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Bolsonaro and the one-eyed man

Why there is more than meets the eye to Brazil’s relationship with the far right

Few things can seem as disconcerting as the international home of carnival succumbing to fascists. So it was that the October 2018 election to the Brazilian presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, an ultra-reactionary firebrand with repulsive views on women, torture and homosexuality, came as a nastier shock than most even to a Western commentariat inured to the rise of right-wing blowhards. In Anglo-American journalism especially, Brazil in the wake of the Bolsonaro election has been portrayed as the inevitable next domino to fall in a supposedly doomed global struggle against the far right. After all, if even Brazil, a gleefully multi-ethnic country best known to the outside world for its partying and footballing, can fall to the dubious charms of a grim bigot like Bolsonaro, where can the world be headed? Yet this collective clutching of pearls may be saying more about the journalists’ ignorance and their newsrooms’ editorial preferences – stories about invincible Nazis sell papers, after all, even as they promote yet more Nazis – than it does about the more complex realities of Brazil.

First of all, Bolsonaro did not come out of nowhere, and neither was he the supposedly natural result of some sort of Trumpian fascist zeitgeist. Even aside from Brazil’s long experience of dictatorship, far-right demagoguery in Brazil is nothing new or exceptional. In fact, one of the longest and most memorable presidencies of the past century in Brazil is that of Getúlio Vargas (pictured above). Having first taken power by force in 1930, quite a while before Hitler, Vargas went on to institute a far-right corporatist state which his contemporaries Franco and Mussolini would have easily recognised. In the late 1930s the paranoid nativism of Vargas’s regime became especially apparent when the teaching of foreign languages was banned outright in Brazil, including private tutoring for those younger than 14. Ethnic minorities, which even then were a particularly vibrant and visible part of the Brazilian social fabric, were dismissed as not being part of the national story. Japanese immigrants, who ironically had come to Brazil only because xenophobic anti-Japanese laws had already driven them away from the United States in the early 20th century, suffered especially grievously at the hands of Vargas and his secret police, who restricted their freedom of movement and forbade them from even meeting or speaking their own language to each other. Vargas’s hold on Brazilian politics endured for an entire generation, too: although he lost power after World War II when the contradiction between his fascistic policies and his alignment with the democratic Allies became unsustainable, he managed to install a puppet of his as a successor and later returned to power by democratic means, only leaving politics upon his death in 1954. Arguably, Vargas cast an even longer shadow than that: the president who oversaw the country’s transition to its current democratic phase in 1985 was Tancredo Neves, who had been Vargas’s close friend and justice minister in the 1950s.

Secondly, far-right cranks never left the Brazilian political landscape even during democratic periods, and actually tended to rise to prominence during acute episodes of national corruption. In the late 1980s, the new guarantee of broadcasting time granted by the government to all presidential candidates as part of the transition to democracy meant that Brazilians made the delighted acquaintance of Enéas Carneiro. A diminutive bald man with a massive black beard, forbidding bifocals and the manner of a 19th century fundamentalist preacher, Enéas grimly hectored his television viewers in his trademarked screech about his novel views on the priorities for the country. This included his aggressive promotion of Mexican soap operas, supposed to instill superior morals compared to their lewder Brazilian counterparts, featuring as they so often did the female posterior. His live conversations with “experts” were as tightly choreographed as Soviet Politburo meetings, and he ended every broadcast by screaming his name into the camera like a prepubescent Rambo (Meu nome é eNÉÉÉÉas!!!), sending viewers into paroxysms of laughter. Your humble Code19 correspondent remembers Enéas fondly from those days. However, from his modest beginnings as a joke candidate – although that is certainly not how he would have ever seen himself – Enéas then skyrocketed to genuine political stardom in 1994 in the wake of President Fernando Collor de Mello’s impeachment for corruption. This is when Enéas’s alarmingly named Party for the Restoration of National Order wildly overperformed in the polls, leapfrogging those of solid establishment candidates including the governors of Brazil’s three most important states. Were he alive today, Enéas would no doubt be applauding significant sections of Jair Bolsonaro’s electoral platform. Bolsonaro himself seems acutely aware of this ideological kinship, too: barely a month into his new presidency, he sponsored a bill to include Enéas Carneiro’s name into the register for national heroes.

Bolsonaro took power in the wake of a much greater corruption scandal than in Enéas’s day: the scandal of the early 1990s only brought down President Collor himself, whereas in the current generation Brazil has been in the throes of the biggest corruption scandal in the world: the so-called Operation Carwash, referring to the authorities’ investigation of the affair, involves close to US$10 billion in laundered money and has brought down dozens of politicians from across the whole political spectrum, including former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, gravely discrediting the entire political class. The story of Bolsonaro’s ascent is therefore little more than that of his predecessor Enéas, but writ larger. Just as the political crisis now is much more serious than the one a generation earlier, the economic crisis too is a wider replication of an earlier, but still very familiar, picture. At the time of the Collor impeachment, the country was mired into a structural financial crisis which years of successive government plans had failed to resolve: hyperinflation was rampant, and during his time there between 1986 and 1991, your humble Code19 correspondent saw the national currency renamed and revalued four times, to no discernible effect (least of all on your unhappy correspondent’s pocket money). Fast forward to a generation later, and at the same time as Operation Carwash, Brazil experienced arguably the worst recession in its history, a problem made much worse in a country also beset by widespread urban poverty, systemic inequality and omnipresent guns, a situation with which many Americans might sympathise.

Finally, another cause of Brazil’s current far-right spasm is that Brazil’s history of dictatorship suffers from a peculiar public-relations problem. Just as some in England and the US can be slow to recognise the true character and danger of fascism because they were lucky enough to be spared its worst horrors, Brazilians tend to underestimate the hazards of far-right regimes because Brazil’s dictatorship between 1964 and 1985 is too widely seen as benign. But this is only because of neighbouring Chile and Argentina, which tend to corner the regional market in terms of perception of totalitarian horror: in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In Chile, a democratically elected socialist president was brutally overthrown in order to bring the sinister Pinochet to power, whose distinctive persona and long tenure made him almost a monopolistic symbol for Latin American reactionary barbarism. In Argentina, meanwhile, the generals outdid themselves in cruelty by effecting the torture and disappearance of tens of thousands of innocent people perceived as political enemies, often bundling them into military planes and dumping them alive into the sea. These desaparecidos, and their distraught mothers gathering at Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo, became a poignant and enduring reminder of the most gruesome aspects of the Latin American far-right.

But in Brazil, the military junta took over far less spectacularly than in Chile. Most even in Brazil would be hard-pressed to name a single one of the many grey men who occupied the presidency during Brazil’s own two-decade military dictatorship, let alone anyone with a stature remotely comparable to a Pinochet. And no cause célèbre exists in Brazil to equal that of the Argentine desaparecidos. It also helps that Brazil never had the misfortune of losing a war against a pillar of the Western alliance, unlike Argentina with the Falklands, which helped insulate Brazil’s regime against international opprobrium, and that the Brazilian junta never took over from a heroically beleaguered left-wing government, unlike in Chile where the forcible removal of Salvador Allende (with CIA assistance) became a lightning rod for the international left. But also, it is simply true that on the whole, the Brazilian dictatorship was several degrees less awful than its neighbours: by contrast, your correspondent vividly recalls the story of a childhood Chilean friend whose mother had to drag him away in terror from a public square in Santiago when he was a toddler after he had playfully derided the colour of the uniforms worn by local patrolling policemen as caca de pato (duck poo). The Brazilian dictatorship was nowhere near as oppressive as that on a day-to-day basis. Finally, with its population rising rapidly and a majority under the age of 40, Brazil has relatively few people left who clearly remember the dictatorship, which ended over a third of a century ago. Those would be the same people approaching old age today who would still remember the 1973 song Cálice by folk-music legends Chico Buarque and Gilberto Gil, which excoriated the regime in all its inhumanity while evading censorship by using wordplay and double-meaning. The word cálice connoted both “chalice”, symbolising the suffering of Christ, and the imperative cale-se, which in Portuguese means “be quiet”. A line in the final verse of the song about diesel fumes is thought to refer to a known dissident who was tortured to death by having his mouth glued to an exhaust pipe. It is true that the Brazilian far-right regime was not as bad as Argentina’s. But like all far-right regimes, it was still awful.

Notwithstanding the hyperventilating of some Western media primed to see all world events as a simple wider-screen rerun of 1930s European politics, it is clear that the arrival of Jair Bolsonaro to power was not a unique, sudden or isolated event in Brazilian politics, or an aftershock of Trumpism. It has clear causes and precedents, and it will one day pass, too. Fortunately, Brazilians are not known for being especially enamoured of their politicians and make poor subjects for mass indoctrination, something that cannot necessarily be said of all populations under the far-right spell. A generation ago, the supreme expression of praise for an able politico in Brazil was rouba mas faz, a phrase whose pithiness cannot be fully conveyed into English but translates as: “He steals, but he does things.” The arrival of Bolsonaro is the logical conclusion of too many years of Brazilian politicians stealing away, but without doing anything positive. This has consequences, and one which is too little remarked upon is that dozens of Brazilian politicians have been indicted: again, this is not something that has happened in a lot of other countries with corrupt politicians. It is not something that would have happened in the Brazil of the past, either: another common watchword of Brazilian politics from a generation ago, along with rouba mas faz, was impunidade – impunity for delinquent politicians. No longer, it seems: now Brazilians institutions work, and Brazil should be congratulated.

Meanwhile, one last factoid about Getúlio Vargas, that grandfather of the Brazilian far-right: he did not step down of his own free will. His regime became fiercely unpopular and bogged down in accusations of corruption, until one day the head of his personal guard overreached, ordering the assassination of two prominent critics. This created a huge groundswell of opposition against Vargas from the press, the military and civil society, and Vargas ended up killing himself.

Bolsonaro is almost certainly not as canny an operator as Vargas, a political survivor par excellence. The odds of his presidency basking in never-ending triumph, therefore, seem slim.