Author: MAITE. JAZEEL CONDE (TARIQ.)
Publisher:
Published: 2022
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781119331360
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"Grappling with the question of democracy in Brazil is far from straightforward, not least in the country's contemporary history. In 2016, then President Dilma Rousseff, of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) or the Workers' Party, was impeached and evicted from office midway through her second term after being found guilty of breaking budgetary laws for deferring payments on public accounts, a long-standing practice common to previous governments. Two years later, her predecessor, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, the most popular ruler in Brazilian history, was incarcerated for twelve years, an act carried out ostensibly on grounds of corruption and money laundering, yet one that as recent reporting has uncovered was part of a conspiracy to prevent him and the Workers' Party from returning to power in the 2018 election. With Lula out of the way, that election was won by the right wing candidate Jair Messias Bolsonaro, a former military officer who has extolled the country's most notorious torturer; declared that the military dictatorship should have shot thirty thousand opponents; told a congress woman that she was too ugly to merit raping; announced he would rather his son killed in a car accident than be gay; avowed open season on the Amazon rainforest, pledging to take land away from indigenous communities; declared that indigenous and Afro-Brazilian peoples are not fit for anything, not even procreating; and promised to rid Brazil of red riff-raff. In 1991 Brazilian philosopher Marilena Chauí, a contributor to this collection, declared "Brazil is an authoritarian country," since it has yet to "fully realise the principals of liberalism and republicanism" (2011:169) Brazil is a nation, Chauí stated, "where there is no distinction between public and private, in which there is an inability to tolerate the formal and abstract principle of equality before the law, in which social and popular forms of struggle are repressed and in which racial, sexual and class discrimination are pervasive" (2011: 170). Chauí's words seem especially prescient today. Since taking office in January 2019, Bolsonaro's right-wing government has intimidated and arrested journalists investigating possible illegalities in his cabinet, accusing them of criminal activities and of spreading fake news; it has appointed Bolsonaro's own son, Eduardo, Brazil's ambassador to Washington DC, in spite of his lack of political experience, and hired another son Carlos, head of communications; it has slashed funding for social initiatives, including science and public education programs, that enabled poorer and Afro-Brazilian students to enter university; and it has made severe cuts to FUNAI, the National Indian Foundation, curtailing the rights of indigenous people, a move that has precipitated increased deforestation, as well as land invasions by loggers and miners and led to a rise in homicides. Bolsonaro himself has called for security forces and citizens who shoot alleged offenders to be shielded from prosecution, stating that he hopes that criminals will "die in the streets like cockroaches." At the time of writing, with the country suffering from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, experiencing one of the highest mortality rates in the world, Bolsonaro has dismissed the disease as nothing more than "a little flu;" has rejected media "hysteria" over its dangers;" and sacked his health minister, Luiz Henrique Mandetta, after he publicly challenged the president's behaviour"--
