Last
month,
during a lecture at the Grande Oriente Masonic Lodge, in Brasília, a
Brazilian Army general named Antonio Hamilton Martins Mourão
said
that the country’s military leaders had discussed overthrowing the
government. Corruption investigations have ensnared successive
Presidential administrations in Brazil, and Mourão said there was a
limit to the political chaos the armed forces could tolerate. “Either
the institutions solve the political problem through the courts,
removing those elements involved in illegal acts from public life, or we
will have to impose the solution,” he said. Wearing his official
uniform, his chest laden with decorations, Mourão explained that his
colleagues in the Army’s high command shared his view. “We have very
well-made plans,” he went on, before ominously adding, “This solution
won’t be easy. It will bring trouble, you can be sure of that.” When he
finished, the audience broke into applause.
Brazil
is all too familiar with military coups—the last one, in 1964, brought
on a twenty-one-year dictatorship. Mourão’s speech, then, was troubling
enough on its own. But his superiors’ reactions were even more
disturbing. No one in the civilian Administration publicly condemned his
remarks, and the commander of the Army, General Eduardo Villas Bôas,
refused to censure his subordinate for violating the prohibition on
political speech by active officers. Instead, he called Mourão “a great
soldier.” Confronted by a journalist on TV, he was compelled to weakly
acknowledge that “dictatorship is never the best” solution, but he only
doubled down on Mourão’s dark suggestion, saying that the armed forces
had the constitutional authority to “intervene” when the country finds
itself “in the imminence of chaos.” As the columnist Josias de Souza
noted,
Brazil’s constitution grants the military no such power. That did not
stop another general, Luiz Eduardo Rocha Paiva, from making the same
claim in a newspaper
op-ed two weeks later.
The
generals are right about one thing: Brazil is in turmoil, economic and
political. The country is just barely emerging from the deepest
recession in its history, and President Michel Temer has been formally
accused
of leading a conspiracy to siphon off more than a hundred and eighty
million dollars from government contracts. His predecessor, Dilma
Rousseff, was impeached last year for violating budget rules. Dozens of
lawmakers are facing their own corruption charges, and their cases have
created a backlog at the Supreme Court—the only court that can try them.
In the meantime, these lawmakers—politicians of various ideological
stripes—have united to undermine the power of the judiciary. The phrase
“the institutions are working,” stubbornly repeated by high officials,
has become so hard to believe that on social media it now serves as an
ironic refrain
to highlight fresh disorder. Many Brazilians have lost faith in
democracy altogether. In a poll taken after the comments by Mourão and
Villas Bôas, forty-three per cent of the population said it supported a
“temporary military intervention.”
The
1964 coup was also supposed to be temporary. Brazilian generals—backed
by the U.S. government—framed it as a necessary evil to preserve
democracy from a Communist takeover. Before long, Presidential elections
were cancelled, street marches were banned, and Congress periodically
shut down. Thousands of suspected subversives were tortured, and more
than four hundred were killed. Today, however, with the country
registering sixty thousand homicides a year, plenty of Brazilians are
nostalgic for those days of law and apparent order. Many believe that
the generals cleansed the nation of graft. In reality, as a government
truth commission showed in 2014, this perception only reflected the
regime’s censorship of the press and control of the judiciary. Under the
dictatorship, kickbacks lubricated Brazil’s political system just as
they always had.
Still, the
myth survives, with dangerous implications. Its current embodiment is a
soldier-turned-congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, who has been polling in
second place for the 2018 Presidential election. When I spoke to him
last year, he told me, “The military period was a time of glory for
Brazil, when criminals were criminals, he who worked was recognized for
it, and even in soccer we didn’t go through the embarrassment we do
today, if you look at Germany’s 7–1”—a winking reference to Brazil’s
epic semifinal loss at the 2014 World Cup. Bolsonaro once told a female
lawmaker, “I won’t rape you because you don’t deserve it.” He has called
the Afro-Brazilian communities known as quilombos “worthless even for procreating.” Of the organizers of an L.G.B.T.Q. art show, he said, “Tem que fuzilar os autores dessa exposição”—they
should be lined up and shot. His solution to Brazil’s crime problem is
to “give police free rein to kill.” He has cited Donald Trump as a
political role model.
In a Facebook
video
titled “A hug for General Mourão,” recorded after Mourão talked about
overthrowing the government, Bolsonaro can be seen telling a fervent
crowd in the city of Belém that the general is a patriot trying to keep
his country from going under. The post has racked up half a million
views. A slim majority of Brazilians still oppose an “intervention,” but
surveys also rank the armed forces as the country’s most-trusted
institution. Maurício Santoro, a political scientist at the State
University of Rio de Janeiro, told me that the generals’ remarks may
help Bolsonaro by recreating the regime-era image of honest soldiers
crusading against corruption. And the threat of a coup should not be
taken lightly. “It’s still an outside possibility,” Santoro told me.
“But for the first time since the return of democracy, it’s on the
table.”
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