Brazilian democracy is on the brink of the abyss. The institutional coup that was set in motion with President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and led to the unjust imprisonment of former President Lula da Silva is all but complete. The consummation of the coup has acquired a meaning that is quite different from what was initially intended by many of the political and social forces that promoted it or just would not disagree with it.
Some of these forces either acted or reacted in the honest belief that the coup was aimed at regenerating Brazilian democracy by fighting corruption, while others saw it was a way of neutralizing the elevation of the popular classes to a standard of living that sooner or later was to be a threat not only to the elites but also to the middle classes (among whom there were many who were the product of the redistributive policies against which they were now turning).
Of course none of the two groups spoke of a coup and both believed that democracy was there to stay. They were unaware of the existence of three time bombs which, although built at very different times, could explode all at once. Were that to happen, democracy would show its frailty and possibly prove unable to survive.
Built in colonial times and during the independence process, the first time bomb was detonated in a particularly brutal way on several occasions throughout Brazil’s modern history, but was never effectively defused. It is the very DNA of a society divided into masters and servants, oligarchic elites and the “ignorant” people, institutional normalcy and extra-institutional violence – in a word, an extremely unequal society in which socio-economic inequality has never been extricated from racial and sexual prejudice.
Despite all their mistakes and defects, the PT (Workers’ Party) governments were unparalleled in the manner in which they contributed to defuse this bomb, creating policies of social redistribution and fighting racial and sexual discrimination in ways that were unprecedented in Brazilian history. For the defusing to be effective, these policies would have to be sustainable and held in place for several generations, thus keeping the memory of extreme inequality and crude discrimination from being susceptible to political reactivation by hostile forces. Since this has not been the case, those policies have had other effects but failed to defuse the time bomb. On the contrary, they provoked those who had the power to activate it into doing so as soon as they possibly could, before it was too late and the threats posed to the elites and the middle classes became irreversible. The overwhelming demonization of the PT by the oligopolistic media, especially from 2013 onwards, exposed this desperate wish to stop the threat.
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