Memories of dictatorship: Some Brazilians fear a right turn: NPR

Half a century ago, Jean-Marc von der Weid was tied to a pole and clubbed by Brazilian security guards in search of information about fellow student leaders.

His torturers also tied threads to his fingers, toes, ears, tongue and penis, and subjected him to electric shocks. He remembers that at one point they had submitted him to a simulated execution platoon.

"They said," If you do not speak, we will certainly shoot you down, "says von der Weid. "I remember one guy who said: 'Do you want to smoke your last cigarette?' I replied: 'No thanks, I do not smoke.'"

"It was not bravery, I just did not think very well."

Von der Weid endured these atrocities for five days in September 1969 during one of the most brutal phases of a military dictatorship that lasted in Brazil for just over two decades. He was 23 years old and ran a banned student organization.

Until recently, few observers imagined that Brazil, which is today the largest democracy in Latin America, ran a significant risk of returning to this chapter in its past. Not anymore.

"We live in an extremely worrying time," says von der Weid, 72.

The Brazilians are preparing for an election that will determine whether their next president will be Jair Bolsonaro, a Congressman and retired army captain, who has openly and often expressed admiration for the 1964-1985 military regime as a period of order and tranquility.

Polls predict that Bolsonaro will win. He took the first round, on October 7, with a huge margin of nearly 18 million votes compared to his closest rival, Fernando Haddad, candidate of the left-wing labor party. They face Sunday in a second round.

If this happens, Bolsonaro will assume the presidency of Brazil on January 1, with the support of his Vice President – retired Army General Hamilton Mourão – with a list of retired military commanders who are advisors, some of whom are expected to join his cabinet. .

What could follow, once Bolsonaro is installed in the presidential palace, will provoke a passionate debate in Brazil.

The election campaign was ugly. Social media and text messaging platforms have been engulfed by acrimonious arguments and flooded with misleading lies and information. According to Pública, a Brazilian investigative journalism agency monitoring political violence, there were 71 election-related attacks in the first eleven days of this month. These include the assassination of Moa do Katendê, an Afro-Brazilian master of capoeira, A martial art combining music and dance, stabbed after an argument with a supporter of Bolonaro in Salvador.

"The forces of darkness, from within and from outside, now seem to force us to go back," famed musician Caetano Veloso wrote in a New York Times editorial this week. Veloso was one of the artists and intellectuals jailed by the military junta in the 1960s; he ended up spending more than two years in exile abroad.

"If Mr Bolsonaro wins the elections, the Brazilians can expect a wave of fear and hatred," Veloso wrote.

Bolsonaro himself rejects the predictions that he is a threat to democracy as "false information" broadcast by his enemies. He said he wants a government "endowed with authority but without authoritarianism" and describes himself as a "slave" to the Brazilian Constitution.

He insists that he is not interested in a military takeover. "It does not go out of our heads," Bolsonaro told NPR in April. "Even the military does not want that."

However, several recent incidents have reinforced suspicions about his intentions. In a speech last weekend, Bolsonaro described his opponents as "red bandits" and promised to "wipe them off the map" as part of a "cleansing that has never been seen before in the history of Brazil ".

The alarm bells began to ring even louder when a video surfaced in which Bolsonaro's third son, Eduardo, a congressman, said that Brazil's Supreme Court could be closed if it tried to get away from it. to remove his father from the presidency.

"You do not even need to send a jeep, send two soldiers," said Eduardo Bolsonaro, on the video recorded in July.

"What is the Supreme Court, dude? Eliminate the power of the pen of a judge, who is he on the street? If you arrest a judge, do you think people will protest? in his favour?"

The Chief Justice of Brazil responded by saying that an attack on the judiciary is an attack on democracy itself. Jair Bolsonaro distanced himself from what his son said, calling them wrong.

The remarkable rise of Bolsonaro in political darkness is fueled by the deep contempt with which many Brazilians now see traditional politicians. They are particularly angry at the Workers Party, which ran the government for over 13 years, from January 2003 to August 2016. This period included a deep recession and the beginning of the "Car Wash" investigation, which had revealed a huge commission. – Scam involving contracts involving political figures and business executives, including former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Bolsonaro, 63, is a seven-member Congressman. Yet he has successfully presented himself as a stranger, a perfectly clean patriot who will defend the fight against corruption and violent crime and restore the pride and traditional Christian values ​​of the country.

Several million Brazilians are following his battle cry. But research suggests that most of the country wants to preserve democracy. In a Datafolha survey conducted this month, 69% defined democracy as the best form of government. Twelve percent said they preferred a dictatorship.

Bolsonaro tried to deflect the current dictator's accusations by transmitting the same allegation to his opponent, Haddad, describing his labor party as an ally of the authoritarian left-wing government in Venezuela, in full economic collapse.

Haddad, 55, is a former political science professor who has been Mayor of São Paulo and Minister of Education of the Federal Government. His record, in fact, shows that he is a moderate center-left.

In the run-up to the presidential election in Brazil, policymakers and investors around the world are watching closely in the hope of detecting the contours of Bolsonaro's policy. Some of the country's most powerful forces, including the evangelical and agribusiness lobbies of Congress, are behind him.

Some of his objectives are already clear: his desire to soften Brazilian environmental laws, which, he says, stifle economic growth, is causing great concern at home and abroad among those who are fighting for the preservation of the Amazon rainforest.

It advocates allowing the Brazilian public to carry arms and advocates that the police use a more lethal force against suspects – an already common practice in poor, predominantly black neighborhoods where cops and criminal gangs struggle to control the crime. drug trafficking.

On the international scene, Bolsonaro is very pro-Israel and should move the Brazilian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as did the United States with its embassy in May. He leans strongly towards the United States and admires very much President Trump, who, according to him, launches "a new way of doing politics".

"I'm planning to get a lot closer to the US," Bolsonaro told NPR in April.

He criticized Brazil 's biggest trading partner, China, claiming that the Chinese were not simply investing in the country, but buying it.

Von der Weid, who is now an agroecologist, is also closely monitoring.

About one third of its 209 million Brazilians were born after the military dictatorship and are unaware of its abuses. Among them are 434 deaths and disappearances, according to the National Truth Commission of Brazil, which investigated the atrocities committed during the military regime.

"The Brazilian military has never admitted to committing an error or committing a crime," von der Weid said. "And they have never been punished."

If Bolsonaro becomes president, von der Weid expects that he will end up confronting Congress and the judiciary.

"Bolsonaro's instinct and … everything he says pushes toward a confrontation with the [government] institutions, "he says.

The key question is whether the Brazilian army "goes with it or not," he says.

The torture suffered by von der Weid as a radical student leader half a century ago left him with permanent hearing loss in the right ear; a crack in a bone in his spine and – for a moment – recurring nightmares.

Yet, the larger legacy is a troubling feeling that in Brazil today, the story could easily be repeated.