The Coup advances: the PGR attacks Lula and Dilma

Photo: Mídia NINJA

By Miguel do Rosário

The golpista scenario has darkened the country.

St. Bartholomew’s Night, as predicted by Luis Nassif a few days ago, has begun.

The Federal Prosecutor General (PGR), Rodrigo Janot, who for some time has been emitting mixed signals, as a disguise, has now taken off his mask and made two radical, but not surprising moves: attacking Lula and Dilma at the same time.

Janot sent to the STF a request to open an inquiry against Lula, based purely on the confession and accusations Delcídio Amaral. He also leaked to the press that he has also decided to make a move against Dilma Rousseff, due to her appointment of Lula as the presidential Chief of Staff.

The cover of Estadão this Tuesday night is an extraordinary mosaic of the coup:
Lula and Dilma are attacked, but Michel Temer, Cunha, Aécio are all spared…

The attacks of the PGR are purely political moves, based solely on the golpista atmosphere, inflamed since the crazy vote against impeachment which occurred on 17 April.

In the Senate, the triumphant pose of the pro-impeachment senators, the cream of reactionarism and political truculence, clearly reveals that this ultra-right is intoxicated.

However, it is frightening to see senators such as Cristóvão Buarque and Marta Suplicy, who for years were active in the field of the left, of human rights, progressive ideas, nowadays align themselves alongside people such as Ronaldo Caiado and Jair Bolsonaro.

The system, instead of punishing Sergio Moro for having committed the crime of leaking audio tapes of the president of the republic, attacks the victim, based on exclusively political conjectures.

The government – and democracy – are paying dearly for the false republicanism which they adopted, appointing judges and prosecutors aligned  with authoritarianism and with the coup.

A few days ago, the association of Federal Police agents released a frightening note, which threatened to persecute the PT if the government did not grant them the pay rise they demanded.

This criminal blackmail is now done in the light of day, and society, hostage of a press which makes deals with any crook, once it serves their political interest, has no forum in which to defend themselves.

It is very similar to the scenario of 1964, when society was equally made an orphan of democratic forces. Everything appeared to have been taken over by the ideology of violence and the coup: the 1964 parliament, in the same form as the current one, held an illegal vote to give a stamp of approval to the military coup. The 1964 STF gave its approval to everything.

Today it is the same thing. Ayres Brito, of such a sad memory, president of the STF during the first attempt of the coup, the judgment of the so-called Mensalão, now enjoys a millionaire sinecure from Fundação Roberto Marinho, gives talks in the United States, saying that Brazil is experiencing a necessary ‘democratic pause.’

In 1964, like today, the defenders of democracy were treated as exotic radicals by the mainstream press, which also sought to manipulate the news that arrived from abroad, in its eagerness to maintain Brazilian public opinion inside the golpista fence.

A senator, in the rapture of sincerity, dared to say that José Eduardo Cardozo, the Attorney General (AGU) was prohibited from using the word coup within the senate. The attempt at censorship received  spirited response from Cardozo, but the infamy of intending to promote censorship in one of the most emblematic environments of a democracy, shows that the climate of political oppression has been consolidated with great strength in the country.

Are we being paranoid? Are we facing a rapid emotional wave, which will rapidly collapse? Or will the fascist night strike the country in a terrible form for long years, stunting liberties, destroying political organizations, forcing into retreat a series of social advances?

Will there be repression of critical and independent origin? Will the new government invest against the alternative press, the blogs, the centers of thought which debate the democratization of the media?

Still in the Senate, the specialists in favor of the government made interventions against impeachment. Marcelo Lavenere, the lawyer who signed the impeachment petition against Collor, presented an excellent refutation of the coup. However, the senators do not appear to be interested in anything.

They have already made up their minds and the broadsheets do not stop announcing measures to be taken by the new government, as well as, of course, advancing against Dilma and Lula.

The newspapers say that Michel Temer will reform the government’s intelligence service, recreating the Institutional Security Cabinet (GSI), one of the sad inheritances of the dictatorship. The names cogitated to direct it are all from the right that is the enemy of social movements, which naturally awakens the apprehension that the government, as in the dictatorship, as in the FHC administration, will once again treat the social movements, as well as trade unions and organizations linked to the world of labor and of thought, as enemies of the state.

The press pretends not to see anything. Everything for it is normal, as it was in 1964, when it even ignored its photographers being beaten by the police during the repression of student demonstrations.

The coup has become even more explicit given the following situation: we elected a leftwing government, which is being overthrown so that a band of rightwing delinquents, which is more golpista and corrupt than can be imagined, linked to the most extremist elements, such as Jair Bolsonaro, Malafaia, can assume the maximum power of the republic.

As in 1964, the people watched everything from afar, indifferent, the victim that they were and continue to be of the lack of information.

The penny has still not dropped for the Brazilian people.

What will happen when they discover that their principal political right, the vote, has been robbed by a band of criminals from politics and the media?