Bolsonaro
is different from Trump in that – instead of planning to build a
wall or enact an immigration ban – Bolsonaro believes in using
military and police violence to purge Brazil of “undesirables.”
by
Whitney Webb
The rise
to prominence of Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate Jair
Bolsonaro has given many in Brazil and abroad cause for concern.
Bolsonaro – once considered a “fringe” politician – has
publicly proposed bringing back elements of the country’s former
military dictatorship, which he has often promoted over his
three-decades-long career in Brazil’s Congress.
Despite
the real concern that Bolsonaro’s potential victory in the upcoming
Brazilian election could resurrect some of the country’s darkest
days, international media outlets – particularly in the West –
have widely likened Bolsonaro to U.S. President Donald Trump. Indeed,
in recent years, Bolsonaro has promoted Trumpesque policies such as
“draining the swamp,” crusading against corruption, and an end to
the moderate welfare policies put in place by the center-left
Workers’ Party (PT) under the tenures of former Brazilian
presidents Dilma Rousseff and Luís Inácio Lula da Silva.
The
comparisons between Trump and Bolsonaro have only grown after it was
recently announced that Steve Bannon, the former head of Breitbart
News and former chief advisor to Trump, will serve as an advisor to
Bolsonaro’s presidential campaign. Bannon’s inclusion in
Bolsonaro’s campaign was announced by his son, Eduardo Bolsonaro,
who also confirmed that Bannon “had made himself available to
help.” Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is also a congressman, further
elaborated that Bannon’s involvement will involve “giving
internet tips, analysis, interpreting data,” and similar types
of assistance.
Bannon
has long followed Bolsonaro’s political career but reportedly
became enthusiastic about his prospects for Brazil’s presidency
after seeing the candidate being swarmed by a crowd of supporters
after arriving at a Brazilian airport.
Despite
Bannon’s involvement in Bolsonaro’s campaign, observers of the
upcoming Brazilian election should not be so quick to compare
Bolsonaro to Donald Trump. Indeed, whereas Trump was a political
newcomer, Bolsonaro has served over 30 years in the “swamp” he
claims he wants to drain as a congressman. He also recently – in
the last four years – became interested in fighting corruption,
only after it embroiled the country’s prominent center-left
Workers’ Party, long the object of Bolsonaro’s political ire.
For much
of his political career, Bolsonaro was considered fringe – even for
Brazil’s right – given his long-standing promotion of Brazil’s
dictatorship, which controlled the country from 1964 to 1985. Indeed,
Bolsonaro has called the 1964 coup a “defense of democracy.”
In an infamous interview in 1999, Bolsonaro declared that the
country’s military dictatorship had failed to “finish its
job,” adding that “you are not going to change anything
through voting; … you’ll only change things by having a civil war
and doing the work the military regime didn’t do.”
According
to Bolsonaro, the work the military dictatorship “didn’t do”
is the “killing [of] 30,000, starting with FHC [former Brazilian
President Fernando Henrique Cardoso].” “If a few innocent
people die, that’s alright,” Bolsonaro concluded.
Trumpism
on steroids
Though —
like Trump — Bolsonaro has long vowed to defend Brazil against
“internal enemies” such as “communists,”
“Indians,” and “faggots,” Bolsonaro is
different from Trump in that – instead of planning to build a wall
or enact an immigration ban – Bolsonaro believes in using military
and police violence to purge Brazil of “undesirables.”
Even
after reinventing himself as an anti-corruption crusader, Bolsonaro’s
promotion of Brazil’s past dictatorship and its violent tactics has
shone through with stunning regularity. For instance, while voting to
impeach Dilma Rousseff in 2016, Bolsonaro announced his vote in favor
of impeachment by stating: “They lost in ‘64, they lost now in
2016 … against Communism, for our freedom … in memory of Colonel
Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra, the terror of Dilma Rousseff … for
our Armed Forces, I vote yea.”
Carlos
Ustra was a colonel in the Brazilian Army and the head of the
DOI-CODI, a well-known torture center that, during Ustra’s tenure,
tortured more than 300 people, including pregnant women and children
as young as five.
As
Frederico Freitas recently wrote in Current Affairs, Brazil’s
seemingly surprising embrace of a far-right would-be mass murderer is
the sad result of Brazil’s long failure to grapple with the dark
past of the dictatorship. Freitas argues: “Brazil has never
fully reckoned with the political crimes of its military
dictatorship. This void of justice and consequence has allowed the
right wing to return and thrive. This is the regime in which a man
like Bolsonaro can build a fatalist political campaign that presents
a return to the ‘years of lead’ as the only solution for the
current Brazilian crisis.”
Though
Bolsonaro’s appeals to “drain the swamp,” his shallow
nationalism targeting “internal enemies,” and his new link to
Steve Bannon evoke comparisons between him and Trump, such
comparisons are misleading. They glibly write off a future
Bolsonaro-led Brazil as being like a Trump-led United States, when
the Brazilian edition is set to be much worse.
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