Bolsonaro persecutes critics with military dictatorship law

The National Security Law, dating from 1983, two years before the end of the military dictatorship, considers how crime harming the heads of the three branches of government or exposing them to danger. The vague rule has recently been used to stop or investigate criticism of Bolsonaro.

Katia Garcia, a geography professor, said on Friday that she protested outside the president’s office that the arrests inspired her. “They were imprisoned because the description of “genocidal” suits our president very well “, Garcia said, wearing a mask and face shield. “He contributed to the collapse of our health system due to the lack of vaccines. The police cannot silence us.”

Even if There have been previous allegations against prominent Bolsonaro critics, including a newspaper columnist, political cartoonist and popular YouTube star., the law is now increasingly used against ordinary citizens. For the time being no arrests have been confirmed by the courts, but lawyers have expressed concern because the tactic is spreading.

The two protests in Brasilia called for a political trial against Bolsonaro for his government’s alleged mistakes in the pandemic, which has left nearly 290,000 dead in the country. This week, authorities reported nearly 3,000 deaths per day.

On several occasions, the president complained that he had been unfairly defamed. The last one took place on Thursday, during a live stream on Facebook. “They call me dictator. I want you to point out something that I have done over the past two years and two months that was autocratic, ”he said in complained about an opinion column in a newspaper that used the word genocidal to describe it.

Brazilian police explained that the four detainees had violated the security law “because they displayed a swastika in association with the symbol of the President of the Republic”.. But federal police, who decides which local cases are worth prosecuting as national security crimes, he dismissed the case and released three of them. One was retained by a search warrant for an earlier case.

Federal police conducted more than 80 security law-based investigations during Bolsonaro’s first two years in power, and more than 10 in the first 45 days of 2021, according to the O Globo newspaper. The annual average before he came to power was 11.

The cases appear to be almost entirely linked to criticism of Bolsonaro, human rights organizations and activists have said.