The failures of (PP-SP) last week proved that Bolsonarism knows much less about public security than it likes to think it does. It was ugly to see, but it was educational.
When Derrite became rapporteur for the government’s proposed Anti-Factions bill, the right gave him two tasks. The first was to equate drug trafficking gangs with terrorists, paving the way for Trump’s intervention in Brazil. The second was to keep the fight against crime under the control of governors.
It went wrong, and there was no way it could go right.
If they were terrorist organizations, combating them would be the exclusive responsibility of the federal government. Who fights Al Qaeda in us? It’s not the Alabama government. It is the federal government, which can act throughout the American territory, enter into international cooperation agreements and mobilize much broader resources than those of state governments.
But if Lula took charge of the fight against organized crime, Bolsonaro governors would not be able to use the issue as a banner in next year’s election.
After all, as I showed in the last few, Cláudio Castro proved that it is possible — only 20 of the 100 criminals that the police were looking for in Complexo do Alemão were arrested, none were killed — as long as enough people die.
The Antifaction PL is necessary precisely because state governments are unable to combat criminal organizations that operate in several states and are part of international weapons and drug trafficking networks. A national coordination effort is inevitable.
One of the key institutions to investigate these large organizations would therefore be . But Derrite tried to castrate the PF, demanding that it only carry out investigations in states with authorization from their governors. The majority of Brazilian governors, it is worth remembering, are from some variety of centrão.
It is unconstitutional, it is stupid, but it is, above all, suspicious: limiting the PF’s actions would only help governors who receive bribes from organized crime, or who intend to collect it when they can sell shielding against the PF to the PCC or the CV.
After a succession of failures and daily position changes, .
He did well, but his misadventures showed that Bolsonarism arrived at the real, practical discussion, completely unprepared. It’s no surprise: the Bolsonaro government’s security policy was to allow the use of weapons and let everyone buy their own to face crime on their own. It was part of the tendency, which caused so much harm to the country during the pandemic, of Jair always choosing public policy in which he didn’t need to do anything.
For the left, the embarrassment from the right on an issue that seemed to dominate may have been a relief. But it is bad for the country that the number of people capable of discussing public security is even smaller than previously thought.
As we saw last week, each time Derrite gave up on a stupid idea, the project became more similar to the federal government’s original proposal. Lula’s project is good, but it’s a shame that there isn’t an opposition with enough qualified personnel to improve it.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
