Not reforming the most cowardly institution will be amnesty – 01/18/2023 – Conrado Hübner Mendes

There is little doubt that active and retired military personnel committed crimes and legal infractions on January 8, 2023. And on September 7, 2022. And in managing the pandemic. And in the management of the Amazon and indigenous lands. And on motorcycles. And at rallies. And in the four years of the Bolsonaro government. Not to mention past crimes against humanity.

In the attempt on January 8, after weeks of protecting and instigating, in military territory, camps that called for the end of democracy, the military would have prevented the police from carrying out arrests in flagrante delicto of people who vandalized the Esplanada. They allowed arrests only the next day, when many would have already escaped.

Lula has shown some signs that he is willing to expose the military threat in Brazil. And thus trigger some process of change. Faced with these gestures, journalistic texts did not hesitate to say that “generals get angry” or “Lula burns bridges” with the military.

They are not neutral descriptions of facts. They carry hidden normative assumptions. According to these assumptions, a President of the Republic should treat military personnel like stuffed animals. He must strive to “build bridges” and watch out for irritability in generals. These assumptions, of course, run counter to the place the Constitution has assigned them. The choice of words and metaphors says a lot about the naturalization of an illegitimate political actor.

The Armed Forces are not State Power. Executive, Legislative and Judiciary are independent branches. The Public Ministry, the Central Bank and regulatory agencies are autonomous institutions. The Armed Forces, no. Neither independent nor autonomous. They have delimited institutional attribution. They must formulate and execute public policy subordinated to democratic authorities. Outside this terrain, its presence becomes spurious.

Political sociology calls “dissonant institutionalization” the mismatch between conflicting images that a society has of itself and its reflection in institutions. The dissonance between reality and the self-image and constitutional status of the Brazilian Armed Forces is a striking example of this phenomenon. Formally and rhetorically, they are one thing. Informally, they are another.

They sell themselves as an institution marked by obedience, hierarchy, discipline, ethical decency and political neutrality. They deliver disobedience, insubordination, delinquency, obscenity, sectarianism and physiologism.

And they still feed, in intentional hermeneutic fraud of article 142 of the Constitution, the notion of “moderating power”, a relic of imperial constitutionalism. In that peculiar model of separation of powers, the institution of the emperor hovered above the other powers. He could step in if the misbehavers needed guardianship.

As Edson Rossi wrote, the Armed Forces not only killed more patriots than foreigners in their history, but today they spend more on payroll than health and education combined. And there are still more than 1,600 agents earning over R$ 100,000.

Badly armed with institutional integrity, poorly armed with a democratic vocation, poorly armed with arguments, poorly armed with a history worthy of respect, they still exhibited an apotheosis of technical incompetence in the posts of the Bolsonaro government. Pandemic and climate denialists, cynical about national sovereignty, have released the Amazon to organized crime and removed oxygen from Manaus hospitals. For example.

Military applied coup, implanted dictatorship, tortured naked women in front of their children. Amnestied, they say they were wronged by the lack of recognition of the service they would have provided. As if that were not enough, they continue to conspire. And tweeting to intimidate judges.

The country could discuss which Armed Forces it needs to have. If one that conspires against democracy and violates citizens on the pretext of fighting internal enemies; whether one that feels free to invoke constitutional powers that it does not have; whether one that teaches in its schools that torture was a legitimate means of combating “communism”, or one that serves the defense of freedom and citizenship.

Punishing individual military personnel involved in the January 8 attack would be an important step. No amnesty. But not reforming the Armed Forces and civil-military relations is another form of amnesty. And more serious.

A rare opportunity opened up to bring the most cowardly institution in the Brazilian State to democracy. If not now, when?

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