The
PT and the Military
There is a lingering hatred for Lula and the PT among
the military’s top brass. An internal faction is openly conspiring to keep any
left-leaning government out of power by all means possible. This same faction
will play a major role in a future Bolsonaro government. This opposition
festers despite the fact that Lula’s government heavily increased military
spending and expanded its role overseas.
Lula’s strategy of appeasement, which mirrored the PT’s
orientation to Brazil’s plutocratic media and big capital, failed. Both retired
and active members of the armed forces — many of whom are today top figures in
the Bolsonaro camp — publicly came out against the commission and denied
torture under the military regime. At the same time, given that the commission
wasn’t supposed to punish anyone, it ended up strengthening and bringing
together anti-PT networks in the armed forces.
The Brazilian military dictatorship, unlike its
counterpart in Argentina, was not removed from power through political defeat.
Instead, facing increased political opposition, corruption scandals, and
economic crisis in the mid-1980s, dictatorship forces opted to carefully manage
Brazil’s transition to democracy. This ensured that their allies were well
positioned within Brazil’s new political system and the constitution would
protect them from repercussions for the dictatorship’s brutal
crimes.
To this day, the military has maintained a certain
reputation. First, as an independent actor who only intervenes in politics to
protect the national interest. Second, among a section of the population, the
dictatorship is remembered as a crime- and corruption-free golden age where
family values were respected and everyone had a job.
Several high-ranking military officers such as General
Sérgio Etchegoyen or General Joaquim Luna e Silva already occupy cabinet
positions in Michel Temer’s current government. The generals have been using
their growing space in the media, especially in Brazil’s largest media company
Globo, to voice alarmingly anti-democratic sentiments.
For instance General Luiz Rocha Paiva openly called for
a coup on Globonews, in
order to thwart the PT’s “silent revolution.” In a disturbing display of naked
paranoia, the general spoke about the dangers of a PT electoral victory turning
Brazil into a communist country.
Mourão — who was removed from his post as the head of
the Military Command of the South for openly clashing with Rousseff over the
truth commission’s work — later took part in a bizarre episode during the 2016
impeachment, in which he appeared on a Youtube
clip made by a Masonic Lodge in Brasília announcing his willingness to
support military intervention in order to “maintain stability.”
The degree of opposition within the military to the PT
has only become clear this year. For instance, the day before the Supreme Court
cleared the path for Lula’s arrest, army head General Vilas-Boas took to
twitter to publicly pressure the judiciary to arrest the former
president.
Following his tweets, almost all of Brazil’s high
military command went online to
celebrate the PT’s defeat. At the time they were only timidly criticized by a
lone justice on the Supreme Court. But the issue has returned to the headlines
during the electoral campaign, with the three candidates of the Left — Fernando
Haddad, Ciro Gomes of the PDT, and PSOL’s Guilherme Boulos — denouncing
military meddling in civilian affairs.
Lava
Jato and the Army
The far right also seems to have closer relations with
the Lava Jato investigation then many imagined. In the lead up to the first
round of the elections, Judge Sergio Moro, the man who sent Lula to prison,
released damaging testimony of a close Lula ally collected months ago in a move
clearly designed to enact maximum damage on the PT’s election
prospects.
Bolsonaro has openly talked about elevating Moro to
Brazil’s Supreme Court and key Lava Jato judges like Marcelo Bretas even
endorsed Bolsonaro openly. Bolsonaro will likely strengthen Lava Jato if
elected and use it as a means to criminalize the Left.
Thompson Flores, head of the Southern federal court of
appeals responsible for overseeing Lava-Jato anti-corruption operations,
was invited by General Mourão to give a lecture at Rio de Janeiro’s Military
Club. The invite came soon after Flores made headlines for ignoring legal
procedures to personally block an order — issued by a dissenting judge in the
court Flores leads — to free Lula. Mourão and Flores claimed during a press
conference that the meeting had nothing to do with Lula’s arrest, instead
citing what they described as their long-term friendship.
Currently presided over by Mourão, the Military Club
was one of the centers of the conspiracy that toppled Brazilian democracy in
1964. In 2014, the day after the truth commission published its report, the
club placed an advertisement in Rio de Janeiro’s main paper defending the
military dictatorship.
Haiti
Mourão, together with General Augusto Heleno, were
Brazil’s top military commanders in its disastrous intervention in Haiti.
According to international observers and human rights organizations, they are
responsible for massacring dozens of civilians in the slums of Port au Prince
in 2006. Now, they stand close to the highest political office in
Brazil.
Haiti was thrown into turmoil by Western states in 2004
after the United States, Canada, and France supported the overthrow of Jean
Bertrand Aristide’s mildly social-democratic government. After losing the
countryside to an insurgency based in neighboring Dominican Republic, Aristide
was forced on February 29 into an unmarked plain by American marines. They took
over Port au Prince’s international airport and sent Aristide to the Central
African Republic against his will. Eventually he was granted exile in South
Africa.
Instead of offering solidarity to the deposed leader,
Brazil’s left government supported the coup against Haiti’s popularly elected
government. The PT government effectively volunteered to occupy Haiti. They
were moved in part by the illusion that Brazilian military involvement in
United Nations peacekeeping missions would elevate the country to the Security
Council. The results were disastrous for both Haiti and Brazilian
democracy.
Heleno was met with immediate hostility from Haitians
after assuming control of military operations in the island by mid-2004.
Pro-Aristide supporters, based in the peripheries of Cite Soleil and Belair,
clashed with UN blue helmets in the capital, Port au Prince. The biggest slum
in the country, Cite Soleil, was also Aristide’s main power base and the home
of his party Fanmi Lavalas. In an attempt to eliminate opposition to the
intervention, on July 5 Heleno ordered the execution of the slum’s pro-Aristide
community leader Emmanuel “Dread” Wilme. Tens of mostly women and children were
killed in the operation.
Video footage of the massacre, collected by human
rights observers form the San Francisco Labor Council, which was later aired on
Democracy Now!, showed gruesome images of dead Haitians killed under Heleno’s
command. According
to Seth Donnelly, who went to Cite Soleil the following day and witnessed
Dread Wilme’s funeral, the event was widely attended by the traumatized
community.
“We found homes, which when we say homes, we are
talking basically shacks of wood and tin, in many cases, riddled with machine
gun blasts as well as tank fire,” said Donnelly. “The holes in a lot of these
homes were too large just to be bullets. They must have been tank-type shells
penetrating the homes. We saw a church and a school completely riddled with
machine gun blasts.”
The massacre fell very much in line with the Brazilian
political discourse of law and order. When asked about the raid, General
Heleno, says Donnelly, “initially challenged us, our delegation, as to why were
we concerned about the rights of the ‘outlaws,’ the term that he used, and not
the ‘legal force.’ He seemed to write off community testimony as being part of
community hostility and part of these ‘gang attacks’ on UN
forces.”
Estimates say at least twenty-seven Haitians were
killed in the raid, mostly young women. Heleno’s response mirrors the Brazilian
right’s championing of mass murder in the peripheries as a valid security
policy, claiming that the only good bandit is a dead bandit.
Pressured
by the Haitian solidarity movement in the United States, change in MINUSTAH
leadership later that month sacked General Heleno. However following a sinister
chain of events, his successor, General Urano Bacelar, was found dead three
months after substituting Bolsonaro’s current chief adviser in Port Au Prince.
While the Brazilian army described it as a “suicide” and avoided an official
investigation, Wikileaks
cables reveal skepticism towards the hypotheses, possibly linking his death
to different conflicts involving the United Nations.
Brazil’s presence on the island was also partially
responsible for spreading a cholera epidemic that killed thirty thousand
people. Additionally, there were over two thousand accusations of rape leveled
against Brazilian soldiers. Racist to its core, the operation was cheered on
by the media as an opportunity for the Brazilian army to practice its future
occupations of Rio’s favelas, with black Haitians serving as guinea pigs. Out
of all the PT’s mistakes that strengthened anti-democratic elements in
Brazilian society, Haiti was one of its most disastrous ones.
What’s
at Stake
Brazil’s democracy hangs in the balance. Bolsonaro’s
candidacy if successful will likely result in bloodshed, mass violence against
the Left, and the destruction of what remains of workers’
rights.
Bolsonaro and his allies in the military are openly
hostile to democracy. This ugly coalition has concluded that Brazil is
impossible to govern democratically and only an authoritarian solution based on
a new constitution will be able to return the country to
stability.
Bolsonaro seeks to channel popular anger against
Brazil’s political system and corrupt political class against democracy itself.
While this anti-democratic sentiment has crystallized around opposition to the
PT, one of the errors of the PT’s time in government was its failure to
curtail the power of the military.
Bolsonaro’s response to Brazil’s social and security
crisis is open violence. Like Duterte in the Philippines or Sisi in Egypt he
promotes a politics that can be reduced to shooting your way through the
country’s crisis. In a country where police mass murder is already business as
usual, if elected Bolsonaro and his friends in the military could unleash a
historic slaughter, the victims of which won’t only be poor black youth in the
favalas. It will also include land activists, trade unions, socialists, and
LGBT people. In this the murder of Marielle Franco serves as an example of a
nightmarish future.
αδειάσετε σε δικό σας δοχείο και να αφήσετε στο ταμείο τη συσκευασία του ΣΜ, αυτό φυσικά δεν ωθεί την βιομηχανία να διαθέσει το προϊόν της σε επαναχρησιμοποιούμενες φιάλες. Όμως σε κάποια κράτη έχει εισχωρήσει ήδη στην αγορά η επαναχρησιμοποιούμενη φιάλη. Φυσικά αυτό ισχύει σε όλα τα εμπορεύματα που το επιτρέπει η υγειονομική νομοθεσία του κράτους.
Τα ποταμόπλοια ταξιδεύουν μόνο σε συγκεκριμένες περιοχές του Ρήνου και με το 1/3 του φορτίου που υπό κανονικές συνθήκες θα φόρτωναν, λόγω του ότι η στάθμη είναι πάρα πολύ χαμηλή. Έχει να βρέξει κανονικά από Απρίλιο 2018. Ακόμα και σήμερα Οκτώβριος 2018 είναι πολύ πίσω από τον μέσο όρο των βροχοπτώσεων άλλων ετών.
Bolsonaro’s Most Dangerous Supporters
![[Der-Freitag_thumb2_thumb_thumb_thumb%5B2%5D_thumb%5B2%5D]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvyr-BYvKfNdTyjfJJxJOKGU7Bj-tY6XT-r0MwxWi0JWMB_dkDvUJoGJaV-ZlsDHpStDb4-2ZRmAG6rcnm_VUN8pb9cOr2Q_DHB_jrVqXepsqM9leCCYUBo19-fgumc0rKHsXCdv_IZQDJ/s1600/Der-Freitag_thumb2_thumb_thumb_thumb%255B2%255D_thumb%255B2%255D)
Ο Νεοφιλελευθερισμός βρίσκεται προς το τέλος του. Το ερώτημα που τίθεται είναι, εάν θα φύγει σιωπηλά ή θορυβώδης. Δυο σενάρια θα μπορούσαν να υπάρξουν. 
