AND Editorial – Coupism is only “giving away its rings”

We share an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial by A Nova Demcoracia.

The complaint on February 18 of the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) shows two important things: first, that the main trend is the arrest of Jair Bolsonaro; second, that the famous movement of “giving away the rings to not lose the fingers” is being carried out in relation to the reactionary Armed Forces, but it cannot completely free them from responsibility.

It is noteworthy, for example, that of the 34 denounced by the PGR, 24 are active or reserve officers of the Army and Navy. That of these 24 military officers, there are six generals and one fleet admiral. For example, the illustrious presence of Eram Theóphilo Gaspar de Oliveira is noteworthy, a general who then headed the Army’s Land Operations Command, therefore responsible for the Special Forces, the “kid preto”, specialists in coups d’état, for crimes committed against the people of Haiti in the mission of the Brazilian army in the imperialist occupation of that country and anti-communist action. It is also noted that, according to the PGR, the “essential nucleus”, the command of the preparations for the rupture of the constitutional order, had seven members – of these, four were military officers of the highest rank of each force: Almir Garnier, Augusto Heleno, Walter Braga Neto and Paulo Sérgio Nogueira.

In spite of this, the “brilliant” conclusion reached by prosecutor Paulo Gonet is that “the Army itself was the victim of the conspiracy”. Such a thesis is that someone is the aggressor and victim of himself. As if the visible presence of military officers in the complaint were not enough, such a thesis is still so stupid because it ignores that the preparations and conspiracies of November 2022 were not born in the middle of the Bolsonaro government, but the birth was the High Command of the Army as an institution. The one who began to use the Army as a political force to dispute with the others the direction of the country, and using the threats and blackmail of a future military intervention if they were not obeyed as an argument, was the commander of the force, General Villas-Bôas when in 2015-16 he made public statements in this regard and a direct threat to the minister of the High Federal Court, Rosa Weber, not to grant an injunction for the release of Luiz Inácio; at this point, Bolsonaro was the federal deputy who agitated the urgency of a military coup and at the same time his candidacy for president, dreaming of surfing the anti-communist wave that was being created by the trumpets of Rede Globo, in the form of repudiation of the PT, and with the encouragement of so-called coup declarations issued by the Army High Command. Who doesn’t remember the speech of Villas-Bôas, or Hamilton Mourão, both in 2017, in the Masonic Lodge, in which they presented the military intervention plan of the High Command: “legality, stability and legitimacy”, acting as a “silent protagonist”?

The cowardly thesis of the PGR that the Army had nothing to do with the outpouring of the coup provocations is the same appeasement that the government has practiced towards the generals in its thesis that the reactionary Armed Forces are the “Moderating Power” of the republic. The High Command of these have committed, over the last 10 years, numerous crimes as part of their military intervention in national political life, which had escalated as the political crisis and the decomposition of the old State worsened, and which they themselves admit that, at the maximum point of this, they “will be forced” to carry out total intervention.

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In front of the amount of evidence presented Bolsonaro’s arrest is the main trend, and it is being conducted like the overflow of a river to clean up the image of the reactionary Armed Forces and show the “strength” of rotten bourgeois democracy. This does not mean punishment for the coup plotters: first, because being arrested does not mean serving the sentence, and Bolsonaro is already working to get out the fastest he can if he gets to be arrested – for that he needs to remain an active leader as a centripetal force of the right, with weight in his mobilized fascist social base, and prevent others from snatching it. Recent history shows that the supreme court, which is a legal and political instance at the same time, therefore ends up, more than in other countries, volatile to the pressures of disputes between the power groups of the ruling classes. And, in turn, it will not be any punishment for the coup, insofar as the birthplace of the coup and its brain since the beginning of this process, the High Command of the Armed Forces, will come out not only unharmed, but with clean hands. They will give the image that they resisted Bolsonaro’s pressures; that they were attacked and blackmailed, but who in the end chose democracy and therefore deserve respect. The reality, however, is that the force that will resume the coup offensive as soon as favorable conditions are reestablished is being preserved: acute political and institutional crisis, reactivation of mobilizations of the fascist social base and the existence of a revolutionary movement in the countryside that is enough to threaten the relative stability of the old social order.

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The revolutionary and democratic forces must advance fearlessly with the revolutionary struggle. The present situation, in particular the lack of leadership of the extreme right and the immediate demoralization of the reactionary Armed Forces in terms of their character as a bourgeois-big-landlord and pro-imperialist class, provides great possibilities to advance, in the countryside, the seizure of land for those who live and work there and to strike a forceful blow at the paramilitary hordes of the big landlords and Bolsonarist extreme right and dismantle them; in the cities, the struggle for housing, the economic resistance of workers and active self-defense against the aggressions of paramilitary gangs such as “Invasão Zero” or genocidal operations against the poor; the struggle for public, free and quality education, for democracy at the universities and good conditions to study and learn. The demoralization of the government of opportunism and the liberal right enhances the possibilities of dragging the active layers of the popular movement, detaching them from the straitjacket of opportunism and revisionism. The revolutionary potential of the present situation will either be seized up by the revolution, or it will be snatched away tomorrow by the embellisher of the old bourgeois democracy, the opportunists or the fascists.