AND – Editorial: The Rejection of the Opportunistic Government

We publish an unofficial translation of an article by A Nova Demcoracia.

The way the 88 Brazilians deported from the US were treated, even on Brazilian soil, is an intolerable insult by the government of Donald Trump. They were subjected to torture, such as water deprivation, submitted to excessive heat and aggressions by US agents. They were deported, but not as humans, but as animated objects. The nation-State that self-proclaims as the “country of democracy”, the nation-State that imprisons the most in the world, has revealed all its affection for freedom, including the so-called “human rights”. The reality revealed in brutal form in this case is only the tip of the iceberg of a nation-State built upon slavery of the African black people and its descendants, exploited to the limit, together with the country’s proletariat, in which immigrants occupy the worst positions. Even today, they are the most exploited and oppressed.

Worse than the fact itself, is the abject attempt of justifying it: Jair Bolsonaro, for example, considered such an episode normal, suggesting that if he was in place of Donald Trump, he would do the same. He said, in a metaphor as bad as the author himself, that immigrants are like the MST, and the US is like a large productive farm: big landlords should react as they correctly understand to the “invaders”, as well as the Yankee government. For Bolsonaro, poor peasants and Brazilian immigrants deserve all violence, basically, because they are parasites. He made the feat of defending, not tortured Brazilians, but the torturers, as he is used to. And this is the far-right patriot: certainly a patriot, who has absolute devotion to the fatherland, but not to the Brazilian, as a renegade dog and a bootlicker of the “USA”, which should blush up to the most even the most chauvinist Yankees.

Moreover, to attribute all the evil of Yankee imperialism to Donald Trump regarding the immigration issue is disgusting. There is no doubts that the enriched-lumpen expresses, in a condensed way, all the worst values of the imperialist superpower. But he is that: concentrated expression of the rottenness that raised him. Let us not forget that Joseph Biden, the genocidaire of the Palestinian people, deported 7,168 Brazilians in his four years in office, 5.79% more than Trump until the date, having exercised a few more days of office. Nor should we forget the case of Kesley Vial, a young Brazilian killed in a Houston, Texas, at an immigrant detention center while trying to visit his mother in 2022 due to the quality of treatment dismissed by the “Democratic” government. And he was not the only one.

In this recent episode, there is the aggravation that the US agents decided, against Brazilian law, already on Brazilian soil, to keep the Brazilian citizens handcuffed, even with protests. Now, with which right? Faced with such an act, the government of President Luiz Inacio asks his ministers a discreet charge, or, in his words, “act with discretion.” Lewandowsky, Minister of Justice, said publicly after a shy protest that he does not want to “confront” the US – as if the torture dismissed to compatriots, and the violation of Brazilian law on national soil, were not enough reasons for at least raise the tone! One is not asking much, gentlemen, only a “national government” is expected to no longer humiliate the nation. But the level of subservience does not even allow the staging of national honor.

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The new Genial/Quaest research on the popularity of the government from January 27 has launched a bucket of cold water on the government, and reveals a milestone in the pace of development of the latent political crisis. There was a fall of five percentage points in approval compared to December (47%), and increased five points in disapproval (now at 49%). It is noticeable fell of seven percentage points in approval to the government in the Northeast. Such numbers cannot be explained by “communication problems,” as the government itself argues, but in its class collaboration, in its economicism and appeasing to the Bolsonarists and the latifundium, in the politics.

The R$ 400 billion of the 2024-25 Safra Plan intended only for the handful of big landlords contrast with the relatively meager R$ 79.2 million for credit for millions of peasant families (“family farming”) and for many others millions of families without any land, in the “agrarian reform” projects of the old state, which no longer leave the role by imposition of big landlords to this same government. It was a bad joke that the misery was criticized by the MST’s own national direction, which defends the government. With state money indecently funding primary latifundium production for export, the price of meat for domestic consumption skyrocketed by 20.8% only in 2024. Food inflation of the basic basket is also increasing in January, putting all of government on alert. After all, it is not the agricultural big landlord who produces the basic basket, but the peasant economy of small owners and the medium business, all without access to a minimally satisfactory credit and in better payment conditions, without logistical support and infrastructure. Inflation, in the countryside and in cities, erodes the purchasing power of popular masses: Paraná Pesquisas, for example, released a survey on January 18 in which 65.7% think that the prices of products in supermarkets have increased since the beginning of the government. The dollar increase, which interests the big local bourgeoisie and the big landlords who produce for exports, also erodes the purchasing power, the medium sectors and especially their lower layers and the large impoverished popular masses (the Brazilian minimum wage today is worth less in dollars than it used to worth in 2019, during the Bolsonaro government). As can be noted, popular masses have “political memory”, they are not as their “politicians” who are mocking: the growing disapproval of government results from their economic policy, which is a reflection of their class positions, their alliances and political composition: The same gentlemen who ruled under the Bolsonaro government facade – Mr. Arthur Lira and company – still governing today.

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In this scenario of demoralization of an opportunist government submissive to the generals and in concert with the right, in which a new offensive by the ultra-reactionaries against it is in danger, within the preventive counterrevolutionary offensive, the initiative of the masses and progressive and democratic forces in the struggle for their rights is even more urgent. Any attempt to submit the organized popular masses and their struggles to the defense of a government that demoralizes itself by promising to the left and carrying out to the right is to confuse them, to disorganize them and, limitedly to favor fascism to snatch them for its counterrevolutionary terrorist ends. The emergence of Bolsonarism and the revival of coup d’état are phenomena arising from this combination: the failure and demoralization of a government that calls itself left-wing and treated as such by the most reactionary right, in fact a bourgeois left, for applying a right-wing government program, on the one hand, and the disorganization of the masses caused by its opportunism, that sought to mobilize them, not to conquer their economic and democratic rights from anyone, but to defend itself as a bureaucratic-landowner government that has exactly attacked such rights. Now, more than ever, in order to dispute the masses and lead them, to the streets, to the revolutionary path, it is urgent to mobilize on all fronts and apply the only Marxist tactic in the class struggle, of just rebellion.

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