AND Editorial – Opportunistic Government Increases Fascist Apparatus of Repression

We hereby share an unofficial translation of the latest editorial from A Nova Democracia (AND).

The right-wing coalition government of Luiz Inácio (PT) is preparing a decree to include issues such as “national sovereignty” and “terrorism” within the scope of the Chamber of Foreign Affairs and National Defense of the Government Council (an advisory body to the presidency of the republic). This decision—which is entirely in line with a counterinsurgency policy, modeled on the Yankee doctrines imposed on lackey and sycophantic governments that seek to institutionalize them—means, in practice, that the government will pay special attention to such topics. The commanders of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, as well as the chief of the Joint Staff of the reactionary Armed Forces and the director-general of ABIN, will eventually participate in these meetings.

What is curious, revealing a continuity in the implementation of fascist policies, is that this decree echoes another from June 2019, issued by the Bolsonaro administration and generals, with the same content. Notably, the opportunistic false left is carrying on what the extreme right and the coup plotters left incomplete.

The attentive reader might ask: why would a government that claims to be left-wing, as stated in the official political sphere and by the media monopolies, implement so-called “anti-terrorist” policies when no one except the extreme right claims that terrorism exists in Brazil? The existence of “terrorism” in Brazil, only admitted by the extreme right, is a resource used to condemn combative popular movements, particularly the struggle for land, and nothing more. Let’s see: in 2021, Jair Bolsonaro, when he was president, called the League of Poor Peasants (LCP) “terrorism that begins in the countryside and will certainly reach the cities,” “more dangerous than the MST” and declared war on it, releasing a large sum of money to the government of Rondônia and big landlords to carry out a criminal war operation called “Operation Nova Mutum” and increase paramilitary groups in the region. Currently, the PM-RO, under the command of a far-right extremist, accuses the LCP of being a “criminal organization,” “guerrilla group,” and “terrorist organization” and acts to combat it as such, despite admitting that this is against the law. Thus, when the government decides to increase fascist repression against “terrorism,” which only exists in the accusations of the extreme right against the democratic-revolutionary peasant movement, it objectively decides to strike at the popular struggle by demonstrating its agreement and echoing the extreme right in its accusations against the peasant movement. There is no doubt that the opportunists deserve to drown together with the extreme right, without any mercy from the poor masses in struggle, who should not come to their aid when the crisis wrecks their government. By embarking on this path of increasing fascist apparatus of control and repression against the combative and independent popular struggle, they only strengthen the extreme right itself.

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That decree, which is already very significant in itself, is not an isolated case. Recently, the Ministry of Justice of the same government presented a draft bill against defamation, which establishes even tougher criminal laws. The result is entirely predictable.

On the one hand, mass incarceration of poor, black youth strengthens the groups that form in prisons to resist their medieval, subhuman conditions, thereby exacerbating the problems they claim to want to combat: members of these groups in the prison system become even more involved in criminal activities once they are released, aggravating the social crisis and increasing the rates of delinquency and crime that plague Brazilian society, which, in turn, will justify even more draconian measures, in an endless spiral. The roots of crime, even in its most developed forms, are none other than chronic and rampant poverty, amid the most revolting injustices and oppression in which the vast majority of our people survive, a reflection of a cruel bureaucratic capitalism that denies a portion of the masses even the right to survive under exploitation. That is the crux of the matter.

On the other hand, these same laws, legitimized to “fight crime,” will be widely used against the popular and revolutionary movement, since “control of cities and territories” will now be considered a crime, a subjective criterion that will soon be applied to mass protests in large cities and the struggle for land in the countryside, as if the existence of punitive legislation such as the Guarantee of Law and Order (GLO), “Anti-Terrorism Law,” State of Emergency, and State of Siege were not enough.

The opportunistic government, with an eye on Luiz Inácio’s reelection in 2026, knowing that there is real panic among the petty bourgeoisie over rising crime, is pushing these bills in order to win votes, as well as to compete for the reactionary right-wing public, demonstrating that it can do the same as the right and far right on this issue. It does not matter if this will aggravate crime rates, the social crisis, and the repression of popular movements: as long as it provides votes and, incidentally, combats the popular class struggle and independence, it is a good deal. It is, however, like selling your soul to the devil: no matter how hard it tries to increase the apparatus of fascist repression, opportunism can never surpass the far right in this regard, which will always present itself as more extremist when it comes to repressing the masses as a solution to crisis scenarios. By increasing such measures and passing on to its own opportunist and electoral bases the idea that repression of the masses is the answer to crises, opportunism only prepares the ideological and political ground for fascism to assault their consciousness and then, further on, to snatch them away from an electoral point of view.

It is clear that democrats and revolutionaries have no choice but to fight and denounce such measures and spread the word about the growing revolutionary popular struggle in the country: it is there that the fascist tendencies of the official and paramilitary troops under the command of the extreme right, on the one hand, and the popular masses fighting for their sacred right to land, the “terrorists” and “guerrillas,” as they are openly accused by the extreme right and in the corridors by the false left and opportunists, are in fact confronted. They are playing with fire, for history is full of passages like these, in which, in the end, the flames turn against those who stoke them. He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind!