Protests in Brazil: Tens of thousands demand the departure of Jair Bolsonaro | Charges of corruption add to claim for handling pandemic

From Brasilia

“Jair will fall” says the sentence in Portuguese projected on the facade of the Planalto Palace in Brasilia. In the Brazilian capital, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and hundreds of cities in the country’s 27 states, marches were organized on Saturday to denounce Bolsonaro for genocide and demand his departure. What was new in the protests were the slogans against the “corruption” of the leader accused of doing business with coronavirus vaccines and the involvement of conservative parties.

Around 5:30 p.m., as the audience continued to arrive, Tens of thousands of people lined up about eight blocks from Avenida Paulista, which besides being the most important in São Paulo is a fairly reliable thermometer of national outrage. The fall of the president Fernando Collor de Mello in 1992 it began to germinate in the demonstrations of this avenue.

“You see a lot of young people and people are starting to be seen in Paulista who haven’t been to the steps before. I think part of the population realized that Bolsonaro is corrupt“, said the political express during the dictatorship of Ricardo de Azevedo, in a telephone dialogue with 12.

Some protesters visited the Monumental Axis in central Brasilia with photos of Bolsonaro they stamped dollars on, to symbolize illegal activities with vaccines.

Others marched past Congress shouting “impeachment” and “superimpeachment”, the latter phrase being used last Wednesday when Dozens of deputies from the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Socialism and Freedom Party (Psol) as well as jurists presented a joint action in which were compiled more than a hundred requests for impeachment filed since 2019 in the Chamber of Deputies. The “over-impeachment” had the support of far-right deputies, such as Joyce Hasselmann and the retired porn actor, Alexandre frota, both disappointed by the president. The president’s rejection, who again threatened last week not to hand over the presidential sash to PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is growing wider if he wins the 2022 elections. Lula 49% against 23% of the current head of state.

Protests in Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro, conducted along Vargas Avenue, began in the morning. The mobilization in Rio de Janeiro was very popular and was followed by organizations of residents of the favelas, which repudiated the killings of the “Bolsonarist police”.

Activists from the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) marched through central São Paulo, led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the former conservative president who recently met his former rival Lula and later said he would vote for the PT to prevent Bolsonaro’s re-election.

The head of the PT, Glesi Hoffmann, he applauded the unprecedented presence of the PSDB. “The movement to impeach Bolsonaro is growing, we need everyone who wants democracy.”

It was the third opposition demonstration since May 29One day, the forces of the Democratic camp began to take back control of the street which had been taken from them by the official rallies, more than once led by Bolsonaro from Aeronautical helicopters or on horseback (showing his weak skills in horseback riding).

In recent weeks, in parallel with his fall in the polls and the news of the coronavirus, the former captain has stopped calling for mobilizations in his favor, replacing them with caravans of bikers (probably police and soldiers hidden under their helmets).

To get vaccinated

A group of social movements and parties held an emergency meeting last week in which it was decided to anticipate this Saturday’s protests. what to give Immediate response to the vaccine scandal revealed on Friday June 25 to the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Pandemic (CPI) where the deputy Luis Claudio Miranda denounced a network of alleged corruption mounted within the government through overcharged contracts for the purchase of vaccines.

Miranda provided details on the signing of a contract for 20 million Indian vaccines, at 15 dollars per unit, 400% more expensive than the AstraZeneca, operation in which a commissioned company linked to pro-government politicians took part. The money would be deposited in an offshore Singapore.

Miranda told the ICC that he informed Bolsonaro in person of the alleged crime, that the president took no action to prevent it.

The revelations caused a political thrill: the Planalto was paralyzed and the opposition denounced Bolsonaro for procrastination before the Federal Supreme Court, which on Friday ordered the opening of an investigation.

The stain came to the military because of Miranda’s complaint and one made by an AstraZeneca vaccine vendor, suspicions arise about former health minister General Eduardo Pazuello, and her ex number two, Colonel Elocio Franco. Everything indicates that while Bolsonaro obstructed the direct purchase of millions of vaccines from laboratories, exacerbating the health crisis, members of his government, with his possible consent, negotiated the purchase of other drugs with payment. of “commissions”. They made money with the pandemic.

The acts of this Saturday, once the participating public is measured, will be a test of the impact of the scandal on the most politicized fringe of society. If the protest is successful, it will fuel the impeachment demand and ICC investigations.

“As in Chile and Bolivia”

The National Union of Students, chaired by Iago Montalva, he deployed columns in São Paulo and Brasilia, where the presence of young people and women was important.

The university community led the first major protests the government faced which led to the resignation of Education Minister Abraham Weintraubel in the middle of last year.

For Montalva, the “growing political force” of the concentrations of opposition is due to the “unity” between democratic and left-wing political movements and parties, comparable to that which existed in the “Directas Ya” movement, born at the end of the military dictatorship (1964-1985).

“Our young people, mainly the poorest, have no prospect with this reactionary government which wants to put an end to the public university and condemns us to unemployment.

Unemployment has reached 14.7% according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, which affects 14.8 million Brazilians of all ages. But the Getulio Vargas Foundation and other academic centers, in a report published by the journal Newspaper, that one in two young people is unemployed.

“Young people do not accept a reactionary government like this, listen to young people, young people have no prospect,” said the student leader. Montalva inscribes Brazilian indignation in a regional process: “look at what happened in the mobilizations in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia.

The Latin American prism analysis of the academic leader is complemented by the commentary of the former political detainee, Ricardo de Azevedo, on the regional implications that the meeting of Bolsonaro and the director of the CIA, William Burns, which took place last week. in Brasilia, could have.

“There is a lack of information on the meeting with the head of the CIA, but this may be linked to the destabilizing position of Bolsonaro, he tried to destabilize the government of Venezuela, supported the coup in Bolivia and attacks progressive governments in the region, ”de Azevedo said.

“Bolsonaro is moving towards a dictatorship”

Meanwhile, in one of the columns that shouts “Bolsonaro genocida” on Avenida Paulista, in downtown San Pablo, is Ricardo de Azevedo, who in the 1970s participated in the armed resistance to the dictatorship of which he was a political prisoner.

“The afternoon is wonderful in Paulista, San Pedro helps us because it is not raining, a lot of people arrive, the presence of young people is very important, the same as in the other markets”, explains De Azevedo in telephone communication with Page 12.

De Azevedo is the coordinator of the “Movement 68 still in struggle”, a group in which the participants in the historic mobilizations of that year against the regime meet.

“We are fighting against dictatorship and today we are fighting against the threat of dictatorship that Bolsonaro represents. Bolsonaro’s objective is to establish one in Brazil. We see concrete elements that show that he wants to go towards that, like the threats of the Federal Supreme Court, the restriction of democratic freedoms, the militarization of the government. ”

“There are a lot of similarities with the army of yesterday and today. In the 1970s there were hard-line soldiers. Ernesto Geisel (dictator 1974-1979) who proposed a limited opening. Confrontation has been common in the armed forces since the 1920s.

“These divisions were not seen during the progressive governments of Lula and Dilma because they may have hidden them, but today they are clearly visible, there are clearly Bolsonarist sectors and other sectors that prefer the armed forces to play a more secondary role, sectors which seem to be more institutionalist ”.