The Clowncar Putsch

Bolsonaro's New Year's Bash

Some years ago I heard a journalist on the BBC’s From Our Own Correspondent talking about his visit to Rio de Janeiro. I don’t recall what prompted his visit, but I remember that the journalist made a strikingly fatuous observation, to the effect that the violence of terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda was something you could never imagine in the laidback country of his gentle hosts.

This comparison stuck in my mind, not only because of the dubious contention that certain countries/regions are somehow more culturally disposed to extreme violence than others, and also because of the journalist’s seeming ignorance of even the most basic facts about Brazil’s very violent history.

Such ignorance isn’t unique. Many people tend to associate Brazil with carnival, the girl from Ipanema or Pele, Jairzinho and Tostao surging forward to the beat of samba drums, but there is another less uplifting Brazil that has always been there.

We are after all, talking about the last country in Latin America to abolish slavery - a country where the young Charles Darwin once heard a slave being whipped and was haunted by the sound for the rest of his life. The legacies of slavery are largely responsible for Brazil’s crushing racial inequality, and a recurring tradition of racialised violence that extends from the murderous slavehunting bandeirantes of the seventeenth century to the massacres carried out by Brazilian police in 21st century favelas.

In the 1960s, Brazilian ranchers, plantation owners, and government officials distributed ‘gifts’ of clothing impregnated with smallpox, influenza, and other microbes to Amerindian settlements in the Mato Grosso. Scores of Indians died as a result of what a former Interior Minister called a policy of ‘bacteriological warfare.’

Last year’s murders of Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira brought the world’s attention to the killing of environmental and Indian rights activists that is still going on. Last but by no means least, Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship for 21 years from 1964-1985 - a period that many Brazilians still remember with more nostalgia than regret.

The fascistic shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethos and militarised modus operandi of special police units like the Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais (BOPE) can be traced back to the ‘off-duty’ Brazilian police who began murdering criminals in the aftermath of the 1964 coup, dumping corpses in public places with letters of explanation signed ‘E.M’ for Esquadrao da Morte.

These ‘death squads’ were the model for the Clint Eastwood film Magnum Force, and they also provided the template that was subsequently repeated by dictatorships all over Latin American against political opponents.

As AJ Langguth’s seminal history of US police operations in Latin America Hidden Terrors once revealed, the Brazilian dictatorship was also something of a pioneer in the use of torture, developing techniques and methodologies that Brazil intelligence officers exported to the dictatorships of the southern cone and beyond.

Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters tend to get misty-eyed at the thought of these decades of military rule. This is why Jair Bolsonoro - a former army officer himself who was once regarded as excessively aggressive and greedy by his superiors - taunted President Dilma Rousseff in Congress with the memory of her torture as a youthful leftwing activist.

It’s why he reinstated commemorations of the dictatorship in 2019, and why so many army and police candidates have won political office since Bolsonaro came to power.

Many of these Brazilian ‘populists’ would love to return to the good old days when Brazil was ‘secure’ and army torturers can once again subject leftists - a very wide category in Bolsonarospeak - to the ‘submarine’, the ‘parrot’s perch’ and other quaint military customs which democracy brought to an end.

They would be more than happy to see the army take over again, to shut down the lesbians and gays, the environmentalists and indigenous activists and bleeding hearts wringing their hands about the destruction of the Amazon or police massacres in the favelas.

Fascists are generally fond of these things, and it’s difficult to separate these yearnings from the vandalistic fury unleashed on January 9th, when thousands of Bolsonaro supporters descended on the empty Brazilian Congress, the presidential palace, and the office of the supreme court, and trashed them.

As coups go, this one doesn’t amount to much. If the army and police didn’t intervene until too late to prevent the assault, nor did the military show any interest in using the ‘protests’ as a justification for taking power - at least not yet.

We don’t know who paid for the buses that brought hundreds of these supporters from across the country to Brasilia to show their support for the defeated president. Or why Brazilian soldiers and police allowed Bolsonaro’s supporters to invade public buildings, even though they had every reason to expect that something like this might happen.

Nor do we know the extent to which Bolsonaro or other members of his clan may have been involved in the preparation of the assault, or what role sleazy race warriors like Steve Bannon played in it.

Made in Mar-a-Lago

Nevertheless, everything about the clowncar coup, from the social media invitations and promotion that preceded it, to the half-pissed, half-ecstatic yobbery and destructiveness of the assault itself, bears the imprint of Trump’s clammy palm.

Naturally the Bolsonaristas deny this. Naturally they’re claiming that leftists are the ones who attacked public buildings and damaged artworks to discredit them. Nothing surprising about this. Trump supporters said the same thing in January 2020, and most of the Republican Party is still saying it.

If there’s one thing you can always guarantee about these people, wherever you find them, it’s that they are always the victims. They are always the hard-done-by children of the simple soil, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a hoodwinked tool of the Matrix, the globalists, the ‘MSM’ or whatever.

Over here, in our no less chaotic, but not yet coup-prone island, members of this international fraternity of the damned were playing the same kind of game. Thus Julia Hartley-Brewer, the grand dame of clickbait trashtalk, dismissed suggestions that the ‘riots’ in Brazil had anything to do with the ‘pro-Trump Capitol riot.’ God forbid.

Got that? Hilary Clinton’s supporters were responsible. No doubt you remember the 2016 assault on the Capitol when Hilary unleashed her followers on Trump’s ‘deplorables’? Not to mention the equally violent assault on…something, by ‘Remoaners’?

It’s nice easy work, if you can get it, and in a world where truth, facts and even reality itself are all equally malleable, Baroness Fox of Griftington, the former hostess of The Moral Haze, had her own few cents of nothingness to add to the conversation:

This is the kind of trite gaslighting we have come to expect from someone who doesn’t care any more about Brazil than she does about her own country, but we should care what happens there. By ‘we’, I mean those who still remain to the left of Atilla the Hun - a diminishing category in these days of perverse political miracles and dismal wonders.

We should look back and remember that in 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew a democratically-elected government with the full support of the United States, that interpreted Jao Goulart’s attacks on the clube dos contemplados - the privileged ones - as ‘communism.’ As was so often the case during the Cold War and beyond, the cost of military intervention for the Brazilian people mattered less to the United States than the destruction of any government regarded as contrary to American regional interests.

Now Bolsonaro’s clowncar putschists are calling for a coup, with the support of the defeated president of the United States and his supporters, rather than the US government itself. Now, instead of tanks and disciplined soldiers, there are overfed, unruly white people in yellow shirts, trashing paintings to show their hatred of the new government and their love of Jair ‘Messias’ Bolsonaro.

In one sense, history really has repeated itself as farce, but no one should be complacent that this is the last of it. Clowncar coups can turn serious, especially if they take place in a country where a sizeable section of the population has never rejected the concept of a military dictatorship.

Now, more than ever Brazil needs a government that do something for the 33 million Brazilians who cannot afford more than one meal a day; that can halt and redress the environmental destruction that threatens the future of the entire planet.

It remains to be seen whether Lula can do this. The opposition from the Bolsonaristas will be fierce and intransigent, both in Congress and on the streets. The coalition that Bolsonaro built is very far from being defeated. It contains powerful political forces that will do everything they can to destroy and undermine the new administration, or reduce it a state of chaos in order to justify the stern hand of the military.

This time they didn’t succeed, but no one should rule out the possibility that they will try again, and those of us who have not yet succumbed to the populist temptation should hope that they fail.