July 2019
Six months is not a long time to take the measure of a new regime, but enough in the case of Bolsonaro’s presidency to form a preliminary judgment. Comparisons with Trump, at the outset based on their respective performance at the polls and depth of social support, can now be extended to their conduct in office. The most striking parallel is the chaotic turnover of appointments in the administration of each, amid a rain of random dismissals and nominations, and a downpour of tweets, seeking to bypass conventional means of communication to rouse sympathizers by direct appeal in social media. But three critical differences between the two rulers have quickly become apparent. As previously noted, if both were political novices, suddenly catapulted into power, Trump could boast a previous career both as a real-estate tycoon, however shady his dealings or shaky his empire, and as a television impresario, however tawdry his show. Bolsonaro had no experience in running anything. Erratic and unstable, unconnected to any political organization, he was not the first Brazilian politician to capture the presidency as a ramshackle outsider. Each in their fashion, Quadros and Collor were conspicuous precedents. But they had at least some administrative experience behind them, as governor and mayor of the capital in their respective states, São Paulo and Alagoas. Bolsonaro had administered nothing.
What he did possess, unlike either of them, was an unbroken stretch of twenty-six years as a deputy in Congress. These, however, he had never used to acquire a good institutional grasp of its workings as a legislature, or a tactical network of like-minded colleagues. Rather the opposite: where Quadros and Collor entered into conflict with Congress only after taking the presidency, Bolsonaro launched his campaign for the presidency with strident attacks on Congress, as part and parcel of the corrupt system of ‘old politics’ his mission would be to demolish. In that, his rhetoric resembled Trump’s denunciations of the ‘swamp’ in Washington two years earlier. But the similarity of posture only underlines the contrast in context. Where Trump came to power by capturing the Republican Party—half of the country’s long-established political system, which was in no danger of melt-down—Bolsonaro’s rise was the product of a virtual collapse of Brazil’s traditional system, with both of its main parties, PT and PSDB, in complete disorientation after the debacle of the Dilma and Temer presidencies, and a miasma of monetary scandals hanging over the entire political class. His overnight ascent was a much more aleatory outcome of a vacuum of power.
That meant he faced considerably less opposition than Trump when he banked his victory at the polls. But the advantage was illusory, dissipated within short order as it became clear that he had no idea how to control or steer a Congress that had shifted well to the right in his wake,1 but in which his own party, just confected for his campaign, had only 10 per cent of the seats. Rejecting the pact accepted by his predecessors—distribution of lucrative ministries and sinecures in the executive in exchanges for votes in the legislature—of so-called Presidential Coalitionism, a formula for generalized corruption, and vainly attempting to mobilize street protests against it, he rapidly antagonized the morass of deputies for hire in the Centrão, without whose support he could advance no significant legislative agenda. Until the mid-terms of 2018, Republican control of both houses of Congress put Trump in a far stronger position, if not without some attrition, too.
The most salient contrast between the two rulers, however, lies elsewhere. Bolsonaro’s priority, it quickly became clear, is essentially foreign to Trump. His main preoccupation has been to prosecute his version of culture wars, at the expense of any other focus of policy or attention. As a deputy in Congress, his practical activity was confined to the continuous defense of corporate interests of the military and manufacturers of small arms, a record which attracted little notice. What gave him a national profile, if at first an isolated one, were virulent rhetorical tirades against the evils of feminism, homosexuality, atheism and, of course, communism, assorted with tributes to the torturers who had made short work of these under the dictatorship. Connecting in due course ever more closely with the rising evangelical churches in the country, by the time he became a leading candidate for the presidency this was a discourse placed stridently under the sign of God and the family. So it is that once in the Planalto, more presidential energy has been invested to date in flailing efforts to stamp out aberrant ideas—sex education and the like—in schools, and to cut down study of subversive humanities in the universities, along with provision of wholesome access to firearms for the self-defence of every citizen, than to any economic, social, environmental or foreign-policy issue, in one bizarre initiative or outburst after another.2 Right-wing enough, such hysterical moralism—however artificial—is not something Trump had any interest in, or, for obvious reasons, could afford.
From this baseline, what has been the impact of Bolsonaro’s style of rule—a general political amateurism, gesticulations of prepotence and lapses into impotence, obsession with ideological phantasms—on the sociological tripod that raised him to power: business, the judiciary, the military? Capital, believing it had first claim on him, celebrated his arrival in the Planalto with a burst of (speculative rather than productive) animal spirits: in the first six months of 2019, the stock market jumped 10 per cent on the expectation of privatization and welfare cuts, hitting an all-time high in March. The key to future confidence was the promise of pension reform to reduce public debt, the top assignment for Guedes at the Finance Ministry. But the radical neo-liberal package Guedes laboured to prepare soon ran into two obstacles. On the one hand, Bolsonaro himself casually made clear that he was quite willing to ditch the centrepiece of Guedes’s plan, a switch of the whole pension system from guaranteed public benefits to compulsory individual accounts, managed by private funds along Chilean lines—not only a politically explosive proposal (average Chilean pensions falling below the minimum wage), but a fiscally hazardous scheme. On the other hand, Guedes’s own lack of experience in navigating any measure—let alone one as sensitive as this, requiring a constitutional amendment—through Congress, coupled with the lack of any competent back-up from within the executive, left the shape of any such reform reverting to a legislature filled with deputies, conservative enough by any measure, but apprehensive of a backlash against too sharp an attack on privileged entitlements. Eventually, given business pressure, a neo-liberal pension reform was passed by the Lower House, and will no doubt be ratified by the Senate. Socially, its effect will hit the poor and precarious hardest; economically, its effect will be a cut in the revenues needed to finance the new system.3
Meanwhile all economic indicators point downwards, towards prolonged stagnation. Recovery from the recession of 2015–16, when GDP fell 7 per cent, was very weak in 2017–18, at no more than 1.1 per cent a year, as public spending was slashed, and consumption flatlined. Worse was to come in the first quarter of 2019, when far from getting a Bolsonaro bounce, the economy contracted by 0.2 per cent, and investment—despite the lowest interest rates since re-democratization—fell by 1.7 per cent for lack of effective demand, depressed by fiscal austerity at home and the retreat of commodity markets abroad.4 Unaltered by Guedes, the neo-liberal medication of the crisis bequeathed by Temer has left unemployment at over 13 million, double the level before the crisis, and increased the number of Brazilians below the World Bank’s minimalist definition of the poverty line by well over 7 million.5 Capital itself has little reason for satisfaction with this performance; the masses, reasons for deepening despair. Without reversing it, the economic legitimation of the regime will vanish.
What of the judiciary, the second foot of the tripod? Had it not been for Lava Jato, Bolsonaro could never have come to power. Once elected, no move embellished the aura of his presidency more than his appointment of Sergio Moro as minister of justice. Personification of the battle against corruption, more popular in the country than the president himself, meanwhile supplying him with an ethically bullet-proof vest, Moro was widely seen as the most likely candidate to succeed Bolsonaro. The only question mark over his future seemed to be whether he would collide with Congress in pursuing further political malfeasance, or alternatively see his lustre dim if he allowed investigations to tail off once installed as minister. In the event, neither scenario materialized, both overtaken by a far more sensational one. In early June—six years almost to the day after he broke Snowden’s revelation of Obama’s worldwide empire of illegal surveillance—Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues at The Intercept started publishing exchanges between Moro and Dallagnol. These made it crystal-clear that, in defiance of the Constitution, judge and prosecutor had been colluding to secure Lula’s imprisonment on evidence they knew to be weak, Moro directing operations of the prosecution in a case where he was supposed to be impartial.
That much was, in truth, plain to see for anyone who cared to look, even without written evidence.6 What the Intercept exchanges delivered was something beyond that, a brutal answer to the question posed by André Singer’s description of the procedures of Lava Jato as at once ‘republican’ and ‘factious’: were they so in equal proportion? For not only did the messages show that the 2018 verdict against Lula was rigged, the judge who wrote it an eager party to the charge against him, and that the same judge was secretly in touch with what in the language of the Italian mafia would be called his ‘referent’ in the Supreme Court, Luiz Fux, reassuring Dallagnol of his ability to ensure its backing for their machinations with the memorable dictum (it could come from a novel by Sciascia): ‘In Fux We Trust’.7 They also proved, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the motivations of judge and prosecutors alike were political, extending to jeers at the PT, measures to ensure that Lula could give no interview to the press that might increase the PT’s chances in the election, and—in a way, perhaps most damningly of all—measures to protect Cardoso, politically Lula’s arch-enemy, from any risk that his own finances, lubricated too by Odebrecht, might be investigated. On being advised by Dallagnol that prosecutors in São Paulo who were apparently looking into these were probably just going through the motions to preserve an air of impartiality, Moro was still not pacified, finding it ‘questionable’ to ‘offend someone whose support is important’. The ties binding the pool in Curitiba to the patriarch of the PSDB could not have been rendered more transparent.
Blithely waved away by Cardoso as ‘a storm in a teacup’, the Vaza-Jato (‘Car-Leak’) revelations were a bombshell for less compromised liberal opinion. The reaction of three of the best-known columnists in the land, two of them famous for the ferocity of their attacks on the PT when it was in power, spoke volumes. Going from right to left within this bandwidth: in the words of Reinaldo Azevedo, the evidence of Vaza-Jato meant that ‘if any law exists, the condemnation of Lula is null and void’; for Demétrio Magnoli, ‘the collusion of Sergio Moro with the prosecutors’ lay ‘like a leaden cloud over our democracy’, and now that it was exposed, ‘any decent government would get rid of Moro without further ado. No such luck’; while for Elio Gaspari, Moro’s continuation in office was ‘an offence to morality, common sense and the laws of gravity’, and he should resign forthwith; the political conduct of the pair in Curitiba resembled the sedition of the officers who had sought to overthrow Vargas in 1954.8 Yet to expect such revulsion, however widespread or well-expressed, to bring Moro down, would be naive. Too much symbolic value had been invested in him for the Brazilian establishment of the hour—the president, the Supreme Court, Congress—to let him fall. But he was now damaged goods, no longer so much protecting Bolsonaro as protected by him. The judicial foot of the tripod has started to look as potentially shaky as the economic.
Within hours of Moro coming under fire, it was not the presidency that came to his defence. Bolsonaro, no doubt waiting to see what the fallout of Vaza-Jato would be, kept silent. It was the most powerful general in the regime who spoke out, and in terms that made starkly clear the political stake of the military in the common task, that had united officers and magistrates, of destroying Lula and ensuring that the PT could not win the elections of 2018. The intercepts, Augusto Heleno announced, ‘seek to stain the image of Dr Sergio Moro, whose integrity and devotion to the fatherland are above suspicion’. Behind them were ‘those who dominated the economic and political scene in Brazil in recent decades, and are now desperately using illegal means to try to prove that Justice punished them unjustly. They are going to be unmasked once more. The exchanges and accusations they are divulging confirm the honest and impartial work of those who had the law on their side. The judgment of the people will give these detractors the reply they deserve.’ When Moro, to avoid the risk of an investigation of his conduct by the lower house of Congress, hastily presented himself to the upper house, where he was assured of a soft reception, Heleno was even more violently outspoken. He declared: ‘Governed for twenty years by a veritable gang, the country was victim of a gigantic plunder of its resources, involving vast private firms and public enterprises, pension funds, administrators and politicians at all levels. Now some of the protagonists of this criminal project of power and illicit enrichment have brazenly participated in an inquisition of Minister Sergio Moro.’9 Fellow officers in the regime chipped in with further affidavits to the same effect.
What such immediate intervention at a moment of crisis signals is that, in the tripod of forces sustaining Bolsonaro, the military are by far the most significant, supplying the regime with its most stable and powerful base. That, of course, was always clear from the sheer number and weight of the government positions they occupy. Starting with Heleno at the top, in charge of Institutional Security, officers were handed control of the portfolios of Infrastructure, Science and Technology, Mines and Energy, and Defence. They were appointed comptroller-general, secretary-general to the presidency and secretary of government, not to speak of press secretary, Post Office director, aide to the president of the Supreme Court, etc. In all, no less than forty-five military appointments in the top two tiers of the administration. In comparative terms, Bolsonaro’s regime numbers more ministers from the armed forces than ever served under the dictatorship: not just in Castelo Branco’s government, at the outset of the dictatorship in 1964, but even in any of his military successors after the regime had hardened—Costa e Silva, Médici, Geisel and Figueiredo.10
What made this formidable resurrection and return, officers adorning the state en masse, politically possible? The answer, bitter as this may be, is that it was neither the Right nor the centre that accomplished this; neither the PFL/DEM nor the PSDB, neither the country’s conservatives nor its neo-liberals. It was the Left, in the shape of the PT, which accomplished this and bears direct responsibility for the political rehabilitation and re-entry onto the political stage of the military. It did so oblivious of historical memory.
Scarcely over a year after the generals seized power in April 1964, the Brazilian dictatorship dispatched an expeditionary force to assist the US intervention to overthrow the constitutionalist authority headed by Francisco Caamaño in the Dominican Republic, feared as too radical by Washington. The counterrevolutionary force that took over the country was even put by the US under a Brazilian commander, the better to maintain the fiction of a pan-American response to the danger of communism in the hemisphere.
Some forty years later, another Brazilian expeditionary force landed on the same island, with much the same kind of mission, this time to cover the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. The only political figure of modern times to enjoy a real following among the Haitian poor, Aristide was regarded in 2004 as too radical by the US and bundled into exile by Washington and its partners in Ottawa and Paris. Aristide, unlike Caamaño, presided over a government that by then—it was his third time in office—was guilty of intimidating its opponents, composed principally of military and economic legatees of Duvalier’s brutal tyranny with far longer and worse records of violence, and no popular support of any kind. Amid mounting disorder, Aristide’s inability to control the streets served as the pretext for an intervention whose motives lay elsewhere. For the US, Aristide had failed to be sufficiently business-friendly. For France, he had committed the unpardonable offence of demanding reparations for the crushing indemnity—some $21 billion in current values—that Haiti was forced to pay the restored Bourbon monarchy in 1825 as compensation for the emancipation of slaves decreed by the Haitian Revolution in 1793. It took the country over a century to pay off this staggering act of extortion.
Aristide was abducted by the US and despatched to exile on 28 February 2004. Within less than a week, Bush and Chirac made telephone calls to Lula, and Brazil announced it was sending troops to Haiti to command a UN peace-keeping force in the wake of his removal. What prompted the alacrity of its collusion with the trio of powers that came to be dubbed the Imperial Trident by Haitians?11 The PT government sought to curry favour with the United States in the hope of Brazil being rewarded with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, where France too held a veto power. Cynical in motive, naive in calculation—naturally, no such solatium was forthcoming—the dispatch of Brazilian troops merely served as ‘the train-bearer of a coup’, in Mario Sergio Conti’s biting phrase.12 The announced original cost was R$150 million, for a tour of six months. The actual expedition lasted thirteen years, and cost in the region of R$3 billion, rotating some 37,000 troops, half as many again as the expeditionary force sent to Italy in the Second World War. Its principal military feat? ‘Operation Iron Fist’, to cleanse the slum of Cité Soleil in Port-au-Prince, viewed as a stronghold of supporters of Aristide: 22,000 bullets and seventy-eight grenades fired, to kill seven members of a local gang; civilian casualties uncounted.13
Politically, the Trident kept its grip on Haiti throughout these years, staging another coup de main in 2010 to ensure that the presidency was in safe hands—one so blatant that Ricardo Seitenfus, the Brazilian special representative of the OAS in Haiti, himself a former emissary of Lula’s government, could not contain his disgust and was fired for expressing it. In a blistering book-length retrospect of the record of the UN mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, and of his country’s role in it, he concluded: ‘Brazil was not in Haiti to fight for democracy, still less for the interests of the majority of the population. It was there simply to further its international objectives … Haiti was what it had always been, a mere means to a greater projection of Brazil on the international stage.’14 After his departure, the US choice for a marionette in Port-au-Prince, the crooner-businessman Michel Martelly, was installed in the Presidential Palace by MINUSTAH on a vote of 4.3 per cent of the electorate, and went on to preside over a system of wholesale corruption, reviving the pitiless egoism of the country’s traditional elites, steeped in the ways of Duvalier’s dictatorship.15 As for MINUSTAH, its parting legacy was the introduction of cholera into Haiti, leaving over 8,000 dead and sickening 600,000 others, without the UN ever accepting responsibility for the victims.16
What would be the overall balance sheet of Brazil’s descent on Haiti? After thirteen years, the Haitian masses were as trapped in misery as they were before Aristide, excluded from any say in their fate at the hands of their customary predators. Not even security, supposedly one of the immediate benefits the UN mission would bring, improved. Under its blue helmets, homicides doubled.17 Gains for Brazil? Zero: the quest for a permanent seat at the Security Council, a waste of time. Elsewhere, the record of Lula’s foreign policy was very different. Celso Amorim’s memoir of his time as foreign minister is rightly proud of the independence of its later initiatives in the Middle East and at the WTO. Tellingly, however, it contains not one significant word on Brazil’s intervention in Haiti—its silence, one must hope, a belated token of shame.18 Beneficiaries of the expedition, however, there were. In the first place, of course, the United States, relieved of the onus of occupying Haiti, as it did for twenty years after 1914, and of having to guard Florida from too much floating black flotsam.19 Far more momentously, however, the Brazilian armed forces, which supplied eleven successive commanders of the troops ‘under the banner of the UN’; enjoyed wide-ranging modernization of their equipment (accounting for most of the cost of the expedition); learnt how to run tasks of a civilian administration; and came back to Brazil redeemed as the heroic guardians of an exemplary pacification. In celebration of their role, a florilegium was published under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence and a domesticated NGO, comprising one fulsome self-congratulation after another, its tone set by Floriano Peixoto, picked by Bolsonaro as his first secretary-general to the presidency. ‘Brazil’s military presence in Haiti for thirteen years’, Peixoto explains, was ‘an epic experience which fully realized all of the goals envisaged by its idealisers back in 2004’. Moreover, it was ‘fundamental to point out’ that to ensure this success, the country’s soldiers drew on ‘Brazil’s previous military experience in 1965 and 1966 in the Dominican Republic, where we confirmed our role as a widely recognized international player’.20 From Johnson to Bush, Castelo to Lula, servants of the same noble cause: how could they not be empowered to apply their dedication to tasks at home once again?
Colonization of the Bolsonaro regime by the military, returning in force some fifty years after a coup of which they remain proud, lends the intervening half-century of Brazilian history the form of a parabola. In 1964 they seized power to remove a president who was too willing to accept, as they saw it, radical changes in the social order. In 2018 they intervened to ensure that a president who was still too popular, as they saw it, after achieving less radical changes, could not be re-elected, and instead one of their own, by origin and outlook, came to power. The curve of a parabola need not be symmetrical. The toppling of Goulart and the blocking of Lula were distinct operations, the first requiring the exercise of violence, the second only the threat of it. If the language of imposition differed, prevention of ‘subversion’ in one case, of ‘impunity’ in the other, as acts of state the pronunciamentos of Mourão Filho in 1964 and Villas Bôas in 2018 were akin. The regimes to which they gave birth were not the same, each creatures of their context, products of contrasting historical circumstances. By the time of the second, there was no requirement for the tanks and torturers of the first, whatever Bolsonaro’s nostalgia for them. Democracy had long been made safe for capital, and within the limits of the established social order, popular combativity was at a low ebb. Once installed, the new regime was more at risk from its own aporia than from any organized opposition to it.
There, in the anomaly of a former captain once nearly expelled from the army upending its hierarchy to command four-star generals, the head of the state has proved to be its destabilizer-in-chief. Bolsonaro’s restless dismissals and reshuffles of his ministers—a rate of turnover faster and higher indeed than Trump’s—have not spared even his military appointees. In the space of six months, he has abruptly fired two generals (Santos Cruz, Juarez Cunha), demoted a third (Peixoto), and co-opted a fourth (Ramos, unlike the others on active service) to handle relations with Congress; while relations with his decorated vice-president have visibly cooled. Professional discipline has so far prevailed, muting any public expressions of disaffection.21 How long that will last is open to question.
There is also, potentially, a much more serious risk of an upset to the fragile equilibrium of the regime. Bolsonaro’s original electoral base, and eventual political patrons, came from the army. But in the course of his entrenchment as an ideological firebrand in Rio, his closest connexions were with another apparatus of coercion, not federal but local, quite distinct from the army in its recruitment and modus operandi: the military police, a byword for corruption and criminality. There Bolsonaro and his sons wove former officers of this force—in retirement, the principal vectors of ‘militias’ preying on slums as drug-brokers and all-purpose enforcers—into their personal economic and political staff, while accumulating a quantum of real estate (thirteen properties to the value of some $4 million in the family) far beyond their means as deputies or assemblymen.22
One such ex-military policeman, Fabrício Queiroz, who served as chief of staff to Bolsonaro’s eldest son Flávio, now federal senator for Rio, engaged in such blatantly suspect multiple cash deposits into a bankomat that an investigation of him was opened in early 2018, extended to the bank accounts of Flávio himself in 2019. On pretext of illness, Queiroz declined any questioning, and has since vanished. Also on Flávio’s payroll were the mother and wife of another former military police officer, Adriano Nóbrega, once decorated by Bolsonaro himself. Nóbrega was later charged with murder, twice, and today is widely thought to be the leader of one of the most feared militia gangs in Rio, suspected of assassinating Marielle Franco. He too is on the lam, the authorities—naturally—unable to locate him. The explosive implications of this nexus for the president are plain. Likewise the pressures to suppress any risk of damage to him. The snail’s pace of the investigation of Queiroz, which has now lasted for over 500 days without any charges being laid, and the unfindability of Nóbrega, speak for themselves. No one expects the minister of justice to be in any hurry to cast light on dark recesses of the ruler with whom he has thrown in his lot. Perhaps some brave spirit in the prosecutors’ office in Rio will break ranks, but there is no counting on it.
What of public opinion? In the midst of prolonged economic recession and discredit of the political system, the main single driver of Bolsonaro’s electoral victory was popular desire for change—whatever kind of change was on offer—at all costs. Disappointment soon followed. After six months in office, his positive approval ratings were the lowest of any first-term presidency since democratization, dropping from nearly half to a third of the population. Even among the better off and evangelicals, bastions of his support, there was a loss of enthusiasm. Principally responsible for the decline in his standing, polls showed, was not the absence of any economic recovery, or impasse of any particular reform, nor even the disjuncture between his rabid brand of identity politics and the trend of values of Brazilian society, where voters at large remain well to the left of him on moral as on socio-economic issues. Rather, what turned most of the disillusioned off was Bolsonaro’s visible lack of preparation for government, his scatter-brained outbursts and want of gravitas, the general sense of a ruler adrift, lurching impulsively this way and that.23
Time may teach Bolsonaro elements of what public comportment as president requires, and of the need to compose with Congress if a neo-liberal agenda that meets the expectations of capital is to move smoothly forward. The possibility, however, cannot be excluded that, unwilling or unable to adjust his style, he goes the way of Collor, a scenario early ventilated in the media. For should the bonds of his clan with the underworld of Rio ever become too vividly exposed, it is not difficult to imagine another impeachment, disposing of him as an embarrassment to the new political order. In Congress the keeper of the keys to such a trial, Rodrigo Maia—son of a mayor of Rio repeatedly convicted of administrative dishonesty and son-in-law of one of the most flagrantly crooked oligarchs of the old PMDB, Wellington Moreira Franco, now under investigation along with Temer—is a worthy successor to Cunha: in manner more jovial, but in scruple infinitely flexible too, a figure quite capable of orchestrating Bolsonaro’s removal from office. Would that be a deliverance for Brazil? Amid a chorus of praise for his moderation, already a basso continuo of bien-pensant commentary, General Hamilton Mourão, theorist of the virtues of a presidential ‘auto-coup’ in case of anarchy, would step up from the vice-presidency to become the country’s new ruler. In the sum of things, the parabola of 1964 would have come to a yet more perfect landing.