From Sao Paulo
Concern grows in the United States at the risk of a coup adventure that the president is plotting Jair Bolsonaro if he were defeated in the October elections by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. A poll by the FSB agency released this Monday ranked the candidate for the Workers’ Party (PT) with 45% compared to 34% of the candidate for re-election.
In recent weeks the president Joe Bidenof the Democratic Party, began to put aside the vague discourse about the Latin American giant to adopt clearer gestures in the face of threats from the extreme right-wing ex-captain.
These winks do not mean a resounding change in the foreign policy nor the end of the alliances between the North American “deep state” with the authoritarian governments of the region inherited from the Cold War and the doctrine of national security: but a series of nuances emerge that should be carefully observed when they impact in the Brazilian situation.
Biden sent to Brasilia the Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austinto transmit to the native generals in person and before cameras the rejection of any seditious attempt at the same time that it postponed, although it did not file, the delivery of anti-tank missiles similar to those used by Ukraine in the war with Russia.
Austin’s trip was covered by CNN from his embarkation in Florida, where he met with the head of the Southern Command, Laura Richardson, to his pro-democracy speech delivered in Brasilia before General Paulo Sergio de Oliveira, the minister of Defense subordinated to the destabilizing policy of Bolsonaro.
Undoubtedly, this was a different staging from the very secretive trip of the CIA chief, William Burns, in 2021 to the Brazilian capital where he met with soldiers and ministers without the presence of cameras or live microphones.
“I think it was an important message, the one that Secretary Austin gave to his colleagues from Brazil and to the other defense ministers of the Americas who were at that summit in Brasilia. Austin told them that the military must be subordinate to civilian power, that the results of the elections cannot be ignored,” Paulo Abrao, former executive secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, declared from Washington, interviewed by PageI12.
“Austin’s arrival in Brazil is one of several events that allow us to say that it is really consistent, that it is not just rhetoric, the defense of democracy in Brazil that the White House is currently doing. To this position We must not see it as an external interference, we must consider it in the context of an interconnected world where the reality of our country is inevitably linked to the region, it has an impact on the region”.
Abrao mentions that a small group of Democratic congressmen proposed to suspend military assistance to Brazil in the event that the armed forces “interfere” in the counting of votes or other types of anomalies in the elections of October 2 and the eventual second round of the 30 of the same month.
The Democrats’ amendment was not approved in the US Congress, despite which it was “given a message” that in itself “has value,” ponders Abrao, director of the Washington Brazil Office.
And remember that for years the discrepancies between the United States and Brazil were not as deep as they are now, affecting strategic issues: which brings to the present the arms embargo decreed by former president, James Carter, to the detriment of the government of dictator Ernesto Geisel .
diplomatic mistake
For Paulo Abrao, President Bolsonaro made a “diplomatic error” and a “calculation error” when he summoned dozens of foreign ambassadors on July 18 to the Alvorada Palace, the official residence, before whom he assured that the voting system with electronic ballot boxes is unreliable and would lend itself to a fraud by the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) to favor Lula.
“Using unsupported arguments, using fake news about a plot by Minister Edson Fachin (president of the TSE), Bolsonaro believed that perhaps he could convince the diplomatic corps and the opposite happened,” this speech fueled concern in the embassies.
With that meeting, Bolsonaro wanted to respond, and he himself admitted it, to Fachin’s statements made in Washington that something “even worse” could happen in Brazil than the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and that the presence of foreign observers to enforce the pronouncement of the voters.
Three days after Bolsonaro’s unfortunate (for him) exposure, the State Department spokesman expressed “confidence” in the Brazilian voting system through electronic ballot boxes along with the decision to carefully observe the development of the elections. He also sent a message to the military to stop trying to carry out a parallel count.
Department of State
At the end of July, after Bolsonaro’s bizarre speech before ambassadors, including the US chargé d’affaires in Brasilia, State Department officials received Paulo Abrao, as a representative of the Washington Brazil Office, along with a delegation of human rights organizations. Brazilian human resources to deal with the “difficult institutional situation we are going through.
“What we took away from that quite fruitful meeting is that the US government does not seem to be willing to stand idly by while Brazil’s democratic institutions are weakened. We can say that this message that was transmitted to us at the State Department is in harmony with Secretary Austin’s attitude in Brasilia”.
Beyond what was discussed in that meeting with the US Foreign Ministry, Abrao points out the “importance” of the Biden government’s decision to have human rights organizations as interlocutors who are not only concerned about what might happen in the elections, but also Several of them have investigated violations of the rule of law and hostile policies against the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, among other issues.
One of the “ambassadors” of the NGO Washington Brazil Office is the indigenous leader, Sonia Guajajara, who in June denounced the disappearance in the Amazon of British journalist Dom Phillips and former Secretary of State John Kerry. the Brazilian indigenista, Bruno Pereira.
Guajajara affirmed before Kerry and in various forums that the deaths of Phillips and Pereiria are a consequence of the “systematic violence” of the government against the original peoples and the defenders of the integrity of the Amazon.
Bernie Sander
This weekend Senator Bernie Sanderfrom the most progressive wing of the Democratic Party, announced that will present a project for the government to break relations with Brazil in case the result is not respected of the October elections.
Abrao told this newspaper that the representatives of the Brazilian humanitarian organizations were received by Sanders and the Democratic deputy, Jamie Raskin, with whom the Brazilian situation was analyzed in more depth in the context of the emergence of a global far-right that has in Bolsonaro one of its referents, along with former Republican president Donald Trump, whose mansion in Florida was raided this weekend by the FBI in search of stolen top-secret papers.
Due to Bolsonaro’s mimesis with Donald Trump, sectors of the Biden administration and especially the left wing of the Democratic Party, consider that if a coup d’état were to take place in Brazil, it could be an accolade to the South American extreme right, and more than that: could bring water to the Trump mill.
“Raskin is a member of the commission that investigates the assault on the Capitol in Congress, and he mentioned the name of deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, but he did not say much more on the subject,” Abrao declared and left the subject itching.
It happens that Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the president, was without plausible justification in the White House in the first week of January of last year, at the same time as the assault on the Capitol blessed, or tolerated, by Trump.
For the time being, the conjectures that Bolsonaro Jr. had some relationship with the Trump coup attempt do not have consistent information. But the suspicion seems to have bothered Eduardo, who categorically denied his participation in the events and denounced a conspiracy by the left to discredit him.