Brazil: institutional and military crisis | Opinion

From Rio de Janeiro

After fourteen days of rigorous silence, finally Brazilian far-right President Jair Bolsonaro spoke on Saturday of the complaint MP Luiz Miranda lodged with the Senate commission of inquiry into the government’s conduct in the pandemic.

The complaint referred to a meeting between Bolsonaro and the Miranda brothers – the MP and a senior health ministry official – when he learned the mechanisms of high corruption managed by soldiers integrated into positions previously occupied by doctors, scientists and specialists. The president announced to the two brothers that he would order a federal police investigation. He never did.

Well, in a radio interview he argued that he gets a hundred people a month, in addition to his agenda with ministers, and that he can’t act on everything they tell him. .

It turned out that it was something of special gravity what he heard, and he did nothing. He chose to protect, by his silence, the people denounced.

Saturday’s statement serves to confirm two points. Un: Bolsonaro is completely lost, and it comes at a particularly negative time for him. All opinion polls reaffirm that Lula da Silva will overwhelm him in the presidential elections next year, and now they reveal something new: more than half of Brazilians – 52% in one poll, 54% in another poll – approve of his dismissal. And even more: 63% of those polled do not believe anything he says.

Other point : institutional tension has reached extreme levels. On the one hand, Bolsonaro radically attacks both the Senate Commission of Inquiry and members of the country’s Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court, the highest level in the industry. And, as if that weren’t enough, he is threatening not to hold the elections scheduled for next year.

And another, the senior commanders of the armed forces threaten the same institutions, and they specify the possibility that they interrupt, when they deem it necessary, the validity of democracy.

All this thanks to what Senator Omar Aziz, who chairs the Senate commission, said in response to the wave of complaints against retired soldiers active in corruption maneuvers of the Ministry of Health. He said most of the military should be ashamed of what the minority did, the “rotten part” of the Armed Forces, emphasizing being a minority.

The unjustifiable reaction of the Ministry of Defense and the three commanders of the armed forces, threatening to go in favor of democracy and institutions – read: intervention – surprised and worried, since it coincides with the presidential threat not to hold elections in 2022 “unless there is a printed vote, to prevent the fraud that brings the nine fingers to power.”

“Nine fingers” is a typical Bolsonaro way of referring to Lula da Silva, who lost a little finger while he was working.

Regarding the Bolsonarian way of exercising the presidency, and his notion of the dignity of the post he occupies, it is worth recalling two sentences from the last days. Referring to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (ICC), Bolsonaro said “I’m shitting on the ICC”. And when mentioning the president of the Higher Electoral Court, who is also a member of the Federal Supreme Court, he said he was “an idiot, an idiot”.

It can all be summed up in a picture of extreme tension.

There is an irreparably unbalanced president who melts in front of public opinion and becomes more and more aggressive to encourage the minority which continues to defend him at all costs (between 12 and 15% of the electorate), which faces serious allegations of corruption during his tenure as an MP, who protects the military involved in corruption initiatives, who by refusing to comply with the recommendations for protection against the pandemic have become complicit in a fundamental element of nearly 540,000 lives lost.

A Senate commission of inquiry is making progress on growing allegations of government corruption.

Armed forces that seem to have lost their way between maintaining their constitutional functions and protecting a corrupt government led by a psychopath.

A tragic picture of unemployment, hunger, inflation, the devastation of everything – everything – by a government determined to do this.

And an immediate horizon covered with darkness.