“Brazil is not for beginners,” Antonio Carlos Jobim used to say. Mr. Jobim, who wrote “The Girl From Ipanema,” was one of Brazil’s most important musicians, one whom we can thank for the fact that music lovers everywhere have to think twice before pigeonholing Brazilian pop as “world music.”
When I
told an American friend about the maestro’s line, he retorted, “No
country is.” My American friend had a point. In some ways, perhaps
Brazil isn’t so special.
Right
now, my country is proving it’s a nation among others. Like other
countries around the world, Brazil is facing a threat from the far
right, a storm of populist conservatism. Our new political phenomenon,
Jair Bolsonaro, who is expected to win the presidential election on
Sunday, is a former army captain who admires Donald Trump but seems more
like Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ strongman. Mr. Bolsonaro
champions the unrestricted sale of firearms, proposes a presumption of self-defense if a policeman kills a “suspect” and declares that a dead son is preferable to a gay one.
If
Mr. Bolsonaro wins the election, Brazilians can expect a wave of fear
and hatred. Indeed, we’ve already seen blood. On Oct. 7, a Bolsonaro
supporter stabbed my friend
Moa do Katendê, a musician and capoeira master, over a political
disagreement in the state of Bahia. His death left the city of Salvador
in mourning and indignation.
Recently,
I’ve found myself thinking about the 1980s. I was making records and
playing to sold-out crowds, but I knew what needed to change in my
country. Back then, we Brazilians were fighting for free elections after
some 20 years of military dictatorship. If someone had told me then
that some day we would elect to the presidency people like Fernando
Henrique Cardoso and then Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, it would have
sounded like wishful thinking. Then it happened. Mr. Cardoso’s election
in 1994 and then Mr. da Silva’s in 2002 carried huge symbolic weight.
They showed that we were a democracy, and they changed the shape of our
society by helping millions escape poverty. Brazilian society gained
more self-respect.
But
despite all the progress and the country’s apparent maturity, Brazil,
the fourth-largest democracy in the world, is far from solid. Dark
forces, from within and from without, now seem to be forcing us backward
and down.
Political life here has been in decline for a while — starting with an economic slump, then a series of protests in 2013, the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and a huge corruption scandal that put many politicians, including Mr. da Silva, in jail. Mr. Cardoso’s and Mr. da Silva’s parties were seriously wounded, and the far right found an opportunity.
Many
artists, musicians, filmmakers and thinkers saw themselves in an
environment where reactionary ideologues, who — through books, websites
and news articles — have been denigrating any attempt to overcome
inequality by linking socially progressive policies to a Venezuelan-type
of nightmare, generating fear that minorities’ rights will erode
religious and moral principles, or simply by indoctrinating people in
brutality through the systematic use of derogatory language. The rise of
Mr. Bolsonaro as a mythical figure fulfills the expectations created by
that kind of intellectual attack. It’s not an exchange of arguments:
Those who don’t believe in democracy work in insidious ways.
The
major news outlets have tended to minimize the dangers, working in fact
for Mr. Bolsonaro by describing the situation as a confrontation
between two extremes: the Workers’ Party potentially leading us to a
Communist authoritarian regime, while Mr. Bolsonaro would fight
corruption and make the economy market friendly. Many in the mainstream
press willfully ignore the fact that Mr. da Silva respected the
democratic rules and that Mr. Bolsonaro has repeatedly defended
the military dictatorship of the 1960s and ’70s. In fact, in August
2016, while casting his vote to impeach Ms. Rousseff, Mr. Bolsonaro made
a public show of dedicating his action to Carlos Alberto Brilhante
Ustra, who ran a torture center in the 1970s.
As
a public figure in Brazil, I have a duty to try to clarify these facts.
I am an old man now, but I was young in the ’60s and ’70s, and I
remember. So I have to speak out.
In
the late ’60s, the military junta imprisoned and arrested many artists
and intellectuals for their political beliefs. I was one of them, along
with my friend and colleague Gilberto Gil.
Gilberto
and I spent a week each in a dirty cell. Then, with no explanation, we
were transferred to another military prison for two months. After that,
four months of house arrest until, finally, exile, where we stayed for
two and a half years. Other students, writers and journalists were
imprisoned in the cells where we were, but none was tortured. During the
night, though, we could hear people’s screams. They were either
political prisoners who the military thought were linked to armed
resistance groups or poor youngsters who were caught in thefts or drug
selling. Those sounds have never left my mind.
Some
say that Mr. Bolsonaro’s most brutal statements are just posturing.
Indeed, he sounds very much like many ordinary Brazilians; he is openly
demonstrating the superficial brutality many men think they have to
hide. The number of women who vote for him is, in every poll, far
smaller than the number of men. To govern Brazil, he will have to face
the Congress, the Supreme Court and the fact that polls show that a greater majority than ever of Brazilians say democracy is the best political system of all.
I
quoted Mr. Jobim’s line — “Brazil is not for beginners” — to bring a
touch of funny color to my view of our hard times. The great composer
was being ironic, but he spoke to a truth and underlined the
peculiarities of our country, a gigantic country in the Southern
Hemisphere, racially mixed, the only country with Portuguese as its
official language in the Americas. I love Brazil and believe it can
bring new colors to civilization; I believe most Brazilians love it,
too.
Many people here
say they are planning to live abroad if the captain wins. I never
wanted to live in any country other than Brazil. And I don’t want to
now. I was forced into exile once. It won’t happen again. I want my
music, my presence, to be a permanent resistance to whatever
anti-democratic feature may come out of a probable Bolsonaro government.
Caetano Veloso is a Brazilian composer, singer, writer and political activist.
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