From abroad, when contemplating South Africa’s history, one automatically thinks of apartheid and the omnipresent Nelson Mandela.
This is a narrative simplification, but it is effective in facilitating an understanding of the world, ordering value judgments and forging actions towards the ideal of full citizenship.
In Brazil’s case, there is no exclusive concept that expresses the violent construction of its national identity and maintenance of lasting mechanisms that sustain injustices committed against the majority of its people.
There is still no exclusive name for the phenomenon that massacred part of the indigenous population and installed half of all enslaved Africans in the country, with a small white elite from Europe that appropriated the land and its resources.
African and indigenous men reduced to disposable tools of forced labour; African and indigenous women turned into domestic slaves and victims of normalised rape.
Those born of this miscegenation were expelled from that small white elite, which was further strengthened after the colonial country became the capital of the Portuguese empire in 1808.
To explain the attempted coup d'état that took place in Brasilia on January 8, it is necessary to take into account the existence of this nameless enemy, whose closest definition is structural racism, in symbiosis with global neo-fascism/far-right wing
This nameless phenomenon did not disappear with the country’s independence in 1822.
Nor did the belated abolition of slavery in 1888 mean the end of barbarism.
And the proclamation of the republic in 1889 only consolidated the evolution of this phenomenon, which accommodated itself in the new capitalist-industrial model and prepared the country to be a migratory destination for European peasants and refugees as a project of population whitening.
To explain the attempted coup d'état that took place in Brasilia on January 8, it is necessary to take into account the existence of this nameless enemy, whose closest definition is structural racism, in symbiosis with global neo-fascism/far-right wing.
The much-vaunted Bolsonarism (in reference to ultra-right former president Jair Bolsonaro) is only the current phase of this menacing phenomenon, the latest act of which was the invasion and destruction of the centre of the republic’s three powers:
- the Planalto Palace — executive power;
- the Chamber of Deputies — legislative power; and
- the Federal Supreme Court — judiciary power.
Days earlier, Bolsonaro left the country before the end of his term of office for the company of former US president Donald Trump in Florida, leaving behind the Alvorada Palace, the presidency’s official residence, with serious damage to public patrimony.
The images that have circulated worldwide since last Sunday show some 4,000 anti-democratic demonstrators calling for a coup against the democratically elected government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The Brasilia police, instead of protecting the city, escorted the terrorists to their target. The military guard inside the Planalto Palace did not resist the destruction either.
Surprisingly, Anderson Torres, Bolsonaro's former minister of justice and security and appointed secretary of public security in Brasilia by local governor Ibaneis Rocha, was in Florida when the coup attempt advanced. Hours later, Lula announced federal intervention in Brasilia’s security and president of the Federal Supreme Court Alexandre de Moraes announced the suspension of the local governor.
On the horizon is the obligation to punish those responsible for planning, funding and executing the orchestrated act that used a mass of Bolsonarist supporters, a majority underpaid poor and a minority “white-trash” middle-class, to destroy and attempt to unleash spontaneous reverberations across the country.
The “Brazilian Capitol” had been warning of thee outbreak since the October 2022 elections. Evidence of corruption and criminal management of the pandemic by Bolsonaro’s government indicated enough attrition for a comfortable Lula victory.
However, the use of a billionaire secret budget to buy votes and a series of roadblocks in predominantly Lula-supporting regions on election day allowed Bolsonaro to achieve an even result and give strength to conspiracies of illegality in the Brazilian electoral system.
This thesis has been roundly rejected by technical experts, international bodies and observers.
Since then, Bolsonaro, the first Brazilian president to lose re-election, mixed silence, confinement and insinuations of illegality to mobilise thousands of supporters camped over the past few months in front of military barracks, waiting for the army to take action to suspend the election results.
The nameless enemy is still present and increasingly expressing itself in the figure of authoritarianism, corrosion of character and insensitivity, all characteristic of self-hatred converted into violence against the other
Equally worthy of criticism has been the compliance of the armed forces and various conservative sectors with so-called peaceful demonstrations calling for the end of democracy.
The most optimistic imagined the inauguration of the new government, celebrated on January 1 with almost 100 international delegations and emblematic figures of the broad Brazilian democratic front, would disperse the coup threats.
Unlikely, as democratic normality had been seriously challenged since 2014, when conservative candidate Aécio Neves questioned Dilma Rousseff’s victory. Two years later, Rousseff suffered a parliamentary coup and the conservatives took power again.
In 2018, with Lula leading the polls, judge Sergio Moro, without evidence and with unrestricted support from the national status quo, sentenced Lula to prison and paved Bolsonaro’s victory and his appointment as minister of justice. When the sentences against Lula were overturned, Bolsonaro continued as president and Moro as minister.
The nameless enemy is still present and increasingly expressing itself in the figure of authoritarianism, corrosion of character and insensitivity, all characteristic of self-hatred converted into violence against the other. In the current collapse of neoliberal ideology, the domination exercised by a reactionary, intellectually rudimentary and selfish elite is added to the role of the neo-Pentecostal religions in the manipulation of the less-favoured masses and the use of new information technologies to control the narrative.
The exercise of full citizenship is still a distant goal in a country that, besides being in defence of its own democracy, urgently needs to combat extreme poverty and preserve the natural environment.
Even if this enemy does not yet have a name, such as apartheid, Lula, indignant at a country where there are queues to get food scraps and queues to buy private planes, arouses hope comparable to that of Mandela.
• Heiber is co-founder of the Common Action Forum
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