[A] reason commonly cited for supporting Bolsonaro is Brazilians’ frustration with corruption, which, for the last 5 years has been nearly exclusively associated in the national and international media with the PT. Like the issue of violence, this does not hold up to a minimal level of scrutiny. President Dilma Rousseff was never involved in personal enrichment through corruption. In fact, she herself is a victim of corruption. Impeached for committing a non-impeachable offense, a budgetary infraction that was systematically committed by all leaders of all levels of Brazilian government and legalized one week after she was removed from office, it has subsequently come out that congressmen were bribed to vote in favor of her impeachment.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was the one man generally believed powerful enough to block the privatization of Brazil’s massive offshore petroleum reserves, was arrested on charges that he committed “indeterminate acts of corruption” related to an apartment the courts were unable to prove he ever owned and thrown in jail before his appeals process played out, in a move which Glen Greenwald says was obviously done to keep him for running for president this year. Likewise, Fernando Haddad was a victim of corruption when US-backed judge and prosecutor Sergio Moro illegally leaked plea bargain testimony to the press during election season, alleging that it implicates him in a corruption scandal despite the fact that the testimony had already been thrown out by the public prosecutor’s office.
Jair Bolsonaro, on the other hand, spent 25 years affiliated with the most corrupt political party in Brazil, the Partido Progressista (PP), led by the most corrupt politician in Brazilian history, Paulo Maluf, who is on Interpol’s most wanted list and can not leave Brazil or will be arrested. Furthermore Bolsonaro is already inviting corrupt politicians to help run his government. These names include:
1) Alberto Fraga, Congressman from the DEM party and gun industry pitchman who Bolsonaro invited to lead his bloc in Congress. Three weeks before the first round elections, in September, 2018, Fraga was sentenced to 4 years of semi-open imprisonment after being caught on tape charging and receiving bribes from a bus company;
2) Congressman Onyx Lazaroni, who has already confirmed as Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, who admitted to taking bribes from the JBS meat packing company to use in an illegal campaign slush fund in 2017;
3) Congressman Pauderny Avelino from the DEM party, who was convicted in 2016 of paying cronies millions of dollars above market rate in rents for buildings and used school furniture when he was education minister in Manaus; and
4) Paulo Guedes, a University of Chicago educated monetarist economist and former attache [military officer] to Augusto Pinochet. Bolsonaro has invited him to be his Economic Minister, even though he is currently being investigated by the public prosecutors office, who want to know how he managed to pocket R$1 Billion in six years while managing pension funds.
[The] election was neither fair nor free. It was the result of a massive fraudulent campaign backed by the US government, Brazilian military and the judiciary to guarantee that the privatizations of the world’s largest offshore petroleum reserves implemented by the coup government of Michel Temer are not reversed, and that the US military has access to Brazilian bases for another possible future petroleum grab in Venezuela. The following events had a much bigger effect on Bolsonaro’s victory than violence and corruption:
1) A joint US/Brazil operation imprisoned leading candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who promised to reverse petroleum privatizations and re-allocate state oil profits to public health and education. He was jailed before his appeals process was finished on trumped up charges with no material evidence, based on a single plea bargain testimony made by a convicted criminal in exchange for sentence reduction and partial asset retention;
2) Lula announced he would run for President anyway, as was his right according to Brazilian and international law. The electoral court allowed 1400 candidates with similar legal issues to run, but they made an exception for Lula. Still leading in all election polls from behind bars, with more support than all other candidates combined and double the support of Bolsonaro, the one man easily capable of defeating fascism was barred from running;
3) The UN Human Rights Committee issued a ruling ordering the Brazilian government to allow Lula to run for office. Brazil is a signatory to the UN Protocol on Civil and Political Rights and, according to MP 311/2009, UNHRC rulings are legally binding. The Supreme Electoral Courtbroke Brazilian law and disobeyed the UN when it refused to let Lula run;
4) In a country where TV crews regularly enter prisons to interview drug traffickers and mass murderers, the courts bared Lula from speaking to Journalists, illegally prohibiting him for communicating to the public why they should vote against fascism in the elections;
5) 3.3 million voters, most of whom were poor and Northeastern – essentially the demographic that most supports the PT party – were purged from the voter rolls two weeks before the elections; and
6) After Bolsonaro support surged in the first round election, Folha de São Paulo revealed that his campaign was using an illegal slush fund created by hundreds of businessmen paying up to $4 Million USD each, to hire tech firms to illegally acquire personal data from users of the WhatsApp social media app. According to the article, this was used to create thousands of demographicly targeted groups of 256 uses each and bombard them with lies and slander against the PT party. These lies were not primarily based on fear mongering about violence and corruption, but on slander that the PT party is run by sexual perverts who want to make everyone’s children gay. After Supreme Electoral Court President Rosa Weber received death threats from Bolsonaro supporters and held a meeting with Bolsonaro supporter General Sergio Etchegoyen, she decided to hold off investigations until after the final round of the elections.
International capital and the US government now have exactly what they want in Brazil. All natural resources will be opened to exploitation from foreign capital. The US military will be able to use the Alcantara rocket launching base as a take off point for forays into Venezuela. Brazil’s participation in the BRICS is dead in the water and US Petroleum companies will be swimming in Brazilian oil. Regardless of the level of participation by the US and its institutions, these events fit a pattern of US interventions in Latin America over the past 100 years.
If we are truly interested in defeating fascism it is important to move beyond cliches and work to identify the real actors at play, so that their power can be countered. In order to do this, we have to move beyond the idea that Brazil operates in a geopolitical vacuum and that the return to neofascism, which was previously installed with ample US government support from 1964-1985, can be explained by oversimplified generalizations on public opinion.
Why Bolsonaro won: beyond the cliches
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Ignisfilimundi 