Brazil – AND Editorial: Bolsonaro, the Country-Seller Charged

We hereby share an unofficial translation of the latest Editorial published by A Nova Democracia (AND).

The indictment of far-right coup leader Jair Bolsonaro, his son Eduardo, and hypocrite Silas Malafaia has put the former president one step closer to prison. After the leak of messages proving the gang’s criminal activity and its coordination with the foreign interests of Donald Trump’s administration, Bolsonaro’s conviction by the Supreme Court (STF) on charges of attempted coup and abolition of the legal order by violent means became a foregone conclusion. The messages and the investigation show: first, that Eduardo Bolsonaro coordinated with the Yankee government to apply the Magnitsky Act against a Supreme Court justice; second, that Eduardo Bolsonaro received millions from his father to stay in the US and that both coordinated with Trump on what measures to take. According to the Supreme Court’s procedures, this is more than enough to put Jair Bolsonaro in prison and treat his son as a traitor to the country, in accordance with the current Constitution.

Bolsonaro knows that the economic sanctions against the country are blackmail by the Yankee government against the Brazilian government, to bend it and make it cower even more in terms of foreign policy and the surrender of strategic natural resources; and even his son Eduardo warns him, saying that he already hears behind the scenes at the White House that “Brazil is gone, let’s move on to the next one.” Of course, such rumors refer to Bolsonaro’s situation and not to what Bolsonaro supporters want, treating the PT as dangerous communists.

Nevertheless, it is striking that, once brave, when he blackmailed the country with threats of a coup d’état in the president’s chair, the boorish Bolsonaro now presents himself in his messages as truly naked: cowardly, cornered, touchy. When pressed by his son and Malafaia to do something effective and public to reinforce the blackmail, he says: “I can’t expose myself, as you want me to expose myself, because that won’t solve anything. If I act like a macho man now, it won’t solve anything.” Malafaia tells him, “You don’t have to be afraid of Alexandre de Moraes.” Not without reason, Bolsonaro is treated with no respect in the leaked messages with his interlocutors: his son tells him to “fuck off” and calls him “ungrateful”; the pastor treats him like a mindless donkey who needs to be told what to do for his own good (not to mention the amount of profanity the “pastor” utters every ten words that come out of his mouth, perhaps a world record for this role). It is the flimsy authority of a cowardly petty boss, as befits the very nature of the extreme right, which, as a rule, is made up of lumpens, gangsters, social climbers, opportunists, and resentful people of all kinds, and therefore, generally speaking, cowards.

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The real struggle against fascism and the far right, however, does not take place under the headlines of the big newspapers: it takes place in the concrete confrontations of the class struggle, and, in the case of Brazil, it has been taking place in the countryside. From July 9 to 11, Bolsonaro visited several cities in Rondônia (RO) for EXPOJIPA (according to his official agenda); a month later, on August 8, in Machadinho D’Oeste, the murderous troops of the Special Operations Battalion (BOPE) raided a peasant area called Valdiro Chagas, of the League of Poor Peasants (LCP), and executed in cold blood a poor peasant, Raimundo Nonato. The commander-general of the Military Police (MP) – RO, Colonel Braguin, was responsible for the operation, along with another supporter of Bolsonaro, MP colonel and now governor, Marcos Rocha. Taking advantage of the occasion being the eve of the 30th anniversary of the resistance and massacre of peasants on the then Santa Elina farm, and that Luiz Inácio would be in Porto Velho to announce public works and nothing for the landless peasants, Colonel Braguin could not contain himself and, with wide eyes, appeared on social media to announce that Rondônia is at war, with poor peasants on one side and the MP-RO and death squads linked to big landlords on the other. Then, Army Colonel Fernando Montenegro, who boasts of being an “expert in combating subversion” and a retired member of the Special Forces, a staunch Bolsonaro supporter, rushed to declare that a “subversive” guerrilla war is underway in Rondônia. The crime of the poor peasants, it seems, is to have decided to continue the struggle for land and, being systematically attacked by death squads fed by big landlords, to have chosen the path of resistance rather than perishing. In Rondônia, it is not uncommon for such groups to have ties to the police force, as demonstrated by an operation carried out by the Federal Police itself in November 2022, so that the peasants cannot be blamed for having no regard for the MP-RO and seeing it as a threat. In fact, when the commander-general of a State’s military police decides to declare himself the “number one fan” of a notorious right-wing extremist like Ronaldo Caiado, and then decides to launch “public-private partnerships” to put the police force at the service of big landlords, as Braguin did in partnership with APROSOJA-RO, to prevent land seizures – even though the struggle for land is a constitutional right – it becomes even more difficult for peasants to believe in the “impartiality” of this institution. Therefore, one cannot condemn democrats and progressives for not trusting the police force when it displays an arsenal of weapons and ammunition alongside the LCP flag, attributing it to the peasant movement. It is not surprising that some people suspect that it may have been fabricated.

In any case, a campaign of encirclement and extermination is once again being waged against the struggle for land in the Western Amazon, with the help of special troops from the PM-RO and paramilitary gangs, death squads, which, throughout this year, have sought to carry out armed attacks on peasant areas, destroy their crops, kill their livestock, and eliminate leaders of the peasant movement, using groups such as the so-called “Gesulino gang,” which ordered the Jacinópolis massacre and was sentenced to 40 years in prison but, curiously, was released after serving only 10% of its sentence.

It is precisely in the revolutionary struggle for land that the terrorist extreme right, born and nurtured in defense of latifundium and their relations of servitude and slavery, confronts the new democracy, the popular democracy, which is embodied in the struggle of poor peasants against servitude and slavery, for the democratization of land ownership and property. This struggle, described by the “kid preto”, Montenegro as “guerrilla subversion,” is the dividing line between new democracy and the trend and march toward fascism. It is not surprising that the opportunist government does not comment on such absurdities, as it only reinforces the large agrarian property of the big landlords, with all the benefits for their primary production of monoculture for export: with its silence, it positions itself, in fact, as an accomplice, like all opportunists and revisionists. True democrats and progressives must raise their voices in defense of the struggle of poor peasants, against the massacres by gunmen and police troops, and for the Agrarian Revolution.

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The deployment of thousands of Yankee naval troops and aircraft to Venezuelan waters and coastline in the Caribbean represents a new phase of blackmail and intervention by US imperialism in Latin America, which shows the extent of the crisis of imperialism’s decomposition and the level of global storms that are forming in the skies.

Any form of intervention against the Venezuelan nation, whether direct/total or indirect/partial, would be yet another abject crime of Yankee imperialism, just as all its ideological justification is nothing more than a blatant ruse. The largest drug cartel in the world is called Yankee imperialism: the US Congress itself has already demonstrated, in investigations, that the Yankee agency for “fighting drugs” (DEA) maintains relations with ‘cartels’ in Latin America and uses them to finance “counterinsurgency” operations in the nations of the subcontinent. Thus, it is nothing more than rhetoric to justify all sorts of illegalities and violations under the guise of the “war on drugs.”

The supposed danger of Nicolás Maduro’s regime to the US is only the justification used by the Yankees to militarize and control their semi-colonies in the subcontinent with tighter reins, deploying troops to secure their interests in the region. It cannot be ruled out that Trump will seek to impose, through military mobilizations or more serious partial actions, certain conditions on the Venezuelan nation in order to gain commercial positions, for example, by obtaining access to Venezuelan natural resources, such as “rare-earth minerals,” or even by producing political instability in the regime. However, the reality is that the Yankees, although they wish to, cannot subvert the Venezuelan regime without invading the territory and occupying it for a certain period of time, imposing a puppet regime: doing so now, however, is not in the plans of Yankee imperialism, as it needs to dry up the war fronts it is involved in and not open new ones, in order to concentrate on the Pacific. Taiwan is the nerve center of Yankee interests, now threatened by the level of global instability that China intends to use to retake the territory illegally occupied by the US at the end of 1949 to save the bandit Chiang Kai-shek.

Yankee imperialism fears that disorder will spread in its “backyard,” both through the actions of its rivals and through the danger of revolutions that will spread throughout the present and coming decades. That is why it is militarizing the subcontinent, but it will be in vain. The severity of the global crisis of imperialism is such that disorder and revolutionary struggles are inevitable in the subcontinent, as indeed everywhere else in the world. A new period of revolutions is coming, and it will also spread to Latin America.