Brazil: Editorial – Only revolution abolishes injustice and changes the country
We publish an unofficial translation of an Editorial by A Nova Democracia.
The release of the confessed murderer of the indigenous leader Nega Pataxó, after paying bail of 30,000 Reais, is a big joke. It is not only despicable and disgusting, it is a complete perversion. José Eugênio Fernandes Amoêdo, who confessed owning the gun and responsible for the shots that killed the people’s leader, is today a free man. The judge who ordered his release on bail stated that there cannot be an early sentence: meanwhile, of the country’s prison population of almost one million people, the vast majority of whom are black and poor, one in every four is imprisoned in sub-human conditions and without condemnation, and not only for a few years. This cannot be surprising to anyone: as much as the systematic and daily campaign to make-up the electoral process intends to convince us that we live in a “democracy”, the raw reality is injustice and indecent privileges for the rich, as in the case of this cowardly murder, as it clearly shows that it no longer goes beyond the simulacrum of the old bourgeois democracy, emptied of almost all its content.
Civil war in the countryside, that is the reality. The action that killed Nega Pataxó is known to be coordinated by the “Zero Invasion” movement: a group of big landlords, gunmen, who act in a unified way in the paramilitary repression of the struggle for land. Behind are notorious Bolsonaro supporters: in October 2023, Bolsonaro, at a meeting of the “Agricultural Parliamentary Front”, spoke giving full support to the creation of “zero invasion”; behind the scenes, he not only declared support, but actually supported and structured the initiative. It is about three things, and in practice, only one: paramilitary groups of murderers payed by the latifundium, the big “agribusiness” barons and Bolsonarism. It is the triad of reaction most linked to the genocide perpetrated against the poor, indigenous and black people in our country.
In the west of Paraná, in Guaíra, six of the Avá-guarani people were injured in an attack coordinated by the latifundium, on the 28th a few days after the release of Nega Pataxó’s murderer. “I have been through some attacks, but yesterday I saw that they are no longer afraid of showing their guns” said one of the victims. Our report closely followed and covered the situation. There is no doubt that Brazil’s rural areas have become a battlefield, divided between the majority of the Brazilian society, the poor peasantry, indigenous people, remnants of Quilombolas, the working masses, small and medium owners in the city and progressive intellectuals on the one hand, and on the other, the parasitic layer of the Nation, the worst of the cursed legacy of five centuries of servitude, almost four of slavery and genocide.
By the way, the so-called “Agricultural Parliamentary Front”, behind all this, is a representative, in the structures of the old State, of those who actually hold the Power, the latifundium. Arthur Lira exercises it. And he exercises it with authority: right now, Luiz Inácio is considering putting him as minister in his government, because his term as president of the Chamber of Deputies will end soon. It is the PT’s “two combine into one”: uniting Bolsonarism (measured) with opportunism (reformism without reforms), to try to remain balanced on the tightrope that is the coalition with which it governs. The result, of course, can only be the even more scandalous prevalence of big landlords interests: or, in other words, genocide against the rural poor, armed attacks and civil war. Bolsonarism – and only it – benefits from this, because elimination of the differences between Bolsonarism and the so-called left only strengthens the former and their plans to establish a military regime. The masses, especially in the countryside, are rising up slowly, and putting up increasing resistance to heights. In more or less time, the civil war, which already exists latently, will erupt explicitly.
Revolutionaries and, in part, democrats and progressives desire its outbreak and long for the moment when the peasant, indigenous and Quilombola masses struggling for land will convert it into a declared insurgency. Centuries of oppression will crumble before the rebellion of the poor masses of the countryside, whose echoes will be joined by the masses of the great metropolises. “And our war is sacred, our war does not fail”, Vinícius de Moraes had already said, in the 1960s, when singing about the birth and growth of the Peasant Leagues.
“Further, there must be no room in our ranks for whimperers and cowards, for panic-mongers and deserters; our people must know no fear in the fight and must selflessly join our patriotic war of liberation against the fascist enslavers” – these instructions, from the great Stalin at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, are valid for all people’s struggles, such as the armed one waged by the peasants against Bolsonarism. In the midst of the crisis that has been going on for ten years, of counter-revolutionary offensive, the Brazilian people faces the difficult situation of identifying who are their enemies and who are their true friends, confused as most of them are on one hand, by the illusionistic action of opportunism that promises them wonderful things, but delivers the reality of a mud democracy for the working masses and billions for the rich and, on the other hand, by the agitation of the extreme right, led by Bolsonarism, which under the banner of “savior of the country” mobilizes the poor frightened by the scarecrows of communism created by pastors and other clergy from profitable businesses in the name of Jesus and the usual desperate people, from the “middle classes”, haunted by the fear of becoming poor. Both sides (that is, opportunism and Bolsonarism), involved to the last to electoral farce. And the revolutionary movement has yet to take the leap to break the “censorship” imposed on it by the press monopolies and this harmful action of welfare and corporatization that electoral opportunism does on the masses, all with the aim of hiding it.
It is necessary to intensify actions to combat the counter-revolutionary offensive of the extreme right and unmask its main responsibles of this murky system and this opportunist bourgeois left and its coalition with the liberal right, all sunk in inter-imperialist disputes, pawns on their chessboard, as well as clearing the ranks of the revolutionary movement of all types of fifth columns, those who renounce, whiners and fugitives to release all the energies of the people’s struggle in the sole direction of their emancipation: that there be a clear separation between the strong and the weak for advancement of the revolution!
