Abstract
The democratic future of Brazil looks shaky.
During the presidential election campaign, Bolsonaro refused to participate in debates, hold press conferences or conduct interviews with journalists where he would have to respond to questions. He relied instead on Twitter and other social media to build a huge network of supporters, including three powerful conservative lobbies: evangelical Christians, agribusiness and the gun lobby (sometimes known as the Bible, Bull and Bullet Benches). His political base in Rio de Janeiro links him to a feared group of militias who are suspected in the involvement of the torture and killing of journalists and opposition politicians. During the election, he repeatedly attacked both the media and the judiciary, who he complained were conspiring against him, and stated that he would not accept the result if he lost.
According to Human Rights Watch, more than 140 reporters covering the elections were harassed, threatened and, in some cases, physically attacked. Meanwhile, some critics of the direction in which Brazilian society is moving have received death threats and have already left the country. Since the election, Bolsonaro has continued to rely mainly on social media, consciously modelling the tactics of US President Donald Trump. While the US media is a robustly defended institution in a stable democracy, however, freedom of expression in Brazil rests on much shakier foundations.
As Dilma Rousseff, its former president, noted in her contribution to my new book, In Spite of You: Bolsonaro and the New Brazilian Resistance: “Since the universal vote and direct elections were adopted in Brazil, in 1946, only five presidents of the republic have been able to conclude their mandates. More often than not we have lived in states of constitutional exception.”
Indeed, to understand the rise of Bolsonaro and why he represents such a threat to democracy in Brazil, it is necessary to explain a little bit of background about how Rousseff was ousted from the presidency.
Bolsonaro’s election was a by-product of a corruption investigation – the Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash), which began in 2013. A group of judges led by Sérgio Moro devised a prosecution strategy which was to be the biggest in Brazilian history, netting the heads of leading companies and senior politicians. By the end of 2017, more than 300 people had been charged and more than 1,000 warrants issued. The effect on public opinion was electric.
Sérgio Costa is a professor at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Freie Univer-sitat in Berlin. He is also a contributor to In Spite of You, where he noted: “Between 2003 and 2013, Brazil’s GDP grew 64%, poverty halved, the minimum wage increased by 75% in real terms and millions of new formal jobs were created every year.
“Since 2014, however, Brazil has faced a political and economic crisis generating recession, lower formal employment and higher household debt. GDP annual growth rate fell from 7.6% in 2010 to 0.1% in 2014 and contracted by 3.5% in 2015 and 3.6% in 2016.”
The narrative that the economic crisis was caused by politicians looting the public finances was a compelling one, although one with little factual basis. Lava Jato probably actually deepened the crisis through its chilling effect on business confidence.
The measures used by the Lava Jato investigators were certainly controversial. Suspects were placed in pre-trial detention in Brazil’s notori- ously overcrowded prisons and were offered plea-bargains as inducements to testify. Evidence gathered in this way was used to target more suspects, and the unsubstantiated word of alleged accomplices has been deemed sufficient for conviction. Brazil has a civil law system in which judges have an investigative as well as an adjudicative function. This means that judges sitting without juries have overall direction of a criminal investigation and then determine the guilt or innocence of the defendant.
Many also saw a blatantly political agenda behind the investigations. As Eugenio Aragao, a former minister of justice – previously a public prosecutor – said: “Lava Jato was an entirely political process with a clear political aim: [to] bring down a democratically-elected president and install a more market-friendly replacement.”
Politicians from all parties were charged, but public outrage focused on the governing left-of-centre PT. Rousseff, one of the few leading politicians untouched by allegations of personal corruption, was impeached in 2016. Many of the Congress members who voted for her impeachment were themselves under investigation in the Lava Jato.
Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro attends a military service in Resende, Brazil, December 2018
CREDIT: Paulo Whitaker/Reuters
Moro provided the Brazilian media with selective briefings about the evidence facing key defendants and tipped them off about police raids so that these could be televised. He also leaked a wiretapped conversation between former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (known as Lula) and Rousseff, while the latter was in power, to the media, significantly contributing to the campaign for her impeachment.
CREDIT: Marian Kamensky/Cartoon Movement
Lula had announced plans to stand in the presidential elections of October 2018 and all opinion polls showed that he would have won it quite easily. However, criminal charges were brought against him by Moro and he was imprisoned in April 2018 after a trial which raised many legal concerns. It was Lula’s removal from the race that proved the vital fillip to the far-right Bolsonaro, a previously marginal candidate. Bolsonaro is a former military officer and an outspoken supporter of the previous dictatorship. His notoriety comes from a series of bizarrely offensive statements that he has made during his career. He told a fellow legislator that she was too ugly for him to rape her; he said that he would rather his son died than accept him as gay; he has repeatedly taunted Afro-Brazilians, indigenous communities and those from the poorer states of the north-east; and he has said that the dictatorship’s only mistake was that it did not kill enough of its political opponents.
When casting his vote for the impeachment of Rousseff in 2016, Bolsonaro dedicated it to the memory of the head of intelligence of the military dictatorship responsible for torturing more than 100 political dissidents, including Rousseff herself. On the eve of his election, he released a statement in which he promised to imprison his political opponents and echoed a slogan from the dictatorship era: “Brazil: love it or leave it”.
Bolsonaro’s inauguration speech on 1 January 2019 vowed to liberate Brazil from “socialism, gender ideology, political correctness and ideology that defends bandits”. Unfurling the Brazilian flag, he declared that it would “never be red unless our blood is needed to keep it yellow and green”. Hours after taking office, he announced a new regulation transferring the protection and regulation of indigenous land rights to the ministry of agriculture, which is now dominated by the country’s powerful agribusiness lobby. Perhaps most significantly, the very first ministerial appointment made was of Moro as the head of a new super-ministry of justice and security. The judge who had presided over the process that had brought down one president and led to the imprisonment of another had become the first beneficiary of the political patronage of a third. These are dangerous times to be a democrat in Brazil.