Defund the future, repair the past – 11/08/2023 – Conrado Hübner Mendes

The Bolsonarist political delinquency was not the delinquency of just one man. It was a structured government program that involved public and private, civil and military, industrial and extractive, urban and rural actors. In general, outside the law. In good numbers, armed. With invertebrate jurists under his arm. Practicing self-legality.

The man who gave name, face and voice to the era of greatest federal incivility in recent Brazilian history brought together many people in the construction of a multifaceted and multi-authored machine. He caused death, suffering and impoverishment through willful action and omission.

This mechanism placed Brazil among the leaders of the global wave of autocratization, in the company of India, Nicaragua, Hungary, Poland, etc. Each one in their own way and rhythm, with a shared toolbox, was emptying freedoms, exhausting institutions of control and corrupting electoral competition.

Jair Bolsonaro was defeated in the 2022 elections. After harassing the Electoral Court with the military, pouring billions of reais into a secret budget, weaving an inter-federative clientelistic plot, instigating employers to constrain employees’ electoral preferences, demanding surveillance in offices, spreading theo-electoral propaganda in churches and re-turbocharge its mill of disinformation and incitement of fear and hatred, lost.

The autocratization march narrowly missed completing its cycle in October 2022, through voting, and in January 2023, through combat boots. The re-election of the autocrat is usually the point of no return, the definitive turning point in the regime transition. Defeating the autocrat electorally and surviving the coup attempt, drawn up in a draft decree, may slow down the march of democratic erosion, but it does not stop it. There are fundamental tasks pending.

Firstly, the tasks of voting: Bolsonarist electoral projects will continue to exploit the extremist spoils that have been forged in Brazil. In the municipal elections of 2024, and even more so in the presidential elections of 2026, they will continue to harbor ambitions of democratic rupture.

There are tasks of normative and institutional change: the reform of the Armed Forces and police architecture, the depoliticization of State careers, the regulation of technology platforms, the more careful construction of a legal doctrine of militant democracy that does not depend solely on the impetus of pen by Alexandre de Moraes.

We cannot count on an unlikely concert between the STF and TSE acting at their discretion in the regulatory vacuum.

And there are even more urgent tasks of justice. Repairing the past is usually a condition, among others, so that catastrophes do not repeat themselves in the future. In the memory of Bolsonaro’s delinquency, there are indispensable documents: reports from the Covid and January 8 CPIs; the dozens of good impeachment requests (among the 150 presented); criminal representations to the International Criminal Court; the public civil action against Jovem Pan, the official apex of the disinformation, conspiracy and incitement to rupture scheme.

This arsenal of facts typical of criminal law needs a corresponding legal consequence.

Punishing the patriotic catfish camped in the barracks, in a free caravan to vandalize the Planalto buildings, will not be enough. The declaration of ineligibility of Jair Bolsonaro and Braga Netto, a fundamental step, will also not be able to mitigate the risk. Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism will emerge victorious if they remain socially normalized and politically alive (even if some become electorally impeded for a while).

In parallel to the effort to hold criminal practices accountable, after all, the amnesty effort is underway. No longer through an Amnesty Law, like that of 1979, whose constitutionality the STF has not yet finished judging (stopped since 2011, under Fux’s report, transferred to Toffoli in 2021).

There is an amnesty hidden in magistocratic illusionism, case by case, postponement by postponement. Embedded in Brazilian due process. He who “pacifies” by preserving violence.

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