex-president a “mannequin,” someone who operates in “analog,” while Bolsonaro’s administration functions “digitally.” He added that it “has been widely proven in three instances that he [Lula] is involved in corruption and money laundering.”

“A coup attempt” was how Brazil’s Minister of Communication, Paulo Pimenta, described the attacks. “It was worse than what happened in the U.S. Capitol because here the three powers of government were invaded.” Camped in front of army headquarters countrywide ever since Lula’s presidential victory on August 31, hard-line Bolsonaro supporters, believing unfounded claims of election fraud, pleaded for military intervention. Their claims, rebutted by the Electoral Supreme Court and with no concrete interventionist steps taken, loyalists of the former president blocked roadways and ignited vehicles less than 24 hours after Lula’s victory. Shortly after assuming office, Lula ordered the military to decamp the interventionist-seekers at their doorsteps but no action was taken until after the attacks on January 8.

Eventually, over 1,400 rioters were arrested. Since then, Supreme Court Justice, Alexandre de Moraes, has maintained 942 of the detainees in prison, while 464 were released on cautionary measures, such as the use of an ankle monitoring device.

Triangle of Peril

Some Lula supporters fiddle with the idea that the U.S. response to the attacks in Brasília is “correct.” U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted, in part, that “using violence to attack democratic institutions is always unacceptable.” Forty-one U.S. congressional representatives, all from the Democratic Party, have signed a letter urging President Joe Biden’s administration to revoke Bolsonaro’s U.S. visa and called for an FBI probe into his possible involvement with the January 8 riots in Brasília.

The former head of state, refusing to hand the official presidential banner to Lula on inauguration day, flew to Orlando, Florida, just days before the ceremony. However, no such investigation was requested in relation to the 13 FBI agents operating in Brazil, participants, directly or indirectly, in the maligned evolution of the Car Wash scandal and judicial hearings.

The same qualifies for Karine Moreno-Taxman, the former U.S. Department of Justice’s Resident Legal Counsel assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Brasília in 2007. During her tenure in Brazil she was a mentor of Sergio Moro, the former federal judge who condemned and sentenced Lula to 12 years and 11 months in prison on charges of corruption and money laundering. U.S. officials, by-and-large, held their tongues about any miscarriage of justice in his case, a textbook lawfare operation bar none. The former president would go on to spend 1.5 years in prison before being absolved of all 25 charges and inquiries.

Also, Anderson Torres, Brasília’s Secretary of Public Security as of January 1st, and Bolsonaro’s former Minister of Justice and Public Security, went on holiday to the U.S. prior to the attacks in Brasília. Just eight days into his new post he was removed from office and, upon his return to Brazil, arrested by federal police citing dereliction of duty.

The Biden administration has expressed unhappiness and confusion about events in Brazil as well as Peru with the ouster and imprisonment of former President Pedro Castillo and killing of protesters by newly installed President Dina Boluarte. It is as if the official statements released by the U.S. and British governments following the 11 of September (1973) attacks were nothing short of lament and sorrow for the fate of Chilean President Salvador Allende—“it was never an honest word,” recalled Coldplay in its hit song “Viva La Vida.”

Media/Military Synthesis

As of January 17, seventeen days into his third presidential term, Lula remains in hotel accommodations in Brasília, still unable to relocate to the Alvorada Palace due to material damage and security concerns. Whether or not his government’s efforts to gain control over the military will succeed remains to be seen—a military institution that has metastasized in conviction and function against a presumed communist “domino effect” threat dating back to the early 1960s and has never been held accountable nor paid for its crimes during its 20-year dictatorship.

One thing is for sure: It has become a top government priority. If it were not for the military, the non-stop media roar referencing Lula, through commission or omission, as “corrupt” and ideologically politicizing, the armed forces might very well serve as precursors for another lawfare campaign.

In an effort to confront the barrage of fake news, Brazil’s executive branch has suggested a more proactive approach. Whereas punishment for the publication of misinformation and disinformation baring legal ramifications remains the sole responsibility of the judiciary, an institution that has proven insufficient in the role, Lula’s government has suggested the intervention of the Attorney General of the Republic (AGU) in such cases. Some specialists claim that such a move would set a precedent representing a risk to “freedom of expression,” a means to instrumentalize the executive branch to go after critics and opponents.

As of January 23rd, at least 90 military officials stationed at Brazil’s official presidential palace have been removed from their post. Of this total, thirty-eight were GSI members.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/01/ ... in-brazil/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Fri Feb 03, 2023 3:04 pm

Brazil: Democracy at Risk
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 1, 2023
Frei Betto

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President João Goulart, at the Automóvel Clube, on March 30, 1964, the eve of his overthrow.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, says an aphorism I have heard since childhood. We, the defenders of democracy, cannot let our guard down.

Let’s not fool ourselves again; our fragile democracy is still at risk. I remember the government of João (Jango) Goulart in the early 1960s and his declarations that he would carry out grassroots reforms. The Ligas Campesinas were lifting up the northeasterners. The unions were ardently defending the rights acquired during the Vargas presidency. The National Union of Students was feared for its power to mobilize the youth.

The restlessness of the Brazilian elite was obvious. It began to conspire in the Brazilian Institute of Democratic Action, the Institute of Research and Social Studies and other organizations until the Family Marches with God for Freedom. However, the Brazilian Communist Party reassured those who smelled a whiff of a coup because it was believed that Jango was supported by a nationalist military platform.

But in March 1964 came the military coup and Jango was deposed; the Constitution was destroyed; democratic institutions were silenced; and Castelo Branco assumed power without the coup perpetrators firing a shot. Where were the “masses” committed to the defense of democracy?

I know the military establishment well. I come from a military family on my father’s side. Great-grandfather admiral, grandfather colonel, two uncles generals and father military court judge (fortunately, he retired after the coup).

The military live in a world apart. They leave their homes, but not the barracks. They frequent the same (military) clubs, the same restaurants, the same churches. Many consider themselves superior to civilians, although they produce nothing. Their paradigm is the armed forces of the United States, and their ideology, a fierce anti-communism. That is why they do not respect the limit imposed on them by the Constitution, which assigns them the responsibility of defending the homeland from external enemies. They are more concerned about “internal enemies”, the communists.

Although the Soviet Union disintegrated, the Berlin Wall fell to the ground, China embraced capitalism, but nevertheless everything that sounds like critical thinking is suspected of being communism. Because in the military ranks the most despotic discipline reigns, the critical sense is not admitted and authority embodies the truth.

Brazil made the mistake of not purging the crimes of the military dictatorship and rigorously punishing those guilty of torture, kidnappings, disappearances, assassinations and terrorist attacks, unlike what our neighbors Uruguay, Argentina and Chile did. Go see the film Argentina, 1985, starring Ricardo Darín and directed by Santiago Mitre. That is what we should have done. The result of that serious omission, which was stamped with the name “reciprocal amnesty” is the impunity and immunity that led to the deleterious Bolsonaro government.

I do not agree with the opinion that the Brazilian right wing only “came out of the closet” in recent years. Without going back to the colonial period, with more than three centuries of slavery and the massacres of indigenous people and the Paraguayan population in an unjust war, we need only remember the Vargas dictatorship, the New State, Integralism, TFP (Tradition, Family and Property) and the coup of 1964.

The high-flown silence of the military in the face of the terrorist acts perpetrated by coup perpetrators on January 8 should lead us to reflect. Complicity is not only consummated by action; it is also consummated by omission. But there was no lack of actions, such as the encampments around the barracks under the protection of military commanders and the attitude of the colonel of the presidential guard, who opened the doors of the Planalto to the vandals and even reproached the military police who tried to contain them.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, says an aphorism I have heard since childhood. We, the defenders of democracy, cannot let our guard down. Bolsonarismo has propagated a necrophiliac culture brimming with hatred that will not give truce to democracy and the Lula government.

Our reaction should not be to respond with the same coin or to take refuge in fear. It is up to us to strengthen democracy, especially the popular and trade union movements and identity patterns, as well as to defend the Constitution and the institutions, to prevent the widows of the dictatorship from trying to resurrect it.

The past has not yet passed. Memory will never bury it. The only one that can do it is Justice.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/02/ ... y-at-risk/

************

Bolsonaro Tried to Convince a Senator to Carry Out a Coup

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Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro. | Photo: Prensa Latina

Published 2 February 2023 (21 hours 26 minutes ago)

Marcos Do Val said that he will resign from the position of Senator that was due to end in 2026.

On Thursday, center-right Senator Marcos Do Val said that former President Jair Bolsonaro tried to convince him to stage a coup to prevent Lula da Silva from becoming president of Brazil.

"I would get angry when they called me a Bolsonaro. You wait for me to drop a 'bomb.' We Can" party who decided to denounce the far-right politician.

After issuing some messages through social networks, Do Val said that he "definitely leaves politics" and will resign from the position of senator that was due to end in 2026. He said that this decision was due to family and health reasons.

"I lost coexistence with my family and especially with my daughter. It was not worth it to be transparent, honest, and fight for a better Brazil. The attacks and offenses continue to occur," he said and announced that he would return to the United States where he previously lived.


The tweet refers to the following: In an exclusive interview with Globo News, Senator Do Val talks about a meeting with Bolsonaro, in which they discussed about a coup. The coup plan included the arrest of Superior Electoral Court Judge Alexandre de Moraes.

These declarations occurred a few days after 513 Lower House representatives and a third of the Brazilian senators elected in October took possession of their seats.

Currently, the former Captain Bolsonaro is in Miami, where he fled before officially concluding his term and without acknowledging the victory of Lula da Silva.

The far-right politician is being investigated for his involvement in the assault on the Brasilia's headquarters of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches, which took place on Jan 8.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bol ... -0008.html

*****************

Why Brazil’s Coup Was Doomed To Fail
By Bryan Pitts
February 3, 2023

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What the Aftermath of January 8 Tells Us about Brazilian Democracy

By Bryan Pitts

Sunday, January 8, the world watched, horrified, as hordes of supporters of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro broke into Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court in Brasília. They sprayed graffiti, smashed priceless art and furniture, and assaulted janitors. Convinced against all evidence to the contrary that Bolsonaro’s October 30 runoff loss to former left-wing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was the product of fraud, they hoped to spark a military coup against Lula’s new government. The eerie similarities to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump were immediately apparent and led to widespread coverage in U.S. and global media.

Despite clear warnings that such an attack was imminent, security around the Praça dos Três Poderes, where all three branches of government are located, and the adjacent Esplanada dos Ministérios was lax. Early indications were that elements of the military police of the Federal District (commanded by the governor, through his secretary of security) may have been complicit with the rioters. As the scene played out on screens around the world, many wondered what all this meant for Brazil’s democratic institutions, which only emerged from military dictatorship a generation ago. Might the notoriously conservative military step in to support the bolsonaristas? How would Lula be able to govern after this, particularly with Brazil’s most right-wing Congress ever in power? And what effects would the insurrection have on the deep polarization that has dominated Brazilian politics since 2014?

On the one hand, the January 8 debacle threw into sharp relief the challenges confronting Brazilian democratic institutions. As was the case in the U.S after the Capitol insurrection, Brazilians are facing difficult questions about the continued viability of democracy when a significant portion of the population refuses to accept basic facts and the empirical evidence that undergirds them. In a recent poll, 25% of Brazilians self-identified as bolsonaristas, broadly similar to the 15% of Americans who identify as “MAGA Republicans.” And in the wake of the attack on the Praça dos Três Poderes, 18% of Brazilians expressed their support for the rioters; a year after January 6, 25% of Americans said they thought that the Trump supporters who had invaded the Capitol were defending democracy.

Yet the aftermath of the January 8 riots has also revealed causes for optimism regarding the future of Brazilian democracy. In this sense, Brazil may be better off than the U.S., where, with the exception of the actions of a few renegades like Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, politics post-January 6 have remained every bit as polarized as before, and the Republican Party has made no pretensions of even a show of national unity, instead doubling down on their opposition to the administration of President Joe Biden.

The first encouraging sign in Brazil came the very day of the insurrection, when the military refused to intervene to support the bolsonaristas. Since at least 2014, far-right Brazilians have been calling on the military to carry out a coup to protect Brazil from the allegedly “communist” Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT), and in the weeks after the election, groups of Bolsonaro’s most zealous followers set up camp outside military installations around the country begging the Armed Forces to intervene. Their actions on January 8 were explicitly intended to spark a military intervention to topple Lula’s government. Yet no such intervention came. To be sure, there were signs that the Gabinete de Segurança Institucional (GSI) (Brazil’s equivalent of the Secret Service) had been complicit with the rioters, granting them entry to the presidential palace. Yet Lula acted swiftly to fire members of the GSI implicated with the attack, along with other members of the military who had been employed by the executive branch under Bolsonaro in various capacities. Most notably, on January 21, Lula fired the Army’s commander, replacing him with a general who had recently given a speech urging respect for the results of the election. So far, the military has accepted these moves by the commander-in-chief, and some observers have suggested that a window of opportunity has opened to curtail the military’s influence over politics.

Perhaps more surprising to U.S. observers has been the extent to which the insurrection has united the Brazilian political class. Condemnation of the attacks was nearly universal and came from across the ideological spectrum, including from Bolsonaro’s vice president. Indeed, fewer than 10 percent of legislators in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of Congress) defended or minimized the attack on Brasília. Most dramatically, the day after the attack, all 27 of Brazil’s governors joined Lula, four Supreme Court justices, and numerous legislators to walk across the Praça dos Três Poderes from the presidential palace to the Supreme Court in a remarkable show of unity unthinkable in the U.S.

Moreover, it is possible that the insurrection has placed Lula in a more favorable position as he seeks to implement his progressive agenda in a Congress. Although center-left or leftist parties hold only 17 of 81 Senate seats and 126 of 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the parties that have agreed to participate in the governing coalition have a collective 46 Senate seats and 282 in the Chamber – comfortable majorities, if individual legislators remain in line with their parties’ position. Time will tell how much of his agenda Lula will be able to implement, but early signs are encouraging in a Congress branded “the most conservative in Brazil’s democratic history” as recently as October.

Thus, while the events of January 8, 2023 looked remarkably similar to those of January 6, 2021, the outcomes in Brazil so far have been strikingly different, both compared with the U.S. and with assumptions in the Global North about institutional instability in Latin America. This is, I believe, due to certain enduring characteristics of Brazilian political culture, as well as some recent changes.

The refusal of the military to intervene politically or support the rioters en masse stems from a longstanding hesitancy to intervene politically without significant support from the civilian political class. Previous military interventions in 1930, 1945, 1954, 1961, and 1964 only occurred when the military was convinced that a large number of politicians would support the move; the most famous intervention of all, the coup of 1964, was a joint plot of the military and conservative politicians. Thus, as it became clear in November 2022 that the political class had accepted Lula, the military ignored right-wing calls to act. It is unlikely that a military coup to keep Bolsonaro in power was ever seriously considered.

Yet why did the political elite remain so unwilling to accept a break with legality, and why did they so quickly rally behind Lula? Part of the explanation is to be found in the changes the Brazilian political class experienced during the military dictatorship. As my just-published book (available for free download from University of California Press) explains in detail, between 1964 and 1985, one of the military’s top priorities was to forcibly reform what it saw as an irresponsible, selfish, and corrupt political class. Politicians so resented this encroachment on their presumed prerogatives that as the regime wore on, they became willing to accept ever-increasing levels of mass political participation and social mobilization as a way to escape from under the military’s thumb – and to keep from being caught under it ever again. The specter of military rule continues to haunt Brazil’s political class, so when far-right protesters attacked the heart of Brazilian democracy in hopes of sparking a military coup, there was little doubt whose side politicians would take. To be sure, the vast majority of the political class had supported the parliamentary coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff in 2016, but that time offered at least a fig leaf of legality to hide behind; a military coup was further than the vast majority would go.

Lula’s favorable position in Congress also owes a great deal to particularities of Brazilian political culture, specifically the ideological flexibility of politicians and parties. The ease with which Brazilian politicians change ideological stripes and parties (there are currently 23 parties represented in the Chamber of Deputies) has long been cast by social scientists in the Global North as a weakness of Brazilian democracy. Yet it is precisely this flexibility that has enabled Lula to build a governing coalition. The greatest dichotomy in Brazilian politics is not between left and right or democratic and authoritarian, but between “situation” (situação) and “opposition” (oposição). Perhaps a fifth of politicians in Congress are ideologically committed to the Left; another fifth are devotees of right-wing ideology. But for the remaining 60 percent or so, being in the situation is always the goal, while being in the opposition is to be avoided at all costs. The situation brings with it the carrots of cabinet appointments and more federal funding for one’s home city and state; opposition means being left on the outside looking in. So as soon as it was clear Lula had won the October runoff, parties that only days before had supported Bolsonaro began preparing to shift their support to Lula, the new situation. A characteristic often characterized as Brazilian political culture’s greatest flaw can also been understood as a strength, for its is precisely politician’s lack of ideological commitments that enables skilled negotiators from either left or right to actually implement their legislative agenda, in marked contrast with the U.S. today, where ideological rigidity prevents either party from making the compromises necessary to govern.

Where Brazil goes from here is anyone’s guess. Lula’s honeymoon with centrist politicians and the media will certainly not last forever. But the greatest lesson of January 8 is not that Brazilian democracy is in crisis – it is that it remains strong and equipped to deal with the challenges of the years ahead.

https://www.brasilwire.com/why-brazils- ... d-to-fail/
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 04, 2023 2:15 pm

Brazil Was Ruled by Groups With Paramilitary Ties: Judge Mendes

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Jair Bolsonaro (R), his son (L), and other Brazilians linked to far-right groups. | Photo: Twitter/ @AgdaOli96919401

Published 3 February 2023 (18 hours 49 minutes ago)

"We were being governed by people in the shadows.... We lowered the political degration scale," Judge Mendes pointed out.

On Friday, Supreme Court Judge Gilmar Mendes denounced that Brazil was being ruled by elites that had support from Rio de Janeiro's paramilitary groups.

"We were being governed by people in the shadows. This is a fact of reality. People from the Rio de Janeiro militia had a leading role in national politics," he told to journalists at the 2023 LIDE Brazilian Investment Forum in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Supreme Court judge was referring to statements made by Senator Marcos do Val, who accused former President Jair Bolsonaro of trying to convince him to stage a coup to prevent Workers' Party leader Lula da Silva from assuming the Presidency on January 1.

"We lowered the political degradation scale," Mendes said and called for reforming the Brazilian security forces since the attack on public institutions carried out by far-right militants in Brasilia evidenced "a bankruptcy of the security system."


The tweet reads, "The Bolsonaro terrorist intended to distribute weapons and ammunition to the bandits who were camping at the Army headquarters. Bolsonaro's decree on weapons was always aimed at the formation of militias."

"History teaches that leniency is not the best way to deal with criminals. They need to be punished with the rigor of the law," said Brazil's Accounts Court President Bruno Dantas, who was also participating in the 2023 LIDE Forum.

This official indicated that there is still no exhaustive quantification of the damage caused by Bolsonaro's supporters in their latest coup attempt.

"The full identification of those involved is a job that is in charge of the Police. But when we have the list of vandals, we will hold them accountable," Dantas explained, adding that some 3.2 million euros have been blocked in the accounts of some far -right militants so far.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0012.html

Brazil: Police Begin 4th Phase of Anti-coup Operations

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"Operation Lesa Patria is becoming permanent, with regular updates," according to the Brazilian Federal Police. Feb. 3, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@policiafederal

Published 3 February 2023 (11 hours 38 minutes ago)

The third phase of "Operation Lesa Patria" concluded on January 27.


The Brazilian Federal Police launched this Friday the fourth phase of the operation against the coup plotters who participated in the January 8 attacks against the three branches of government in the federal capital, Brasília.

"Operation Lesa Patria is becoming permanent, with regular updates on the number of arrest warrants issued, people captured and fugitives," the Brazilian Federal Police said in a statement.

Police carried out an operation in the states of Rondônia, Goiás, Espírito Santo, Mato Grosso and São Paulo, as well as in the Federal District. This took place within the framework of Operation Lesa Patria approved by the Federal Supreme Court (STF).

Three preventive arrest warrants and 14 search and seizure warrants issued by the Supreme Court against alleged coup plotters were served. During the third phase of the operation, completed as of January 27, the STF issued arrest warrants for 11 suspects, as well as search warrants for 27 residences.


The Federal Police launched today (February 3) the fourth phase of Operation Lesa Pátria, aimed at identifying people who participated in, financed, or encouraged the events that occurred on January 8, in Brasília/DF.

The suspects are charged with the crimes of coup d'état, violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, incitement to crime, criminal organization and destruction of specially protected property.

"It is required to verify if the necessary means were used, the units with competence to attend this type of demonstrations, which apparently were not present on January 8 giving rise to these unfortunate events, which are under investigation," said this Friday the Secretary of Public Safety of the Federal District (DF), Sandro Avelar.

On January 8, supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro attacked the headquarters of the Presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court. This took place a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0015.html

When will the right strike back? Don't think they're going to just roll over.
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sun Feb 05, 2023 2:44 pm

"We cannot support a government of class conciliation"

INTERVIEW BY EL MACHETE WITH IVÁN PINHEIRO, FORMER SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE BRAZILIAN COMMUNIST PARTY (PCB) 31.Jan.23 interviews
“We cannot support a class conciliation government. When Lula is elected and takes office, it is not a left-wing government, it is a bourgeois government, albeit a social democrat."

Interview by El Machete newspaper with Iván Pinheiro, former general secretary of the Brazilian Communist Party , between 2005 and 2016, and who attended the VII PCM congress to receive the David Alfaro Siqueiros award .


El Machete (EM): We appreciate that you can grant us the interview, comrade Iván Pinheiro. Our Party has great recognition for the process of the revolutionary Reconstruction of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), in fact it was an important example for us to undertake the New Step in our IV Congress in 2010. Please, tell us about the context in which it took place the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB and what it consisted of.



Iván Pinheiro (IP): I have been in the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party since 1982. That was a clandestine Congress, the Party was illegal. I had been a member of an armed struggle organization, the October 8 Revolutionary Movement, and I joined the Party in 1974, still illegal.



I began to have differences with the line of the Central Committee in the late 1970s, over the question of the Democratic Front.



Until then, I considered that policy to be merely tactical. In the hardest phase of the dictatorship it seemed correct to me, because the trade union and mass movement was very weak, it had been very repressed and the PCB, too, had been severely hit, with the imprisonment and murder of many members of the Central Committee that they had not gone into exile.



But, in the second half of 1979, the situation underwent important changes, when a process began that the dictatorship called "slow, safe, and gradual political opening," with the easing of some exceptional laws and the advent of political amnesty. those persecuted by the regime. In this period, an important labor and union movement broke out in Brazil, several sectors of workers went on strike. There, those of us who diverged from the Party's position began to defend the need for an inflection of the Democratic Front policy for a Left Front with the class forces that were emerging, as was the case of the PT at that time, which It was not the reformist party of today, but a combative PT, where there were some currents that considered themselves socialist.



However, the PCB remained in alliance with sectors of the so-called "centre-democratic" bourgeoisie throughout the 1980s. Some comrades, mainly among those of us who were active in the trade union movement, began to talk about these issues, and we spent to confront reformism in some episodes. The Central Committee imposed guidance on us to oppose the strikes, arguing that they were inopportune, since they "hindered" such a democratic transition. We considered the opposite: strikes and mass struggles shortened the end of the military dictatorship, since the ruling classes were already giving signs that it was time to change their form of dictatorship, this time as a bourgeois democracy.



Between 1982/83, the reformists, hegemonic in the Central Committee of the PCB, imposed our break with the Single Central of Workers that we were building with the PT, because they thought it was “leftist”. The fact is that the priority alliance was with the Brazilian Democratic Movement – ​​MDB party, the bourgeois party that headed the Democratic Front. We did not participate in the founding of the CUT and helped to create another central, conciliatory and moderate, under the leadership of bureaucratic unionists.



It was a whole decade of internal struggle that deepened. I always agree with the criticisms that Prestes presented when he left the Party in 1980, with the "Letter to the Communists." But, I did not agree with his decision to leave the Party, considering that there were still conditions to engage in the internal struggle.



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Prestes in the 1980s

Despite our infighting against reformism in several episodes, at the end of the 1980s, the Eurocommunists and bureaucrats were still in the majority in the Central Committee. In July 1991, when the Berlin Wall had already fallen and Perestroika was advancing, they tried to liquidate the Party, in our IX Congress. Having foreseen that, we create an internal trend, which we publicly assume. We produced a document called We were, we are and we will be communists, we created the National Movement in Defense of the PCB and we went to Congress already organized nationally and, by a small margin of votes, we managed to maintain the Party and in it we advanced, from being a minority, less At 10% we became close to a third in the Central Committee.



Despite this, a few days after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Political Commission decided to hold a meeting of the Central Committee fifteen days later, in which the majority approved the convening of an Extraordinary Congress for January 25 and 26, in São Paulo, with a single point, which was to create a "new political formation", that is, to liquidate the PCB and create a social democratic party.



When this congress was convened, we immediately began a national effort to try to elect a majority of delegates. It was an aggressive dispute at every cell conference or Regional Committee. But, we did not count on the trick used by the liquidationists, who transformed the debates on the theses with non-members of the Party into instances of election of delegates.



We estimated that at that “congress” about a third of the delegates were from outside the Party. Thus, in this way, we called a National Plenary of the Movement in Defense of the PCB for December 1991, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, where comrades from different States participated and there we decided not to recognize the fraudulent congress and to carry out, in the same days, a National Political Conference to maintain and reorganize the Party.



On the morning of January 25, 1992, in the city of São Paulo, we gathered around 400 comrades in our first plenary session, so we decided to march to the meeting place of the liquidationists, where we demanded to be able to speak to explain the reasons why which we did not recognize that "congress" and inform that we would return to the place of our meeting to hold the National Organization Conference of the PCB, where we issued a political declaration, elected a new Central Committee and convened the X Congress, which we held a year later.



There we began the revolutionary reconstruction of the Party, which was erratic in the 1990s, because, beyond the impact of the counterrevolution in the USSR, there were among us comrades who wanted to maintain the Party, but they did not agree with its revolutionary reconstruction, an objective that It only developed effectively from 2005, at the XIII Congress, when those who wanted us to continue supporting Lula's first government, which began in January 2003, left the Party.



Our 2005 Congress broke with stageism, defined the socialist strategy of the revolution and the Marxist-Leninist character of the Party. We placed ourselves in opposition to Lula's government and we advanced in the revolutionary reconstruction, not as a process that had an end date, but rather as a long road, which had a long way to go. Next, we held the National Organization Conference, in March 2008, and the XIV Party Congress, in October 2009, which the PCM and the KKE attended, when we promoted an important International Seminar and placed ourselves alongside the parties that at that time they were already building the International Communist Magazine, whose first issues we translated and published.

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EM: What did the “left” organizations think about this policy of the socialist nature of the revolution and the break with the Lula government? I refer to what was happening around, to the political environment of Brazil, to Latin America. What did the other communist parties and other organizations think of your party? His performance was clear and courageous, as it occurred at a time when progressivism was on the rise.



IP: How the PCB broke with Lula's government, still in the middle of his first government, in the midst of the first "progressive wave" in Latin America, and was one of the few parties that openly expressed solidarity with the FARC-EP , the “left”, including some communist organizations, considered us sectarians and ultra-leftists. We have no self-criticism to make of our XIII Congress. On the contrary, we had the audacity to denounce that progressivism serves to numb the class struggle, for a harmony between capital and labor, as was more evident in the second and current "progressive wave."



Our relationship with other communist organizations was very weak until the early years of this century. The political and material difficulties were great. For this reason, we had not been able to expand our international relations. Our priority was to survive. The Soviet Union had fallen on our heads. No other organization was so committed to the entire story of the Russian Revolution. The PCdoB, for example, had been pro-Chinese, pro-Albanian. People said we couldn't survive more than a few months. In the international communist movement, the PCdoB was already strong, it already had parliamentarians, it was in alliance with Lula, and it appeared in international forums saying that the PCB no longer existed.



EM: It was important for us to see that you raised critical positions in support of Lula and progressivism (the so-called first wave of progressivism) when this phenomenon was emerging and was looked upon favorably by other organizations. His early criticism of progressivism and the affirmation of the fight for socialism are an example to think about the current political situation. Do the members of your Party know all this history? Is there a specific document or book that summarizes all these elements?



IP: Our militants and friends know this history well, from which we can draw many lessons. There are many videos, texts, debates and documents around this issue. In particular, I wrote some articles about it, including one (“ The Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB”), which I presented at the International Seminar that the PCM held in 2019.



EM: At what point did the idea again arise in the Party of conceiving that progressivism, Lula again, etc. could help the communists in something? If the trajectory was one of breaking with them, at what moment did this rapprochement begin again? What influenced that approach?



IP: In the 2002 elections, we supported Lula, from the first round, despite the fact that the Central Committee was divided almost down the middle on that. There were those of us who were already defending our own candidacy for the presidential elections, a thesis that was made impossible to avoid the risk of a division at an inappropriate moment. In 2006, we no longer supported Lula, but sought to build a Front with the Socialism and Liberty – PSOL party, which emerged from a break with the PT, with a discourse towards the left. In the second round, instead of explicitly and formally supporting Lula, we recommend voting against his adversary, who, ironically and as proof of the PT's opportunist turn, was Geraldo Alckmin, the same man who is Lula's vice president today in his third government.



Without any dialogue with the PT and already previously declaring ourselves in opposition to his government, in the event of victory, we critically support Lula against Alckmin with a document called: “Defeat Alckmin at the polls and Lula in the streets ”. It was a vote much more against Alckmin than in favor of Lula, that is, a clear option for the “lesser evil”.



In the 2010 and 2014 elections, we no longer participated in leftist fronts and we presented our own candidates for the presidency of the Republic and the other positions in dispute, with the aim of presenting our political line, without any conciliation or electoral illusion, denouncing capitalism. and bourgeois democracy.



In 2018, the Central Committee of the Party, mistakenly in my opinion, returned to the politics of the left front and once again supported the candidates for president and governors of the PSOL which, 12 years after its founding, had already significantly deepened its vocation as a social democratic party, turning to the parliamentary struggle, with a discourse focused on the humanization and democratization of capitalism and on the gradual and peaceful construction of the so-called "democratic socialism." In 2020, in the municipal elections, the PCB repeated this policy of alliance with the PSOL.



Now in 2022, the PSOL, radicalizing its opportunist turn, opted to support Lula and the candidates for state governors indicated by the PT and its allies, from the first round, when it was clear that Alckmin would be the vice-presidential candidate and that the PT It sewed an alliance with sectors of the bourgeoisie, aiming for a government with more class conciliation than the previous ones.



This decision of the PSOL undoubtedly had important weight for the PCB to opt for a more adequate electoral policy, presenting in the first round its own candidacy for the presidency of the Republic, to signal the independence of the Party and present its objectives and proposals. .



Already in the second round, the PCB formally supported Lula against Bolsonaro, correctly denouncing the far-right tendency of that government, its anti-popular policies and coup intentions. In my view, the problems arose in the way of supporting Lula in the second round, when it was not made clear to the workers that they did not have any illusions with Lula's third government, since it will fundamentally serve the interests of capital, of class conciliation, with the co-optation and moderation of the union and popular movement, even if it correctly comes to revoke Bolsonaro's reactionary, inhuman and even genocidal policies and laws.



It is also true that Lula will adopt compensatory measures to alleviate hunger and extreme poverty, while not altering the perverse income distribution in Brazil at all. And let us not expect from the new government the revocation of the counter-reforms that reduced workers' rights and of the privatizations already carried out, nor of the foundations of the liberal economic policy, unless a social outbreak stirs up the popular masses and finds a vanguard at the height of its responsibilities.



It is necessary to understand that the new government is the result of a pact with bourgeois sectors to overcome this atmosphere of euphoria, unrestricted support and total conciliation with Lula, reigning in the so-called left, even in parties with revolutionary strategies, aggravated by the recent coup attempt. , and that is caused by an overestimation of the risk of the implantation of fascism in Brazil, which led to prioritizing the flag "out with Bolsonaro" during the 4 years of his government, which was used by the Brazilian bourgeoisie to approve in parliament all the counter-reforms that it needed to maintain and expand the reproduction of capital in the midst of a crisis in the system.

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EM: Exactly, the fact that Bolsonaro has some fascist idea does not mean that the bourgeoisie decides on fascism as a way of managing capital in Brazil.



IP: I said that clearly when I had the honor that the PCM gave me to present a paper at its recent VII Congress.



If it had depended solely on Bolsonaro's will, during his tenure he would have closed Congress, silenced the judicial branch, advanced some fascistic measures in Brazil. It's just that in the current Brazilian situation the bourgeoisie doesn't care about that. Fascism is a weapon that she uses only when she needs it.



The events of last January 8 in Brazil allow us to draw important conclusions.



Until the moment I write these lines, the picture is highly favorable to Lula and unfavorable to the extreme right. Practically almost all the institutions and bourgeois leaders vehemently repudiated the coup attempt and demand the punishment of the coup plotters, including their financiers and organizers, which could reach Bolsonaro and his entourage.



But, it is necessary to reflect that this decisive support from the ruling classes, including sectors that distanced themselves from Bolsonaro, will have its price charged to Lula in the form of more conciliation in the management of the economy, especially so that the new government does not touch on the counter-reforms and privatizations of recent years, in the so-called "fiscal responsibility" and in the autonomy of the Central Bank.



The first conclusion is that the frustrated coup attempt that was made in Brasilia by the most radical Bolsonaro sector reveals that the Brazilian bourgeoisie is not interested in fascism at this juncture, especially so that Brazil does not become a pariah country and that will come to harm the foreign investments that capitalism needs here to overcome its crisis. This is not to say that there are no risks of new coup attempts, that the ultra-right will disappear, or that the bourgeoisie treats its democracy as a universal value and rules out coups, dictatorship and even fascism.



The second is that, at the present moment – ​​after the main counter-reforms in favor of capital have been implemented and with hunger and misery reaching the bottom of the well – bourgeois democracy with a government of class conciliation is the best formula for investment, resume the growth of the economy and the profit rates of capital.



The third is that, not only in Brazil, right-wing coups and dictatorships are not decided by the military, but by the ruling classes for which you are generally at the service. The dictatorship that emerged with the 1964 coup in Brazil was military only in form, but it was decided and maintained by the bourgeoisie and it lasted until the moment when it no longer suited them. The bourgeoisie has no ideology, it has interests!



The fourth conclusion is what history teaches us: the bourgeoisies only resort to fascism when the correlation of forces is unfavorable to them and in view of the risk of insurgencies and proletarian revolutions. This is by no means the situation in Brazil, where bourgeois hegemony is indisputable in the face of a degenerate trade union movement and a hegemonically reformist, institutional and increasingly identity-oriented left.



The problem is that the frustrated coup attempt by the extreme right increases the tendency among the so-called left, including some communists, to postpone the question of socialism to guarantee the governability of Lula and bourgeois democracy. My concern is that we do not fall into the mistake of considering that Lula's government will be threatened 24 hours a day by a fascist coup and, therefore, we must close ranks with him. It is correct and very important to fight against coup attempts and ultra-right dictatorships, marching in different streets from the "democratic" bourgeoisie. But we cannot support a class conciliation government. When Lula is elected and takes office, it is not a left-wing government, it is a bourgeois government, albeit a social democrat.



Another mistake, in what we call the “left” camp, is to vehemently demand the punishment of the coup plotters, evoking the current anti-terrorism law – by the way, in force thanks to the initiative of the PT government of Dilma Rousseff – and value as heroic and daring personalities and institutions that reconciled with the coup attempts for 4 years and that will be much faster, more efficient and tougher if we dare to exercise the right of the rebellion of the peoples!



It also seems to me a great mistake for a Communist Party to declare that it will concentrate its energies on the fight against fascism and neoliberalism. It is like saying that he will continue to defend the "democratic rule of law" and fight for a more humane capitalism. The main task of the Brazilian communists today is the mobilization, awareness and organization, especially of the working class and the proletariat in general, in the struggles for the revocation of the counter-reforms, for more social, economic and political rights and in the perspective of their emancipation by the only possible path, the socialist revolution!



EM: We appreciate the interview that comrade Iván Pinheiro gave us, and we congratulate him on the recognition of militant merit that the PCM gave him within the framework of the VII Congress.

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Publicado por: https://elmachete.mx/index.php/2023/01/ ... de-clases/

Texto completo en: http://elcomunista.nuevaradio.org/no-po ... bierno-de/

http://elcomunista.nuevaradio.org/no-po ... bierno-de/

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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Tue Feb 14, 2023 3:52 pm

Lula Flirts with Montezuma
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on FEBRUARY 13, 2023
Quantum Bird

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Montezuma II, emperor of the Aztecs, and Hernán Cortés, Spanish conquistador

Montezuma was the last de facto emperor of the Aztecs. It is known that during his reign the Aztec Empire reached its peak in terms of expansionist activity, political reforms and infrastructure construction. On the other hand, according to the more popular version, Montezuma promptly surrendered to the Spanish newcomers without any resistance, betraying his people and then helped the European colonizers to rule until his death.

Montezuma’s biography is the subject of intense dispute among serious historians, and much of what is known and taught in history courses is based on documents written by the colonizers themselves. In any case, it is exactly the image of Montezuma as described by his conquistadors that interests us in this analysis.

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On his second official trip, President Lula visited the US. The Brazilian ambassador in Washington, a notorious Olavo-bolsonarist who inexplicably continued to hold his post, took a vacation during the presidential trip and did not receive Lula at the airport. Bolsonarist whim or veto by the White House? We will never know for sure. On the other hand, even though he was snubbed by his own people, Lula was received with pomp by the Biden administration. The body language of Lula and his entourage, in general, and of the Brazilian president, in particular, showed a jubilation rarely seen among statesmen who command economic powers of the caliber of the BRICS.

The details of what was actually talked about are slowly coming in, but Lula’s statements in his press conference with Biden certainly raised eyebrows. Lula condemned the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine, reaffirming criticisms he had made previously alongside Alberto Fernandez on his visit to Argentina in January, displaying little, if any, grasp on the subject. Here is the excerpt from the joint statement:

“The two leaders also examined wide range of global and regional issues of mutual interest. Both presidents deplored Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and annexation of parts of its territory as flagrant violations of international law and called for a just and lasting peace. The leaders expressed concern about the global effects of the conflict on energy and food security, especially in the poorest regions of the planet and expressed support for the full functioning of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Presidents Lula and Biden intend to strengthen cooperation in multilateral institutions, including in the context of the upcoming Brazilian presidency of the G20. The two leaders expressed their intention to work together for meaningful reform of the United Nations Security Council, such as expanding the body to include permanent seats for countries in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to make it more representative of UN members and improve its ability to respond more effectively to the most pressing issues related to global peace and security.”

In diplomacy, words and gestures are very important. And Lula continues to insist on a narrative all his own, that Russia erred and should not have entered Ukraine and annexed the territories targeted by the ruling Nazis in Kiev, but rather negotiated a peaceful solution to the conflict. Even after the interviews of Merkel and Hollande, in which they admit to the entire farce staged in the Minsk agreements aimed at arming Ukraine, not to mention the countless evidence and proofs of war crimes, as well as abuse and suppression of rights, perpetrated against the Ukrainian Russian-speaking population since the Maidan coup in 2014.

And these basic facts, which now are permanently noted in the playbook of any minimally serious geopolitical analyst, by themselves do not compose the full picture. In the panoramic tableau of the contemporary geopolitical situation, we have the dizzying decline of the Anglo-Saxon Empire, dragging along with it its European vassals, NATO and its rules-based international order. The inexorable decline of the dollar, the euro and the other currencies in the imperial basket is at this point inevitable. The Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine is only the opening salvo of a much broader, intense conflict to come, involving China, Iran and other countries of the Global South that are coordinating to consolidate the Multipolar Order away from the US imperial agenda. In other words, the picture is one of systemic change.

Does Lula not perceive this? It is difficult to conclude from his statements and first actions. For example, during Lula’s visit to the USA, Brazil denied Iranian ships access to Brazilian ports without any convincing reason.

Returning to the joint communiqué, we have references to joint management of the Amazon, to prevent climate change, with Brazil signaling a willingness to cede sovereignty over the region in exchange for access to funds that are derisory compared to its own economic potential and offered by countries with a colonialist tradition, now in deep economic trouble.

And of course, the inevitable myriad platitudes about democracy, as if the democratic regimes in place in Brazil and the US were comparable. The mention of the invasion of Congress insinuates a disturbing naivety. Is the Brazilian president unaware that this was a rehearsal of tropical Maidan prepared by the USA?

Thus, in the first months of his government, Lula reveals himself to be a confused and vacillating leader, unable to outline a domestic economic policy to put the country back on track, distracted by superficial identity issues, as well as erratic and ill-advised about Brazil’s geopolitical role in the BRICS+ and the multipolar Global South.

None of this comes as a surprise if we consider the deep imperial infiltration of the Brazilian left, via NGOs and related entities, duly financed by NED, USAID and the Soros Foundation. Many of the current ministers were in fact catapulted into public life from this environment. Another relevant force in this game is nested within Lula’s own party, the PT. It is the Brazilian Atlanticists, the native fifth column, who fight tirelessly to convert the PT into a branch of the US Democratic Party. A sample of how the members of this wing “think” can be found here.

These are early days, but as a result of the actions of a Lula beleaguered by endemic, ill-advised Bolsonarism and pressured by his fifth-columnist co-partners, Brazil is now the first and only BRICS+ country to criticize Russia due to the Special Operation in Ukraine. This negatively distinguishes the country in the Global South and severely limits its diplomatic leverage. Furthermore, it invalidates any possibility of mediation by Brazil in the conflict in question, generating unnecessary tension within the BRICS+.

Also, Lula’s official visit to the United States, before he visited any partner of the BRICS, amounts to a tacit acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine, as recently put into perspective by General Laura Richardson of USSOUTHCOM. Is Lula flirting with Montezuma?

Translation by Internationalist 360°

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/02/ ... montezuma/

Here we see where 'principled' pacifism leads us, futility. Given that Ukraine and the West were proven utterly dishonest and had no interest in peace other than on entirely their terms which any sovereign state with the wherewithal could not accept wtf does Lula and all the "peacenik" left expect Russia to do? Meekly accept the slow dissolution of their ancient state?

I dunno how much of this programmed futility can be ascribed to 'infiltration' and how much to the 'New Left' and the 60's, which look to have inflicted more long term damage to the Left than is comfortably contemplated.

***************

Brazilian Police Arrest 4 Police Officers Linked to Coup Plot

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These arrests are part of the fifth phase of operation "Lèse Patria." Feb. 7, 2023. | Photo: Twitter/@policiafederal

Published 7 February 2023

Among those arrested is the former commander of Operations of the Federal District Military Police, Jorge Eduardo Naime Barreto.


On Tuesday, Brazil's Federal Police arrested four Military Police officers for dereliction of duty during the January 8 assault on the headquarters of the three branches of government in Brasília.

Those arrested are "Colonel Jorge Eduardo Naime Barreto, Captain Josiel Pereira César, Major General Flávio Silvestre de Alencar and Agent Rafael Pereira Martins," according to information from the Federal Police.

They are accused of having facilitated the entry of supporters of former president Jair Bolsonaro on January 8 to the buildings of the National Congress, the Planalto Palace and the Federal Supreme Court.

Colonel Jorge Eduardo Naime was head of the operations department of the Military Police in the Federal District at the time of the attempted coup. He was removed from his post on January 10.


The Federal Police launched, this Tuesday morning (2/7), the fifth phase of Operation Injury to the Homeland, with the aim of identifying people who participated, financed, omitted or encouraged the attacks that took place on 1/8, in Brasilia DF.

These arrests are part of the fifth phase of operation "Lèse Patria." Three provisional arrest warrants and one pre-trial detention were executed in this phase.

The charges are: "violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, coup d'état, qualified damage, criminal association, incitement to crime and destruction of protected property," according to the Federal Police.

The Federal Police "continues to investigate the events that occurred last January 8. The findings are delivered to the Judiciary and the Public Prosecutor's Office to take the corresponding measures," said the Minister of Justice, Flávio Dino, via Twitter.


More than 1 800 people have been arrested since the anti-democratic acts in the South American nation a week after the inauguration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bra ... -0016.html
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Re: Brazil

Post by blindpig » Sat Feb 25, 2023 3:06 pm

WHERE IS LULA'S FOREIGN POLICY HEADED?
Feb 24, 2023 , 3:05 p.m.

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The Brazilian president plays a balancing act between hegemonic and emerging powers (Photo: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AP Photo)

Yesterday, Thursday, February 23, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization (UN) approved a resolution aimed at condemning Russia for its Special Military Operation (OME) in Ukraine, a few hours after one year of the launch due to Washington's systematic disregard for President Vladimir Putin's demands regarding NATO's threatening eastward expansion and Kiev's increasingly belligerent behavior in its military offensive against the Russian population of Donbass, a linked region geographically, linguistically and culturally with the Federation, which has been the target of bombing, persecution and apartheid experiments since 2014.

The resolution in question, which had 141 votes in favor, 32 abstentions and seven against , is not binding -that is, it does not have practical effects nor does it imply obligations- and must be seen as a symbolic act of simulation to project a favorable image towards the efforts of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to escalate the conflict with Russia in the military sphere, but also in the economic, financial and energy spheres.

Among the countries that were in favor of the resolution, Brazil's affirmative vote should be highlighted. The government headed by Lula Da Silva was the only member of the BRICS to support it, an action that broke the common position of abstention in the multilateral block in the vote.

This is not a minor aspect, especially if one takes into account that the consensus of neutrality and non-alignment has marked the path of the BRICS in the international arena since the Russian OME began a year ago.

With this position, the platform has exercised a balancing role aimed at fostering understanding between the parties, keeping open the window of cooperation with Russia on multiple levels (refusing to sign the "sanctions" packages), while providing continuity to its relations with European countries that openly support Ukraine.

However, Brazil's affirmative vote on the resolution can be seen as the manifestation of a broader geopolitical line of action that is taking shape during this first stage of Lula's government, according to which the Atlantic axis of power (United States + Europe Western) is standing out in terms of the hierarchy that Brazilian foreign policy assigns to it.

In the joint statement of the Brazilian president and US President Joe Biden in the framework of their first bilateral meeting on February 10, it is noted that the two heads of state "deplored Russia's violation of the territorial integrity of Ukraine and the annexation of parts of their territory as flagrant violations of international law, and called for a just and lasting peace".

This uniform vision that puts all the responsibility for the escalation of the conflict in Russia is also a sign that the South American president tilts his balance of international priorities towards the multilateral frameworks of association with the United States (since "climate change", the " protection of the Amazon" to "human rights" and the "gender agenda"), to the detriment of a careful treatment that preserves the unified position of the BRICS in the context of the war in Ukraine.


In this sense, the vote of Brazil can be seen as a nod from Lula to Biden, as a reconfirmation of the convergences that were expressed in their bilateral meeting and that are shaping up to mark the strategic sign of Brazilian geopolitics in the years to come. come.

However, trying to take care of the forms, given that Dilma Rousseff has just assumed the presidency of the Bank of the BRICS, Brazil included an amendment in the draft resolution to include a call "for the cessation of hostilities" and "the need to reach a general, just and lasting peace as soon as possible", with which he sought to reduce the noise among the members of the block, but without this meaning to dilute the discursive alignment with the US president at all.

On the other hand, the vote in Brazil occurs in the midst of a new period of intense lobbying for the ratification of the free trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, a matter pending final resolution for 20 years. Despite the historical tension of the negotiations, especially around the meat industry in which Brazil would surely have the advantage over French producers, the vice president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, projected that by July of this year it could end define the agreement.

Added to this, the billionaire European funds of the Amazon Fund, retained during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, have begun to progressively unfreeze since January of this year.

Consequently, a more balanced Brazil towards Europe and the United States in the face of the most important geopolitical issue of recent years: the war in Ukraine, represents an additional boost for Lula's agenda in trade, environmental and multilateral matters focused on the Atlantic axis. .

Although it is clear that Lula will show elasticity to maintain a foreign policy of multiple vectors, oriented towards a passive balance in the midst of a chaotic and complicated transition from a unipolar order to a new model of international relations -multipolar-, his first moves reflect a framework of preferences settled more in the West than in Eurasia.

The Brazilian president's visit to China in mid-March, where he will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, will be a new opportunity to continue evaluating these projections.

https://misionverdad.com/globalistan/ha ... or-de-lula

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