[RESUMO] Amnesty campaign to Bolsonaro and others convicted of a coup plot resumes addiction that touches the history of Brazil since the Empire. Supposed pacification defended by reactionary coalition is actually a method for undermining liberal democracy and restoring by dictatorship the power of traditional dominating groups.
but in the concrete circumstances of contemporary politics, in Brazil and in the world. We live a period of frontal attack on liberal democracy by an internationally articulated far right.
In the light of Nazifascist experience, post-institutional democracies raised institutional walls against authoritarianism. It was not enough to rely on the political game: the regime had to be shielded with clear liberal and republican constitutions, strong constitutional cuts and broad powers of protection against circle of circumstantial majorities.
With the globalization of the 1980s-1990s, this model spread, even in Brazil. It has made room for the emergence of new social groups within each nation – freely incorporated, but until then maintained as subordinate – and for new countries outside the North Atlantic on the international scene. It looked like the announcement of an egalitarian era, capable of dissolving the traces of the old oligarchic and imperial order.
It was then that the groups that always found themselves as owners of power began to feel threatened. Against adventures, immigrants and different, these traditional elites reacted, claiming their supposed condition of “authentic” people, rooted in patriarchal Christian families and nationalist foundation myths that would justify their historical-cultural superiority.
They thus organized a coalition. In the case of ancient colonial powers, this ideas projects itself in aggressive imperialism designed to contain the autonomous development of emerging powers.
The goal is to counterrevolutionary: to reverse national and international achievements of recent decades, to restore ancient hierarchies and return to old elites to social and political hegemony. Its diagnosis is simple and brutal: liberal democracy – as well as the multilateral order that supports it – generates an egalitarian dynamic that condemns historically dominant minorities, whether countries or social groups, to lose their primates.
The urgency of reversing its decline, before it becomes irreversible, leads these traditional elites to resume control of the political process by force or fraud. Thus, they break with the democratic commitment and began to push the liberal democracy of “leftist dictatorship.” More than that: they are articulated on a planetary scale in a kind of reactionary international, a mutual aid company dedicated to overthrow the democratic regime around the world.
The current extreme right bumps, however, in three barriers decisive to its purposes: first, democratic political culture, built over half a century through places of memory against the totalitarian past; Secondly, the institutional defenses erected by the liberal constitutions to contain any return of authoritarianism; and, finally, the very consolidation of liberal democracy as the only universally recognized regime as legitimate
The reactionary offensive, therefore, is organized on four fronts.
1) Historical negationism. of the 20th century., which paves the way to renew the robbery of liberal democracy. Dictatorships of the past are justified as necessary to combat “communism” – or simply their dictatorial nature denied.
2) delegitimation of the liberal democratic regime as “undemocratic”. Sowing the distrust of the elections is the starting point. If the ballot boxes are electronic, they are required to be paper; If they are paper, which are electronic. If the far right does not rule, it is not because it is minority in the electorate, but because there would be a collusion of the system against the “people.” Hence the fake attacks on democratic safeguards-Imprension, universities, judiciary (especially constitutional courts) and international human rights bodies-all denounced as instruments of oppression of the “people” (understand: the people of the extreme right).
3) Authoritarian camouflage. The extreme right man kidnaps the words “democracy” and “freedom”, emptying them of their meaning. The demolition of the liberal democratic regime is made paradoxically in their name. “Democracy” comes to mean exclusive government of the fachine coalition for its own benefit; “Freedom” becomes a license for crimes committed by the reactionary minority; It becomes saved to spread to spread lies and hate speeches against democracy itself.
4) Reactionary populism. Democratic institutions are rejected as gears of a supposed “left dictatorship”. Only the reactionary leader, anointed by priests like Silas Malafaia, is recognized as legitimate in the eyes of God and the “historical” nation. Its authority must overlap with local parliaments, courts and governments. Thus, “reactionary democracy” is established: a restrictive pseudocracy that consecrates the superiority of a minority and excludes dissidents.
When it reaches power, reactionary populism abolishes the style of democratic government, in which acts are linked to the law and the precedents. It proclaims the leader’s supremacy over all powers and starts to rule by decrees and laws of exception in the name of “national security”. It invokes the state ratio to cover up administrative decisions and legitimize the persecution of opponents.
Not so, in power, reactionary populism ceases to resort to the instruments of safeguarding liberal democracy, but always for its own benefit. Reinterpret human rights as a monopoly of their political base: “Human rights only for human rights,” that is, only for right -wing extremists.
It labels the constitutional courts of ‘tyrannical’ and threatens to disobey their decisions. Institutions and magistrates who defend liberal democracy against their blows are now denounced as “human rights violators.”
On the eve of elections, reactionary populism seeks to capture or defraud the process to ensure its perpetuation in power. When defeated at the polls, as in the case of Trump and Bolsonaro ,. In the name of the “self -defense” of the will of the people who intended to usurp, organizes badges and blows disguised as popular outcry.
When the coup fails and those responsible are brought to trial for the same cuts they intended to close or pack, and requires that crimes against democracy be treated as mere common offenses.
It is this, after all, which means its demand for “technical judgment” “: that the attempt to abolish democracy be reduced to a failed assault on the corner bar, erasing the political dimension of the application of democratic, liberal and republican constitutional principles.
This is the context in which today.
Amnesty does not forgive: forget. Suspends the action of justice on defined crimes, silences the laws, revokes its application. Therefore it should be used only under exceptional circumstances.
Reiterated, demoralizes the norms of protection of democracy. Sold as pacification – – Amnesty almost always produced the opposite effect: it did not pacify, but stimulated recurrence. And not just in the Republic, but already in the Empire.
In 1844, he already warned in the Senate: “In Brazil there has been no revolution, there has been no political attack that one does not follow an amnesty; but there is also no amnesty act that was not followed by an attack, a new political commotion.”
For Itaboraí, amnesty could pacify only when the subversive principles that had animated rebellions and coup attempts were already destroyed or irreversibly suppressed.
And above all, amnesty could never be understood as the fruit of institutional cowardice, that is, of the weakness of the state. In this case, I would only encourage the scammers to repeat as soon as they had conditions again.
The Brazilian experience confirmed the diagnosis. , and since then the military has never ceased to imagine tutors of the Republic, as supreme representatives of the sovereignty of the people.
Quality that, after 1930, would invoke to justify their unconstitutional interventions in the political process, under the pretext of safeguarding the famous “national security”. The effect of amnesties, in this picture, was always the same: by revealing the weakness of the institutions, they became a stimulus to recidivism.
Recently, derived from his article on Globo, showing that all scammers forgiven or ignored throughout the Republic have again participated in new coup attempts-these times successful
in the democratic regime that was airs. His sole purpose, under the label of “pacification”, was to guarantee impunity.
Today, the rhetoric of “pacification” mobilized by the reactionary coalition-identified with the Bolsonarist minority around the slogan of a “broad, general and unrestricted amnesty” (always the inversion of democratic expressions to destroy them!)-Returns with the same vice of origin that maraches Brazilian history.
The insistence of the coalition is proportional to the novelty of the institutional reaction. The 1988 constituents deliberately surrounded the democratic citadel with reinforced walls against the future authoritarian invested – that they knew, sooner or later, it would return.
That is why they created an autonomous prosecutor and judiciary. No one will say that everything there are flowers. It would be like, the citadel created by the constituents not only resisted: sued and condemned Bolsonaro and the other scammers, almost all military.
Now asks: Is the amnesty convenient? Is it appropriate? Will pacify the country? In the light of the current circumstances, compared with the warning warning warnings, the answer can only be negative.
The reactionary coalition that asks the amnesty has not surrendered to the institutions. It did not open from extremism. It persists to deny liberal democracy to impose its “reactionary democracy.” And it does not receive a frontal refutation, unfortunately, from the institutional right identified with the center. Quite the contrary.
While asking for amnesty, he gets the American government support for his attack on Brazilian democracy and directly threatens the STF ministers. Ask amnesty without testifying the weapons: tries the blow by other means, while unable to go back to power.
Under these conditions, amnesty obviously does not pacify finish with democracy by legitimizing institutional vandalism. If the amnesty aims to forget, what is imposed now is the opposite: not forgetting anything. It is time to remind continually past attacks and apply the law in all its rigor, requiring the Guardians of the Democratic Citadel to honor their togas and their mandates – and do not income the opportunism or pragmatism that contaminate politics.
It must be clear: to the far right, “pacification” only existed when he managed to establish his dictatorship – as in the Estado Novo and the military regime. The peace it has always claimed is that of imposed silence, of forced unanimity, from policy reduced to fear.
It is peace that rises over silent critics, persecuted opponents, eliminated enemies. It is the peace we are seeing today being created us, in, and that was tried to create in the Bolsonaro government.
It is, yes, a peace: but it is the peace of cemeteries.
